The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  In Money you [include] a me-persona, ‘Martin Amis’, so that nobody might identify you with your hero, John Self, indulging a wet, drunk fantasy.

  I was wondering whether I did put ‘me’ in there because I was so terrified of people thinking that I was John Self. But actually I’ve been hanging around the wings of my novels, so awkwardly sometimes, like the guest at the banquet, that I thought I might jolly well be in there at last. Also, every character in this book dupes the narrator, and yet I am the one who has actually done it all to him: I’ve always been very conscious of that, and it is perhaps an index of how alive and unstable my characters are to me……

  Do you recognize in yourself a puritanical streak? After all, you do believe in innocence - simple innocence and criminal innocence - and in corruption.

  I have strong moral views, and they are very much directed at things like money and acquisition. I think money is the central deformity in life, as Saul Bellow says, it’s one of the evils that has cheerfully survived identification as an evil. Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy that we have all agreed to go along with. My hatred for it does look as though I’m underwriting a certain asceticism, but it isn’t really that way: I don’t offer alternatives to what I deplore.

  I am clear about the moral transgressions and even the occasional strengths and steadfastnesses of my characters, but I don’t ever feel the need to point them out. I may be just a victim of what I take to be the nature of moral thinking in our time, which is actually lazy. At one point in Money John Self thinks, ‘[w]hat is this state, seeing the difference between good and bad and choosing bad … okaying bad?’ (p.26), and he decides - though I don’t know if I spelt this out in the final draft - that it’s a state of corruption. A certain sort of perverse laxity about oneself, moral unease without moral energy. I think people do and always will have moral awareness, but the executive branch is weak at the moment; and perhaps I reflect or connive at that in not sorting out reward and punishment……

  Do you feel any need to justify what some readers may consider to be pornographic scenes in your novels? In your profile of Gloria Steinem you recorded her view that pornography is part of the conspiracy of ‘“anti-woman warfare”’, and you went on to suggest that it might be better to see it as ‘mere weakness and chaotic venality’ (Moronic Inferno, p. 139). This question may relate to certain heavy passages in Money: do you feel yourself to be something of a male apologist in respect of pornography?

  I think the feminists have got a very strong argument against pornography, but I don’t think it’s a civil-rights issue. Many women take pornography as an organized attack but it isn’t that: it’s just a nasty way of making money for all the people who are in it……There are certainly one or two pornographic scenes in Money, and they’re there for the effect they have on the narrator: he has no resistance to pornography, or to any other bad thing. It’s very easy for me to decide that I don’t write pornography, because I’m sure that one of the definitions of pornography would have to be that the creator of pornography is excited by it, and I’m not excited by anything except by how I’m going to arrange the words. All definitions, by the way, would have to include the element of money.

  You somehow managed to make John Self in Money both obnoxious and endearing, but could it not be said that in creating the excitement of his vulgar and meretricious career you are inviting readers to indulge their bottom-line impulses and erotic drives?

  If his erotic drives were stronger, then presumably pornography wouldn’t have such easy access to him. Pornography isn’t really erotic, it’s carnal; it’s a frippery for the jaded, and jadedness is again an enemy of eroticism. John Self likes everything that’s bad - that’s the trouble with him - he has no resistance, because he has no sustenance, no structure. Pornography is one of his many symptoms, if you like. The crucial pornographic scene is when he is seduced, as it were, by his then stepmother, Vron. That’s his nadir in the book: everything has collapsed, so why not do the worst thing? Then he is beaten up, and told that his father isn’t his real father; so it had to be the worst possible sex. The artistic objection is the only objection. But it seems to me that it’s John’s worst moment, and the idea of pleasure isn’t in that scene at all: isn’t he in fact getting the lesson of pornography? It never occurs to me that the reader could find such a scene titillating, because that’s just not what I’m thinking about……

  You include two strings of literary allusions in Money: to Othello (about 1604) and to Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and (perhaps slightly less) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). How important were these allusions in your planning of the novel, and do they in fact amount to a mythic structure in your mind? Or are they just curlicues [decorative curls or twists] ?

