On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Leo Robson and Rosa Lyster join us to discuss two essays by Martin Amis: “In Praise of Pritchett,” which appeared in the London Review of Books in 1980, and “The American Eagle,” an essay about Saul Bellow published in The Atlantic in 1995.
On this episode of The Point podcast series “Selected Essays,” Leo Robson and Rosa Lyster join us to discuss two essays by Martin Amis: “In Praise of Pritchett,” which appeared in the London Review of Books in 1980, and “The American Eagle,” an essay about Saul Bellow published in The Atlantic in 1995.
Hey everyone. Welcome to selected essays, a podcast series from The Point Magazine about essays you should read, but probably haven't. Each episode we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda and I'm here with my co-host, Zach Fine.
Zach Fine:Hey everyone. Today we have Leo Robson and Rosa Lyster on the podcast. We spoke with them about the writer Martin Amis, who passed away in May of this year. Leo and Rosa chose to have Amis's essays "In Praise of Pritchett," which appeared in the London Review of Books in 1980. And an essay about Saul Bellow called the American eagle, which was published in the Atlantic in 1995. Amos was both a celebrated novelist and essayist. He said that when some writers of fiction turn to discursive prose, they write left handed, they become suddenly strained or inauthentic and have a tendency of putting on their Sunday best. Instead of writing with the same freedom they would in their fiction. But admirers of Amos is criticism memoir and journalism, often argued that his fiction and nonfiction belong to a comprehensive literary project, and that not unlike bellow or Pritchett Amis essay showed as much of the same stylistic flair and ambition as his fiction. Leo Robson is a journalist and critic who's written for the New Statesman, the London Review of Books, the New Left Review The New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. He's currently finishing a novel, Rosa Lister has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post month Review of Books, and the Paris Review. She's currently finishing a book about the global water crisis to be published by Penguin Random House, and Jonathan cape.
Jessica Swoboda:We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments, or anything else, send an email to selected essays at the point mag.com. We'd love to hear from you. So hey, Leo, and Rosa, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of selected essays.
Leo Robson:Hi.
Rosa Lyster:Hi.
Zach Fine:Before we get into the essays, could you tell us a little bit about Amis as an essayist about how we started writing, and what kind of writers and critics were influential for him early on?
Leo Robson:Yeah. So basically, yeah, so he, when he was born, his father was a kind of junior academic who then when Amos was about four and a half wrote this very famous first novel, Lucky Jim. So he, by the time he was sort of sentient, he was the son of a famous writer, a famous writer, whose best friend was a famous poet Philip Larkin, and whose second, wife not Amis's mother but Amis's stepmother was a famous novelist, Elizabeth, Jane Howard. And Amis grew up in quite an ideal weigh a bit in Swansea, a bit in Cambridge, a bit in Princeton, New Jersey, and had a poor education and ended up at what's called a Cram Out, which is kind of like a school for kids that have not done very well in conventional educational have not been conventionally educated, either two. And at some point in about maybe even as late as 1966 or 67(w hen he was in his late teens) Elizabeth Jane Howard recommended that he read Pride and Prejudice. And he previously claimed that he had spent all of his reading all of his reading time it just been rereading comics, which I don't know whether it's true, because that's also the first line of Ian McEwan, his first novel that cement garden. So I don't know whether it's an allusion to that, or McEwan stole it from him. But anyway, or maybe that is just what kids do read comics I never did. But anyway, it's it's supposed to represent a certain kind of adolescent latitude and depression in McLuhan's novel, and I suppose that's what Amos meant by it. But anyway, he really loved Jane Austen. And then he decided quite improbably to apply to Oxford. And you can see from his letters when he's in his late teens, some of which are reprinted in experience, where he's writing to father and his stepmother, all the stuff he was reading, essentially, well for exams, but also for his Oxford interviews, and it was really all the very canonical stuff Shakespeare, Dunne, Milton, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, a tiny bit of foreign stuff, Kafka, and so on. And anyway, he got into Oxford. He studied at Exeter college, he wanted to go to his father's college, the College where he and his father did a blog and had gone St. John's, which was a really academic college, but he didn't get in part because John Kerry, who was sort of famous, most famous professor in Oxford thought that his Latin was too poor. And that, you know, the idea had any Latin at all was kind of incredible because he was barely educated really, really. Well, he ended up at Exeter and he was taught by this man Jonathan Wordsworth. He was collateral descendant of the poet. And he was his great, great, great, great nephew. And anyway, and he was just very well taught essentially in English Anglophone literature. And then when he left university in 1971, I think yeah, I believe that's the case. 971. He quite quickly started reviewing stuff initially, like less promising stuff, like the first review, I think he ever wrote was at the Guinness Book of World Records for The Spectator. But within a year, he was writing about, well, novelist he was interested in William Burroughs. Soon enough, Philip Roth, and also canonical figures in the by, son of miraculously and this would obviously never happened today(well none of this would happen today but this especially wouldn't happen today), he wrote three different pieces about Coleridge, between December 1972 And June 1973, a review of a study review of a biography and a review of amps and sort of color amps and CO edited a collection of codes. So anyway, it's the serious, canonical stuff he was into, which I think is kind of interesting. So we think it was quite a slangey, modern, sort of denim clad figure. But actually he was as fogeyish as they come in is absolutely obsession with. While they're basically Milton, the Romantics, Dunne slightly, Orton slightly, Yeats a tiny bit, and the bigger he referred to in his last video pieces, my favorite writer William Shakespeare, so that was kind of that was it it was kind of modern American and English prose. Not not Bellow yet, we'll get on to Bellow but it wasn't bellow for quite a while. It was it writers I suppose who had been famous and unwanted in his in his sort of late adolescence. So like Roth would have been famous for Portnoy's Complaint and William Burroughs was famous Updike was famous from Couples. And these were the people that were in his that were kind of on his radar. And he read, he read them all. And if you read, for instance, his article about Angus Wilson's novel, As if by Magic, he he'd read all of Angus Wilson, which now just seems quite strange, because he was a slightly fly blown beggar even by them probably from the 1950s. But Amos was just immersed in this stuff. And he loved reading novels, at least novels in English.
