The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  Gregory Riding is squeamish about such things. He is appalled by the ‘grim femininia’ of the girl he’s sleeping with, ‘the ghostly smells that issue from her pouches and vents … the underworld effluvia she leaves glistening on your sheets’ (p. 17). Fortunately Gregory need not often tolerate unpleasantness: he is, he assures us, rich and aristocratic, drives a ‘powerful… car’ (p. 19), has a prestigious London art gallery job, is much pursued by glamorous members of both sexes. His evenings out at the fashionable Torka’s throb with excitement. Terry, his foster-brother and flat-mate, is not so lucky. Adopted at the age of nine by Gregory’s father - ‘Riding Sr was an insatiably compassionate man (i.e. off his chump in a posh kind of way … )’ (p. 26) - he has never overcome his squalid lower-middle-class origins, and lives in a ‘world of cheap eateries and drab bedsitterdom’ (p. 153). He worries about losing his job, his legs are so short that Gregory is ‘amazed they reach the ground’ (p. 113), and his dream of a rare sexual conquest dissolves when the callous Gregory takes his girl.

  Or, rather, seems to take her: we have no omniscient authorial voice here, only the testimonies of Terry and Gregory themselves. And once we are warned by Terry that Gregory is ‘a liar … the author of lies’ (p. 88) we begin to suspect that ‘the horror of being ordinary’ (p. 48) has driven him to desperate invention. Terry, too, as he takes revenge on Gregory by sleeping with his neurotic sister, Ursula, discovers that success is mainly a matter of ‘style’ (clothes, attitude, language). Gradually he begins to behave and talk (‘a rather marvellously tarty woman’ (p. 177 [Compare p. 89, where Gregory says ‘this rather marvellously tarty girl’])) rather as Gregory had done: they might almost be one person so interchangeable are the roles of failure and success.

  Almost, but not quite: the novel never sinks to a platitudinous ‘success is merely an attitude of mind’ because it contains elements of social allegory which suggest that the success may be ‘real’. Terry, whose surname is Service and who works in Masters House (pp.33, 217), is emphatically the ‘coming’ (p. 194) man (the pun neatly equates social and sexual achievement), and his ascent is imbued with a political significance: he and his kind ‘are the masters now’. The structure of the novel forces the reader to feel ambivalent about this. Each of the twelve chapters presents first Terry’s voice, then Gregory’s, and the voices compete for our sympathy. Terry says at the outset that he wishes to make us hate Gregory, and for much of the novel he succeeds; but at the end, with Ursula dead, Gregory broke and broken, and Terry increasingly vicious, our sympathy may have shifted.

  Success lacks some of the imaginative power of Dead Babies, and reservations may be felt about the at times sentimental handling of the ‘dead sister’ theme - reservations which even Terry’s self-conscious ‘I’m so sentimental these days that I squelch when I walk’ (p. 106) cannot dispel. But the narrative economy and manipulation of sympathy makes this Martin Amis’s most assured work so far. The presentation of city life in its sadness is forceful in itself, but what is especially impressive is that all the detail counts. The tube trains, the restaurant meals and the ‘fucked-up hippie’ (pp. 64, 99, 126, 143, 177, 209) by whom Terry measures his own social status: all these play a part in the overall design.47 □

  Morrison’s praise for Success was not endorsed by the novelist Paul Ableman, who reviewed Success in the Spectator and criticised it as largely tedious, overfree with four-letter words, often sloppily written, lacking in significant purpose, and imitative - but none the less exhibiting talent:

  ■ Martin Amis’s third novel concerns two young men who share a London flat. Gregory is handsome, witty, elegant and derives from landed gentry. His foster-brother, Terry, is a product of the slums. While still a child, Terry saw his younger sister murdered by their brutish father who was then carried off to retribution. Left alone, since his mother had previously suffered the same unkind fate at the hands of her spouse, Terry was adopted by Gregory’s kind-hearted parents. Now the two boys have grown up. The novel spans a year in their lives and is divided into twelve sections, corresponding to the passing months.

