We are such a disappointment to Martin Amis

 
26 June 2012
WEST END FINAL

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They treat writers better in America, Martin Amis has said. Yet again. In America. There they value their role in forming the nation, he believes — whereas in this country, the press have more respect for the man in the street than for writers. We are nothing less than congenitally suspicious of authors, he reckons.

Catching out Amis rubbishing Britain to foreign interviewers has become merry sport over the past few years. Last year, he gave a corker to Le Nouvel Observateur, in which he dissed the royals, saying they were all philistines, the Queen didn’t listen to what he [Amis] said, Prince Charles had a laugh like a pig snoring, and he’d rather not be English at all — and that though life in London could be pleasant enough, it was all crap in the provinces (“tout est délabré à l’intérieur”).

Amis is a serial interviewee and many prize pronouncements along these lines still remain hidden away in literary blogs. My personal favourite came when an interviewer for a website called Identitytheory.com sagely observed to him that Americans have more space, and Amis replied: “Yes you have. We are all crushed together. Our countryside is just bollocks.” Clearly he has never explored Norfolk properly.

Usually, Amis takes care to make it clear that it is our press, rather than the English per se, that he despises, doubtless aware that picking that fight, Little Mart v the nation, might not turn out too well. And indeed he often says perfectly nice things about the English that never get relayed home. He told the latest interviewer, Sam Tenenhaus, the editor of the New York Times book review, he feels “very uncrusading” about England now, regarding us with “affectionate amusement rather than any great frown”.

So what is it that really makes Martin Amis so unhappy about British journalists and critics? The answer perhaps is to be found in one of the first interviews he ever gave, at the start of his career. Then he said, with apparent seriousness: “In 200 years, I want them to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.”

This collocation, let’s agree, doesn’t seem to be popular yet in the press. On the contrary, reviewers in this country have become ever more snarky, deriding the way Amis has addressed a long succession of giant themes in his fiction — millennialism, the Holocaust, the infinity of space, Stalinism, nuclear weapons, Islamism — as if that was the way to make it matter more.

Even his good friend Will Self observed to Amis’s biographer that “the impulse that makes him the finest prose writer of his generation causes him also to be the worst political writer”. The quote so startled Amis when he read it in proof that he rang Self in the hope that he had been misquoted. He hadn’t. Another scene for Beerbohm.

In America, it seems, not knowing him as we do, they take Martin Amis in particular more seriously as well as writers in general. Tenenhaus assured his readers that Amis’s new novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England — hilarious but completely bogus as social observation — was spot on. For American readers, he said, “Amis’s peephole picture of a great nation in decline, its inhabitants like ICU patients gnawing at their sutures, will seem painfully relevant.”

Gnawing at our sutures! Quite an image of Albion there, courtesy of Martin Amis. We really should feel proud of him after all, perhaps.

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