Jessica Swoboda:So both of you chose essays from Amis's collection, The War Against Cliche, which gathered a selection of his essays and reviews from 1971 to 2000. And Rosa, you chose a Mrs. essay called the American eagle, which originally appeared in the Atlantic in the 1990s. Why did you choose this essay about Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.
Rosa Lyster:Um, I think I sort of chose it because it's sort of representative of a lot of a lot of the stuff that I kind of love about Amos is criticism. And a lot of this stuff, like, drives me insane about as his criticism. And, you know, I mean, of course, I do admire him hugely. And I think I probably do admire him more than Leo. But reading these things, reading these essays before preparation for today, I think the main thing I found myself doing was like arguing with him. And sort of trying to remember, and things I kind of read years ago that in his own work that actually, you know, explicitly rebut what he'd been saying in this essay, and that is the, you know, what I realized is my main experience of reading Amos is being kind of really pissed off by him or with him almost consistently. Um, and maybe that is part of his kind of inescapableness. And, you know, part one, so sad that he died, because not that I think I ever would have been in the opportunity to be like, Well, what did you actually mean when you say, and why did you say this when you also said that? And don't these two things explicitly contradict each other, but now, now, I definitely can't ask him any of that. So this bit from Augie March, yeah, and the reason that I chose that is because it's, it's a sort of, it's an argument for his kind of critical method, like such as it is, um, and it's a sort of, you know, the thing about Amis is you can recognize that it's Amis from space, you know, it takes like It's like halfway through the first sentence before you realize that it's him. And I think that's here as well. And then the maybe the third reason I chose it is because I want I want to know what it means and I want someone to tell me what this means. And so I thought maybe Leo or one of you guys could assist. So the in this sort of is Just a couple of paragraphs. Can I read from the beginning? Yes, please. This is you know, the the essay starts and he says the adventures of Augie March is the great American novel. Search no further all the trails when called 42 years ago, the question what quests very rarely did, it ended. And then just gonna skip a bit and then he says like most quest, the quest of the Great American Novel seemed destined to be endless. You won't find that mythical beast, that holy grail that earthly even though you have to keep looking. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit was the thing, you were never gonna catch up. It was very American to insist italics on having a great American novel, thus rounding out all the other benefits Americans enjoy. Nobody is ever worried about the great French novel or the great Russian novel, there is entirely intelligible that there should be some cautious talk about the great Australian novel. Trying to find the great American novel rolling up your sleeves and trying to write with this was italic American. And so it would go on forever. Just as literature never progresses or improves but simply evolves and provides the model. The great American novel was a chimera, this myth this, this mythical base was a pig with wings. Miraculously, however, an uncovered entirely so Saul Bellow bought the animal home. He dedicated the book to his father and published it in 1953 and then settled down to write Seize the Day. Literary Criticism as normally practice will tend to get in the way of a novel like Augie March, shaped loosely as an Odyssey and well stocked with unsystematic erudition, with indications and incantations. The book is very vulnerable to the kind of glossarial jigsaw solver who must find four italics and decor lamination color scheme, but that isn't how the novel works on you. Books are partly about life and partly about other books. Some books alone are largely about other books and spawn yet other books Augie March is all about life, it brings you up against the dead end of life. Bellow's third novel following the somewhat straightened performances of Dangling Man and The Victim is above all free without inhibition, and epic about the so called ordinary it is a it is a marvel of remorseless spontaneity. As a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself, your job is to work your way around to the bits you want to quote, your a guide and the gallery where the signs say silence please. You are shepherd shepherding your group from spectacle to spectacle, all humbled and trying so far as possible to keep your mouth shut.
Jessica Swoboda:So it's funny, you mentioned before that there are things in this essay that you love about Amos, and things that you find so annoying. And it's funny, because in that the one section there, the implication is that this essay you just read, does not get in the way of Augie March. And so I'm wondering if you can elaborate on what you find annoying about Amis and what you love about Amis, as displayed in this in this essay.
