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A is for Amis
Paul Sweeten scales the peaks of the grand canon.
Posted 3rd June 2009 | Author: Paul Sweeten
(Views: 144)
The Eng Lit canon is perhaps the most intimidating prospect a young undergraduate could ever behold. From Auden to Woolf, Chaucer to Palahniuk, the staple texts alone – those which every self-respecting academic must read before they are twelve years old – arrange themselves in libraries like a great mountain range of aesthetica: each peak as treacherous as the last, each as cavernous and labyrinthine, and every one worth a year’s expedition, a lifetime’s look-around. And where should one start? At A? At 1400? A keen reader of Marlowe may scale the faces of The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus only to have his summit’s view eclipsed by the parent mountain across the way – be it that Mt Jonson or that Mt Shakespeare; that unreachable, unconquerable Shakespeare – he whose peak is readjusted with every new critical approach, with every fresh example staged. And what then is Marlowe? Just another, I suppose. Just another thing to get around.
So to be well-read is to know nothing at all. For most of us, whole literary ranges go uncharted. I’ve never so much as looked at a Victorian novel. Never read a Haiku. Apparently I must read Hanif Kureishi. But I’ve never heard of Hanif Kureishi. ‘I know, I know,’ I’ll say, ‘but I honestly haven’t. I’m sorry. Under a rock, yes, that’s where I’ve been. You’ll have to lend me something. I’ll get round to it.’
And so we fly too high above it all. Too awed, too drowning. To get back to earth, I’ll visit the A-file, sometime in the 1980s, and just say something brief about Kingsley Amis. Of course he and his son have both left their impressions: Kingsley the consummate poet-novelist, Martin the stylist of his generation. In fact, books written by the Amises have sat with their spines aligned – that accordion of talent – on the top shelves of bookshops for thirty-five years. There they have kept themselves company between Douglas Adams and Jane Austen and made for us two additional talents to appreciate. As if we didn’t have enough to get through already. Thanks fellas.
In 1973 Martin Amis’s first novel The Rachel Papers slunk up beside its elders: Kingley’s Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You, The Green Man – and that first novel of Martin’s no doubt held its father’s hand through the first reviews. But it found its way, of course. A year later The Rachel Papers had won the Somerset Maugham Award, just as Lucky Jim had nineteen years earlier. Funny then that the two men – Martin and Kingsley, father and son, writer and writer – never enjoyed great parity when it came to their work. Kingsley’s careful control of English never went off as Martin’s did, and does; never in those stylistic pyrotechnics, those somersaulting sentences of London Fields and Dead Babies did Kingsley ever indulge. It was never to his liking, that high-style. He once said of his son that he had a ‘terrible compulsive vividness...that constant demonstrating of his command of English’. Kingsley could never even bring himself to finish one of Martin’s novels, such were his objections. But the unlikeness of Amis and Amis has been well publisized. Something which has not, and something which says a great deal for Kingsley’s sensitivity, was what he told his son some years after those first critial remarks.
It was never going to be unreserved praise. As Martin notes in his memoir, Kingsley was incapable of fudging an opinion when it came to writing. And that’s the way it should have been, he adds. ‘That’s what writers are for, to tell the truth as they see it.’ And so what Kingsley said in his final days was that what the world had was a father and a son who were both ‘some good’. Indeed they were writers of some good, the pair of them, and that Martin was ‘the best of a bad lot’. That was high praise coming from him.
So it’s what you’ll hear Martin Amis talking about if ever you catch him on a radio interview or somewhere in The Independent: to be a writer of some good. Not that anyone ever changes history, not that any writer is ever a Dickens or a Kingsley Amis, but that a writer can occupy a small corner of the canon and prove of some worth, in some sentence, in some little book in the range. That, of course, is the point. So I’ll put aside the sarcasm and throw it out with all talk of mountains and intimidating prospects for young readers. I wouldn’t worry about scaling the peaks of literature. It isn’t hard work. That’s not what it’s for.
Find a cave, perhaps. Find one sentence that does something and let it suffocate in some embarrassed sense of appreciation – and let that word not be so contemptible. To be a reader of some good, whatever you like reading; to find a corner of literature and sit with it. ‘A Small, Good Thing’: there’s a corner, a favourite story of mine by Raymond Carver. But of course you’d have to be living under a rock not to have already read it.
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