Martin Amis: "Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is." Credit: Frederick M. Brown/Online USA/Getty
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No he was not a racist — Martin Amis wanted everybody to know it. Why wasn’t Martin Amis, enfant terrible turned lordly paterfamilias of English letters, a racist? Well, he told Johann Hari in an interview at his Primrose Hill mansion 12 years ago, it all came down to… sex.
Martin Amis literally loved “multiracialism”. In the late Sixties, whatever race prejudice teenage Mart was lumbered with had been pantingly released. “At the time I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim… The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernise. You would — I don’t know — just look at her and just feel eons between you.”
How had 1984’s best novelist pretzeled himself into this position? Forced to deal girlfriend receipts to a smarmy journalist, in order to prove he was not listing around the same weedy moral pond as a Klansman, or Nick Griffin?
Amis’s problem — like so many other problems — began at 9:03am on September 11 2001, when United Airlines Flight 175 was swallowed by the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the dust, debris, and people rained eerily down on New York City that day, the outlines of this grand tragedy, and many more tragedies to come, for America, and for everyone else, could be discerned.
But it may have been an even bigger tragedy for our novelists. Or it seemed to feel that way to them. What were they supposed to do now? Write craftily about unhappy marriages when the world was curling at its edges?
In the days, weeks, and months after the attack, they filled the pages of newspapers and magazines, scrounging around for the right words. Salman Rushdie wrote of a “dreadful blow”, and the war to come: “We must send our shadow warriors against theirs.” John Updike wondered whether America could afford “the openness that lets future Kamikaze pilots, say, enrol in Florida flying schools”. (He reckoned America could.) A sage Jonathan Franzen suggested that this dreadful new world would have to rediscover “the ordinary, the trivial, and even the ridiculous”. Ian McEwan — somewhat strangely given the widespread sense of shock that day — accused the hijackers of a “failure of the imagination”. Zadie Smith felt sick: “Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen.” David Foster Wallace wrote a melancholy (even for him) essay about flags. A weepy, angry, depressed Jay McInerney was probably the most honest. He admitted to being glad he didn’t have a book coming out that month. The collective tone was nervous, eschatological, distressed. Novelists sounded, just this once, like everyone else.
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SubscribeLet him say what he wants. I do not care for his father’s writing at all, and do not care for Martin – but he is someone very wrought about meaning, religion, and 9/11 – so he went a bit far, fine, why worry so much about it? I really hate the modern passion for tripping people up from something they said way in the past. The past is a very different land, and most of what was said, and went on there, is out of context in the here and now – and this obsession of then taking it in a modern context is just to trip some one up.
As if there isn’t enough self censorship about Islam already , let’s make. Martin Amis islamophobe of the year for the years before the islamophobe of the year award was a thing..
What Will Lloyd calls ‘the hubris of the last 20 years’ was presumably the attempts to ‘nation build ‘ and impose western values on Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan .
But that attempt was itself a displacement activity by politicians like Blair who felt unable to tackle the Islamist threat at home .
Indeed he was allowing vast numbers of Somalis ,and other migrants from cultures without noticeably liberal values ,to move to the UK at the same time as he was trying to westernise Iraq and Afghanistan through war .
‘Offence archaeology’
Though I did enjoy Trudeau and his blackface.
Yes, but I enjoyed his Bollywood phase even more
Kingsley Amis is a terrific writer and has nothing in common with his son Martin, either politically or stylistically. Why mention them in the same breath?
Amis was at least honest in his views. Which is more than can be said for ‘when United Airlines Flight 175 was swallowed by the World Trade Center’s South Tower.’ Was swallowed by? No, chucklehead, it was deliberately flown into the tower in an act of mass murder in the name of a violent and totalist religion.
Yes his locution is a bit of a give-away
“Some people did something”.
I can’t despise cancel culture and book burning, then support an article inviting it. So what if Amis said something he regretted? People were angry.
We have to stop this Crucible style denunciation: I saw Goody Smith dancing with the devil! I saw an author criticising trans people!
We really have to grow up – and that means simply accepting that people make mistakes. (Or, if you like, that we’re all sinners and sinners who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.)
Agreed. I would even say : “accepting that people make mistakes or do not agree with you all the time.”
I don’t see the point of this article. I gave up reading Amis years ago but can’t see why his trying to say something significant about 9/11, even if he does misspeak at times, should be dismissed as ‘hubris’. I know you’ve got a crust to earn but this is just opportunistic journalism made only vaguely interesting because of its quotations from Amis.
I took hubris of the last 20 years to refer to Tony Blair’s attempt to nation build in Iraq and Afghanistan .
Perhaps he was referring just to Amis in which case your response is totally valid
I got the strong impression from the ‘literary’ writing style of this article that the journalist is trying to prove his credentials as a novelist. The style is annoying and the content is pretty trivial.
You think this is a take down attempt fuelled by envy?
We live in a dishonest and stupid world, as this article reminds us. Somehow the mere suggestion of travel bans and profiling is beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse in countries that were, at that very moment, sending soldiers to invade and occupy Muslim countries. Which is worse? And which is the more rational course of action? 9/11 was, after all, an immigration failure. An immigration response is more logical than invading a foreign country. And, of course, the stupidity of the ubiquitous ‘islamophobia’. True phobias are irrational but this fear is entirely reasonable.
You’re completely spot on but the liberal media can’t accept the truth that 9/11 was an immigration failure, because it would raise the question of whether large scale Muslim immigration to the west was a mistake. And that isn’t a discussion they wish to allow .
I can’t stand his books, but this is just spiteful drivel.