Rosa Lyster:I mean, one of the things that I sort of both love and find infuriating about and it's sort of like epigrammatic kind of absurd confidence that he kind of says things that, you know, they're not supposed to be kind of critically engaged with, you just sort of meant to kind of swallow it and just say like, Damn, you know, like, you sort of in brackets, yeah, when he says those entirely intelligible that there should be some, there should be some cautious talk about the great Australian novel. Why is that entirely intelligible? Why would that be entirely intelligible, you know, and then you just sort of, as I've always done with Amis, it just kind of skim past it, because it sounds good. It sounds kind of interesting. Um, and another thing that I find maddening, but that I also love is, you know, towards, when he says, as a critic, therefore, you feel no urge to interpose yourself. A, he clearly does feel an urge to interpose himself, and B, that kind of incredible universalizing again, and he's such a kind of idiosyncratic critic, but now he's sort of putting himself in the place of awkward. And so your job is to work your way around to the bits you want to quote, and it's all there. That's his job. And that's what he like he wants to do. But in this, you know, in this way, he's making a very kind of striking argument for his way, his critical method or his critical approach, and that's what he kind of goes on to do in this, in this essay, he just works his way around the bits he wants to quote in a kind of like, a sort of, like a scandalist, shameless way. What else do I owe this sort of incredible derision where he says, the book is very vulnerable to the kind of glossorial jigsaw solver who must find form as if that's the kind of most nonsensical like ludicrous thing you could ever do is look for like form or pattern or you know, and I think he said it in the, in the Paris Review interview, he said, If the prose isn't there, then you're reduced to what are mostly secondary interests, like story and plot and characterization. And because I mean, all these interested in the center, you know, really and truly, that's kind of all he's interested in, that's all he really cares about is the kind of the beauty of the sentence and the beauty of the paragraph. And, you know, those are the things I love about him, because I think he's got, you know, he had great in its novels, but he's got an, I think, a better eye as a kind of a reader. And as a guy who's just gotten the most incredible either things, he sort of picks out and notices. Other things that I, you know, pick out and notice, and I don't know what I what kind of a reader I would be if I hadn't read these things when I was younger. But yeah, if anyone has any idea what he why it will be, for instance, entirely intelligible. And that there should be some caution talk about the great Australian novel. I love to hear.
Leo Robson:I think that's just a joke, isn't it? Like when people say that? I think he means he has not. There's not been any good ones. But you know, to my knowledge, he never read anything by Patrick white, or even Peter Carey. So it's just one of his ridiculous. I mean, I get the thing that it does stagger you is just Well, in that case, it's loneliness, but generally just confidence and it's not even really intellectual confidence. It's almost like a sort of moral confidence, or at least as a sort of moral bearing, that you can say these. But yeah, this is a guy's like, you know, okay. He's pretty erudite. He's well educated and so on. But he spent most of his time, you know, writing so, you know, obviously, there are more erudite people out there. He also only read in English. And yet his capacity for coming out with these tremendously universal things, you know, almost worthy of George Steiner or something. It was just, it's just, it was, it was funny. I mean, one thing that Rosa and I have mentioned before off mic, is that is that he does toggle quite amazingly between kind of loathing of pomposity and a kind of love to sort of brick, overinflated reputations, or bubbles or whatever. And just to complete love of just sounding like a total know-it-all. And not just not just not just like a know-it-all, but the way he expresses himself is it's almost concertedly kind of fogeyish and ridiculous at times. And I think that's one of the pleasurable things about his nonfiction prose is, is this is this jangling of registers, the way you can go from this kind of pompous certitude to using a kind of piece of slang, or kind of using a slightly colloquial, almost Salinger esque kind of italic. It's a it's a real ride, actually, and often between or and I'm sort of near derision, but in other ways as well, it's a real ride on one of his one of his essays. And sometimes it's easy to forget, because he was, as far as we're saying, such a sort of performer, it's easy to forget how remarkably intelligent he was really analytically at times, partly because he doesn't always bring it out.
Jessica Swoboda:So Rosa, Leo, they're talking to at the early beginning of his answer a little bit about style. And there's this great line at the end of the essay you've selected. That says style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose, it is intrinsic to perception. And I'm wondering if you can riff on that line a little bit and also talk about what has earned Amis, this reputation as a great stylist.
Rosa Lyster:I mean, that, I mean, I'm so glad that you mentioned that, because this is the other thing that I really wanted to talk about. So yeah, he said, style is not something grappled under regular presidents. And then, shortly after that, he says, style is morality style judges.
Jessica Swoboda:Right. And I'm wondering, what does it mean for style to be morality or to judge?
Rosa Lyster:So I was this is one of the things that I was talking about. Just now where I just sort of find myself kind of arguing with him all the time. Because I mean, style as morality he says it in Experience, he says it in the book about style, and he says it here. It's just one of these things. He just says it all the time, like style is morality. And then in his essay about Joan Didion, which I do think has some extraordinary bits. But he's got this kind of really scathing opening where he's talking about her essay on Georgia O'Keefe and he quotes he does a big kind of block quote and she says this is her she she says My daughter was making that day in Chicago and an entirely kind of quite basic assumption about people in the work they do. She was assuming that the glory she saw in the work reflected the glory and its maker that every choice one made alone betrayed one's character and then in italics, style is character. And then he says it is easy to see how quickly you sentimentality proceeds to nonsense the extent to which style isn't character can be gauged by reading a literary biography, so you know it's I don't really necessarily see all that much of a difference between style is italic morality or style is character; I just I don't know that they actually is any different than that. But then a little bit later in his essay, he's describing Didion style. And he says, again, he says style is character or as Mystillion puts it, style is character in italics. If style character everyone would write itself revealingly, as was Didion not everyone does Mystillion style relishes emphasis, repetition, re emphasis, or style, like looking at the same things from different angles, both style like starting and finishing successive sentences with identical phrases. I was thinking if I had to very, very quickly describe Martin Amis style, that wouldn't be a bad way to start. Um, he is, you know, these things that he's kind of very critical of, and are his sort of tips. The the sort of that kind of addictive repetition that he's so keen on the, you know, the starting and ending kind of senses in the same way those those sort of the like, the watermarks of the sky, I think those things are the things that he's kind of extremely critical of. But I don't know, I mean, I think he, as Leah was saying, just now, he's sort of drawn to and repelled by the sort of complexity of that.
