The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  There are instances where we have been unable to trace or contact copyright holders before our printing deadline. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to acknowledge the use of copyright material.

  The editor is most grateful to his wife, Angela Tredell, and to her colleagues in East Sussex County Library service, especially Carol Russell, for their speed and efficiency in obtaining copies of the many books and essays consulted in the preparation of this Guide. Another of her colleagues, Tina Smith, very kindly provided transport for bulky batches of the Literary Review.

  Nicolas Tredell teaches courses in literature, art history, cultural and film studies, and information technology and society for the University of Sussex. He has contributed widely to journals in the UK and USA and his recent books include Uncancelled Challenge: The Work of Raymond Williams; The Critical Decade: Culture in Crisis; Conversations with Critics and Caute’s Confrontations: The Novels of David Caute. His study of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Fighting Fictions, appears this year (2000). He is Consultant Editor for the Icon Readers’ Guides series and has edited Icon Guides to The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and The Sound and the Fury I As I Lay Dying.

  1 For an account of the hostile criticism of Dickens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some key examples, see Nicolas Tredell, ed., Charles Dickens: ‘Great Expectations’, Icon Readers’ Guides series (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000), chapters one and two.

  2 See Tredell (2000), p. 8.

  3 Even in his own time, however, Dickens was not wholly immune to, for example, pro-feminist criticism. Kate Flint points out that John Stuart Mill wrote to his wife in 1865 about coming across a copy of Bleak House by ‘[t]hat creature Dickens’ in the London Library, taking it home and reading it, and finding that Dickens ‘has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule the rights of women’. Quoted Flint, Dickens, Harvester New Reading series (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 122.

  4 Sara Mills, ‘Working with Sexism: What Can Feminist Text Analysis Do?’, in Peter Verdonck and Jean Jacques Weber, eds., Twentieth-Century Fiction: Front Text to Context, Interface series (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp.206-19.

  5 Anthony Quinn, ‘The Investment’, Independent Magazine (25 March 1995), p. 34.

  6 Jonathan Wilson, ‘A Very English Story’, The New Yorker (6 March 1995), pp. 105-6.

  7 Wilson (1995), p. 106.

  8 James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, Understanding Contemporary British Literature series (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), p. 5.

  9 Kevin Byrne, ‘The Two Amises [a radio conversation]’. Listener, 92:2368 (15 August 1974), p. 220.

  10 Wilson (1995), p. 106.

  11 Charles Michener, ‘Britain’s Brat of Letters: Who is Martin Amis, and why is everybody saying such terrible things about him?’. Esquire, 107 (January 1987), p. 109.

  12 Wilson (1995), p. 106.

  13 ‘[F]ourteen schools’ is the figure given by both Diedrick (1995), p. 3, and David Hawkes, ‘Martin Amis (1949- )’, in George Stade and Carol Howard, eds., British Writers: Supplement IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), p.25; ‘thirteen schools’ is the figure given by David Thomson, ‘Martin Amis (25 August 1949-)’, in Merritt Moseley, ed., British Novelists Since I960: Second Series, Dictionary of Literary Biography: vol. 194 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research, 1997), p. 8.

  14 See Martin Amis, ‘Expelled’, in Visiting Mrs Nabokov (1994), pp. 186-88.

  15 Martin Amis, in Ann Thwaite, ed., My Oxford, My (Cambridge/LSE/Drama School, etc.] series (London: Robson Books, 1977), p.213.

  17 Peter Prince, ‘Out of Afrika’, New Statesman, 86:2226 (16 November 1973), p. 744.

  18 Peter Ackroyd, ‘Highway of Good Intentions’, Spectator, 231:7587 (24 November 1973), p. 674.

  19 ‘Martin Amis’, in John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 9-10.

  20 Susan Morrison, ‘The Wit and the Fury of Martin Amis’, Rolling Stone, 578 (17 May 1990), p. 101.

  21 Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, Harold Williams, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 597.

  22 [Diedrick’s Note:] Amis acknowledged the autobiographical matrix of The Rachel Papers in an interview [Michener (1987), p. 110.] [Editor’s Note:] In fact, the reference to the autobiographical aspect of The Rachel Papers seems to occur on p. 111 of the Michener interview, where the following exchange takes place: [Michener:] ‘Why was there never any thought about sending you to boarding school or trying to get you ready for Oxford?’/ [Martin Amis:] ‘I don’t know. My parents were always sort of loose about that sort of stuff. Somehow, in all the shuffling about, it never occurred to them that I would have to know Latin, for example, in order to be considered for Oxford. But suddenly it just came to me, and I did a crash education in one year, studying Latin and poetry, which I really took to, especially the Romantics. The Rachel Papers was about that year’.

  23 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 140.

  24 Diedrick (1995), pp. 20-6, 27, 28, 30-1.

  25 Hawkes (1997), p.27.

  26 Hawkes (1997), p.28.

  27 Alfred Tennyson, Poems and Plays, T. Herbert Warren, ed., revised and enlarged by Frederick Page (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 90.

