The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  All told an unsuccessful trip, this first one (the first of four yoyo excursions across the Atlantic which comprise the novel), with nothing achieved, mysterious unsettling phonecalls from a vengeful victim … a near terminal humiliation at tennis from Fielding, seven Fastfurters at a sitting, sundaes of bad dope … Great Lakes of drink, Pentathlons of onanism [masturbation], suffering……He staggers back to London where a fawning reporter asks: ‘“what’s it feel like? You’re one of the top commercial directors in the country, you’re only thirty-five, you’re about to make your first feature”’ (p. 51). Well, yes, we had been wondering what exactly his skills were; later it transpires, unsurprisingly, that his fame is based on an unflinching use of flesh to sell, unsurprisingly, ‘smoking, drinking, junk food and nude magazines’ (p. 78). The film they are making is called Money (or Good Money or Bad Money as time goes on) and Self’s the man [‘Self’s the Man’ is the title of a poem by Philip Larkin87] who is wholly corrupted by money, who wholly corrupts money and with money, who is lifted and eventually dropped … by money, bad money driving out good in a moral Gresham’s Law [bad money drives out good]. This is the significance of the novel’s (and Self’s) recurring concern with the pornographic: not corruption by sex, but the corruption of sex by money……

  Something else happens on that first Manhattan fling. Invited to a dinner party by Martina where there will be some writers, a Nigerian novelist, Fenton Akimbo, and critic Stanwyck Mills (Martin Amis can use joke names without catastrophes of embarrassment),88 he rejects the offer vehemently. ‘A writer lives round my way in London. He looks at me oddly in the street. He gives me the fucking creeps’ (p. 39). The aside lies there ticking quietly, gives another warning rumble a score of pages on (p. 60), and ten pages beyond that it goes off.

  Oh yeah, and a writer lives round my way too. A guy in a pub pointed him out to me, and I’ve seen him hanging out in Family Fun, the space-game parlour … This writer’s name, they tell me, is Martin Amis. Never heard of him. Do you know his stuff at all? (p. 71)

  At this point, the reader, harangued by tricky Self… and Self’s tricky author, must resist the urge to reply ‘Yes, I do, as a matter of fact, and please get your elbow out of my spleen’. Of course Self hasn’t heard of Amis, for Self is a proclaimed illiterate (‘it all came down to a choice between pain and not reading. I chose not reading’ (p.42)). Chivvied by Martina, he thinks Animal Farm childish, Desdemona an adulteress, The Catcher in the Rye a miracle of polished prose. Self reads, peruses rather, only the rawest of vulval glamour mags; his shelves and Selina’s contain about a dozen books: Treasure Island, Silas Marner, The Pardoner’s Tale, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Success! (Amis’s last novel but one was Success without the exclamation [mark] …). But Self is an unreliable narrator, whose prose has already spilled over the cramping confines of his dialect. Would an illiterate describe the experience of ‘[being] bopped by a mad guy’ as ‘qualitatively different, full of an atrocious, a limitless rectitude’ (p. 38), a Jamesian or Borgesian cadence? His conscience too overflows, though quirkily, the narrow confines of his egotism. ‘I must marry Selina. If I don’t I’ll just die. If I don’t no one else will, and I’ll have ruined another life. If I don’t, I think she might sue me for every penny I have’ (p. 173). Even pornotopia palls. ‘I suspect I’m not cut out for brothels’, he ruminates, in one, where, by the by, he has given the name of Martin: ‘I can’t help getting engaged on the human scale, minimal though this is, fight it though I do’ (p. 102).

  Money runs into difficulties. The wayward dirigible of its plot is repeatedly snared, and ripped, on the prickly skyscraping egos of its future stars, the geronto-macho Lome Guyland, the sterile Madonna Caduta Massi, Butch Beausoleil, the female flesh interest, and Spunk Davis, about whose name Self anticipates a little difficulty for the British market. The infighting and negotiations among the cast are the most uncomplexly entertaining parts of the book……

  In successive novels, as his characters grow more repugnant, Amis has manipulated the distance between himself and them. He is not, and even in 1973 wasn’t, the Charles Highway of The Rachel Papers, the one who is advised to “‘for Christ’s sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff” (p. 211); but there is a zestful closeness between them.

