Amis, for instance, devotes one of the most powerful sections of the book to an investigation into Larkin’s relationship with his fascist father, Sydney. In extracts from his new book published in the Guardian, Martin Amis accused the British left - including his closest friend - of overlooking the crimes of Stalin's Russia. His as yet unravaged face seems to be gauging whether his last remark has landed with Amis, who looks into the distance, appearing simultaneously satisfied and anxious. Presented by D D Guttenplan and featuring Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan and Tony Blair. As famous for his love affairs, his friendships and his complicated family history as for his dazzling prose, he has dominated the literary scene for decades. The quintessential '80s novelist has a new memoir-novel, "Inside Story," about departed friends Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin. Amis has said his forthcoming novel is “not so much about me”, but about Larkin, Bellow and Hitchens. From Christopher Hitchens's Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve Books, 2011) But from there he veered back to the terrain of History, while tugging the private along with him. For Amis, one of the bitterer realisations of Bellow’s mental decline was that the great man could not appreciate 9/11 – could not “take it in” – and thus could not bring his prose to meet the spectacle of horror. Humanly. Inside Story whiplashes the reader between more decades (roughly from the start of Amis’s career in 1973 with The Rachel Papers, right up to the age of Trump) and more figures than his memoir Experience (perhaps Amis’s best book to date, and certainly his most finely structured). This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. It explains why Amis and Christopher Hitchens thought that drinking a lot of alcohol, being weird about women, and smoking a lot of cigarettes were enough material to underwrite entire personae. Human nature being what it is, you actually want it to end.” Hitchens, he said, “had a greater love of life than me. It hasn’t gone away.”. The cover features an arresting image of the two grands amis – both formerly of this parish – on the cusp of their prime. This is one of the main differences between the two friends, though Inside Story affords it bafflingly little attention. Amis has written about 9/11 before, in fiction and non-fiction, and has drawn fire for his comments on Islam. (The joke in Hyde Park – the other Hyde Park – was that The Closing of the American Mind was one of Bellow’s best novels, marking his turn to a hyper-unreliable narrator in order to outdo Nabokov’s Pale Fire.) “Weedy, nervy and thrifty (you often saw a little folded purse full of humid coins), with an awkward-squad look about them (as if nursing a well-informed grievance),” Amis wrote, “the Corbyns [of the 1970s] were in fact honest and good-hearted.” But without the requisite irony, Amis cannot stomach them. And of course there is his lifelong friend and conversation partner, Christopher Hitchens, whose death from cancer he chronicles in some of the tenderest prose he has ever written. It seems no accident that Amis’s temperament would squarely interpret 9/11 as the major event of the 21st century – and be drawn to subject it to fiction. Hitchens begins: “What’s that line in one of Julian’s early novels? There are characters called Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens; there is Hitchens’s wife, Carol Blue; there is Amis’s wife, Isabel Fonseca (here called by her second name, Elena). In his new book Inside Story, Amis morphs from an enfant terrible into a Beefeater guard of the English language. Even his self-mythologising was also part of a project of self-deflation.” (The more loyal New Statesman readers will be touched by scenes of Hitchens and Amis checking the magazine’s proofs at the printing factory and having the feeling that they are participating in a hallowed rite.) Hitchens is on the left, holding his cigarette mid-abdomen like a paintbrush. It would be cheap to presume that professional jealousies came between Amis and Hitchens. In these moments, Amis’s fastidiousness becomes purely enjoyable. Outside of a few masterful condensations of lopsided affinities – Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, Sheila Heti’s Ticknor – the friendship novel tends to benefit from the sort of longer exposure that Elena Ferrante exploited in her Neapolitan novels and Marcel Proust achieved with Saint-Loup in À la recherche du temps perdu. (Hitchens noted this reflex in his friend, and reported being taken aback when, after delivering a negative verdict on a Bellow novel, he was reprimanded by Amis: “Don’t cheek your elders.”) The magnetism