The hum of the tuning fork

PHIL BAKER looks at 30-odd years of Martin Amis as a critic. To read a collection like this, and especially analyse it, is to be reminded of the intrinsic impertinence of criticism, he says.

"YOU can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your **** tattooed ... but can you get lunch?" Nobody reading Money, and John Self's encounter with the over-specialised nature of LA life, could fail to notice Martin Amis's unusual talents as a stylist. Vladimir Nabokov said that style is the only thing that really matters in books, a dictum quoted with approval in the present collection, and Amis himself has said that style is morality. The War Against Cliche presents 30-odd years of the stylist as critic, inflated into an all-comers' combat with the language of moral stupidity.

Taken straight, over nearly 500 pages, Amis's own critical style is if anything less pyrotechnic, less Jamesian (Clive, not Henry) than that notional half-remembered Amis who now lives in most literate people's heads. The mature Amis is studiedly casual and reasonable, rising to a gymnastic verbal logic that is sometimes over-developed in its muscular neatness. Discussing violence, Amis offers the real and vivid insight that "desensitisation is precisely the quality that empowers the violent ... in the moments leading up to violence, the nonviolent enter a world drenched with unfamiliar revulsions. The violent know this." But he continues: "They are taking you to where they feel at home. You are leaving your place and going over to their place." The over-development, with its perky urge to entertain and its shift of register, actually weakens the effect.

There is no shortage of these iffy moments in Amis's prose-led thinking. The plain style can be as bad as the complex: "Mrs. Thatcher is the only interesting thing about British power politics; and the only interesting thing about Mrs. Thatcher is that she isn't a man." Clear, trenchant and wrong, this is an instance of apparent cogency building on itself by shifted repetition, like a politician's speech. "The reaction, like most reactions, is just an overreaction. To get an overreaction, you need plenty of overreactors. Somebody has to do it. And here they all are, busy overreacting." There is less to this sequence than meets the eye; it must have felt clever to write, but somewhere along the line its mock-trenchancy has slipped into a kind of turbocharged trudge.

With ingenuity at a premium, Amis is down on cliches, be it herds of them "roaming free" in a dinosaur novel, or a cretinous conversation between football managers in a bar. But he over- prosecutes his case, criticising William Burroughs for "grinding poverty" and "oppressive heat". The trouble is, you just do not need an ingenious new phrase for everything every time, as if verbal consciousness was some kind of parlour game. Not all prose is poetry, and it need not always stimulate the reader by novelty. Amis criticises a writer for noticing merely "mangy" dogs on an Indian street, when instead of this "received, automatic" adjective he could have noticed that Indian dogs are in fact like "abruptly promoted rats, bemused by their sudden elevation, and pining for a quiet return to the rodent kingdom". This is lovely, of course, but superfluous in a book about encountering Eastern spirituality. And when Malcolm Lowry feels his dreary parents, Amis says it was "their very ovinity that haunted him". We get the message, after a fashion (anti-sheep, anti-herd; appropriately enough, it is about avoiding ordinariness), but if this is the trouble we have to take to avoid cliches, I would be quite happy to meet one now and again.

So cliche is bad, vaunting originality is good; cleverness is next to godliness. Cliche is carrying the can here, for dumbness in general, but it is by no means synonymous. Some people - Beckett was one - are positively fond of cliches. Cliche can be appropriate, felt, fully inhabited, and far from empty speech. Lack of nuance - dumb thesaurus prose - is worse. A cynic might feel cliche is bad here because it is the opposite of what Amis happens to be so good at, but he ups the ante by taking on more than just verbal cliches. There are cliches of the "mind and ... heart" too, so cliche comes to represent stock responses, calcified thinking and bigotry. By implication, flash prose has never had greater ethical value. It is in a 1986 Atlantic Monthly piece of James Joyce - the title piece in this collection - that anti-Semitism provokes the observation "prejudices are cliches: they are secondhand hatreds". Cliches, on the other hand, are not necessarily prejudices, but the drift is clear, leading Amis to praise Saul Bellow's writing as "a source of constant pleasure because of its manifest immunity to all false consciousness".

Title essay or not, Amis does not have the enthusiasm for Joyce that he has for Nabokov. Writing for an American audience, Amis wonders who actually reads Joyce these days; "Who curls up with Ulysses?" He claims to have tried to read Ulysses and got about half way through, which sounds like a man loosening his tie and trying to come on like plain folks. Still, he likes it better than Finnegans Wake (where allegedly, "every word is a multi- lingual pun"): "Joyce told a dream, Finnegans Wake, and he told it in puns - cornily but rightly regarded as the lowest form of wit ...." The Wake is nothing less than an "ultimately reader- hostile, reader-nuking immolation". It nukes the reader? Amis on the Wake sounds remarkably like the winner of an Amis parody competition.

As for Amis's other likes and dislikes, Kurt Vonnegut's phrasing makes the reader "sweat with pleasure"; "you can read for hours without hearing a single false quantity". Chandler's Big Sleep is not very good, but "curling up" with an Elmore Leonard is "decadent bliss". Nabokov, of course, is the joyous divinity in Amis's literary universe, and Amis also writes superbly appreciative pieces on Saul Bellow and Don Do Lillo. Then there are a few writers he liked but is not quite sure about, notably Philip Roth ("unbelievably dirty" he writes of a late Roth; "You toil on, looking for the clean bits"). And of the British, he writes beautifully about Ballard, Pritchett and Larkin, leaving them standing amid a rubble of demolition jobs.

NO doubt Iris Murdoch believed she was labouring to produce art works of enduring value. But with the help of Amis's gleefully insensitive plot summaries, selective quotation and talent for caricature, we can see that what she was actually doing was digging her own grave, and digging it deep. "Imagine the teaching staff of a toytown university. The men all have names like Hilary and Julian. The women all have names like Julian and Hilary. Everyone is on permanent sabbatical, but they look in each day to sample the hallucinogenic love-potions available in the SCR." Murdoch's androgynously over-privileged names are an unfailing source of fun: "I had hoped that this might be the Murdoch novel where, at last, the heroine was called Butch and the hero Maureen."

If anything Murdoch gets off lightly - plenty of reparative faint praise is heaped on - compared to John Fowles. "It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow; it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise." Then comes the clinching killer below: "There is a difference, morally." Amis has mellowed, but in the 1970s and 1980s, for people like Angus Wilson and C. P. Snow, finding Amis on your case must have been a truly horrible, heart-sinking experience, not unlike spotting the Red Baron in your rearview mirror. As Amis discusses them, writers such as Fowles, Fay Weldon and D. M. Thomas seem like the last people who should be novelists: not merely flawed but in completely the wrong job, possessed of a positive anti-talent, producing books far further into deficit than the ones averagely untalented people simply never get round to writing.

One of the strengths of this collection, taken whole, is the presentation of consistencies and stylistic tricks, and the opportunity to compare the early and mature Amis. He does not always look good in the early pieces, but his editorial comments show a sense of humour about the process of growing up in public: it is modest, generous and very sane of Amis to reprint his earliest criticism as straightforwardly as this. It has the style of an undergraduate controversialist, with more references to syllabus books than an older metropolitan critic would ever bother with, and where the mature Martin is deliberately unbuttoned, young Martin can be stuffy, as if writing in a borrowed bow-tie.

Admonishing William Burroughs, "One wearily instances the possibility represented by King Lear, at once the most harrowing and uplifting work in the language". Twenty-three-year-old Amis found an "endearing, Boy's Own eagerness" in William Empson, but managed a conciliatory reply when Empson wrote to the TLS to challenge his review: "So far as I am concerned, Professor Empson always writes like an angel" (clearly the war against cliche was not yet under way). John Carey gets some distinctly finger- wagging treatment in the following year: "First, as Dr. Carey well knows ... Second, as Dr. Carey well knows ...". and "Third, as it suits Dr. Carey to forget, social issues should have only a conditional bearing on what we generally regard as works of the fancy".

The usefully combative cliche "politically correct" has not been available for most of Amis's career, and nor has "dumbing down", but one can see him struggling against certain tendencies right from the start under various other labels. "Democratisation", the "bien pensant" "certain fashionable murmurs" and "levelling none of these are positive words in this book. "Democratisation" is particularly bad, because it is against "the talent elite", just as academic criticism now also "moves against talent".

In his junk-culture way, Amis is essentially an aesthete. He agrees with Edmund Wilson and Nabokov that "the sole end of art is 'aesthetic bliss'. and that the critic's spinal cord is as vital as a tuning fork". It is a salutary position in the present climate, although you have to be a little careful with aesthetes: there is a marvellous moment in a Dennis Cooper novel when someone is described as "a guy who'd watch newsreels of Nazi death camps, then say something like 'Wow, that old back-and- white film stock is beautiful'". Amis, aestheticism shows not just in his description of Lolita - "like a recreational drug more powerful than any yet discovered" - but in perceptions like the "marvellously depressing" fact that in later life Philip Larkin offered to help an old girlfriend with money for a hip replacement. These oxymoronic delectations are a slippery slope; you could soon find yourself applauding the wonderfully banal and the thrillingly ordinary. More than that, anyone less hung up on style than Amis might well find something strangely cheering in the news that the miser with the schoolgirl fladge-mags tried to help a former partner with her medical bills, even if it is a reminder of the prosaic nature of ageing.

To read a collection like this - and especially to review it - is to be reminded of the intrinsic and perhaps necessary impertinence of criticism. "None so poor," as H. G. Wells once wrote, "that cannot swagger at a writing desk." Aside from authors Amis clearly enjoys roasting, he is a surprisingly harsh critic even of writers he broadly admires. Updike, for example can [writhe] in jargon, sentence-length cliche, and prissy sarcasm", although he can also attain to a university that "wins one's deepest assent; it seems to enlarge the human community". Amis finds a similar universality in Philip Roth - "reading about his life has satisfactions analogous to reading about one's own" - and this is certainly part of the appeal of Amis's own writing, in his criticism just as much as his fiction. And as for the basic question - is it good? - anyone without an axe to grind can only say well, impertinent quibbling aside, of course it is good. Of course it is. It is Martin Amis. It is uneven and it is not infallible, but for the most part it is very good indeed, in a distinctively exhilarating way. Style may be morality, but style is also pleasure.

The War Against Cliche, Essays and reviews, 1971-2000, Martin Amis, p.506, Cape, œ20, TLS, œ18.

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