Zach Fine:So Leo, you chose an essay that was written, I think, 15 years before, the Bella for the one Review of Books that's called "In Praise of Pritchett." And can you tell us why you chose this essay? And can you also read a selection of for
Unknown:Sure. I mean, I chose it because I think it's a really good essay. on a on a on a really interesting writer V.S. Pritchett, English, London born and melodically based short story writer, sort of novelist and critic who Amis really admired and I think it's probably not recognized how much Amis admired him and actually, if you look at the collections, the moronic Inferno and with a piece about going to see Bellow in Chicago, the Rub of Time and the War Against Petia and with essays on Nabokov and, and, and visiting Mrs. Nabokov the book of ends with going to see V.S. Pritchett in Camden. I'm not saying that means he's quite at the level with Bellow and (...) Amis but I think he was someone I think the English influence on Amis's prose, vision and so on is massively underrated. Because, well, because he just couldn't stop banging on about Saul Bellow, essentially. But he's a very, very English writer. I mean, don't you know, and I think the reason why he wrote about America, in a way was very English reasons it brought out things that were fundamental to his perception really a Commonwealth kind of identity that was Englishman, you know, really, I mean, he said in the video, an essay that Rosa was talking about. We are we're all excited by what we most deplore, especially as Ms. Didion said in another context, if we are writers, (and Ms. Didion is really great). But yeah, so I just, I kind of think it's interesting that he was so into Pritchett, I think Pritchett and Iris Murdoch are very important influences on his early stuff. Success. His third novel, is very immersed in London virtually plagiaristic of Murdoch's novel A Word Child, which he would have read, kind of while working on it, and just immersed in Pritchett's world of sort of Robbie London really, but this is also this is an essay about some new short stories, by Pritchett and also an essay collection and so it allows you to see what he notices about Pritchett as a a critic and so on. Anyway, I've taken the liberty something I've always wanted to do, which is to edit Martin Amis. A number of times I've been reading him thinking like God. And so I've actually, I've cut this down because I wanted to get from potentially from Pritchett to to Virginia Woolf. Anyway, so this is the passage and it's revealed two books as I say short story collection as a collection published in 1980. Or maybe 70. Well the essay came out and 80 in London Review of Books, anwyay. V.S. Pritchett short stories are retrospective, provincial, formless and feminine. His is an art that does not care how peripheral it sometimes seems. There are no twists, payoffs, reverses, jackpots or epiphanies. Pritchett never rubs life up the wrong way, is happy to leave only a faint shine on its fur. He is proof, Frank Kermode has argued, that an older tradition could survive the input unities of the modernist 20s and stay modern, respond finally to the world as it is. I'm not sure how true this is or in what ways it might turn out to be true. But it's clearly the central critical question posed by Pritchett's quietly extraordinary way of looking at life. Luckily, Pritchett the explicater is on hand with a new collection of essays to provide oblique guidance. All artist critics are to some extent secret proselytizers for their own work. They are all secret agents. (That's what Rosa was talking about in Amis's texts). As in his stories, he has the curious ability to let art shine through him, helplessly, Pritchett is a mirror, not a lamp. He goes at criticism the old way, creeping up on a writer through the light the letters the creative temperament on offer. The new critics tend to look at classic texts as if they were contemporary and anonymous. With Pritchett, criticism is always busily attentive to history, character and random human traffic. Inspection is like this too, inevitably, he does not feel at ease with the stylized and the exemplary. He responds finally to Borges wit and elegance of mind, but is quickly dislocated by his panoptic coolness, the liberties Borges takes with the shape of lie. He makes several fruitless attempts to humanize stories like Amazon's and the Allah and simply miss reads the irreducibly abstract fable the circular ruins. If fiction is imagined as a globe, with realism at its equatorial belt, and Borges occupies a spectral citadel in the North Pole, while purchased sweats and smarts in the tropics. When one artist writes about another, the reader is doubly rewarded by this reverse barometer effect. We enjoy Prichett's culture shock, and note to the minor adjustments and time lags he undergoes when he visits writers who live much nearer home. Now this is more like it you can hear Pritchett saying to himself. The distinction is he is secretly making becomes explicit in his essay on Henry Green. Some very fine artists impose themselves but Henry Green belong to those who masochistic DC to let their character speak through that. It is clear from the construction of the sentence that Pritchett aligns himself with the second kind of writer the masochist rather than the imposer. He doesn't go on to add, perhaps because he prefers epigrams to generalizations with their suggestion of schools and modes and whatnot. But the moderns are all imposes while the masochists belong to a quieter and more fitful tradition, male writers tend to be imposes female writers masochists, is it not remarkable that there is only one female modern Virginia Woolf? No wonder we're all so afraid of her. Anyway, I mean, he's completely mad. I was shouldn't use that word. But I mean, it's it's very, very eccentric stuff. But I think it's has lots of truths about V.S. Pritchett as a as a short story writer as lots of truths about V.S. Pritchett as a critic, which is important enough in its sub in itself, because even though he's not necessarily super famous name now, he was one of the great British writers of the 20th century, one of the best critics ever, really. And I think Amis saw himself really, as I think Pritchett and Updike, probably the models really, you know, writing a hell of a lot of criticism journalism as he did, as we've touched on, you know, that's not something that bello did not something that Nabokov did not something that Philip Roth did. But it is something that it is something that V.S. Pritchett did, and he commissioned Pritchett when he worked on the New Statesman, and Pritchett was, in a way his sort of predecessor as the regular contributor on modern literature to the New Statesman. But anyway, I mean, it's just, it's just very interesting. I mean, first of all, I guess the thing that really stands out for us probably is that he has like a genderized vision of literary production what men do and what women do this absurd generalization about Virginia Woolf being the only modern or modernist writer which actually in any way I mean, I don't know it's sort of joins up he's has this thing that after that, sorry that Kermode says about how just sort of ignored. Modernism, he sort of just wants to respond finance the world as it is. And Amis is sort of saying that this is what Bridget's like this is why Pritchett loved Henry Green. He quotes quick Pritchett and a few other writers who he thinks are like him. Rudyard Kipling. Carson McCullers. I believe I cut that bit or was it may have been Flannery O'Connor, a female writer anyway. But anyway, generally, I wonder what Rosa's reflections are on that passage about Scripture.