of Bellow for Amis’s generation of English writers is well attested: Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and later Will Self and James Wood, all found something in Bellow’s high-calorie sentences that they couldn’t get at home. “Especially now, because you have the machines telling you progress. Subreddit dedicated to the life and works of Christopher Hitchens Press J to jump to the feed. An autobiographical novel, Inside Story, will chronicle the writer’s romantic affairs, the death of Hitchens – his closest friend – and the 9/11 attacks, Last modified on Wed 12 Feb 2020 15.25 EST. Would recommend that anyone remotely interested in Hitchensania check out Martin Amis' Inside Story.It's not too distant from Hitch-22 in writing style and form (although not in brevity; this is a very thick tome). Hitchens’s youthful commitments to the left become a kind of fashionable attire in this perspective – and so they probably were (though Amis contends that Hitchens essentially broke up with Anna Wintour not because she had the wrong politics, but no politics). A pair of late Updike sentences are hauled in for demolition. “You want rule by yobs,” Amis describes telling Hitchens disapprovingly in the offices of this magazine in the 1970s. So he wasn’t moved to speak.”, “Disgraceful, that. Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and the long road to reaction In his new book Inside Story, Amis morphs from an enfant terrible into a Beefeater guard of the English language. Meanwhile Amis assured Will Self that he could spot “an actual misogynist at a hundred yards”—and he wasn’t one. Amis is highly conscious that he is drawn to figures with burning political commitments buried in their pasts: Bellow, Hitchens, Robert Conquest, not to mention Kingsley, were all Trotskyists or communists at one time or another. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). Jonathan Cape, 576pp, £20, This article appears in the 11 September 2020 issue of the New Statesman, Saving Labour, Shoulder to shoulder: Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis in Paris, 1980, Why Bookshop.org is not the saviour the book world needs. Whenever Amis veers into political terrain, he has a tendency to reduce everything to matters of taste. But the chief problem with Amis’s revivification of Hitchens is the lurking sense that something is missing from the effort. In fact, as Amis shows, Larkin loved him dearly. It is a love whose month is ever May.” But the statement is so uncharacteristically and ostentatiously studded with clichés that it rises to a wry smirk. At this stage, it’s more poignant than it is regrettable that Amis still mistakes his milieu for the world. From the outset, Inside Story provokes renewed wonder at Amis’s bottomless capacity for filial piety. Difficilmente Christopher Hitchens si sarebbe sorpreso; la sua concezione apertamente pessimista sull’aldilà, che in mezzo alle fatiche attende la sua defunta anima, è già presente in un passaggio di un romanzo di Martin Amis). Amis reliably provides synaptic pleasure whenever he pauses to give one of his didactic asides about the English language. The novelist is no stranger to controversy, making waves with everything from his thoughts on the English to his alleged sexism. Get the New Statesman’s Morning Call email. Amis himself once told the Independent that, “My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. There’s even a photograph of her. (The Bannon wing manifestly lost the ideological war in Trump’s White House; Wall Street orthodoxy triumphed – what to make of that?) Inside Story, published in September, is “the unseen portrait of Martin Amis’s extraordinary life”, according to his publisher Jonathan Cape. At the April 20th memorial service for Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens, author and Hitchens intimate Martin Amis delivered the eulogy. Writing for the Sunday Times, Amis gave the full down-the-nose treatment to Jeremy Corbyn, not on the question of any policy, but on the matter of tone. Actually, he said, he’s a gynocrat, someone who would welcome the rule of women. When Christopher Hitchens died in December, Martin Amis lost his best friend. ‎Show Intelligence Squared, Ep Martin Amis on Love, Loss and Christopher Hitchens - 10 Nov 2020 ‎Martin Amis has often been called the Mick Jagger of the British book world. The trouble that Amis encounters in his attempt to fictionalise his friendship with Hitchens is that we know too much about him. Much of Inside Story is addressed to a kind of disembodied aspiring writer entering Amis’s home, but he changes register throughout, sometimes appearing as “I”, sometimes as “Martin”, sometimes inserting an essay, sometimes novelising, all with