Farewell to a giant who scorned the humourless
Great writers really only have one job and that is to stop you from feeling alone. Whether it’s a newspaper column or War And Peace or the Bible, the highest purpose of the written word is for the reader to suddenly feel that there is somebody who gets them, somebody else who understands the world the way they do, even if it is somebody they have never met.
For me that person is Martin Amis. I should say “was” because he is now dead, but words live forever.
Amis is to me the greatest writer of the last half-century. But the words of Amis’s that meant the most to me weren’t even written down.
I was driving along and switched on the radio to hear someone just chatting away about politics and the world and the rest of it and I found myself agreeing with absolutely everything they said.
Of course it was Amis. And the purpose of saying all this is not to put down a post-mortem love letter to a bloke who can’t read it but to telegraph his message down the line.
Because Amis was something that for a long time seemed like a contradiction in terms: an intelligent and rational man of the left.
Like many of those of his generation and background – uppermiddle class Oxbridge youths of the 1970s – he was instinctively and culturally of the intellectual left.
But there is a big difference between being intellectual and being smart, and over the years Amis’s big brain became aghast at some of the insanities and inanities perpetuated by the fashionable left.
Key among these was the lunar left’s sympathies for communism and
downplaying of the murderous ravages of Stalinism, which resulted in his eviscerating book about Stalin, Koba the Dread.
And he railed against the lunar left’s puritanical zeal for censorship and cancel culture, joining 150 other authors and academics in supporting J.K. Rowling’s right to free speech.
And of course the lunar left hated Amis for it and turned on him with all the viciousness and bile it always reserves for apostates.
Like I said, the guy really gets me. And yet as more and more people fall victim to cancel culture and have the scales fall from their eyes, and as the lunar left’s endless crusades increasingly become exposed as either baseless, ridiculous or downright dangerous, people like Amis and other refugees from the sensible centre left have been utterly vindicated.
In Australia, the Labor Party, after foolishly toying with class war rhetoric, has repositioned itself squarely in the political centre.
As a result, the Albanese government is still riding at honeymoon highs more than a year after its election, despite incredibly tough economic times.
And in the UK, the Labour Party jettisoned the commie-adjacent Jeremy Corbyn after copping a drubbing and replaced him with the centrist Keir Starmer – who is on track to win the next general election against the Tories.
All of this has taken me about 600 words to write and yet Amis was able to capture everything that is wrong with the far left in just one word: humourlessness.
And as usual he is completely correct. You simply cannot trust anyone humourless to lead a political
party, much less a nation. And once again he has been vindicated. Because this was what he wrote about Jeremy Corbyn in 2015:
“When he found himself arguing for a UK where every house has a garden, Corbyn elaborated as follows: ‘Anyone who wants to be a beekeeper should be a beekeeper.’ Nobody with a sense of humour could possibly have said that.”
And of all the hard left’s shortcomings, that is perhaps their final distillation: the utterly dour, earnest, censorious humourlessness of them. Little wonder no one ever coined the phrase “As funny as a socialist”.
But fortunately the fun is coming back as more and more people fight back against cancel culture – including our own PM.
While Amis may be dead, the sensible centre has come back to life.