Rosa Lyster:I mean, I suppose the this when he says, already critics are, to some extent secret proselytize for their own work. They're all secret agents. I mean, that is a classic Amis tip, but it's also, again, you sort of wonder how many writer critics he has in mind when he says that other than like him, and the person he is reading at that moment? Because he is, of course, you know, a secret agent for his own work. And he's, you know, I just think this extract is, and it's got so, so many of these sort of little, you know, he's really not keen on Graham Greene. And he's sort of like fines, kind of Pritchett, sort of the credits, the criticism of Graham Greene, he sort of whatever he's talking about it is again, as he's sort of, you know, fondly accusing Pritchett, of doing he does the same thing, and he's doing it with Pritchett now, like every single prejudice that he has. He's kind of working it into his own discussion of Pritchett . Um, I don't know, what he means. When he says is not remarkable. There is only one female part of Virginia what No wonder we're also afraid of her. I don't know what collective fear he is, like calling on. I don't know what he who he has in mind when he says male writers tend to be embarrassed as female. Right? It's inadequate.
Leo Robson:It goes back to the what was it glossorial Jigsaw thing that you quoted from the Augie March thing, which was basically actually he said, he's actually explicitly saying there, the bellow is not an imposer. Really, he's not saying he's a masochist. And quite this, let's briefly just explain what this is about. He's basically talking about the distinction between a kind of a kind of looseness that's not too plotty not too formally rigid, and something where you really feel the writers vision. And so Borges is a good example of an extreme, a writer where he really imposes a vision on the world. I think he would say that Joyce is especially in Ulysses, and especially especially in Finnegans Way. And so, I mean, obviously, the real standout line here is Pritchett doesn't go on to add perhaps because he prefers epigrams, to generalizations, but the moderns are all imposes. Well, he may also not go on to add it, because it's just a ridiculous thing to say. And he may well not not believe it. So when he says because he prefers epigrams, to generalizations, Amis is implicitly saying that he himself. Well, I don't know whether he prefers generalizations to epigrams. But he's clearly capable of indulging in generalizations. And it's sort of interesting, because he doesn't actually say Pritchett would disagree with me. He say that he doesn't really like generalization. So presumably that would mean that he doesn't really agree with certain generalizations. Obviously, for Amis, this is a big, this is a big part of his armature, and it sort of comes back from the criticism that he got into really, and it's one of the things he loves about Nabokov, obviously, Nabokov's essays and interviews or interviews and whatever they were was called strong opinions. And, you know, Nabokov was very, very big on, on, on these kind of ridiculous generalizations, such as his definition of a good translator, which was competent in the translating out of language, excellent at the translating into language and a man. And this is the kind of thing that Amis thinks is like, you know, awfully amusing and I guess true. And so for instance, here we have we said, he says, Bridget, is, what is it a mirror, not a lamp? That's that that that's a distinction from M.H. Abram's book about romantic theory of literature that the romanticism introduced the idea of the lamp, essentially the writer who was imposing their, their soul onto the world rather than trying to reflect it as mimetic writers had done beforehand and that and again, in the, you know, in the heyday of realism, and Amis does think that these categories are useful and he he loves Northrop Frye splitting the genres up into the seasons, and he quotes it endlessly or on attributed the quotes that he uses, even in novels and the information there's so much so many of Northop Frye's typologies come up and up. it again and again in a bloody you know, in a thriller about two writers falling out in Notting Hill gate. It was a kind of compulsion with him, and and I think it's sort of comes from anxiety in a way. I mean he was an anxious guy he writes a lot in success about the kind of panic attacks he used to have on the London Underground and so on and I think he loved he loved this orderly world and I think one of the reasons why he loves America and he loves Bellow writing about what Bellow or what Wyndham Lewis called the moronic Inferno is because he's sort of magnetized to kind of danger and chaos but absolutely hates it hates violence hates disorder. And he has this very, sort of just this sort of tidying mind, but he's obviously also kind of magnetized all the forces ranged against it. And I think his literary sensibility is not necessarily as an obvious because we're not really talking about that. There's a reader is caught between these things. And it's interesting that this Pritchett essay is from 1980, because that is really when his taste was sort of changing. So he first started reading Bellow in 1977. It's curious, he hadn't read him before them because he was a big deal. And he'd won the Nobel Prize the previous year. But anyway, Hitchens said to me should read Humboldt's Gift, and he didn't read Humboldt's Gift, he read another another novel, but he made up for that by reading Humboldt's Gift 70 or 80 times and mentioning any possible opportunity. But He then got very very into Bellow and actually reading him on Bellow from the first time he writes about Bellow as a review in 1982 of the deans December and the last time he writes about Bellow is with the publication of the second volume of daiquiri leaders biography in 2015. So that's over a 33 year period, he wrote about him eight or nine times. And he really just becomes more and more you know, prostrate, really, I mean, for instance, he describes the events of Augie March, as resembling a lecture on Destiny fed through a dictionary of lowlife patois. And then, barely 10 years later, and slightly over 10 years later, he's saying, you know, we found the great American novel search no further. He there's also an essay that I used to rather