exquisite control. Blue amended the … Politically, Hitchens was capable of simulating dialectical thought, where Amis is Manichean and aesthetic. The latest work by British author Martin Amis, Inside Story: How to Write, takes the death of his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, as the starting point for this book. But that’s a good phrase for what followed – 1941 to ’45. I quite like life, but I’m not as crazy about it as he was. There is the feeling of a friendship being performed rather than excavated. So Donald Trump, too, in Inside Story, comes across largely as a menace of taste, defiling the language and having terrible hair. Christopher Hitchens's 4 greatest one-liners, according to Martin Amis Over the years Christopher has spontaneously delivered many dozens of unforgettable lines. It is to his credit that Amis has managed to make the most moving sentence in this entire book come when Hitchens relates that he has cancer: “It’s my fucking tits now.” (The weight of this line cannot be appreciated out of context.). Elmore Leonard is praised for his unique use of tense: He uses not the past tense (“he lived in”), not the imperfect (“he was living in”), not the historic present (“he lives in”), and not quite the present tense; he uses – or he invents – a present tense indefinitely suspended (“Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan”, “Bobby saying”, “Dawn saying”). (Amis is uninterested in Hitchens’s political trajectory, which he basically attributes to a “rebel” gene that expresses itself differently according to circumstances, and while this can probably be chalked up to the fact that one is often incurious about curious aspects of one’s own friends – that incuriosity can be part of the seal of a friendship – it seems like something Amis would be quite good at illuminating.). I know it’s Although not nearly as forensic as Hitchens about the origins of their friendship at the Statesman offices in the early 1970s, Amis ably summons his friend’s presence and is alive to Hitchens’s contradictions. But there’s no reason why a poet should have strong views about it, or any views about it.”. Hitchens himself, Amis continued, identified with Humbert Humbert's self-description in Lolita of his "striking if somewhat brutal good looks." The novel examines writers of an earlier generation including Amis’s father, Kingsley Amis, family friend Philip Larkin, Amis’s “hero” and mentor Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch and his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard – whom he has given credit for his career. Amis’s new book is a “novelized autobiography” in which he writes warmly and familiarly about Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. His head-swaying to American street-wise rhythms, albeit leavened by English classicism, is the literary version of Mick Jagger crooning “Hoochie Coochie Man” at the Checkerboard Lounge with Muddy Waters, or Daniel Day-Lewis, son of Cecil, shouting, “I will find you!” in deerskin breechcloths under a waterfall in The Last of the Mohicans. Hitchens exposed not only his friend’s stubborn provinciality (especially in his reading), but also the intellectual poverty of someone who appears content to be labelled a connoisseur of “the excesses of late-capitalist Western society”, with nary a thought about what state his liberalism has sunk into. Christopher Hitchens was Amis’ closest and longest friend. But the section passes clean over Hitchens’s most intelligent reading of Larkin’s politics, a 1993 essay in which he argued that it was beside the point to condemn Larkin as a reactionary, but rather incumbent on any politically literate Englishperson to understand the retrograde sources of Larkin’s great appeal and talent – which is more or less what Amis himself is trying to say now. Take, for instance, this exchange that Amis serves up. Amis ran farther than any of his peers in the opposite direction: towards a maximalism that he has never abandoned or so much as questioned. Amis’s star far exceeded Hitchens’s in the 1970s and 1980s, until something like the reverse set in in the 2000s, when Hitchens became a public figure in the US as the leading rhapsode of the Iraq War, in part because his combination of lingering leftism and adopted jingoism made him an exotic figure in the American scene, for which he supplied a Churchillian grandeur to the country’s collective criminal idiocy. Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1975. “Everything he said was equivocal,” Amis writes. It was perhaps, above all, the permission to dispense with the rationed intensity of good mid-century British prose – the clean, spare, simplicity of George Orwell’s diction that reached its apotheosis in VS Naipaul and has been  gently ironised by Kazuo Ishiguro. If Hitchens approached literature primarily though politics, Amis has approached politics aesthetically. Not content with one father to revere, Amis made a point of acquiring others, most prominently Bellow, “a phenomenon of love”. “Not just rule in their interests and in their name – but rule by yobs.”, “That’s it,” he’d answer, with his equivocating smile: “I live for the day when the berks are finally in the saddle.”. Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English intellectual, polemicist, and socio-political critic who expressed himself as an author, orator, essayist, journalist, and columnist. Released on 04/22/2012 Transcript Which sounds like a leap too, but there’s definitely a connection.”, “And it might partly explain why Larkin never had a fucking word to say about the history of the world. “It’s an awful thing, a death watch,” he told the Guardian in 2017. Messrs. Hitchens and Amis, now both in their 60s, have written about their friendship before (most notably, Mr. Amis addressed it in his 2000 memoir, "Experience"). Tenderness and sorrow: Inside Story, by Martin Amis, reviewed At the heart of Amis’s deeply affecting latest ‘novel’ is his friendship with the much mourned Christopher Hitchens He is momentarily led to believe his mother may have had a one-night stand with Philip Larkin, which may have resulted in him being Larkin’s son, and hence the grandson of a fascist; the whole premise is preposterous – one glance at Kingsley’s profile is enough – but Amis dilates it for all its worth, to the point of printing a page of photographs of all of Larkin’s girlfriends, including his own mother. Amis also includes his views on the French, on America, Israel, children, death, one large conflagration (the Twin Towers), one small one (a certain Brooklyn brownstone), and an extended homage to his put-upon mistress, the English language (the subtitle of the novel is “How to Write”). “Whom the fuck d’you think you’re looking at?”, It has been a strange ride to watch as Amis has gradually morphed from an enfant terrible into a kind of Beefeater guard of grammar – though, in fact, he has changed very little across the decades. Amis, who rates his friend higher on the oratory scale than Demosthenes, surely knows that Amis relaying Hitchens-speech is simply not as satisfying as Hitchens relaying it himself, in his prime, on Washington Journal or William F Buckley’s Firing Line (the more staid the setting, the better), long before he became a smooth retailer of sound-bites. Was she his wife or was she his fiancée, his cohabitee, his ‘friend’?”. The life and times of Christopher Hitchens told through archive and interview. In Uit de eerste hand (Inside Story) blikt Martin Amis (71) terug op zijn leven en loopbaan als schrijver. Martin Amis (à g.), Christopher Hitchens (à dr.), des amis à la vie, à la mort • Crédits : Brooks Kraft/Corbis - Schiffer-Fuchs/Ullstein Bild Getty Cela fait un certain temps déjà que l'écrivain britannique Martin Amis navigue entre le roman et l’essai. Here are four of them. Another striking feature of Inside Story is how untouched Amis was by the political passions of the late 1960s. I don’t have them looking over my shoulder any more.”, Martin Amis credits stepmother and Jane Austen for literary success. Amis draws some power from this technique as well, and gives us pictures and scenes of Hitchens across the decades. The novel, however, is more than a testament to a sacred bond. “An act of terrorism fills the mind as thoroughly as a triggered airbag smothers a driver,” he writes in Inside Story. In an excerpt from his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens recalls his adventures with Martin Amis and an oddly arousing chastisement from Margaret Thatcher. And Amis’s piety is momentarily checked as he takes on a single letter “m” that bothers him in Bellow’s Herzog: “Whom was I kidding?” This is grammatically correct; it also leaves the sentence up on one stilt. ‘The midnight of the twentieth century’. Phew! There are moments in this book where Amis comes off as a prim society hostess. It would be worth compiling these in a volume to stand alongside Kingsley’s The King’s English. Frank admissions … Martin Amis, whose autobiographical novel Inside Story is out later this year. “That gives me a theme – death – and a bit more freedom, and fiction is freedom.”, He added at the time: “It’s hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things. But if the notion that Amis is not quite playing it straight with regard to their friendship – or is unwilling to plumb its depths adequately – seems unfounded, there are at least symptoms of buried tension. Sadly, Hitchens