My heroes were very much his heroes. Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens. Except that he, too, was my hero.
I believe that we all have a writer who writes specifically for us. A writer whose every line we have to read, and internalise, and interpret. A writer whose every line we selfishly believe that only we can truly internalise, and interpret. For me, such writer was Martin Amis.
While I had no idea that he had cancer (incidentally, it was the same cancer that Christopher Hitchens had), I approached his last book, Inside Story (2020), with a certain trepidation. It was, all things considered, a very strange novel. A little all over the place and a little unfocused, Inside Story felt like a final statement. It was semi-autobiographical, and not unlike something Konstantin Paustovsky once did, but it had the disturbing sense of life and fiction getting into each other's way. 'Why was it written?' was a question posed by many critics who reviewed Inside Story. Critics who may have forgotten that you never, ever, ask such a thing. That these four words are at worst poisonous and at best completely meaningless. Because once you get rid of this silly old question, you find all the wit and all the heart which you have always seen in his books.
Martin Amis was (oh how wrong this 'was' feels) like an intimate friend. A literary lover, if you will. There are lines that got burned into me ("You always write for someone. Mother. Friend. Shakespeare. God".), and there are circumstances I will never forget. I remember how I was reading London Fields (for me, his greatest work) at five in the morning, inside a car in Brompton, following a rainy festival night. Or the dry summer day when the sun was killing me in a scorched park in late August as I was reading the grossly underappreciated The Pregnant Widow. Or, indeed the old yellow armchair in an apartment in Warsaw that saw me trudge along, quizzically, through the complex world of Inside Story. No, I do not profess that I loved his every book (Yellow Dog was, I believe, an artistic failure), but even his minor works (like the short story collection Heavy Water, or one of those slim early novels like Other People) were brutally witty, and incisive, and deliciously well-written.
Obviously and somewhat inevitably, I was thinking of him on the day that he died - without me even considering for a second that he could die, or fall ill, or be 73 (after all, he was always the younger Amis). First, I was thinking of him because the new film based on his Auschwitz-set novel The Zone Of Interest was lauded at this year's Cannes. And this, one has to understand, after decades of cinematic flops and failures by directors who could never really perceive that Amis's books were essentially unfilmable. Second, earlier that day I was talking to someone about Martin Amis being a great, and rare, example of an artist escaping the shadow of a hugely successful parent.
And then he died, months after his friend Salman Rushdie had survived a brutal attack in New York. It was, of course, a literary life well lived. Amis himself had recently said in an interview that at the age of 25 he would never have believed that he would accomplish so much. But he did. He wrote close to three dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, and he had long become a much better writer than his father. Unwittingly, he also gave some of the best literary advice I have ever received. The best being perhaps "Never write a sentence that absolutely anyone can write". Someone has once asked me about the meaning of this particular advice as it appeared bizarre and not entirely meaningful. After all, how could one ever only write unique sentences? However, that was missing the point entirely. The point being that while writing, you always have to keep them in mind, those words: "Never write a sentence that absolutely anyone can write". If you do that, you will never once write a generic sentence.
Last autumn, in Amsterdam, I went into an old bookshop to get a few books. However, the shop was closing and I only had ten minutes to browse, to make an agonisingly difficult choice, and to pay to an old man who pretended to have read every single book that he was selling. I was in full panic mode as I grabbed Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters from a cluttered shelf and headed for the counter. On my way, however, I caught a glimpse of The Rub of Time, Amis's last work of non-fiction collecting his essays and articles from 1986 to 2016. It was a fortunate moment, a moment of incidental miracle, and I felt positively ecstatic as I left the bookshop and walked down the busy street of German tourists and Dutch cyclists.
Today, when I come to terms with the death of Martin Amis, I find it hard to experience anything resembling that feeling. There is, nevertheless, something precious ahead of me, something that contains a tingle of that literary ecstasy. And that is me reading The Rub of Time in the coming days. Because I have not done it yet, and those pages hold the biggest promise.
