Thirty years of reflections from a former enfant terrible
THE RUB OF TIME: BELLOW, HITCHENS, TRAVOLTA, TRUMP AND OTHER PIECES: 1986-2016 by Martin Amis (Cape, £20)
PUTTING together a collection of journalism isn’t as easy as you think, Martin Amis once said, what with struggling with the photocopier flap and all. This time, for his fifth such collection, he thanks an editor “who took a mass of clippings, typescripts, attachments and cyber-litter and turned it into a book”.
So here’s a mixed bag from the past 30 years, then — the subjects ranging from Vladimir Nabokov, porn, tennis, Princess Diana and Jeremy Corbyn to murderous criminals in Colombia — unified only by Amis’s own personality. But as he observes in his Author’s Note, there’s nothing wrong with that. If a novel should have i t s own life, independent of the au t h o r ’s personality — his own novels never achieving such independence, some of us find — that’s not the case with discursive prose such as this, essays and reportage, which “cannot be cleansed of the ego”. Even those who find Amis’s fiction insufferable can relish his journalism on that basis.
There are some terrific essays here, especially those on the literary subjects most dear to him (Bellow and Nabokov bookending the volume) and those to whom he was personally close, such as his father
Hitchens.
A review of Nabokov’s barely sketched last novel, The Original of Laura, titled Nabokov and the Problem from Hell, grapples with greater honesty than any other critic has managed with Nabokov’s “nympholepsy” or, as it might be, sympathy with paedophilia, convincingly arguing that it is turned to artistic purpose in The Enchanter, Lolita and Transparent Things but seriously mars Look at the Harlequins! and Ada (“that incontinent splurge”) and therefore harms Nabokov ’s standing altogether. It leaves “a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpse”, Amis says, always over-writing, even in bearing such grim news.
Contrariwise, he says of Bellow: “Compared to him, the rest of us are only fitfully sentient; and intellec tu ally too, hi s sentences simply weigh more than anybody else’s.” Fitfully sentient! Disdain infects even his praise.
Amis is, as ever, percipient about Philip Larkin, reporting this time that the long process of assimilating him has been complicated by a process of his own, “the ageing process, and what it means”, a human trial with which he has struggled ever since he published The Rachel Papers in his early twenties, aka the rub of time.
He admits that he has found learning ever more details about L a r k i n ’s sorry life “e v e r m o r e estranging”, yet nobly he continues to honour his writing: “L arkin siphoned all his energy, and all his
and Christopher