love. When you look at it now, it's completely insubstantial, which he wrote in 2003. On to mark the 50th anniversary of The Adventures of Augie March, so he'd already he'd already written this essay that Rosa quoted, which was for an everyman edition, and appeared in the Atlantic. So we're saying, This is the great American novel, and so on. But then he he wrote this, this other this other one, where he just writes off the claims of all these other pretenders to the throne, Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner and Henry James, all on kind of just either a really packed description of what they what they did the multitudinous facetiousness of Melville, the melodramatic formularies of Faulkner. And then for Henry James, it's because he had a grammatical quirk, which Amis thinks is both brat and also indicative of kind of a larger patricianism and kind of loftiness, which means that he didn't truly love the reader as Bellow did, and so on. Anyway, he basically is moving from, he's moving more and more to the equator in his own metaphor. So he's getting more into Pritchett and more into Bello. And neither of them, you know, at all experimental writers. Neither of them you know, really mean you wouldn't they're not really mimetic realists, I didn't, he would have gone for something like that, but, but they're close. They're a little bit closer to responding to life, which is this word he uses all the time. And you can see that shift a little bit in. You see the division in the Pritchett essay saying Pritchett doesn't understand ball has an amen. He's not saying I understand both of them, but he obviously sees the appeal of both of them. He sees the appeal of the irreducibly abstract Borges and also of a writer that he doesn't want to rub life up the wrong way, and clearly bellow belongs in the Pritchett camp and Rosa and I found this random thing where in 1994 The Sunday Times asked everyone to name their famous not favorite novelist in English. And, and Amis chose(living) and Amis chose Bellow and Pritchett. I mean, Pritchett was a bit of a cheat because I never saw him ever mentioned any of Richard's five novels, and they weren't very admired. So I think he means as a short story writer, but it makes sense that he was getting more and more into these freedom and fluency and less into this slightly, you know, cool abstract writers, although he never he never lost his love and the book off but I think he kind of changed a little what he what he loved about him. I think,
Zach Fine:Leo, can you just if we go back to the passage you read that turn where he says that Pritchett for Pritchett criticism is busily attentive to history, character and random human traffic. Pritchards fiction is like this too. So thinking about Amis here And the continuities between his criticism and fiction. Do you think something similarly could be said about him? Or is there a gulf between his critical writing and his fiction?
Leo Robson:I think there's a massive overlap and correspondence which is helpful if you want to understand a missus fiction or if you want to understand they miss his criticism. I don't think it's necessarily that they show the same traits like when he says that he's saying that Pritchett essentially likes to be in the stream of life. And that's the way he is a very unacademic critic. And that's one of the things that Amis loved about him, wrote his criticism Yeah, he wants biography wants the letters he wants, contingency essentially, and not kind of structures and systems. I think the way in which they are very continuous is that you can see a mess all the time finding the Amisian virtues, qualities and emphases in writers. So for instance, like when he's right, so V.S. Naipaul, you know, with who we obviously know about, as you know, Nobel Prize winning Trinidadian Indian novelist, but he also had a younger brother who died. I think in 1985, age 40, who Amis greatly admired, who was a novelist; he wrote two or three novels, but one of them fireflies. Amis absolutely loved and, and he actually pointed out once that a writer on on Trinidad had scolded V.S. Naipaul as he no doubt would also scold Shiva the younger brother, but not going not talking more about Trinidadian social conditions. And he said that what Naipaul did was castrated satire. And Amis says no, no What the Naipauls write is irony and he says an irony is by definition non-militant, which is a reference to the thing I talked about for Northrup Frye's definition of satire as militant irony, he said, "should they decide to give up creative prose in favor of pamphleteering, then George Lambing's remarks would carry weight as it is Caribbean social conditions have for them acquire novelists and imaginative significance only." Or similarly there's um, in I think it's forget which book it is, but Naipaul goes to Argentina. And essentially, he goes to, he goes to see Borges, and he says, I've never valued ball house as a pundit on Argentina's problems, nor seen him as much of a contemplator of its history. Sorry, this sorry, this is this is this is Amis talking about Borges, because Naipaul essentially says Borges is no good on Argentina. He's not interested in Argentina. And Amis finds this hilarious because he thinks that you wouldn't read Borges for that, and you also wouldn't read Naipaul for that. So why Naipaul cares, you know, about Borges being bad at it, you know, is alien to him. And it's alien to him because he can't see past his own emphases, which is essentially, what what, what Rosa was saying earlier about the intense asceticism of his sensibility, which is essentially, it's all about, it's all about writing. I mean, I think it's becomes less true. He obviously became interested in history, but essentially for a while, he has his literary sensibility. That's and it's, it's tracked in the essays, but I think it comes out in its darkest form, before he gets really into Pritchett and before he becomes this Bellow fanatic, so between like 72 and 80, but all the writers he's really interested in, and all the things he's really interested about certain writers. You know, I guess Updike is sort of a big part of this picture as well. And he wrote many many many pieces about Updike, all but one of which are collected, and then one he didn't collect, I should have mentioned this earlier, he did a hierarchy of what he thinks are the of order of strenuousness of forms of writing, which is typical generalization. And anyway, and this is the order, starting with the easiest to write to the hardest to write. And it goes film scripts, plays, straight journalism, fiction, book reviews, poetry, now to my knowledge, never wrote any poetry and he certainly never wrote any plays. So obviously this is him totally over you know, over selling his authority as ever, but I mean, I always found it interesting and gratifying that here and elsewhere, he talked about a little bit that he claimed he found book reviews harder to write than fiction and you might say, well, that's reflected in the fact that he's a really outstanding book reviewer at its best and kind of even at its worst, really, and, and, and a slightly patchy novelist, but also