  28 Hawkes (1997), pp. 28-29.

  29 Richard Brown, ‘Postmodern Americas in the Fiction of Angela Carter, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan’, in Ann Massa and Alistair Stead, eds.. Forked Tongues: Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 99.

  30 See Martin Amis, ‘A Tale of Two Novels’, Observer (19 October 1980), p.26; Jacob Epstein’s letter under almost the same heading (26 October 1980), p. 32; and, for a detailed account, ‘The Epstein Papers: Writing a Second First Novel’, Chapter 3 in Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), pp. 89-143.

  31 Kingsley Amis’s second novel was That Uncertain Feeling (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955).

  32 See ‘What’s “Dark Secrets?”’, Sunday Times (3 April 1977), p. 35.

  33 See Betty Radice, Who’s Who in the Ancient World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 163 (Menippus), 191 (Petronius), 155 (Lucian).

  34 John Mellors, ‘Raw Breakfast’, The Listener, 30:2430 (30 October 1975), p. 582.

  35 Elaine Feinstein, New Statesman, 90:2326 (17 October 1975), p.480.

  36 Peter Ackroyd, ‘Tirades’, Spectator, 25:7686 (18 October 1975), pp.510-11.

  37 Brown (1994), p. 99.

  38 Brown (1994), pp. 99-100.

  39 Neil Powell, ‘What Life Is: The Novels of Martin Amis’, PN Review 20, 7:6 (1981), pp.43-44.

  40 Anon., ‘Many Voices’, Times Literary Supplement, 3760 (29 March 1974), p. 346.

  41 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dosteovski’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 94.

  42 Bakhtin (1973), p. 94.

  43 Bakhtin (1973), p. 94.

  44 Diedrick (1995), pp.32, 33-8, 39.

  45 Hawkes (1997), p. 30.

  46 See Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  47 Blake Morrison, Into Nastiness’, Times Literary Supplement, 3967 (14 April 1978), p.4O5.

  48 Paul Ableman, ‘Sub-texts’, Spectator, 240:2815 (15 April 1978), pp. 23-24.

  49 Diedrick (1995), p. 40.

  50 [Diedrick’s Note:] For Kingsley Amis’s relationship to Larkin, see Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (New York: Summit, 1991), pp. 51-64. In a 1993 interview, Philip Amis remembers being deeply offended when Success appeared; he clearly assumed that he was the only ‘Philip’ alluded to in the dedication [whereas, Diedrick suggests, the dedication also alludes to Philip Larkin]: ‘You could say I was the taller one who got his come-uppance in the end … But that’s simplistic. It was probably about
Martin and someone else, a friend, say. I happen to be taller than Martin but there the resemblance ends. When he dedicated the book to me I was outraged, but it’s water off a duck’s back now’. Andrew Billen, ‘On a Whimsical Carousel Ride Back to Boyhood’, Observer Review (28 November 1993), p.8.

  51 [Diedrick’s Note:] See Martin Amis, ‘Philip Larkin 1922-1985’, [in] Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (New York: Harmony, 1994), [pp. 201-6]; ‘Don Juan in Hull’, New Yorker (12 July 1993), pp.74-82.

  52 Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’, in Anthony Thwaite, ed. Collected Poems, revised edn (London and Boston: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 180.

  53 Martin Amis, ‘The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces’, in Peter Quennell, ed., Vladimir Nabokov, His Life, His Work, His World: A Tribute (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p.76.

  54 Martin Amis, ‘Lolita Reconsidered’, Atlantic, 270:3 (September 1992), p. 111.

  55 Diedrick confuses Greg and Terry four times in this paragraph, which inadvertently emphasises his earlier point that the two characters are ‘doubles’. See Diedrick (1995), pp.40, 43, 44.

  56 Graham Fuller, ‘Yob Action’, Village Voice (1 December 1987), p. 66.

  57 Diedrick (1995), pp.42, 43-4, 45-7.

  58 Powell (1981), p.42.

  59 Thom Gunn, ‘Elvis Presley’, The Sense of Movement (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p.3l.

  60 Powell (1981), pp. 44-5.

  61 Allan Massie, The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970-1989 (London and New York: Longman in association with the British Council, 1990), p. 47.

  62 Victoria Glendinning, ‘Lamb’s Tale from Amis’, Listener, 105:2702 (5 March 1981), p.319.

  63 Glendinning (1981), p. 320.

  64 Glendinning (1981), p.319.

  65 Alan Hollinghurst, ‘Opening Eyes’, New Statesman, 101:2608 (13 March 1981), p. 21.

  66 John Sutherland, ‘Making Strange’, London Review of Books, 3:5 (19 March-1 April 1981), p. 21. This issue bears on the front cover a large close-up photograph of Martin Amis looking soulful and drowsy.

  67 Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ (Oxford; New York; Toronto; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 1-2.

