Martin Amis knew the horror of words
Years after I first read The Rachel Papers, I bought the copy of Hamlet that Martin Amis had owned as an Oxford student from a book dealer in Charing Cross. It had his undergraduate jottings in the margins and his own personal bookplate inside the front cover. He must have been a teenager when he stuck it in. Truly, Amis was precocious. He was also brilliant, but not just as a novelist.
Frank Kermode described Amis as “a literary critic of startling power” — and he was right. Amis later tried his hand at political writing, with a slightly absurd analysis of Stalinism in Koba the Dread and of 9/11 in The Second Plane. These were not successful.
Amis failed when he tried to write about politics, but when he wrote about literature, that “startling power” revealed much, especially concerning the nature of autocracy. This is because while style was the essence of good prose for Amis, it was also the essence of morality. In Experience he wrote: “I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified.” For Amis, clichés of the pen stemmed directly from those “clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart” because a cliché was, above all, “used thought” — which poisons literature, but also politics.
To understand Amis the writer, look to his idol Vladimir Nabokov, a man on intimate terms with the perversion of politics after his family was forced to flee Russia following the 1917 October Revolution. In his essay, “The Creative Writer”, Nabokov set out his process of artistic creation, which he divided into two stages, vostorg and vdokhnovenie: “rapture” and “recapture”. The process starts with the pure flame of vostorg, in which the writer breaks everything down to first principles in a kind of “rapture”. Once this is achieved, he settles down to the actual composing of his work, relying on the “serene and steady” kind of inspiration, vdokhnovenie, through which he recaptures and reconstructs the world.
In The Rachel Papers, Charles Highway walks down an ordinary street in which everything seems alien: “demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extraterrestrial wayfarers”. The same is true of The Information’s Richard Tull, who is “an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this”. He is, in the end, a man “harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles”…