  I asked Saul Bellow if [The Adventures of] Augie March (1953) had a mythic structure, and he said that it just had a patina. You don’t want to be fondling the elbows of thesis-candidates. There is a strong Shakespearian theme in Money, and it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare as a sort of writer-god. John Self’s interpretation of Othello is that Desdemona is being unfaithful, because fifty pages earlier he’s seen a pornographic film which uses the same plot - plus graphic infidelities. Shakespeare is the model or taunting embodiment of what he’s excluded from, and Fielding Goodney’s relation to John Self is really that of Iago. Though Self, of course, isn’t Othello - he’s Roderigo, the lecherous spendthrift and gull. When Goodney fights with him, he appears to say ”’[o]h damn dear go … Oh and you man dog”’ (p. 350); later on the Martin Amis character tells Self that the words might have been ‘O damn’d Iago, O inhuman dog’ (Othello, Act 5, Scene 1, Line 6492) (this is the best line in the play and says everything about Iago), at which point John Self thinks Martin Amis is talking about his own car! (‘He drives a little black Iago, a 666’ (p.272).) Martin Amis says, ‘“Fascinating. Pure transference”’ (p. 377), because at that moment Fielding Goodney had thought he himself had been betrayed, whereas in fact he had been the betrayer.

  I’m not a great Orwellian, but I wanted Animal Farm because of the animal imagery in my book, and I thought it would be wonderfully funny if someone could read Animal Farm just thinking it was an animal story and not an allegory.

  Did you have any sense of Fielding Goodney, being a type of O’Brien [the interrogator in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four], persecuting this victim of modern society, John Self?

  The wised-up operator, the one who knows all the uncomfortable truths: there was a glimmer of that, but it doesn’t have particularly wide emphasis. The point of it is that John Self’s education is under way, but he still sees himself as on the O’Brien side whereas in fact he isn’t: he’s a victim. He likes the sound of classless Oceania, and he sees himself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police, but the reader suspects that he’s more of an occupant of Room 101.

  Is John Self a nihilist, and would it not have been logical for him to have died at the end of the book?

  He does end up dead in a way - outside the novel, outside money and Money, in endless and ordinary life. To describe him as a nihilist is stretching it. What he lives through may be a sort of nihilism, but he has no informing ideology of the way he lives.93 □

  One of the features of Money which Amis and Haffenden discuss and which reviewers such as Eric Kom and critics like Richard Brown noted - the presence of a writer called Martin Amis in the novel - is further explored by Karl Miller in his fascinating book Doubles: Studies in Literary History (1985; 1987). Miller identifies Amis as ‘the latest of Anglo-America’s dualistic artists’ who creates, in Success, Other People, and, above all, Money, three examples of an ‘orphan delirium’ in which orphan and double meet:

  ■ Money is an obscene orphan delirium, that of the guttersnipe filmmaker John Self, who shuttles in continuous escape between London and New York, and is ripped off by a tempter, a money-man. The movie they a
re making is a family romance in which Self’s own orphan-oedipal predicament is mirrored. One of the most brilliant strokes in the annals of the genre is delivered when the narrator, Self, takes up with a serious-minded, not to say disapproving writer by the name of Martin Amis, who rewrites his movie, and narrowly beats him at chess. (The symbiotes play chess together in Success …) After his victory, ‘Martin Amis’ offers poor Self what comes across as an authorial apology for making him up and putting him through this turmoil.

  The reader is plunged into a momentous, aerial, ethereal, lunar, pre-menstrual, manic, antic, frantic ‘panting present’ (p. 208), of ups and downs, fights and flights and gutters. Here is an antinomian duality which is also an emetic, diuretic, onanistic duality. Here is a narcissist who is never done playing with himself, and not only at chess … Onan is an orphan, and there are two of him [In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, Onan, ordered by his father to make his brother’s wife pregnant in order to produce a child for his brother, ‘spill[s] his seed on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother’ (Genesis, 38:9). ‘Onanism’ is a term that means interrupted intercourse, or (as in this case) masturbation]. Masturbation, no less than suicide, is a dualistic proof, and both proofs are furnished in the course of Self’s self-exposure.