  68 Kingsley Amis, Ending Up (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), p.23.

  69 Christopher Reid, ‘Baldanders’, New Statesman, 95:2443 (13 January 1978), p.52.

  70 See Craig Raine, The Onion, Memory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp.2-8.

  71 Blake Morrison ‘In the Astronomical Present’, Times Literary Supplement, 4066 (6 March 1981), p. 247.

  72 Paul Ableman, ‘Fairies and Violence’, Spectator, 246:7967 (21 March 1981), p.22.

  73 Craig Raine’s ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ first appeared in the New Statesman, 94:2440/2441 (23 and 30 December 1977), p. 891. It was reprinted, along with a reprint of Reid’s ‘Baldanders’, in the New Statesman, 95: (20 October 1978), p. 520, under a short piece by James Fenton, ‘Of the Martian School’, which announced that he had awarded the Prudence Farmer Prize, for a poem published in the New Statesman, to ‘A Martian … ’ but had decided to create a second prize for Reid’s ‘Baldanders’ - hence, perhaps, the conjunction of these two poems in Blake Morrison’s review of Other People.

  74 Haffenden(1985), pp. 17-18.

  75 Martin Amis, ‘Point of View’, New Statesman, 98:2543 (14 December 1979), p. 954.

  76 Diedrick (1995), p. 55.

  77 Diedrick (1995), p. 57.

  78 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 7, part 2, p. 7.

  79 Morrison (1990), p. 98.

  80 In Sartre’s play Huis Clos, Garcin, one of the three characters trapped together in Hell, comes to the conclusion that Tenfer, c’est les Autres’ [‘Hell is other people’]. See Sartre, Huis Clos suivi de Les Mouches (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 92.

  81 Patrick McGrath, ‘Martin Amis’, in Betty Sussler, ed, Bomb Interviews (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992), p. 192.

  82 Sartre (1976), p. 94.

  83 Haffenden (1985), p. 18.

  84 Brian Finney, ‘Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 37:1 (Fall 1995), pp.3, 4-7. 8.

  85 Massie (1990), p.47.

  86 Richard Todd. ‘The Intrusive Author in British Postmodernist Fiction: The Cases of Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis’, in Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema, eds., Exploring Postmodernism: Selected Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism at the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress, Paris, 20-24 August 1985, Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature vol. 23 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987; 1990), p. 123.

  87 ‘Self’s the Man’, Larkin (1990), pp. 117-8.

  88 [Editor’s Note:) For a discussion of the names in Money, see Leonard R.N. Ashley, ‘“Names Are Awfully Important”: The Onomastics of Satirical Comment in Martin Amis’[s] Money: A Suicide Note’, Literary Onomastics Studies, 14 (1987), pp. 1-48.

  89 Eric Korn, ‘Frazzled Yob-Gene Lag-Jag’, Times Literary Supplement, 4253 (5 October 1984), p. 1119.

  90 Brown (1994), pp. 100-1.

  91 ‘Bernard Bergonzi’, in Nicolas Tredell, Conversations with Critics (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), pp. 101-2.

  92 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, William Montgomery, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 848.

  93 Haffenden (1985), pp.3, 4-5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13-14, 21-2, 23-4.

  94 Kingsley Amis, ‘A Bookshop Idyll’, in Philip Larkin, ed., The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 527-8. This quotation, p. 528.

  95 Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History, corrected edn (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.411-4.

  96 Todd(1990), p. 123.

  97 Todd(1990), p. 124.

  98 Todd(1990), p. 125.

  99 Todd(1990), p.131.

  100 Miller (1987), p. 409.

  101 Korn (1984), p. 1119.

  102 Shakespeare (1998), p.998.

  103 Todd(1990), pp. 131, 132-5.

  104 Todd (1990), p. 135.

  105 Miller (1985), p.411.

  106 Todd (1990), p. 136.

  107 Laura L. Doan, ‘“Sexy Greedy Is the late Eighties”: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money’, The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Committed Writing, 34-5 (Spring 1990), p.69.

  108 Haffenden (1985), p. 5.

  109 Benoîte Groult, ‘Les Portiers de Nuif, trans. Elissa Gelfand, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken, 1981), p. 72.

  110 Suzanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986), p. 50.

  111 Doan (1990), pp. 70-1, 72-4. 74-5, 78, 79.

  112 Not all the praise came from men, however. The novelist Emma Tennant (1937- ) concluded a laudatory review of Money: ‘[i]n this world impoverished by money [Martin Amis] has discovered an extraordinary verbal richness’ (‘Seriously Rich’, Literary Review, 11 (November 1984), p.45).

  113 William Rose Benét, ed, The Reader’s Encyclopedia, 2nd edn (London: Book Club Associates, 1977), p. 1071.

  114 David Profumo, ‘Interview: David Profumo drops in on Martin Amis’, Literary Review, 107 (May 1987), pp.41-2.

  115 Adam Mars-Jones, Venus Envy, Chatto Counterblasts series (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p.8.

  116 Mars-Jones (1990), p. 1.

  117 Mars-Jones (1990), p. 2.

  118 Mars-Jones (1990), p. 11-17.

  119 MM. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics’ (1937-38), in Michael Holquist, ed., trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: Uni
versity of Texas Press, 1981), p. 84.

  120 Rachel Falconer, ‘Bakhtin’s Chronotope and the Contemporary Short Story’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 97:3-4 (Summer-Fall 1998), p. 706.