On the night of October 11, 2007, Martin Amis sat on the stage at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts as representatives of the left intelligentsia went berserk.
Amis was arguing that radical Islam was a fascistic movement. “What about Israel?” cried Chris Morris, a TV satirist of the day. Amis stayed calm, as he always did, and held onto his cigarette, as, alas, he could never stop himself from doing, and composed a reply. While Palestinians needed justice, he said, Jews needed a homeland.
“Ohmigod he’s defending Israel now!’ squealed Morris.”
“You could read views like this man’s in the Daily Telegraph!” cried an elderly gentleman, stabbing an accusatory finger at Amis.
Amis attempted to find common ground. “Would all those in the hall who think they are morally superior to the Taliban please raise your hands,” he asked. Just one-third of the audience found the moral self-confidence to lift their trembling hands.
Amis not only fought a “war against the cliché” in literature, with prose so thrilling it made you glad to be alive, but a war against cliched thought. In the response to his laconic question, one could see the future of the worst of the left. Corbynism was coming. It was all there in 2007: the inability to oppose a totalitarian theocracy because it was anti-Western; the belief that, if it were not for Jews, planes would not crash into New York skyscrapers, bombs would not explode on the Underground and the Middle East would enjoy perpetual peace. I was writing against proto-Corbynism at the time. But when I talked to Martin about the confrontation, he made my case better than I ever could. “The only people you are allowed to feel morally superior to are the Americans and the Israelis.”
The self-righteousness repelled him as much as the cravenness. “Let me assure you,” he once said, “that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious.” (So many quotes for so many occasions: you think you are writing a piece about Martin Amis, and find that Martin is writing the piece for you.)
He is sometimes described as a philosemite: a dubious honour, I think, for it is as blinkered to admire Jews because they are Jews as loathe Jews because they are Jews. It is better to say instead that Martin felt the tragedy of Jewish history, and could see from the behaviour of the left, as well as of the right, that it was not over.
In his autobiography, he describes a casually racist home upbringing. His father, Kingsley Amis, saw him carrying a copy of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man.
“What’s that you’re reading? Some Jew?”
Martin turned his back on him and read out a description of how mothers arrived at Auschwitz, thinking it was a prison camp rather than a death camp. They expected to survive the night and hung their children’s washing on the barbed wire to dry.
He turned to look at his father whose “motionless face was a mask of unattended tears”.
Others refused to listen, and occasionally they had good reasons.
I hate to say it, but you could also see the worst of the right coming in 2007. An enemy, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, dug out Amis’s response to the Metropolitan Police arresting 25 Islamists who were allegedly plotting to murder thousands. Amis said: “There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’” Eagleton presented the quote out of context. But as Amis’s old friend Christopher Hitchens said, quotes are, by definition, always out of context. Amis’s words foretold another future where once moderate people would become so disgusted by the liberal-left’s failure to challenge radical Islam, they would spin off to the far right.
I knew a few who did just that. And if I had paid more attention at the time, I would have caught the first whiff of Trumpism in the air.
Amis did not abandon liberalism. Nor did he want to become a second Hitchens, always looking for the next fight. He was an English novelist and essayist, one of the greatest of our age. And yet England never truly honoured him. The newspapers (broadsheets as well as tabloids) were more interested in his love life and the vast sums he had to spend on repairing his teeth than his work. His success, and his brilliance inspired envy as well as admiration and imitation.
As telling was the reaction of the grandees of the liberal mainstream. Amis could write bad books, although never dull books, but not one of his great novels won the Booker Prize. The highbrow critics and celebrities with a taste for literary fiction, who made up the juries, honoured late-20th-century contemporaries we’ve long forgotten. But they could never bring themselves to recognise Amis’s genius.
Like all other humourless people, they could not take comedy seriously. Like the audience at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, they had only the uneasy feeling that Amis was laughing at them because, for all their sloganising and chest-thumping, he understood that they could never be truly serious.