I can’t disagree with either of those thoughts
I regard articles like this as watching an episode of Celebrity Big Brother with a commentary by Frankie Howerd. Interesting to a degree, mawkish and bathetic but ultimately disposable. Filed alongside National Geographic articles on Patagonians who speak Welsh. I gave up reading MA after Koba the Dread, his excursion into anthropophagy. He has little to say about the arching realities of modern times, the supreme irony of an interview with Johan Hari. That the sainted Ian McKewan cares more about the horror of Brexit than a stupendous act of terrorism says it all. Oh, and it was interesting to read that John Updike wrote something then died.
Perhaps if you read articles like this WHILE watching Celebrity Big Brother etc etc, life would take on a more meaningful trajectory. Just a thought …
I’ll try anything once, or twice.
“How had 1984’s best novelist pretzeled himself into this position?”
He wasn’t 1984’s or any other year’s best novelist.
As far as I am concerned NO-ONE should have to apologise for being critical about Islam and Islamism. Ever. Martin Amis was best friends with Christopher Hitchens who would never offer up a weasel apology for offending Islamic sensibilities. He and Amis were among the few who stuck up for Salman Rushdie when others capitulated to Islamist violence. Screw worrying about offending Islam, it deserves to be offended.
Rather unfortunate of him to back off. Collective punishment is necessary when there is collective if not universal guilt.
But searching a ‘disproportionate’ number of Muslims isn’t even collective punishment .
It’s a perfectly normal rational response to where the threat comes from. Except in our neurotic , woke society we can’t admit that , which is why they’ve been bigging up the pretend terrorist threat from supposed right wing extremists .
I disagree, Will. As a young man struggling to assimilate the cataclysm at the time, I found sustenance and insight in Amis’s 9/11 stuff, and I think it has aged pretty well. Partly it was his gift for putting into words what I felt myself. From The Second Plane:
“That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.”
Yes!
Also, it’s worth noting that Inside Story gives us a fascinating insight into his state of mind post-9/11. Apparently a vindictive ex-girlfriend, knowing he’d be deeply unsettled by the attacks, got in touch and claimed that his father was Philip Larkin. That would do it, right?
This is deeply unfair. Amis – unlike journalists who need a strong take clickbait profile – was trying to give his insight into an appalling event. I suspect his views were deeply felt, and came from a post war base of deep scepticism to all religions. 9/11 was a day when the idea of C20th progress died for all of us: I think he and C Hitchens nailed that, and we are still living through the detritus of those explosions.
And exactly why should not Al Qaeda be compared with the Nazis et Al for their evil? I’m not at all sure where Will Lloyd is coming from here.
The fact that our bien pendant leftist ‘intelligentsia’ – laughable term – can get more het up about Amis and others condemning Islamist barbarity, but far less about the atrocities themselves, puts him in a rather favourable light compared to them. It’s always white, western people’s fault.
On this day twenty years ago, the imagery of violence announced itself. Live, immediate, connected, in glorious technicolor of course, after a century of the moving image, the power of the televisual image to seriously hog the limelight, as it were, has thrown human beings into disarray.
We resent technology more than we know. It’s given the world major benefits, we know that. Pleasure has given way to sensationalism, however. It was easy to see how exactly twenty years ago, books, writers, even reading, might suddenly no longer matter. In the 1994 movie, set in the Fifties, ‘Quiz Show’, we see the intimations of that cultural chasm when the quiz show’s star’s distinguished academic father’s disdain for the new medium of television is based on his view that television is an usurper, a device that will replace all that is good and worthwhile with, ultimately, the tawdry, the sensational.
We worry now that the moving image, brought to the palm of a hand nearest you, does not so much relay events or stunts or activities or atrocities as encourage them. Had the 9/11 attacks occurred in 1981, it would have been highly unlikely for there to have been any cine recording or television broadcast of the impacts, let alone for that recording to have been beamed beyond a few countries. The copycat attack has depended on the Information Age. The power of the sensational, to our chagrin, has diminished in scale the pleasure of technology. The Sunday drive has given way to the 24/7 dash.
How different would society in the West have been had the arrival of the moving pictures coincided with the talking pictures? It’s amazing to think that the Wright Brothers had invented controlled flight more than twenty years before actors could talk on film. But what to do? For thirty years, in the Silent Era, comedy was the mainstay of the movie industry. It could not be otherwise, really. A breaking-in, if you like, that perhaps even the old-time professor from ‘Quiz Show’ once enjoyed and approved of as a young man. What harm, laughs? Was it fun? Certainly. The old comics railed against the new shiny things of their day, smashing them up.
A world war occurred during the Silent Era. But without the three decades of the Silent Era in film, I doubt that the Western world would have for so long held on to throughout the twentieth century the idea that what was on a screen ought to be cheerful. Did the Silent Era condition the West? I think so. Did it change the course of history? No. But a certain kind of hope has always been held on to. It’s just much harder to see now when we are told entertainment today is no longer as we know it. So how to spread a little cheer around the world now? Even in America? The home of the entertainment industry? Where it all began?
Maybe he should have stopped with London Fields and Money. I certainly did, if somewhat unconsciously. The memoir could be interesting though.
The real problem with these guys is that they defended the enlightenment from all religions, particularly going for a dying and relatively harmless Christianity (especially Catholicism), ignoring the threat from left field. It’s the left that denies biology now. Hitchens as a well read left winger should have known that the enlightenment was under attack from the left. In any case that was a waste of their time and energy.
I say the “hubris of the last 20 years” was a natural outgrowth of the prideful belief (which became policy in 1965) that anyone could be an American or an Englishman.
Invite the world, invade the world; what difference does it make?
Not knowing much about Amis, the content of the article reminds me of Wilde’s saying “Everything is about sex”. And I find the delivery very sexy too. (Word choice like “please-forgive-me eyes” etc.)
Dear me, what a piece! Good luck with your A levels…
Dear me, what a piece! Good luck with your A levels…