  In Dead Babies/Dark Secrets there is a malign diabolus ex machina who suddenly becomes aware of ‘all the blank wrong yesterdays’ (p. 219) [diabolus ex machina means ‘devil out of/from the machine’ - Korn is adapting the more common phrase deus ex machina, the god out of/from the machine, a ‘power or event that comes in the nick of time to solve difficulty’, a ‘providential interposition, especially] in [a] novel or play’. Originally the phrase deus ex machina referred to the ‘god from the machinery’… by which in [the Greek] theatre the gods were shown in the air]. In Success the narration (and the nastiness) is cunningly divided between the two near-twin foster brothers. (The protagonist of Other People, a far less satisfying construction than Money for my money, is not nasty: but then she is hardly alive.)

  Money is exhilarating, skilful, savvy. It manipulates the plot… as painlessly, as inexorably as it manipulates the reader. And this is a root of discontent: the structural wit, the metaphysics, is less interesting - to me, perhaps to him - than the diction and character. Hence the nastiness is sympathetic, the vice enticing … Amis manipulates Amis: when he denounces Sin it’s only Self-abuse. And now that the Swiftian, the planet-wide disgust ([i]f you don’t like it here, Mr Martian Amis, why don’t you go back where you came from?) of the earlier novels is alleviated, shouldn’t some of the recurrent themes be shed? It’s retiring age for the worry about falling teeth and falling hair, [and] the phrase … ‘What’s the point of her if she doesn’t do that?’ -i.e., fuck {Money, p.244)[,] cook (Other People, p. 158), allow you to do whatever the hell you like (Success, p.82)?89 □

  Korn’s by that time corny pun ‘Martian Amis’ alludes, of course, to the ‘Martian’ technique of seeing the familiar as strange which, as the last chapter demonstrated, was noted by reviewers and critics in Amis’s previous novel Other People. If the Martian perspective is less evident in Money (though, as Richard Todd suggests, it is not wholly absent (p. 73)), this is perhaps not only because its novelty has worn off, but also because Amis has not had to travel to a hypothetical Mars and back to find a point of view that is vividly different but strangely familiar: he has merely had to fly to and from the USA. As Korn’s review alliteratively underlines at the outset, Money is set in ‘fastfood, fastbuck, fastfuck Manhattan’ as well as the ‘louche London-on-the-make’ that had earlier figured, in its premonitory phase, in Success. The first two chapters of this Guide cited Richard Brown’s discussion of the representation of Americans in The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies: but those were Americans abroad, in England; it is Money that actually goes to America and shows Americans at home. Brown begins his account of Money by linking it with Amis’s collection of essays on America, The Moronic Inferno (1986):

  ■ A key term that recurs throughout The Moronic Inferno, producing and defining the Dickensian grotesques of America whom Amis seeks out, is ‘money’. Money, Amis’s fifth novel published inevitably in the year of dystopias 1984, might be read in and through these essays. He wrote of the popular American TV evangelists in 1980: ‘[m]oney is the two-way traffic of the religious TV industry: money is taken from the viewers in the form of sacramental contributions; money is ‘returned’ to them in the form of celestial jackpots … Money is its own vindication; money is its own just cause’ (p. 113). The circularity of such money/ religion figures largely in the novel, whose anti-hero John Self survives as ‘“commercial [director]”’ (p. 51) in the financial hinterland of the movie industry, linking actors [,] writers and directors to the all-important ‘“money genius’” (p. 52) Fielding Goodney in order to make a film called Good Money that turns out to be little more than a financial trick played on Self in which he is duped into bankrupting himself.