  The book is narrated alternately by Gregory and Terry. Presumably the intention, analogous to that of [Lawrence] Durrell (1912-1990) in the [Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)], is to provide different perspectives on the same sequence of events. But for such a device to engage and hold the reader’s interest, the events themselves must be interesting. Unhappily much of the action in Success is pedestrian and the necessity to plod through it twice becomes tedious.

  Terry has a girl friend called Jan. Gregory calls her June [or Joan]. This is a fair sample of the level of variation of perspective. There is, however, a ponderous differentiation of diction. Gregory talks like a super-dandy out of [Ronald] Firbank and Terry like a super-yob. Neither of them is very convincing as a person but this drawback is somewhat mitigated by the reader’s growing perception that the book is a parable about the decline of the old order in England and the new raj [reign] of the yobs …

  Miranda, Gregory’s sister and Terry’s foster-sister, joins the m[é]nage. Her role, apart from the provision, in the massage-parlour sense of the word, of relief is to go quietly ‘tonto’. This is a word much favoured by Mr Amis and used by him as synonymous with ‘bonkers’, although my Italian-English dictionary says it means stupid or silly. There is not, in fact, much erotic relief in Success. In dismal compensation, there is an abundance of what unenlightened folk would call bad language……

  This schoolboy flaunting of ‘rude words’ is distressing, and not merely as a symptom of imaginative poverty or poor taste. The right to use such words in literature has been laboriously won over the centuries. Success is the kind of novel that gives libertarianism a bad name …

  There is a lot of sloppy writing. Gregory says of Terry: ‘[h]is … teeth … taper darkly off into the metallic hecatomb of his jaws’ (p. 184). A hecatomb is, of course, an animal sacrifice and not a kind of mausoleum. [In Greek and Roman Antiquity, a ‘hecatomb’ meant a ‘great public sacrifice’, properly of 100 oxen; it has come to mean, figuratively, a ‘sacrifice of many victims’.] The get-out available to authors who use fictitious narrators is to attribute mistakes to their ignorance. Happily, there is one, out of many, terminological faults in Success which has a built-in safety device against this defence. Gregory, the arch-aesthete, contemplating Terry’s bed, refers to it as: ‘Terence’s large and unfastidious double bed’ (p. 24). The use of such an unfelicitous term as ‘unfastidious’ robs Gregory of the very quality (fastidiousness, in fact) which the observation is meant to demonstrate. But such matters, albeit material, are quibbles.

  Much more damning is the fact that it is hard to discern any purpose behind Success other than the desire to write a novel. The split narrative belts on, desperately hoping for something good to turn up. Here there is a plod through Becketland and next a meander through Kafka country. One could, in fact, relate fragments of the novel to a whole spectrum of modern masters. But stylistic versatility doesn’t necessarily generate a work of art.

  And yet Success bristles with evidence of talent. ‘When I said that pathetic thing to Gregory and stumbled down the stairs, whose face burnt the hotter with embarrassment and remorse? Mine, mine. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I have no pride, and they merely have no shame’ (p. 140). The build-up is adequate, if not elegant, but the final epigram is subtle and haunting. ‘[W]hy is it always cliches that make you cry?’ (p. 202). The question might seem an invitation to any critic to guffaw but in fact, and in context, it is genuinely touching. ‘A blue light was shooting round my room like a spectral boomerang’ (p. 203). One of many stabbing images. And there is much more detail one could praise.

  But alas Mr Amis distrusts his own creative imagination. There is a sub-text to this book, a surreal, lyrical novel about the eerie quality of urban life as ancient norms crumble and machines evolve like drosophilae [fruit-flies used extensively in genetic research]. But Mr Amis only harvests it in moments when
his guard is down. Then he remembers that he is the most with-it penman around and quickly shifts his narrative back to the plane of trendy cynicism. It is hard to escape the feeling that subconsciously Mr Amis regards Success as a stance rather than a novel.48 □

