The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International) Read online

  Acclaim for Martin Amis’s

  The War Against Cliché

  “Amis is the best practitioner-critic of our day—just what Pritchett was in his prime.… We have here a literary critic of startling power, a post-literary-critical critic who, incorrigibly satirical, goes directly to work on the book.”

  —London Review of Books

  “[An] antic, fiendishly witty and brilliant collection.”

  —Buffalo News

  “A peek at the evolution of Martin Amis.… The book’s aggressive sounding title is apt—Amis is a warrior when it comes to language.… Peppered with small English cruelties, sure, and the occasional assassination … but this book also introduces us to a gentler side of Martin.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Amis writes things you want to remember and repeat: he is original … [and] a brilliant writer.”

  —New Statesman

  “These essays glitter with elegant put-downs.… You read them admiring the way in which Mr. Amis keeps to his own rules about writing.”

  —The Economist

  “[Amis] doesn’t just review books, he rewrites them.… [His] signature style wasn’t a leather-patches-on-tweed-jacket critic; no, he seemed a leather-patches-on-leather-jacket critic.… Whatever the book, there is no one whose review of it you’d rather read.”

  —The Guardian

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2002

  Copyright © 2001 by Martin Amis

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd. in 2001. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Talk Miramax Books, a division of Hyperion, New York, in 2001. The War Against Cliché is published by arrangement with Hyperion/Talk Miramax Books.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Amis, Martin.

  The war against cliché : essays and reviews, 1971–2000 / Martin Amis.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-375-72716-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91025-2

  1. Books—Reviews. I. Title.

  PR6051.M5 W37 2002

  824′.914—dc21

  2002066155

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  To Kingsley and Sally

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  On Masculinity and Related Questions:

  Iron John. Movie Violence. Thatcher, Lincoln, Hillary Clinton.

  The End of Nature. Elvis Presley and Andy Warhol.

  Nuclear Weapons. Writing About Sex.

  Zeus and the Garbage

  I Am in Blood Stepp’d in So Far

  A PM, a President, and a First Lady

  The World and I

  Elvis and Andy: US Males

  Bad Dreams

  What’s Your Favourite?

  Some English Prose:

  V.S. Pritchett. Angus Wilson. Iris Murdoch. J.G. Ballard.

  Anthony Burgess. C.P. Snow, Brian Aldiss, Cyril Connolly,

  Fay Weldon, John Fowles. D.M. Thomas.

  In Praise of Pritchett

  Kith of Death: Angus Wilson

  Iris and Love

  J.G. Ballard

  Anthony Burgess: Jack Be Quick

  Shorter Shrift

  The D.M. Thomas Phenomenon

  Philip Larkin

  The Beginning: Larval Larkin

  The Ending: Don Juan in Hull

  From the Canon:

  Coleridge. Jane Austen. Milton. Dickens. Donne.

  Waugh and Wodehouse. Malcolm Lowry.

  Coleridge’s Beautiful Diseases

  Tinkering with Jane

  Sticking up for Milton

  The Darker Dickens

  Donne the Apostate

  Waugh’s Mag. Op.; Wodehouse’s Sunset

  Lowry: In the Volcano

  Popularity Contest:

  Robert B. Parker: Chandler Prolonged. Michael Crichton.

  Elmore Leonard. Tom Wolfe. Thomas Harris.

  Chandler Prolonged

  Park II

  Maintaining on Elmore Leonard

  Half Wolfe

  Bob Sneed Broke the Silence

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Life

  Lectures

  Plays

  Letters

  Lolita’s Little Sister

  Some American Prose:

  Norman Mailer. Gore Vidal. Philip Roth. William Burroughs.

  Kurt Vonnegut. Truman Capote. Don DeLillo. Saul Bellow.

  Mailer’s Lows and Highs

  Vidal’s Mirror

  Philip Roth and the Self

  The Name Is William Burroughs

  Kurt’s Cosmos

  Truman’s Remembrance

  Don DeLillo’s Powers

  Even Later

  Obsessions and Curiosities:

  Chess. Football. Poker. World Records. Modern Humour.

  Chess Is Their Life

  Football Mad

  The School of Doyle

  Believe It or Else

  No Laughing Matter

  John Updike

  Life Class

  Ultramundane:

  World Literature. Zamyatin. Kafka. Shiva Naipaul.

  A Journey in Ladakh. V.S. Naipaul.

  Here Comes Everybody

  Russian Ghost

  Nothing is Deserved and Everything is Accepted

  Educated Monsters

  No Way

  More Bones

  Great Books:

  Don Quixote. Pride and Prejudice. Ulysses.

  The Adventures of Augie March. Lolita.

  Broken Lance

  Force of Love

  The War Against Cliché

  The American Eagle

  Nabokov’s Grand Slam

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my editors, in whom I have been unusually fortunate: Arthur Crook, John Sturrock, Peter Labanyi and the late Nicolas Walter at the Times Literary Supplement; the late Terence Kilmartin at The Observer; the late George Gale at the Spectator; John Gross and Claire Tomalin at the New Statesman; Harvey Shapiro and Charles McGrath at the New York Times Book Review; Karl Miller and Mary-Kay Wilmers at the London Review of Books; Jack Beattie at Atlantic Monthly; Blake Morrison at the Independent on Sunday; Tina Brown, David Remnick, Bill Buford and (again) Charles McGrath at the New Yorker, Deborah Orr at the Guardian; and Jonathan Burnham at Talk. I would also like to thank Dan Franklin, Pascal Cariss and Jason Arthur at Jonathan Cape.

  Pieces in this book were compiled by Professor James Diedrick. I gratefully salute his skill and acuity.

  Foreword

  While complacently planning this volume in my mind I always thought I would include a nice little section called – let us say – ‘Literature and Society’, where I would assemble my pieces on literature and society (pieces on F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, and on lesser figures like Ian Robinson and Denis Donoghue). ‘Literature and society’ was, at one time, a phrase so much on everyone’s lips that it earned itself an abbreviation: Lit & Soc. And Lit & Soc, I seemed to remember, had been for me a long-running enthusiasm. But
when I leafed through the massed manuscripts I found only a handful of essays, all of them written, rather ominously, in the early Seventies (when I was in my early twenties). Having reread them, I toyed with the idea of calling my nice little section something like ‘Literature and Society: The Vanished Debate’. Then I decided that my debate had better vanish too. The pieces themselves I considered earnest, overweening, and contentedly dull. More decisively, though, Lit & Soc, and indeed literary criticism, felt dead and gone.

  That time now seems unrecognizably remote. I had a day job at the Times Literary Supplement. Even then I sensed discrepancy, as I joined an editorial conference (to help prepare, perhaps, a special number on Literature and Society), wearing shoulder-length hair, a flower shirt, and knee-high tricoloured boots (well-concealed, it is true, by the twin tepees of my flared trousers). My private life was middle-bohemian – hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly debauched; but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube; I always had about me my Edmund Wilson – or my William Empson. I took it seriously. We all did. We hung around the place talking about literary criticism. We sat in pubs and coffee bars talking about W.K. Wimsatt and G. Wilson Knight, about Richard Hoggart and Northrop Frye, about Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner and George Steiner. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilization. Everyone concurred. Literature, we felt, was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it. The early Seventies, I should add, saw the great controversy about the Two Cultures: Art v. Science (or F.R. Leavis v. C.P. Snow). Perhaps the most fantastic thing about this cultural moment was that Art seemed to be winning.

  Literary historians know it as the Age of Criticism. It began, let us suggest, in 1948, with the publication of Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and Leavis’s The Great Tradition. What ended it? The brutalist answer would consist of a single four-letter word: OPEC. In the Sixties you could live on ten shillings a week: you slept on people’s floors and sponged off your friends and sang for your supper – about literary criticism. Then, abruptly, a bus fare cost ten shillings. The oil hike, and inflation, and then stagflation, revealed literary criticism as one of the many leisure-class fripperies we would have to get along without. Well, that’s how it felt. But it now seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.

  Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdothon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.

  Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, at the other end of the business, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least a book-reviewer. Democratization has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments. I think Gore Vidal said this first, and he said it, not quite with mockery, but with lively scepticism. He said that, nowadays, nobody’s feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else’s. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review, whether on the Web or in the literary pages. The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. The right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact will form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature.

  Probably some readers are getting the impression that I think these developments are to be deplored. Not so. It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you like about it, the present is unavoidable. And we, in the Seventies, were frequently ridiculous, too, with our Fallacies and our Seven Types (and Leavis’s besieged intensity was ridiculous. His shaping embarrassment, however, was to nominate as his model for sanity the person of D.H. Lawrence). Emotional egalitarianism, for example, looks hard to attack. I honour it, in a way, but it has to me the pale glow of illusion. It is utopian, which is to say that reality cannot be expected to support it. Then, too, these ‘feelings’ are seldom unadulterated; they are admixtures of herd opinions and social anxieties, vanities, touchinesses, and everything else that makes up a self.

  One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study, is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book-reviewer, and to the literary critic, but it’s true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematize it. Interacting with literature is easy. Anyone can join in, because words (unlike palettes and pianos) lead a double life: we all have a competence. It is not surprising, therefore, that individual sensitivities come so strongly into play; not surprising, either, that the discipline has rolled over for democratization far more readily than, for example, chemistry and Ancient Greek. In the long term, though, literature will resist levelling and revert to hierarchy. This isn’t the decision of some snob of a belletrist. It is the decision of Judge Time, who constantly separates those who last from those who don’t.

  Let me run, for a while, with an extended simile. Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone twenty-four hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies in their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, nowadays, then he’s likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its oohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care.

  Readers of the present book are asked to keep an eye on the datelines which end these pieces, for they span nearly thirty years. You hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder, simply by avoiding the stuff you are unlikely to warm to. Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember (Angus Wilson and William Burroughs nursed my animadversions – and no doubt the animadversions of others – to the grave). Admittedly there are some critics who enjoy being insulting well into middle age. I have often wondered why this spectacle seems so undignified. Now I know: it’s mutton dressed as lamb. I am also struck by how hard I sometimes was on writers who (I erroneously felt) were trying to influence me: Roth, Mailer, Ballard.

  You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue. Gallingly for the lit-crit imperialists (especially I.A. Richards), there is no means for distinguishing th
e excellent from the less excellent. The most muscular literary critics on earth have no equipment for establishing that

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

  is a better line than

  When all at once I saw a crowd

  – and, if they did, they would have to begin by saying that the former contains a dead expletive (‘do’) brought in to sustain the metre. Yet quotation is all we have. To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.

  London, October 2000

  On Masculinity and Related Questions

  Zeus and the Garbage

  Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly; The Way Men Think: Intellect, Intimacy and the Erotic Imagination by Liam Hudson and Bernadine Jacot; Utne Reader: Men, It’s Time to Pull Together: The Politics of Masculinity

  In 1919, after prolonged study, the Harvard ethologist William Morton Wheeler pronounced the male wasp ‘an ethological nonentity’. An animal behaviourist had scrutinized the male wasp and found – no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to behave more intriguingly. For nowadays, according to a recent Scientific American, ‘interest in the long-neglected male is flourishing, a tribute to the animal’s broad array of activities’. Male humans will surely feel for their brothers in the wasp kingdom. After a phase of relative obscurity, we too have rallied. In fact, we seem to have bounced back pretty well immediately, with all kinds of fresh claims on everyone’s attention. Male wounds. Male rights. Male grandeur. Male whimpers of neglect.

  What is the deep background on the ‘deep male’? From 100,000 BC until, let’s say, 1792 (Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Woman), there was, simply, the Man, whose chief characteristic was that he got away with everything. From 1792 until about 1970, there was, in theory anyway, the Enlightened Man, who, while continuing to get away with everything, agreed to meet women for talks about talks which would lead to political concessions. Post-1970, the Enlightened Man became the New Man, who isn’t interested in getting away with anything – who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior. The masculine cultivation of his feminine ‘side’ can be seen as a kind of homage to a better and gentler principle. Well, the New Man is becoming an old man, perhaps prematurely, what with all the washing-up he’s done; there he stands in the kitchen, a nappy in one hand, a pack of tarot cards in the other, with his sympathetic pregnancies, his hot flushes and contact pre-menstrual tensions, and with a duped frown on his ageing face. The time is ripe. And now the back door swings open and in he comes, preceded by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John.