261-] English Literature - Martin Avis

261-] English Literature

Martin Avis 

British author 

Personal life

Amis married the American academic Antonia Phillips in 1984 and they had two sons together. Towards the end of that marriage, he met the writer Isabel Fonseca, whom he married in 1996; together they had two daughters. He became a grandfather in 2008; he later described his new status as "like getting a telegram from the mortuary".

From 2004 to 2006, he lived with his second family in Uruguay, where Fonseca's father had been born. Upon returning, he said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reported that he was disquieted by what he saw as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.

In late 2010, Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, US, although it was uncertain how much time he would be spending there.[110] In 2012, Amis wrote in The New Republic that he was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill. He also had a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, United States.

Death

Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on 19 May 2023. Like his father, he died at age 73. Amis was a life-long smoker.

Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for services to literature, and the knighthood was backdated to the day before his death.

Views

Writing

On writing, Amis said in 2014: "I think of writing as more mysterious as I get older, not less mysterious. The whole process is very weird ... It is very spooky."

Interviewed by Sebastian Faulks on BBC television in 2011, he said that unless he sustained a brain injury, it was unlikely he would write a children's book: "The idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable ... I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write." The "brain injury" remark caused opprobrium among various children's authors, although the poet Roger McGough wagered that "if I gave him £100 to write a children's book I bet he'd do a good one".

Nuclear proliferation

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."

Geopolitics

In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the more dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis of Evil, but that Iran was Britain's "natural enemy", suggesting that Britain should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence".

Electoral politics

In June 2008, Amis endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president of the United States, stating: "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world." When briefly interviewed by the BBC during its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election, Amis displayed a change in tone, stating that he was "depressed and frightened" by the US election, rather than excited. Blaming a "deep irrationality of the American people" for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis said the Republican Party had swung so far to the right that former president Ronald Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the present party – and invited viewers to imagine a Conservative Party in the UK that had moved to the right so much that it disowned Margaret Thatcher. He said: "Tax cuts for the rich, there's not a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!"

In 2015, Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for The Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated". In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Amis said that United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union was a "self-inflicted wound" that had left him "depressed".

Islam and Islamism

On the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine about community relations in Britain and the alleged threat from Muslims; he was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children ... It's a huge dereliction on their part."

The interview provoked immediate controversy, much of it played out in the pages of The Guardian newspaper. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for this particular quote, saying that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, ... but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world". In a highly critical Guardian article, entitled "The absurd world of Martin Amis", satirist Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employed "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran" to incite hatred.

Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating: "We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being ... Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived... But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination ... Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Mohamed Atta."

On terrorism, Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder", and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."

His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet "Blitcon" (British literary neoconservative) from Ziauddin Sardar, who labelled Amis as such in the New Statesman.

Euthanasia

Amis aroused a new controversy in 2010 with his comments regarding euthanasia during an interview, when he said that he thought Britain faced a "civil war" between the young and the elderly in society within 10 or 15 years, and called for public euthanasia "booths". Of the geriatric cohort, he declared: "They'll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops. ... there should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal."

Agnosticism

In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". He added that "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated" and "so over our heads" that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.

In 2010, Amis said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe ... Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us ... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2021)

Novels

Amis published 15 novels:[a]

The Rachel Papers (1973: ISBN 9780224009126)

Dead Babies (1975: ISBN 9780224011679)

Success (1978: ISBN 9780224015714)

Other People (1981: ISBN 9780224017664)

Money (1984: ISBN 9780099461883)

London Fields (1989: ISBN 9780224026093)

Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence (1991: ISBN 9780670843664)

The Information (1995: ISBN 9780002253567)

Night Train (1997: ISBN 9780224050180)

Yellow Dog (2003: ISBN 9780224050616)

House of Meetings (2006 : ISBN 9780224076098)

The Pregnant Widow (2010: ISBN 9780224076128)

Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012: ISBN 9780224096218)

The Zone of Interest (2014: ISBN 9780385353496)

Inside Story (2020: ISBN 9780593318294)

Short fiction

Collections

Einstein's Monsters (1987: ISBN 9780099768913)

Two Stories (1994: ISBN 9781898154044; both later collected in Heavy Water and Other Stories)[b]

God's Dice (1995: ISBN 9780146000546; two stories reprinted from Einstein's Monsters, part of the Penguin 60s series)[b][35]

Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998: ISBN 9780609601297)

Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)

The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)

Vintage Amis (2004)

Stories

Title   Year  First published     Reprinted/collected        Notes

Oktober      2015  Amis, Martin (December 7, 2015). "Oktober". The New Yorker. 91 (39): 64–71.            

Non-fiction

Books

Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982: ISBN 9780458953509)

The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986: ISBN 9780670814329)

Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993: ISBN 9780224038249)

Experience (2000: ISBN 9780224061254)

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (2001: ISBN 9780099422228)

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002: ISBN 9780786868766)

The Second Plane (2008: ISBN 9780099488699)

The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016 (2017: ISBN 9780099488729)

Essays and reporting

Amis, Martin (August 29, 2022). "The Queen's heart : in time for her Golden Jubilee, two biographies of Elizabeth II". The Critics. Books. May 20, 2002. The New Yorker. 98 (26): 60–62, 64–65.[c][d]

Screenplays

Saturn 3 (1980)[e]

London Fields (2018; with Roberta Hanley)[f][g]