The Fiction of Martin Amis
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241 [Nash’s Note:] Saul Bellow, backcover blurb for The Information.
242 Vincent (1995), p.23.
243 See Maya Slater, ‘Problems When Time Moves Backwards: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow”, English: The Journal of the English Association, 42:173 (Summer 1993), pp. 141-53.
244 [Nash “s Note:] To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 19 November 1923, in Richard Ellmann, ed.. Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3 (London: Faber, 1966), p. 83.
245 Borges, ‘The Circular Ruins’, trans. James E. Irby, in Borges (1970), p. 75.
246 Borges (1970), p.74.
247 Borges (1970), p. 76.
248 [Nash’s Note:] For the points about Epstein and Lucky Jim I am indebted to Don Nichol, ‘Rewriting Plagiarism’, Angelaki, 1:2 (Winter 1993/94), pp. 13-23.
249 Bryan Appleyard, ‘Balancing the Books: Martin Amis’s Mid-Life Crisis’, Sunday Times Magazine (19 March 1995), pp. 30-8.
250 See Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 6-9.
251 John Nash, ‘Fiction May Be A Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information’, English: The Journal of the English Association, 45:183 (Autumn 1996), pp.2I3-24.
252 Independent on Sunday (28 September 1997), Section 2, p. 5. Amis has written about Updike in The Moronic Inferno, pp. 15 5-9, and Visiting Mrs Nabokov, pp. 47-59.
253 John Updike, ‘It’s a Fair Cop’, Sunday Times Books (21 September 1997), Section 8, p. I.
254 Updike (1997), pp. 1-2. It should be noted that this review contains a number of misquotations from Night Train: on p. 1, ‘weigh the maggots’ is rendered ‘size the maggots’, and on p. 2, ‘fuck’ is rendered as ‘f***’ (perhaps for reasons of decorum), ‘eighty-year olds’ as ‘eight-year olds’ and ‘has been staring’ as ‘had been staring’.
255 Anita Brookner, ‘Farewell, My Lovely’, Spectator, 279:8826 (27 September 1997), pp. 36-37.
256 Russell Celyn Jones, ‘Unable to Do the Locomotion’, Times, 18 September 1997, p. 42.
257 Sean O’Brien, ‘Choo-Choo Time’, Times Literary Supplement, 4929 (19 September 1997), p. 22.
258 Philip Oakes, ‘Bloody and For Real’, Literary Review, 232 (October 1977), p. 50.
259 Natasha Walter, ‘The Gender Benders’, Guardian (29 July 1997), pp.4-5.
260 Adam Phillips, ‘Cloud Cover’, London Review of Books, 19:20 (16 October 1997), pp.3, 6.
261 Russell Celyn Jones, ‘Not Such Light Reading’, Times (24 September 1998), p. 40.
262 Natasha Walter, ‘Fat Men, Thin Lives’, New Statesman (25 September 1998), pp.81, 82.
263 Tredell (1994), p.8O.
264 Compare Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique précédée de Question de méthode:Tome I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques. Bibliothèque des Idées series. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1960, p. 208. ‘Rien, en effet - ni les grands fauves ni les microbes - ne peut être plus terrible pour rhornme qu’une espèce intelligente, carnassière, cruelle, qui saurait comprendre et déjouer l’intelligence humaine et dont la fin serait précisément la destruction de 1’homme. Cette espèce, c’est évidemment la nôtre se saisissant par tout homme chez les autres dans le milieu de la rareté.’ ‘Nothing, neither microbes nor the Lords of the Jungle, can be more terrible for man than an intelligent, cruel, flesh-eating species, capable of understanding and outwitting human intelligence, and whose prime aim lies in the destruction of man. This species is obviously our own, comprehending itself in each individual through the intermediary of others in an environment dominated by scarcity’ (trans. Philip Thody, in his Sartre: A Biographical Introduction, Leaders of Modern Thought series (London: Studio Vista, 1971), p. 123).