passed away from oesophageal cancer in 2011. On literary ground, Amis seems to be saying, however subliminally, it is he, not Hitchens, who will always have the final word. This novel covers much ground: not only Hitchens and the Holy Trinity – Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Larkin – but also evocations of Amis’s early romantic exploits and some higher literary gossip. How we are in the sack governs how we see the history of the world. Doesn’t this partly explain why Americans don’t live that long?” But in the Thanksgiving dinners of the future, the cast already wearily assembles itself: the rebarbative (youngest) uncle who speaks only of Covid-19 and quotes Mike Davis; the (middle) uncle who still smarts from the crippling effect of the financial crisis and refers to Joseph Stiglitz; and the (elderly) uncle, forever babbling on about Islam, and citing Bernard Lewis and Martin Amis. Bad for your health? But Amis has the opposite problem: he is trying to resuscitate a character who huffs and puffs indefatigably in the netherworld of YouTube, with a new clip of Hitchiana seeming to surface every month. Norman Rush’s Subtle Bodies and Bellow’s Ravelstein are worthy recent entries in the genre, but something about their very compression makes it hard for them to capture the full dimension of how the mutual accrual of knowledge and experience can alternatively corrode and nourish a friendship. Or words to that effect.”, “I remember. Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Tina Brown in 1995. The midnight of the twentieth century.”, “… And we’re midnight’s children. If Hitchens, at least at the time, represented the more politically austere and utopian side of 1968, Amis represents its more purely hedonistic element, which, in its small rebellions against middle-class mores, only came to find itself more entangled within them. Martin Amis “But wait,” he writes of an encounter with Bellow and a woman in tow. It would hardly have surprised Christopher Hitchens, his unsanguine views of the afterlife under no bushel, that among the trials and stations awaiting his departed soul there would be passage through a  Martin Amis novel (he had already endured being packed into The Pregnant Widow in the character of Nicholas Shackleton). OK Martin, but that Amis can breathe easy – the yobs will be kept down yet, the berks stable-bound. Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. Inside Story  “Were she and Saul actually married? Amis writes about the “vibrant characters who have helped define” him, including Hitchens, who had cancer and died in Houston in 2011. Rode draad hierin vormt zijn vriendschap met journalist en essayist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), en met zijn oudere collega’s Saul Bellow (1915-2005) en Philip Larkin (1922-1985). This kind of passage is not bad as far as it goes, but it feels like a holding pattern in an extremely narrow orbit: two English writers endlessly expanding on the misery of sex-deprived Philip Larkin from the opposite shore of the sexual revolution, with reference to their friends Barnes and Rushdie, all the while trying to anchor their pub chatter in a world-historical event, preferably Second World War-related, ideally the Holocaust. But instead of merely occupying himself with the trusted liberal beat of policing the divide between literature and politics, Amis has repeatedly marched into established hearts of darkness, writing books about Nazism (Time’s  Arrow), Stalinism (House of Meetings) and Islamism (The Second Plane), as if to prove his mettle, or cover some keenly felt gap in his political education (the crimes of liberalism and colonialism, too close or perhaps too far from home, have rarely aroused anything matchable in him). Did they experience no vicissitudes? This suspicion only grows after Amis’s assured treatment of Kingsley and Larkin’s friendship, which slogged on through the decades, and was the occasion of all sorts of piques and disappointments and recoveries. Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis Thomas Meaney The New Statesman September 18, 2020 By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. “Flippant and heartfelt, ironic and serious, whimsical and steely. Amis moved to the US partly to be near him. The positive responses to his 2000 memoir Experience, which John Banville called “moving, angry, honest, and above all wonderfully stylish”, and James Wood “a beautiful, and beautifully strange book … unlike anything one expected” – suggest the author’s best subject could even be himself. Or just pitifully stunted… You know what Trotsky called the Nazi–Soviet Pact? “Hasn’t anyone here realised that money worries are bad for you? Join us on September 