  The duality of the novel can be further characterized in terms of its way with women. [In his poem ‘A Bookshop Idyll’,] Kingsley Amis -Martin Amis’s father - has suggested in his time, unequivocally enough, that

  Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them,94

  but has been thought to have withdrawn the suggestion in his recent fictions. And now his son has joined this debate about the strangeness of women - attractive women in particular. The heroine of Other People feels that women go a little mad once a month (p. 188). ‘Women are more civilized,’ reflects the hero of Money (p. 331), a ferocious consumer of pornography who treats them as sex objects. Father and son have seemed to punish an excessive or delirious machismo, and yet they have been charged with misogyny. Arguments break out as to whether or not these writers really like them.

  ‘The world wavers,’ the novel reports (p.202). ‘People are doubling’ (p. 63). The doubling in the novel itself is both intricate and strategic, ranging as it does from alter egos to double-takes and double-pates (there’s a scalper’s keen interest in hairstyles, ‘rugs’). Duality drops a tear when the Selves, if that is what they are, the narrator and Martin Amis, watch the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di on television, and accuse each other of being moved. In New York, the disgusting Anglo-American Mid-Atlantic Self makes friends with sensitive sky-blue-blooded Martina Twain … , who points him towards a better life, subjects him to opera and evening dress, waters her plants, and serves as a sort of bridge between Self and the sobersides Martin Amis, over there in London reading and writing for all he is worth: Martina lends support, in other words, to the impression that the two males are sharers of a life. Reading is an activity in relation to which Self is something of a remedial case, and Martina has him trying his hand. After a while he finds he no longer likes what he wants: a version of Ovid’s dualistic deteriora sequor - of that famous self-disapproval - which can be read as a sign of grace, and of change. [‘Deteriora sequor’ is from the Latin phrase ‘Video meliora, proboque; / Deteriora sequor’ - ‘I see the better way and I approve it; [but] I follow the worse’ - or, as John Self puts it, ‘[w]hat is this state, seeing the difference between good and bad and choosing bad …?’ (p. 26).]

  So Onan lets up and learns to read fancy books, and to write one. Onan and double meet. As usual in the literature of such conjunctions, the excluded is seen to escape, and in this work the escapes would appear to be from troubles and fiascos in which a first exclusion is repeated or remembered: we gather that John Self has a family which is anxious to exclude him (his mother is dead and his father proves false) and from which he is anxious to escape. At all events, he is a self-proclaimed ‘escape artist’ (p. 393) who can execute a ‘full escape posture’ (p. 228). He strives upwards, with the help of aeroplanes. ‘Away! I thought, as we climbed through the air with the greatest of ease’ (p. 92). ‘Away’ is Keats’s word [in his poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1820) - ‘Away! Away! for I will fly to thee’], and this may even be Keats’s exclamation mark. Allusion and parody are a dimension of the book’s duality. Self ‘moves like a ghost’ (p. 222) as if to pour one of his countless drinks - the stride alluded to here (‘strides’ means trousers in the street talk of the novel) is that of the ravishing Tarquin in Macbeth; and he then supposes himself in hell. Film is called a ‘“delirium”’ (p. 226) and people are ‘paranoid’ (pp.239, 240): this, too, is allusive. The novel … observes that even the most confident are afraid: and ‘confidence’ is another time-honoured term. Brash John Self attempts suicide. This confidence-man comes to regard confidence as a ‘psychopathic state’ (p. 393). Nervousness is best. The novel carries and declares a range of co-ordinate fictions, including Melville’s novel [The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)], and precipitates the arguments and debates of traditional duality into the panting present tense. It updates such concerns as ‘possession’ and puts a view of this, and of the superstitions of the past, to which many people would now assent:

  these tribes of spacefaced conquered would brood about God, Hell, the Father of Lies, the fate of the spirit, with the soul imagined as an inner being, a moistly smiling angel in a pink nightie, or a grimacing goblin, all V-signs, bad rug and handjobs. But now the invader is a graph shadow swathed in spools and printouts, and he wears an alien face.

