A stylist, yes, but Martin Amis was also right.

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

Here is a passage from Tony Blair’s talkative, undemanding and therefore unamisian memoir:

“It’s like when people say to me: ‘Oh, so-and-so, they don’t believe in anything, they’re just good communicators.’ As a statement on politics, it is close to being an oxymoron. . . If you don’t have fundamental beliefs as a politician, true pathfinding instincts bred from conviction, you’re never going to be a good communicator because, and this may sound corny, but it’s true, the best communication comes from the heart.”

In other words, style is substance. Or at least the two things are harder to separate than people pretend. The idea that Blair was a shallow smoothie and Gordon Brown a deep but mute man is primitive analysis. If Brown had trouble communicating, it was precisely because he was a weathervane, a news-driven strategist, always doubting a tabloid audience here, a liberal there. Who am I meant to be today?

Martin Amis spent half a century making a version of this argument. (Her first novel by him, Rachel’s Papers, came to light 50 years before his death last week). No writing is “just” fancy, she thought. If a sentence pleases the reader, it is because it contains a moral or psychological truth. how about this london fieldsabout a miserable marriage:

“When Hope called his name, ‘Guy?’ — and he answered Yeah? there was never an answer, because his name meant Come here.” I found that slick and graceful enough at 25. Now, with the marriages to be sown around me, it’s the insight, the insight, that makes me smile/shudder. A good joke will often elicit “how true” right after eliciting “ha ha.”

Amis always reminded me of Pep Guardiola, another man who was accused by the British of unnecessary elaboration.

Amis’ career might best be understood as a prolonged response to George Orwell. (“Man can write nothing worthwhile,” he said, according to Christopher Hitchens, though his point of view would soften.) Orwell’s simple prose is still hailed as a mark of integrity and farsightedness: from loathing English to nonsense. Except, as his biographers record, with varying degrees of tact, he was not that contrary. We still don’t know if he shot that elephant in Burma. Pressed on an alleged fabrication, he is said to have defended it as “essentially true”. Regarding clarity of vision, 1984, his account of a future Britain, was, and this is not said enough, staggeringly wrong. (Unless he’s the type to shake his head sadly at CCTV cameras and mutter “she saw it coming.”)

The point is not that Amis, an excellent comics writer, and Orwell, a great man of the 20th century, are the same. It’s just that Amis had the better point about style. There is no causal link between outer simplicity and inner wisdom. And the belief to the contrary can cause problems for entire societies. Take back control. Brexit ends. Make America Great Again. It was simple prose that led mature democracies astray over the past decade.

How Theresa May, that sphinx with no secret, became prime minister? Because the British political class assumed that someone so nondescript must have hidden depths. It was Brown’s mistake again. This happens in workplaces all over the world. I’m afraid it happens in journalism. A spurious weight is attached to the monotonous and laborious. This writing must be serious. It is awful.

By the way, none of this means you have to find Amis work in style. All those adverbs (“vigorously tousled”, “appreciably crappier”) can seem a little college once you discover a Cormac McCarthy or a John Banville: writers who work hard for their effects, who never say what they might evoke. The point is that Amis was right. about style, about its inseparability from content.

I wrote less and less about sports as I got older, but Amis always reminded me of Pep Guardiola, another man the British accused of unnecessary elaboration. His total conquest of domestic football has been necessary to show how much rigor and seriousness (and petrorichness) underlie the superficial shine. You play the ball from behind to attract the other team, not to make an aesthetic statement. You hoard possession as the best way to defending, not to attack. Now give me that fifth Premier League title out of six, and don’t call me a braggart.

Amis said writers die twice. First, the talent leaves. So the body does it. So when did the talent reaper come for him? It is clear that something changes later Information in 1995. His ear is covered for street slang. So good at capturing the texture of London and New York in their grungy and dangerous 1980s phase, I was at a loss when each became a sanitized boomtown. In Lionel Asbopublished in 2012, go ahead and pretend nothing has changed.

The glitches that were always there became more pronounced. He was enthusiastic but not original about America. (Do you know that people there usually carry some wood?) In the 1980s, someone seems to have informed him of the existence of nuclear weapons. That bee took too long to get out of his hood.

But no accusation dogged him as much as that of sexism. He had a viable defense: that the men on his books fare worse. His greatest creation, Keith Talent, is a sleazy pub that deals in stolen goods and talks sports. (“Pressure? He fucking phrives on it.”) But the physical scrutiny was not the same. The first books permeate the feeling, quite recurrent in the British entertainment canon, that the female body is a hoot. Imagine little britain put in prose

In the end, for all his Atlanticism, he could not overcome his nationality. Amis argued that Britain’s coping tactic after the loss of the empire was to embrace trivialities. If we can’t run the world, we’re going to treat the whole thing as a joke. It’s still the sharpest thing I’ve ever heard on the subject of our decline. And he was saying it long before Boris Johnson laughed his way to the top. The curious thing here, to be meta about it, is that Amis himself was an example of the phenomenon that he described. A man who had it in him to write in a greater register kept returning to the comic grotesque. He couldn’t say no to a joke. Would it have been as true if he had been born American or Indian?

His funny bones cost him prizes. (Comedies don’t win Bookers, any more than they win Oscars.) It could have cost us, although we cannot know it, a lot of work.

“Why is the death of Amis so visceral for a certain type of man? That’s not a headline in a newspaper art supplement. That’s a text from a banker friend last weekend. Others who got in touch: a lobbyist, a football executive, a civil servant, someone from marketing. What other “literary” novelist (Amis was not much of a salesman) would elicit this kind of response from men in non-art lines of work? Not Julian Barnes, although I think he wrote a book or two that will outlast any of the Amis. Not Kazuo Ishiguro, who had won more prizes by 35 than the Amis. Not Ian McEwan, who, now that he’s outlived Hilary Mantel, might be the last nationally recognized serious novelist.

So why “Mart”? I think, for men raised before YouTube, before Jordan Peterson and wall-to-wall life advice, he served a kind of mentoring role. She chose a masculine rite (sex, fatherhood, sports failure) and Amis said the truest thing about it. He even saw through the perennial lie that male friends don’t talk to each other about their inner lives: that it’s all movie recommendations and transfer rumors of Declan Rice with us. I’m afraid I’m going to have to get up on my hind legs for this. There are at least 10 men I can and I talk about anything, to the nth degree, like Amis and Hitchens are now doing in some heavenly trattoria. That’s not universal, no. But, looking around, it’s not that exotic either.

By illuminating this and other truths about life, Amis felt like a big brother, conveying ideas as prolifically as clothing. As? Being a good egg is not enough in this world. “Alpha” is a state of mind, not body. (Amis was far from strong.) No, it’s not like that, it’s like that. As the advice says, it was cold and gloomy. That was Peak Amis. But the arrival of Late Amis brought a softer kind of advice. On your deathbed he writes in the pregnant widow, the only thing that will matter to you is “how you had done” in matters of the heart. So put a lot. And make sure it sticks to the hippocampus. This is Amis talking to Esquire magazine about the advice he gives his children:

“I tell you, when you are in love and sex, make sure you squeeze it in the fist of your mind, so that you remember it later. It becomes very important in the late fifties and early sixties; you spend quite a bit of time in the past, thinking about those moments. . . Thus I instruct the boys; It’s like a pension for when they’re old.”

Romantic memories as a pension: an asset that is lived on in old age. It is an elegant line. But it is also a true one. How Amis would have resented that “but”.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

Get our latest stories first — follow us @ftweekend On twitter