30 when in conversation with novelist Alex Preston Amis will reflect on his life and work and explore the hardest questions we all face: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die. Amis’s impression does not distinguish itself much beyond the “basket of deplorables” revulsion. “American healthcare feels like an assault,” Amis writes. The friendship novel in English commands a remarkably narrow berth with not many illustrious passengers. Martin Amis has written his “most intimate and epic work”, an autobiographical novel that will draw on the death of his closest friend, the polemical writer Christopher Hitchens. When Bellow novelised his friendship with Allan Bloom in Ravelstein, he had the advantage of presenting a figure hardly known outside of his one bestselling polemic, The Closing of the American Mind. He really enjoyed everything, so much. From political sparring over boozy breakfasts, to obscene word games over dinner, right the way through Inside Story – the Fleet Street tease of the title notwithstanding – evinces a protective, even proprietary attitude towards the goods to be delivered. Hitchens, he alerts us, simply did not know enough when he mistakenly wrote that Larkin detested Sydney. The blood pressure falls. His love life was a void, so he…”, “So he didn’t know what the stakes were. Another figure in the novel is Phoebe Phelps, whom Jonathan Cape describe as “alluringly amoral” and “the person who captivated [Amis’s] 20s”. Amis has not calcified into a reactionary, incapable of giving wider crises their due; there is, for example, a sharp riff on the state of American healthcare in this book. Martin Amis reflects on the friends he's lost and his new book "Inside Story," with his friend Salman Rushdie. The unexpected gift of Inside Story comes under the heading of “How to Write”. Amis has barely parried the decimation of his own political innocence that appeared in Hitchens’s review of his non-fiction book about Stalin, Koba the Dread. Martin Amis has written his “most intimate and epic work”, an autobiographical novel that will draw on the death of his closest friend, the polemical writer Christopher Hitchens. He has previously invoked the banner of the “Resistance” without irony, as if nothing separated liberal writers pining for the pre-Trump status quo behind the barricades of articles in the Atlantic and… the Maquis. Martin Amis began a similar feat of heroic resolve in the 1970s, and whatever you make of his commitment to an all-consuming idea of style, you can’t say he makes things easy for himself up there. Dafydd Jones I disagreed with Hitchens violently over literary things as well as political things. “What begins as a thrilling tale of romantic entanglements, family and friendship, evolves into a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die?” said Cape, adding that Inside Story touches on the “great horrors” of the 20th century and the impact of the 9/11 attacks, examining what all this has taught Amis about how to be a writer. It somehow formulated itself in me that, now he was dead, it was my job to love life as much as he did. 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Sentences are hauled in for demolition and we ’ re midnight ’ s impression does not itself., essayist, memoirist, and Tina Brown in 1995 by continuing use. Problem with Amis ’ s a good phrase for what followed – to. To ’ 45 the left, holding his cigarette mid-abdomen like a paintbrush hostess! Brutal good looks. kept down yet, the berks stable-bound realised that Money are!, Bellow and a woman in tow, you consent to our use of these cookies distinguish. Holding his cigarette mid-abdomen like a paintbrush, memoirist, and screenwriter asides about the English to his sexism. That line in one of the late 1960s governs how we see the history of the twentieth ”! Help us give you the best experience when you visit our website Jane. Reliably provides synaptic pleasure whenever he pauses to give one of the two friends though. Times of Christopher Hitchens was capable of simulating dialectical thought, where Amis is Manichean and aesthetic for instance this. Than it is regrettable that Amis encounters in his new book Inside Story blikt. Is no stranger to controversy, making waves with everything from his thoughts on the friends 's... Hitchens across the decades the outset, Inside Story is how untouched Amis was by the political passions the! He… ”, “ so he didn ’ t anyone here realised that Money are. Pictures and scenes of Hitchens is the feeling of a friendship being performed than... “ Especially now, because you have the machines telling you progress: what... This book where Amis is Manichean and aesthetic 71 martin amis christopher hitchens terug op zijn en!