  I sometimes think I am controlled by someone. Some space invader is invading my inner space, some fucking joker. But he’s not from out there. He’s from in here (p. 330).

  Parody and allusion, then, are compounded by affinity. The later Bellow is evident in the novel, as are the terrors of Mailer and Mickey Spillane. Like Bellow, Amis likes to write about change, metamorphosis, what he calls ‘turnaround’. The problems raised by his novel are problems familiar to the reader of the literature of its affinities, which has witnessed a turnaround from the condition of the novel to the condition of the poem, and a new kind of subordination to the author of the other people he creates. This novel bears a relation to its author which makes it difficult for it to end. And indeed it is not altogether easy to say where it begins: some of the phobias which attack the Self sensorium - that of the disappearing penis, and of the borrowing of smelly second-hand clothes - are borrowed from the orphans in Success. Self is that rare bird, the dipsomaniac masturbator, and he is a man who can barely read who has written a fancy book which quotes from Keats and Shakespeare. He is a man who confesses what can appear to be less intelligible to himself than it is to that other man whose name is on the title-page - and to whom, at the time of Self’s suicide attempt, there is a bewildering, or obfuscating, direct allusion, an allusion which operates quite independently of the presence in the novel of a ‘Martin Amis’. We may conclude that Self is not a person but a part, a burlesqued proclivity, a preposterous Jonsonian humour, a bundle of at times incongruous - as distinct, we may feel, from dualistically inconsistent - bad habits. If he is the expression of some ulterior self-disapproval or disavowal, what are its scale and proportions? Where does it end? It is as if these bad habits are being made endlessly delightful, by an unending author. With such fictions, it is sometimes possible to sense that only the one man is on show, to doubt the authenticity of those characters who trail no shadow of a Siamese connection with the author. But this is not to doubt the authenticity of the show itself, or its appeal to semblables, to a paranoid orphan readership.

  It is also possible to doubt whether this is a book about money. John Self coins it and blues it, but other things matter more. Nevertheless Money is its title, and in the autumn of 1984 a book entitled Rich is due to be published by the poet Craig Raine, who will be treated by some, and not for the first time, as Martin Amis’s Martian Twain. Such coincidenc
es or designs belong to a semaphore whereby these same semblables communicate. It signals the existence of a community of strangers. And on this occasion it signals that ‘Martian’ and ‘alien’ and ‘orphan’ are collusive terms. There exist a literature and an environment in which the individual who feels himself invaded, from without or from within, is perceived as an invader. Here once more are the orphan and the double.95 □

  Miller’s interpretation of Money in terms of ‘the orphan and the double’ is developed by Richard Todd in his exploration of the notion of ‘the intrusive author’ in postmodern fiction. In a paper delivered in 1985 and published in 1990 in a collection called Exploring Postmodernism, Todd presents his analysis of Amis’s Money and Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) as ‘a protest at the exclusiveness of the premature canonic status [John Fowles’s] The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) has gained in discussions of British postmodernism during the past fifteen years or so’.96 His essay proceeds on the assumption ‘that Gray and Amis, far more insistently than Fowles or any of his more tentative imitators such as Malcolm Bradbury (in The History Man (1975)), use the device of the intrusive author to exploit self-reference and self-reflexiveness in a number of interesting and noteworthy ways’. In particular, Todd contends that the more intrusive the authorial presence, the less dominant are those references to history and to place, such as occur in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which serve both to invoke and subvert the conventions of realism: the primary concern becomes not to subvert realism but to explore ‘the self-referent and the self-reflexive‘97 and to foreground their style - particularly in Money, the ‘stylistic foregrounding’ of which shows ‘more evident virtuosity’ than Lanark, although the latter has ‘noteworthy stylistic attributes’.98 Todd first discusses Lanark, and then moves on to Money, arguing that in this novel, as in Gray’s, the ‘use of the device of the intrusive author is integrally related to its self-reflexiveness’.99 He begins his discussion of Money by relating the question of its intrusive author to Amis’s own fame or notoriety and to his previous novels: