Here’s a passage from Tony Blair’s chatty, undemanding and therefore non-Armenian memoir:
“It’s like people saying to me: ‘Oh, so and so, they don’t believe in anything, they’re just a good communicator.’ As a statement about politics, it’s almost an oxymoron . . . if You don’t have the core beliefs of a statesman, and a true wayfinding instinct developed from those beliefs, and you’ll never be a good communicator because — this may seem corny, but it’s true — The best communication comes from the heart.”
In other words, style is substance. Or at least those two things are harder to separate than one might think. The idea that Blair is a shallow smoothie guy and Gordon Brown is a deep but tongue-tied guy is primitive analysis. If Brown has difficulty communicating, it’s precisely because he’s a weather vane, a news-driven tactician, forever second-guessing a tabloid audience here, a liberal audience there. Who should I be today?
Martin Amis has spent half a century developing a version of this argument. (his debut novel, Rachel’s Story, which came out 50 years before his death last week). In his view, there is no such thing as “just” fad in writing. If a sentence brings pleasure to the reader, it is because it contains a moral or psychological truth.How about this, from london fieldsabout a miserable marriage:
“When Hope called his name—’Guy?’—then he answered Yes? never had any answers because his name meant come over’ I found that to be tactful and classy enough at 25. Now, with the marriage seeding around me, it’s the insight, the insight that makes me smile/wince. A good joke usually starts after a “haha” “How true”.
Amis’s career is best understood as a long-winded answer to George Orwell. (“The man is worthless,” he said, according to Christopher Hitchens, though his views would mature.) Orwell’s austere prose is still hailed as a mark of integrity and perceptiveness: The British loathe nonsense.Except, as his biographers record, with varying degrees of tact, he was not That disgust. We still don’t know if he shot that elephant in Burma. Under pressure from being accused of fabricating the facts, he is said to have defended it as “essentially true”. As for clarity of vision, 1984, his description of the future of Britain is, and that’s not enough, spectacularly wrong. (Unless you’re the kind of person who shakes his head at a CCTV camera and mutters “he saw it coming”.)
The point is not that Amis, a good comedy writer, is equal to Orwell, a great man of the 20th century. It’s just that Amis has a better argument for style. There is no causal relationship between outer simplicity and inner wisdom. Otherwise, this belief can put the whole society in trouble. Take back control. Get Brexit done. Make America Great Again. It is this simplistic prose that has led mature democracies astray over the past decade.
How did no-secret sphinx Theresa May become prime minister? Because someone who the British political class thinks is so unremarkable must have hidden depths. Another Brown error. This happens in workplaces all over the world. I’m afraid it happens in journalism. Monotony and drudgery are given false weight. This article must be serious. terrible.
By the way, that doesn’t mean you have to find Amis’ own work stylish. Once you find a writer like Cormac McCarthy or John Banville, all those adverbs (“vigoroly tousled”, “appreciably crappier”) can seem a bit pedantic: writers who work so hard for effect, they never say What can they evoke.The point is that amis is right about Style, about its inseparability from content.
He wrote less and less about sport as he got older, but Amis always reminded me of Guardiola, another man accused by the English of unnecessary exposition. He has completely conquered domestic football to show how much rigor and seriousness (and oil wealth) lies beneath the surface. You pass the ball from the back to entice the opponent to play, not to express beauty.you take possession as the best form defense, do not attack. Now give me my fifth Premier League title out of six and don’t say I’m showing off.
amis said writers die twice. First, the talent goes. Then the body will be fine. So when did the talent harvester come to him?Obviously, something has changed since then Information the year 1995. His ears to street slang were clogged. He’s so good at capturing the texture of grungy, dangerous London and New York in the ’80s, but he’s overwhelmed when they’ve all been transformed into sanitized boom towns.exist Lionel AsboPublished in 2012, he continues to pretend nothing has changed.
Kingsley Amis listens to his son Martin while his wife Hilary and daughter Sally watch © Daniel Farson/Getty
The ever-present glitches became more apparent. He was passionate about America, but not original. (You know that guy over there always carries a bit of lumber?) In the 80s, it seemed like someone told him about the existence of nuclear weapons. The bee took too long to get off his hat.
But no accusation bothered him as much as sexism. He has a viable defense: the characters in his books are far worse. His greatest creation, Keith Talent, is a bar low living doing swag and sports talk. (“Stress? Fucking penis on top. ’) But the physical examination was different. A sense that permeated the early books, and recurred throughout the British entertainment canon, was that women’s bodies were a commotion. Imagine little britain Set to prose.
In the end, despite his Atlanticist tendencies, he cannot overcome his nationality. Amis argues that Britain’s coping strategy after losing its empire was to accept trivialities. If we can’t manage the world, we’ll treat the whole thing as a joke. It’s still the most poignant thing I’ve ever heard about our decline. He said so long before Boris Johnson giggled to the top. Oddly enough – and quite frankly, Amis himself is an example of the phenomenon he’s describing. A man capable of writing on major registers keeps coming back to hilarious grotesques. He couldn’t turn down a joke. Would it be true if he was American or Indian?
His funny bones cost him the prize. (Comes don’t win Bookers any more than they win Oscars.) It probably cost us, though we don’t know it, some great writing.
“why did amis die So heartfelt about a certain type of man? That wasn’t the headline of the newspaper’s arts supplement. It was a text message from a friend who was a banker last weekend. Others who got in touch: lobbyists, football executives, civil servants, marketers. And which “literary” novelist (Amys is not a big seller) would elicit such a response from men in non-art jobs? Not Julian Barnes, although I think he wrote a book or two that outlasted any of Amis’s Not Kazuo Ishiguro, who has won 35 more awards than Amis. Not Ian McEwan, who now outlives Hilary Mantel and may be the last serious novelist with national fame Home.
So why “bazaar”? I think he acts as a sort of mentor for men who grew up before YouTube, Jordan Peterson, and ubiquitous life advice. Pick a masculine ritual—sex, fatherhood, athletic failure—and Amis speaks the truth. He even sees through the eternal lie that male friends don’t talk to each other about their inner lives: It’s all about movie recommendations and Declan Rice transfer rumours. I’m afraid I’m going to have to stand up for this. There are at least 10 men with whom I can discuss anything down to the nth degree, like Amis and Hitchens do in some naturist restaurant now. That’s not universal, no. But, looking around, it’s not that fancy either.
To shed light on this and other truths about life, Amis does feel like an older brother, delivering insights as heavily as clothes. For example? It’s not enough in this world to make a good egg. “Alpha” is a state of mind, not body. (Amis isn’t big at all.) No, it’s not like that, it’s like that. As suggested, the weather was cold and bleak. This is Peak Amis. But late Amis’ arrival brings a more grown-up suggestion.On your deathbed, he wrote pregnant widow, the only thing you’ll care about is “how it goes” in matters of the heart. So eat more. And make sure it sticks in the hippocampus. Here’s Amis talking to Esquire magazine about his advice to his sons:
“I say to them, when you’re in love and making love, make sure you hold it in your head so you remember it later. In your fifties and sixties, it becomes It’s very important; you spend a lot of time in the past, thinking about those moments . . . so I coach the boys; it’s like their pension when they get old.”
Romantic Memories as a Pension: An Asset to Live On in Your Old Age. It is a stylish line. But it’s also real. How Amis would resent that “but”.
Email to janan.ganesh@ft.com
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