  The novel b
egins with a pointedly American scene: a New York in which Self seeks Goodney to set up the first deal through a minefield of junk food and pornography. Even the cab driver has views which make him an extension of Charles Highway’s nightmare exaggeration of American violence and racism [see p. 21 of this Guide]. The reader is thrown into America immediately not only by settings but also by the personality and the language of the first-person narrator John Self whose very body is the city; his toothache its ‘upper west side’ (pp.26, 75, 76, 112, 357). Amis creates for him a brilliantly fast-paced new idiom packed with brand names (his car is a Fiasco; he takes a sleeping pill called Serafim), and terms like ‘rug-rethink’ (pp.83, 273), ‘handjob’ (passim), ‘sack talent’ (p. 57) and the word ‘pornography’ used as a positive term (which are types of usage that the British reader will probably register as ‘Americanisms’). As Self says on the comic names of characters in the book: ‘“lots of Americans are called things like that. They’ve all got names like Orifice and Handjob. They don’t notice. They think it’s cool”’ (p. 247). So it is something of a shock to the English reader (no doubt a relief to the American) to find that stereotypically Mailerish and American John Self has, in fact, an English background and even refers to himself as an Englishman (p.20), though he also admits to being ‘half American and half asleep’ (p.9). ‘I pitched my voice somewhere in the mid-Atlantic’ (p.206), says Self in his own defence, implying that Amis … may find aspects of his writing emerging from that space between.

  The narrative alternates between an American film industry, with its vain and self-seeking ‘stars’ Lome Guyland and Butch Beausoleil, seen through vestigially English eyes, and a west London publand (the pub that Self frequents in London, since he was ‘born upstairs’ (pp.59, 145) and where he meets the English writer ‘Martin Amis’ is called the Shakespeare) defamiliarized as through the eyes of an American. But Anglo-American cultural mixedness prevents the polarities from stabilizing. Self’s ‘American, but English-raised’ girlfriend Martina Twain[,] ‘a real boss chick … with a terrific education on her’ (p. 39), who teaches him to read George Orwell and Othello, helps both to identify England as a place of culture in the novel’s Anglo-American dichotomies and also to subvert such identifications. Selina [S]treet, his London girlfriend, whose ‘brothelly knowhow and top-dollar underwear’ (p. 14) call up American currency, similarly serves to destabilise stereotypes.

  Self’s eventual undoing at the hands of American Fielding Goodney may be prefigured in the story of his Uncle Norman who had believed America to be ‘the land of opportunity’ (p. 207) but ended up coming home none the richer and living in a ‘home’ (a ‘home’ is significantly defined as a place ‘where money isn’t worth anything’ (p. 208) [In fact, the idea that America is ‘the land of opportunity’ is attributed to Self himself, rather than directly to Uncle Norman - ‘I have always understood that America is the land of opportunity’ (p. 207) -but he quickly brings it under the sign of irony by telling the story of his uncle’s business failures in the USA]). Self too ends up back ‘home’ and almost inadvertently begging in the London Underground with his dubious new girlfriend, Georgina. But this opposition too is undercut, perhaps, by Fielding’s Enlightenment English writer’s name [that is, Henry Fielding (1707-54), author of Tom Jones (1749)], and by the fact that it is Martina’s English husband, Ossie Twain, who works ‘in pure money … nothing to do with anything except money, the stuff itself (pp. 119-20), who is both Selina’s secret lover and the true instigator of Self’s supposedly clandestine relationship with his wife, as well as sharing his name with America’s comic genius Mark Twain [(1835-1910), author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)].90 □

  Brown’s sense that in Money the oppositions between England and the USA are both highlighted at times, and at other times blurred by a merging and an exchange of qualities, is echoed by Bernard Bergonzi in his observations on the way Amis’s fifth novel brings together elements of English and American fiction which had been sharply distinguished when Bergonzi had originally compared and contrasted them in his study The Situation of the Novel (1969; 2nd edn, 1972). In an interview in 1990, asked how he saw the relationship between the English and American novel today, Bergonzi replied:

  ■At that time [in the 1960s and early 1970s], one did have this sense, which was rather encouraged by certain critics and indeed novelists, that English fiction was domestic and dull and commonplace and small-scale, whereas the Americans were going for the biggie and everything was up for grabs there. That was a kind of myth, if you like, a literary critical myth … But now there’s much less of a clear distinction. For instance, Martin Amis’s Money seems to me a most brilliant novel which has a great deal of American writing in it -Mailer, Burroughs and so on - but which is also a painfully sharply observed work of English social comedy: he’s got them both going at the same time.91 □

  The English aspect of Money is underlined by Amis in his interview with John Haffenden, when he talks about his reasons for setting it in 1981 and refers, not to events in the USA at that time, but to the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, and the riots in Brixton, Liverpool and other English cities. The conversation goes on to cover a range of important aspects of the novel which was, at the time of the interview, Amis’s most recent one: the plot, the apparent arbitrariness of the ending, the significance of John Self, the author appearing as a character, the moral dimension of the work, and its sexual, possibly pornographic scenes:

  ■ [John Haffenden:] Money is set in 1981: was it begun then?

