[Martin Amis Experience Pdf Download
Ainoha Sistek
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Near the beginning of his "memoir" Martin Amis asks: "Why should I tell the story of my life ?" He offers a variety of reasons, perhaps first and foremost being that he wants to "set the record straight". Set the record straight ? There's an awful lot of arrogance right there. He wants to tell us his side of things and have us accept it as the truth, that's what he is saying. The record is a much more complicated thing and it is unlikely that a principal actor could set it straight: he's been too involved in contorting it all along (unintentionally or not). And when the man is a novelist -- why he's hardly to be trusted more than any of the members of the Fourth Estate Amis inveighs against. Novelists and journalists are, after all, all professional contorters.
Amis does tell a story, but it does not convince as the story of a life. There are a few foci: dear old Dad (noted novelist Kingsley Amis), the disappearance of Amis' cousin Lucy Partington in 1973 and the discovery, decades later, of her grisly fate (she was brutally murdered by a man responsible for many similar despicable crimes), and Amis' 'orrible teeth (and their expensive replacements). It's an odd choice of emphasis for what is meant to be a memoir.
Amis does proceed with a fair amount of autobiographical detail, though it is largely presented in only the roughest chronological order, with constant jumps ahead and back. "Letters from School" (and then College) to Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard (Martin's stepmother from 1965 to 1983) are interspersed between the chapters of the first part of the memoir, giving a glimpse of the young Martin and his academic (and other) tribulations as he crams for (and then at) Oxford. There are anecdotes galore throughout, as Amis recounts adventures and episodes from his life, leaping back and forth. The memoir is also heavily footnoted ("to preserve the collateral thought") with additional asides (some of which are astoundingly off-point -- indeed, off almost any point).
It is Kingsley who takes up what seems to be most of the memoir. He seems an almost ever-present figure, and the book reads largely like a tribute to the man. Amis revels in the father-son relationship, even when it is a difficult one. (Martin's sons are also a loved presence throughout the book (while Martin's wives and women rate few mentions (except as dedicatees)).)
The last part of the memoir deals with Kingsley's decline and death. The brief mention of the peculiar living arrangement of the last years (Kingsley's ex-wife (Martin's mum) and her husband moved in with him) typifies Martin's approach to many of the "controversial" pieces in the book: readers of newspaper-articles on this book learn more about the arrangement than they do in the book itself. Perhaps Martin presupposes that his readers are familiar with the details; still, it is an odd way of "setting the record straight". (In fact, Martin handles these scenes particularly well, but there is just too little information for those who aren't in the know.)
There is also a fair amount about the "betrayal" by "the Biographer" (Kingsley's appointed biographer, Eric Jacobs), culminating in an appendix discussing what Martin and other Amiss apparently took very amiss, the writing and eventual publication of some material about recently departed Kingsley. It was apparently an "agonizing violation (...) inflicted on the immediate family", as Kingsley was "described without a particle of decorum" a mere seventy-two hours after his death. Martin obviously feels extremely strongly about this, and there is no arguing with such deep hurt and outraged feelings. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that he once again does nothing resembling setting any record straight. Kingsley's arrangement with Eric Jacob's is never adequately explained, and neither are many of the details of the controversy. Martin's righteousness may well be justified, but here he just sounds righteous.
There are other, more interesting scandals that Amis almost completely ignores, notably his split with longtime friend Julian Barnes and his wife (and Amis' agent), Pat Kavanagh. Perhaps Amis is tired of this subject, fodder for the Fourth Estate for ages, but surely it deserves more comment than the brief passages on it and the letter he wrote to "Dear Jules".
The ghost of Lucy Partington also haunts the memoir. What could one possibly say about this unspeakable tragedy ? It affected Amis, obviously, and he conveys this convincingly -- and still the reader feels manipulated. In part that is because there is so much else about which Martin says so little -- including the other women in his life, as well as his books (one hardly senses book-writing is his main occupation).