Jessica Swoboda:Oh, sorry, Leo, can I actually jump in there because you're talking about him that he's an even better book critic and book reviewer than he is a fiction writer. And Rosa and Leo, can you talk about how He's in some way set the standards for criticism and for book reviewing what is what is so good about it?
Leo Robson:Rosa Rosa, is it okay if if if if we have another quote here?
Rosa Lyster:Yes
Leo Robson:Um No but Rosa Could you could you read the beginning of ihis of his review of Updike's Picked up Pieces which is the first proper collection of Updike's reviews because it's it first was really funny but also it does point to why Amis is so is so valuable and rare
Rosa Lyster:and then I have I have one also again why it's valuable read Picked up Pieces
Leo Robson:it's the first thing in the section which is just called Updike I think.
Rosa Lyster:Okay, it's called Live Class. "The adversaries of good book reviewing are many and various but the chief one is seldom mentioned. Perhaps because of its ubiquity. We hear a lot especially from academics about reviews not being academic enough. And it is true that name reviewing of the Evil Knievel on Kierkegaard variety often shows the reviewer hideously stretched. We hear a lot, especially from publishers about reviewers using books as springboards for tangential music. And it is true that the book trade might well improve the blurb transcribing sorts of Yes, yes do reinstated. And you hear a lot, especially from authors about showing off about metropolitan spite and about the unknown disparity of the menial scribbler ie cheek. As F.W. Bateson once labeled the tendency, these biases exist, perhaps but they don't seriously diminish that corner of intellectual life which literary journalism inhabits. The crucial defect is really no different from that of any other kinds of writing is done. The Literary pages throng with people about whom one has no real feelings either way, except that one can't be bothered to read them.
Leo Robson:I mean, it's, you know, it risks total insularity, to ask the question about why Amis is a really good, you know, invaluable or invaluable reviewer with quotes from Amis on book reviews. But also, I would want to quote some other one or two other people on Amis, and we obviously have our views about why we've returned to his britches, and I do think that a lot of people of our generation, have The War Against Cliche, have quote, no quotes from it, you know, for instance, like the put downs, especially later on when he was briefly a regular book reviewer for The Sunday Times, he did famous put downs so for instance, he's he writes about Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, or the sequel, maybe the last world he said,"dinosaurs, including, but not solely velociraptors, are what Crichton is good at. People are what he is bad at people and prose", or when he's writing about Thomas Harris as Hannibal, you had this thing about, he quote someone saying that the book contain not a single dead or ugly sentence. And he says,"in fact, Thomas Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences. And Hannibal is a necropolis of prose." So basically like as an entertainer with takedowns, and, you know, epigrammatic wit and cruelty and so on. He's just, he has a lot of unforgettable staff, which people quote and know and so on. I mean, I think probably more so than in his fiction, partly because the fiction works, maybe in riffs which are quite long and so on. But yeah, I mean, as I say, like quoting people quoting people's reviews on Amis's reviews you know, risks total insularity, but I just liked this passage. I just notable that the two really brilliant academic slash reviewers of the age both wrote about The War against Cliche so Frank Kermode had this this little passage I just find quite moving, as well as being totally true. He says, Martin Amis has always wanted to be a good writer, and he has got what he wanted. He early acquired a habit of vigilance of stopping cliches at the frontier, and that habit can easily be broken. He is one of the few critics who trouble, even in a shortage newspaper review, to include some consideration of the fabric of a book, the faults of its texture, its cliches. And the other person, the other person who I think they both reviewed the moronic Inferno as well, but the other the other person who was who was really a marvelous standout figure still alive. I don't think any longer really reviewing, but John Carey, who was the person who turned him down all those years ago from Oxford. He was a I was reminded of his by Rosa reading the passage from the Updike thing where he said that the the, the, the problem is is just people being dull I people you just don't want to read, because he had a Harry had a passage in his War Against Cliche review, which I'm not sure whether one can get actually. But where he basically just talks about what what virtues he had as a as a reviewer, and basically it was that that he was, he was an entertainer. And anyway, maybe we'll move on if I can find the quote, it's only a couple of sentences. But it's, yeah,
Zach Fine:We only have time for about one one more question. And so I was hoping we could actually at the end here, think about Amis's legacy. And how both of you see his reputation changing in the coming decades about whether he'll be remembered primarily as a critic and an essayist. Or he'll be remembered for his fiction, and if so, which, which novels in particular
Leo Robson:Rosa, you go for that one.