  Where Ableman saw Success as a montage of modernist fragments, James Diedrick felt that it was a work in which Amis had left behind the ‘stylistic patchwork’ of his first two novels, along with their ‘occasional wavering of tone’ and ‘sometimes intrusive self-reflexivity’, and replaced them with ‘a rigorously controlled narrative’ whose structure demonstrates that the ‘narrative “doubling” characteristic of both The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies’ had been taken further and become ‘an organizing principle’.49 In the extract that follows, Diedrick also suggests significant intertextual references in the novel and analyses the ways in which the narratives of Greg and Terry first engage, then estrange, the reader. He then moves on to provide an analysis of the ‘social and familial causes of [the] respective pathologies’ of Terry and Greg and to link it with the first stirring of Thatcherism:

  ■ Taken together, [the dramatic monologues of Greg and Terry] form an ‘X’ whose intersection marks the death of Greg’s sister Ursula, to which both men have contributed. It also represents the crossing point in the fortunes of each: while one brother falls in the world, the other ascends. As this geometry suggests, and even granting the precisely rendered differences between the two [compare this with Ableman’s remarks on p. 36, about the ‘ponderous differentiation of diction’] they emerge as doubles of one another, much as Quentin and Andy do in Dead Babies. Only now such doubling is an explicit theme …

  Success also manifests some significant intertextual ‘doublings’. The first of these is hinted at in the book’s dedication: ‘To Philip’ (p. 5). Philip is the name of Amis’s older brother, who was named after the poet Philip Larkin - a regular visitor to the Amis household during Martin Amis’s childhood.50 Martin Amis has written of Larkin’s work with great admiration,51 and Larkin’s 1946 novel Jill anticipates Success in its focus on a young working-class man in awe and envy of his decadent, aristocratic Oxford roommate. In addition, Amis’s treatment of the damage Terry suffers at the hands of his father, and Terry’ s own oft-repeated lament that he is ‘fucked up’ constitute a narrative excursion into the nihilistic territory Larkin explored in his 1971 poem ‘This Be the Verse’, with its bleak opening stanza: ‘[t]hey fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you’.52 In his own narration, Terry implicitly doubles himself with Oliver Twist, emphasizing the Dickensian qualities of his orphaned childhood, from the grim and violent squalor of his early years to his fairy-tale ascension into privilege when he is adopted by Gregory’s wealthy family. Ultimately, however, Terry comes to resemble the Artful Dodger more than Oliver.

  Vladimir Nabokov also haunts the margins of Success. Its title is also the title of a novel by the fictional author featured in the first book Nabokov wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Nabokov’s novel is narrated by Sebastian Knight’s half-brother, who searches in vain for the definitive truth about a person he feels he is virtually becoming by the end of the quest - a doubling echoed in a different register at the end of Success. In his first essay on Nabokov, published two years after Success, Amis claims that Nabokov’s characteristic literary mode is the ‘sublime’, focused not on some ideal world, but ‘directed at our fallen world of squalor, absurdity and talent-lessness. Sublimity replaces the ideas of motivation and plot with those of obsession and destiny. It suspends moral judgements in favour of remorselessness, a helter-skelter intensity’.53 This description certainly applies to Amis’s own procedures in Success (and most of his other novels), as does his comment about Lolita in a later essay: ‘[i]t constructs a mind in the way that a prose Browning might have gone about it, through rigorous dramatic monologue’.54 As with all dramatic monologues, Success expects a great deal of the reader, who is left to construct the truth from the unspoken gaps in and between each narrative.

  Success encompasses a year in the lives of Greg and Terry, who share a flat in Bayswater … The novel begins in January and ends in December, emphasizing a cyclical pattern consistent with the place-trading fortunes of the two: in the end, as in the beginning, one is abject, the other ascendant……Despite their mutual malice, Greg’s and Terry’s voices initially engage the reader with their immediacy, their dialectical authenticity, and their confessional intimacy. The foster brother’s narratives are dialogic: each speaker is intensely aware of the other speaker and of the reader. Their remarks are sprinkled with direct addresses to an assumed listener. ‘I’m drinking a lot these days’, Terry says in the first chapter, adding ‘[w]ouldn’t you be?’ (p. 12). When his turn comes, [Greg] says of his decadent friends, ‘[t]hey’re marvellous fun - you’ll like them’ (p. 41). Each also intermittently quizzes or counsels the reader about his counterpart. ‘Has he said anything to you about it?’ (p. 45), [Greg] asks after reporting what [Terry] has told him about his liaison with [Greg’s] ex-girlfriend Miranda, and [Terry asks if Greg has ‘said anything’ to the reader about Terry’s relationship with Ursula (p.173)55].