And then there are the teeth. Certainly, Amis describes his oral suffering very well. On page after page. And his dental preoccupation is understandable: they were terrible teeth, and the solution to his problems was a highly unpleasant procedure. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that no one, save professionals, need all this gory detail. (And, again, the question arises: why not similar detail about other events in his life ? Admittedly this was a major trauma, but surely other events from earlier on warrant similar coverage.)
There is a great deal of informative stuff in Experience as well, and much of it is cleverly presented. Amis casts himself (in younger days) as Osric (the "water-fly" from Hamlet), which works quite well. And there are revealing bits tucked away all over. Perhaps he really doesn't need to say more about his relationship with the women than he does in a revealing letter from 1971, writing about then (and longtime) girlfriend Alexandra "Gully" Wells:I haven't been able to bring myself to tell Gully that I don't think our living together will work and it's getting to be pretty worrying since we're supposed to be looking for suitable places to live. I think she knows I'm not happy about [it] but I suppose she's just hoping for the best. Amis adds that he is "increasingly convinced" that he won't get married until he's "about 70." It seems: "It's all too harrowing." Harrowing or not Amis did wed, repeatedly, before he hit 70, but there is not much about that here. He revels in fatherhood (including the (re)discovery of a girl he fathered in his younger days and first met some 20 years after the fact), but the women involved are treated much more circumspectly and discreetly.
Kingsley, central throughout, is well done in Experience, the mothers (real and step) less so. There are some other decent portraits: when he finally gets around to him Amis has some excellent pages on Philip Larkin ("life was happening to Larkin, but he had no talent for that"), and some of his own friends (Hitch -- Christopher Hitchens -- for example) work well on the periphery. Then, of course, there is the adored Saul Bellow (whose own struggles with a near-fatal illness also shook Amis in the late 1990s). Amis maintains that he is Bellow's "ideal reader", though the case for this is not presented convincingly. (He also suggests that Christopher Hitchens is, "funnily enough", Kingsley's ideal reader -- a judgement that, on the basis of the evidence presented in this book, sounds more convincing.)
There is a jumble of odds and ends throughout the book. There are far too many pets (accorded about the same status as Amis' women). There are odd star-struck asides ("John Travolta is one of the sanest men I have ever met"). There are fun little facts and opinions.
Still, stunningly, one comes away from the book almost none the wiser.Amis' life has been a very public one, so perhaps most of the pertinent facts are already familiar. But there seems almost nothing new here, and Amis' spin on what he presents seems so controlled and carefully dosed that more seems to be hidden than revealed. Far from setting the record straight Amis seems to have largely obscured it (except, perhaps, some of the stuff about the teeth, and the fact that everyone cried at Kingsley's funeral -- the only facts he really seems to care about).
Amis writes engagingly and generally very, very well, and this book is no exception. It's a good enough read, and an entertaining one, and certainly of interest to anyone who is interested in Kingsley Amis and Martin's relationship with his father. As a memoir it is selective indeed -- a practise-volume, one hopes, for the subsequent real thing.
At one point Amis writes:This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will do. Fair enough, and point taken -- but Experience seems to try too hard to make that point.
Unlike his friend Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis did not revel in argument. Nor, like so many artists, did he subscribe (or pretend to subscribe) to identikit left-wing views. But in the early 2000s, he found himself and placed himself at the centre of the ferocious arguments about radical Islam, the war on terror, Islamophobia and Israel. I went to talk to him. Not everything he said back then stands up well. But the reason I and so many others will miss him terribly is that so much of what he said can still compel you to stop and think again.
WHEN LIBERAL intellectuals go on one of their periodic berserkers, the targets of their rage experience three emotions. The first is astonishment as men and women who boast of their independence of mind turn into a gang of playground bullies. Outrage follows as they hear supposedly respectable academics and journalists propagate demonstrable lies. Finally they settle into a steady contempt, as they realise that many liberal intellectuals are neither liberal nor noticeably intelligent for that matter.