  [Martin Amis:] I started it in 1980. It could have been set any time, but the conjunction of the Royal Wedding and the riots in 1981 seemed a natural timetable for the book. I also thought it amusing to write an historical novel about something which actually happened only the other day……

  I wonder how much the business of plotting a novel matters to you, particularly when you often seem so possessed by the central characters of your books? Money might well have worked simply as a scathing chronicle of John Self’s degeneration through drink and sex and power, whereas you introduce the twist of having him undone by the manipulator, the phoney Fielding Goodney. It might strike one as a trick ending when the bulk of the novel has given us perhaps too few suggestions that Goodney is the antagonist.

  It has been said already that the plot is almost a distraction in this book, but I think it’s important that Fielding Goodney is like an artist. I don’t understand it fully yet, but I’m sure it all has to do with that idea. Everyone in the book is a kind of artist - sack-artists, piss-artists, con-artists, bullshit-artists - and perhaps this leads on to something I will understand and write about later. There is a type of person who is a handsome liar, a golden mythomaniac, who lies for no reason, without motivation. It’s a great affront to the novel, because A. C. Bradley and that whole school of humanistic criticism tell us that people behave for reasons, whereas - if you read The Sun every day, and keep your wits about you in the street - you see that motivation has actually been exaggerated in, and by, the novel: you have something much woollier than motivation.

  The Martin Amis character in Money suggests that motivation must now be seen as something more inward and neurotic.

  Yes, motivation has become depleted, a shagged-out force in modern life.

  In Money, however, the reader has seen too little of the character or thoughts of Fielding Goodney even to feel concerned about whether or not he has motivation. We may be amused or disturbed by the trick or gimmick of the plot, but he is presented more or less as a suave ideal in John Self’s eyes.

  Yes, ‘ideal’ is right: he is meant to seem like an absolute given, like Quentin in Dead Babies. He embodies confidence, which is at last in my novels identified as a psychopathic state. The last chapter says that confidence is a wildly inappropriate response to present-day life. Fielding Goodney is meant to embody and show the weakness of such a state of mind … I remember telling my father three years ago that the plot of
Money would all be based on a totally unexplained confidence trick which I meant to be as bald and brutal as possible -absolutely unexplained - and I think that’s quite a good analogy for money……

  With respect to your… novels, it can, I think, raise an uncomfortable paradox in the reader’s mind that you can write with a Nabokovian writerly relish and at the same time keep up the indignation usually expected of the satirist.

  I’m never sure that what I’ve been writing is satire. Money is a sort of dramatic monologue, but Self never actually says anything intelligent in the whole book. At one point he asks Martina Twain why she likes him: ‘“Why?” Because I’m so twentieth century? “Why?”’ (p. 334). It’s important that he doesn’t actually say ‘[b]ecause I’m so twentieth century’, since all his quoted remarks are fumbling.

  He sees himself as a representative figure?

  He suspects that he is, yes. Another example is when he reads in the newspaper about that girl who is allergic to the twentieth century - all modern fabrics make her roar with rejection - and he thinks, ‘I am addicted to the twentieth century’ (p. 91). I do mean him to be a consumer, and he is consumed by consumerism, as all mere consumers are. I also mean him to be stupefied by having watched too much television - his life is without sustenance of any kind - and that is why he is so fooled by everyone; he never knows what is going on. He has this lazy non-effort response which is wished on you by television - and by reading a shitty newspaper. Those are his two sources of information about the planet. On four or five occasions his mind stretches to thinking about Poland, and he always sees it as a sort of soap opera: he wonders about Danuta Walesa, for example, and hopes she’s had her kid OK.