One of my favourite writers, Martin Amis, died recently. In a substantial way, Amis taught me to write. On the shelf in front of me, there are three books: Money (1984), The Moronic Inferno (1986), and Experience (2000). While Money is merely a little dog-eared, the pages of Experience are crowded with sticky notes, tabs, and underlinings. Amis’s painfully self-aware, precise, graphomaniacal voice gave me a sense of literature, a sense of decorum, and a sense of what it was to be young. Alongside his always-dark extroversion, he exuded gravity. He was funny and detested the humourless. To quote a devastating footnote from Experience:
By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
Amis said in The War Against Cliche (as a response to anti-elitist, anti-standards democratization in literary criticism) that in the long term “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.”
He has given me great joy over the years. I have been rereading his work, and introducing it to my friends. I begin by saying that Martin Amis died recently, and that I loved his books very much, and that here is something by him they might like to read. And they will hear him say, “Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege. Let me help you with that” and before he begins a story, they will hear him say, “It’s no trouble. There’s a lift… Oh, don’t mention it – de nada. The honour is all mine. You are my guest. You are my reader.” Martin Amis, Inside Story (2020), Preludial.
I was his guest, I was his reader, and it is the least I can do to ensure that he continues to be read.