Rosa Lyster:I probably will I mean, I would I think, you know, I think I, I sort of loved his essays more than his fiction, you know, at the end of it, but I do think he will be remembered for his novels. I think he's, I think I think he will be remembered for Success, which I it just, it's aged incredibly well. And I think he'll be remembered for his memoirs, I think he'll be remembered for Experience, not Inside Story, I think he'll be remembered for Money, which had probably, you know, that that as a sort of invoked influence, I think comes up more than any sort of as in I mean, what are the English novel is there, that is invoked as often as Money. And I mean, I sort of, I do think that will continue. This sort of, you know, I mean, I, this is sort of very personal. It's a bit like, you know, I sort of I grew up in South Africa, and where I didn't have any sense of Amis as a cultural figure at all. He just he was, he wasn't, you can figure all that much on the sort of cultural South African scene in the 90s. And I was kind of astonished as a sort of adult to realize how, how he sort of disliked he was in England, often. And I've you, and I've always kind of been startled by that. And I sort of, I think that sort of poison is going to leach away kind of quite rapidly. And I think it's not going to take all that long for him to kind of become the sort of beloved figure that he always has been for a lot of people.
Leo Robson:Yeah, I mean, I agree. Like, it's one of these tricky things. I think, what he was good at, he was so good. I do think he was quite an idiosyncratic, I think, if he wasn't if he hadn't, if he just wasn't so musical and intelligent, and, and I think able to write about so many things as a journalist, because we haven't really talked about many of the things he did in nonfiction. Like he really did write about a lot of major modern events, not always, you know, with subtlety, and tact and so on. But he really did, he did broaden out a lot as a reporter and essayist himself. But um, yeah, I think it's almost a bit unfortunate that he was so charismatic and also such a kind of musical writer. And so on because because I think he would almost fit a bit better as a cult writer, I can kind of see people's dismay, because you hear all about this guy. And you know, he is primarily a novelist, and then you go to read him. And I can sort of see why people might be like, well, I guess it's the experience. I had, in a way hearing some of this stuff right on the television, and then going off to look at the fiction sort of being like, I wouldn't quite say that there's like a missing book in his oeuvre, like some people say, you know, like Lorrie Moore saying that Updike's, you know, the greatest American novelist, he doesn't have a masterpiece, that kind of thing, because clearly, Money is this enormous to wrench of achievement, and it's got so many memorable passages in it and so on. But he certainly, it's certainly quite an odd career, like the kind of stuff he was interested in. It's not really what his contemporaries are interested in. It's not really what most novel readers were in interested in. And I think it was kind of just a product of when he came of age really like he, you know, a mixture of having this very high end education, you know, canonical education in Oxford mixed with reading these culty writers like Burroughs and Ballard, and the newly translated Nabokov that was coming into English and, and so on. So I think like, I think he never really was, even though he was obsessed with major writers and people who struggle, the culture and all this stuff and or trying to find a century or civilization or a species or whatever, I don't really think that was his thing. I think he was sort of, I think he's this kind of curious writer who had all these peccadilloes, which he, although he writes in this universal way, very few people are likely to share, you know, and it fits, because he really was interested in what he called perceptual manner, or, you know, kind of a worldview or this thing about style being totally individual. So I think as long as people, there are enough people who have a taste for what he's offering, then, you know, I think he'll just continue to be like mentioned and name checked, I do think what I said earlier, probably true that some of his frame of reference, and his emphasis is so baffling. But I can imagine, in not too long a time, people actually just not really knowing what he means in some of the stuff in The War Against Cliche really, like already to me, like, you know, you know, just knowing this stuff Well, and, you know, having been looking at it when, you know, when it was much nearer closer in time to publication, you know, 20 years ago, whatever. Some of it is just it is, it is just super subtle stuff. And with all this sort of unexplained assumptions, and, and so on. But I think I think he just wrote enough stuff, and enough stuff of value, that I would be quite surprised. And this stuff, as he pointed out, many, many times in his essays on dead writers is unpredictable. But I'd be very surprised if Martin Amis, you know, shrank to being forgotten or even really marginal, bigger, you know, not not just because of not looking at him literary in literary historical terms, because obviously, someone who's big in their time always just gets a certain amount of name checking, but I would be I'd be, I'd be surprised that people don't always find something or a lot of things in Amis to return to.
Jessica Swoboda:Well, thank you, Leo, and Rosa for joining us. It's been great to talk to you about Martin Amis. I've for one learned a ton about him. Thank you for having us. Thanks, everyone for joining us for this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank Joe Coleman for editing the podcast and Mic Duffy of hands habits for contributing the original music. We hope you'll tune into our next episode where we'll be talking with Karina del Viashorski about Samuel Delaney's Times Square blue. And as always, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays at thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners