False quantities: on Martin Amis’s hobbyhorse
What’s most
revealing about Prospect’s recent interview with Martin Amis isn’t his opinion of JM Coetzee – “he’s got no talent” – but the
evidence he cites to support it. (It’s hardly a surprise, after all,
that the cool wit of a writer whose PhD thesis looks at the manuscript
revisions to Samuel Beckett’s Watt should hold no appeal for a man
whose aversion to Beckett, vented after “a couple of hundred glasses of
wine”, once drove Salman Rushdie to the brink of violence.) Put to one
side what Amis says about the Nobel laureate being no fun,* since
that’s a matter of taste, and in any case isn’t exactly an original
point to make about an author whose best-known book pivots on a gang
rape. Of greater interest – because it suggests how blithely Amis can
pass off wilful ignorance as critical rigour – is the moment where he
tries to convince his interviewer, Tom Chatfield, that cliché is the
enemy of literary value:
MA: These are two quotes from Coetzee. How does it go. Oh, yes. A woman is watching him closely. “She watched me like a…”
TC: “… hawk.”
MA: Next sentence. He had said these words in “a voice loud enough to wake…”
TC: “… the dead.”
“Consecutive
sentences,” tuts Amis. The passage he’s thinking of comes near the end
of Waiting for the Barbarians, where the novel’s narrator, the
Magistrate, recounts the fallout from a shaming liaison with a girl
who’s supposed to be in his custody. You assume Amis must know – as a
loud admirer of Nabokov if nothing else – that we can’t in any
straightforward sense assign the Magistrate’s words to Coetzee, but
never mind: by simply zeroing in on two phrases from page 149 of a
170-page work published thirty years ago, he avoids having to think
about anything meatier than Coetzee’s merits as a neologist (such as –
for instance – the way, in Youth and Summertime, he mocks the
myth-making of the lit-celeb memoir, or how, in Elizabeth
Costello and Diary of a Bad Year, he casts doubt on the entitlement of famous writers to pontificate on whatever subject takes
their fancy). (E.g.)
Pseudo-punctiliousness of this sort was on
show last summer when Amis reviewed John Updike’s posthumous collection
My Father’s Tears. His piece began with an invitation to
discover “if you have what is called a literary ear” by reading a quote
from the story Personal Archaeology.
The following wedge of
prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing
– one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention:
Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his
land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and
socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.
The
“minor flaw”, said Amis, Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester
University, is “the proximity of prior and prime”: it gives us “a
dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides,
are etymological half-siblings, and should never be left alone without
many intercessionary chaperones”. To say nothing of the “major flaw”
(look it up if you must).
On Amis trudged, through the horror of
sentences that contained both “walking” and “sidewalk”, “knowing” and
“knew”, “year”, “yearbook” and “year”, before confronting, from behind
his hands, the climactic ruin of this (admittedly plopping)
formulation: “The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody
ever thinks to pick them up when they fall.”
Such clumsiness was
submitted as evidence of Updike’s late-life decline. That’s to say, for
Amis, Updike wasn’t so good any more because in his prose he forgot not
to repeat words and sounds too often. But the grim consequence of this
logic is that it reduces the A-game Updike whom Amis so admires to
little more than a sentient thesaurus with a feeling for rhythm: Amis
even implied as much (unwittingly, I guess) once he eventually saw fit
to assess My Father’s Tears not as a exercise in elegant variation but
as a collection of stories – or “mere narratives” – and found that
“denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, they sometimes seem to be neither
here nor there”.
Maybe that university professorship is partly
to blame for the apparent narrowing of Amis’s vision as a critic.
Creative Writing emphasises craft – what else can you teach? – and of
his own pedagogy he has stated: “It’s always detail, detail,
little things, trying to work on the surface... That’s what I think the
job is... By clearing away all the second hand stuff – the clichés, the
dead sentences – I think you can make people a lot more alert, and if
talent is there” – that word again – “it will emerge quicker if the
surface is very strictly attended to”. (Perhaps Coetzee ought to dip
into that million-quid Nobel haul and stump up the twelve grand
for a course at Manchester.)
It’s impossible to argue
with what Amis is saying – essentially, do not be lazy – but such
common-sense advice scarcely warrants elevation to the status of a
one-size-fits-all critical philosophy. The bathos seems unintended
when, in his interview with Chatfield, discussing the merits of Orwell,
Amis concedes that Nineteen Eighty-Four, despite being “journalistic”
and “non-genius”, is after all a decent novel with “few false
quantities” – his term for those unwitting rhymes and repetitions of
the sort he finds everywhere in Updike’s last work.
Elsewhere in
the interview Amis nods approvingly at Flaubert; not for his famously
strenuous efforts to avoid the false quantity, but because he’s
“funny”. Well, quite. Flaubert’s sense of humour let him ridicule even
his own perfectionism. He once asked his friend Edmond de Goncourt if
there was “anything more stupid than struggling to eliminate the
assonances from a sentence or the repetitions from a page”. What was
the point? Goncourt, for his part, thought there wasn’t one. “Style,”
he wrote, in a journal entry for 3 March 1875 – the translation is
Robert Baldick’s – “has become so affected... as to make
writing practically impossible”:
It is bad style to place fairly
close to one another two words beginning with the same syllable; it is
bad style to use the word /of/ twice in the same expression, and so on
and so forth... This excessive fastidiousness dulls the minds of the
most gifted of writers, and distracts them – busy as they are with the
intricate manipulation of every phrase – from all the vital, great,
warm things that give life to a book.
* But – for
what it’s worth – the belief that Coetzee lacks a sense of humour is an
obvious canard. C, the Coetzee-ish writer in Diary of a Bad Year, says:
“I cast my mind back over the new fiction I have read in the past
twelve months, trying to find one book that has truly touched me, and
come up blank.” The real JM Coetzee is a notably obliging provider of
enthusiastic jacket quotes.