  Greg and Terry’s repeated interrogatives function like hooks, pulling the reader into their perceptual worlds, their quandaries and queries. Terry’s early questions are particularly endearing in this regard……For a time then, and to differing degrees, the reader feels close to the two narrators, and implicated in their stories, almost as a relative would. Indeed, each speaks to the reader with the intimacy and special pleading that a sibling might, seeking an ally. Amis wants the reader to experience the way these two men think, and what they represent, from the inside, and the hothouse atmosphere induced by their narratives achieves this. So do the suggestions that they are symbolic doubles…

  [There are] many explicit warnings in the novel, voiced by Amis through his characters, that his two narrators are unreliable, that the reader needs to be on guard. It is an especially apt warning in regard to Greg: the most shocking scene in the novel, his brutal seduction of Terry’s would-be girlfriend Jan, turns out to be a product of Greg’s delusional imagination. It is also one of the ways Amis engineers a progressive withdrawal of sympathy and identification from Terry and Greg, encouraging the reader to evaluate the underlying social and familial causes of their respective pathologies.

  There is in fact something uncomfortably close about the intimate relationship initially established among foster brothers and reader in Success, and the reader’s recognition of this coincides with consecutive revelations of the literal incest that exists at the corrosive center of the novel. Terry was nine when his sister was killed by his father. Greg was nine when he initiated an incestuous relationship with his sister Ursula. Abused and victimized women thus define the family histories of both characters. Through special pleading, Greg tries to convince the reader that his intimacy with Ursula is exempt from moral censure. With sneering superiority, he calls the prohibition against incest ‘a strip of warped lead from the gutter presses, a twitch in the responses of philistines and suburbanites, a “sin” only in the eyes of the hated and the mean’ (p. 66). He claims that he and Ursula came together innocently in childhood, clinging to one another in the absence of parental warmth.

  From Greg’s earliest confessions, however, it is clear that incest is both the product and the embodiment of the pathological narcissism that forms the ground of his being. Greg’s description of Ursula’s response when he first caressed her alludes to Narcissus’s own immobilizing stare into self-reflecting waters. It reveals more about his own desires than his sister’s: ‘Ursula looked up at me encouragingly, her face lit by a lake of dreams’ (p. 68). In one sense all of the doubling in the novel, and all of the abuse and betrayal, double back to this primal moment. It initiates a kind of narcissistic withdrawal from the larger world and from other people that blights Greg�
��s later life. As an adult, he is unwilling to face the fact that his continuing intimacies with his sister have emotionally maimed her and driven her to suicide. When he does turn his mind to her, his thoughts are self-damning, and reveal his essential infantilism. ‘Why does she cry so much now? What else can she be crying for but the lost world of our childhood, when it didn’t seem to matter what we did?’ (p. 117).

  Terry harbors a different kind of pathology. Significantly, it is well adapted to the world of late-seventies London, a world where ‘socio-sexual self-betterment’ (as both Greg (p.43) and Terry (p. 36) term it) is the ruling ethos. Thus it is not surprising that once Terry gains the social upper hand, he should take up where Greg has left off. He coaxes Ursula into his bed, pressures her to repeat sexual acts she performed on Greg, and hastens her self-destruction. Out of gratitude, he offers a kind of mechanical reciprocation, unaware that Ursula takes no pleasure in his advances. When she does finally come to him for sexual comfort, after Greg has permanently rejected her in a fit of jealous pique over Terry, their union is brief, fitful, and desperate. Terry’s self-absolving description of their last conversation before Ursula’s suicide precisely captures his own emergent sociopathology: ‘I merely pointed out, gently but firmly, that there was no sense in which I could assume responsibility for her, that you cannot “take people on” any longer while still trying to function successfully in your own life, that she was on her own now, the same as me, the same as Greg, the same as everybody else’ (p. 207).