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Jun 25, 2008 07:01 PM
If Martin Amis can be described as a worshipper of any sort, then his deity is language. One either finds his religion observed cloyingly or reaffirmingly. I'm in the latter category, which these days is the minority category. The man who declared war against cliche and once opened an essay with the sentence "Expect a lot from the next sentence" has me wishing I wouldn't let him down by yanking a familiar Auden gobbet off the shelf. But there's really no other apposite quotation than the great poet's memorial on W.B. Yeats, particularly the stanzas he later excised from the poem:
Martin Amis needs no pardon because his views are not as noxious as Kipling's (at his worst) or Claudel's (at his best). In fact, they are solidly in the liberal Enlightenment camp, which would seem boring today if these views weren't so radical. This has not stopped a certain semi-literate faction of p.c. ideologues from calling Amis a racist. Its evidence? In an interview he gave in 2006, he said the following:
I have an urge sometimes to cheat on my taxes. I am not a tax defaulter. If you are Terry Eagleton, not only would you claim that that's exactly what I am, but you would then point to a confession signed by me explaining my own guilt. It was Eagleton who, in a sloppy and lazy introduction to the updated edition of his book Ideology (a perfect concatenation of circumstances), accused Amis of putting down the foregoing in an "essay" and doing so as a matter of policy prescription. As even a non-literary critic will have ascertained, Amis was a) talking and not writing, b) insinuating his remarks as a "definite urge" and not an arrived-at conclusion, much less a morally defensible one. Totalitarianism starts with a butchery of language, and it is worth noting that Eagleton's most memorable recent contribution to the genre of the essay was to compare the martyrdom of Rosa Luxemburg to that of Mohammed Atta. I find this perfectly amenable to his commissar tendency of falsification and hysterical denunciation. (Graham Greene's Frankenstein hybrid of Catholicism and Marxism may have been "problematic," as the tortured young students in an Eagleton seminar would no doubt phrase it, but at least Greene managed to produce some good novels.) I bring this up because Eagleton's lying seems to have worked. In a new article addressing Ian McEwan's defense of his friend Amis, the Telegraph journalist Nicole Martin makes the same reheated and philistine mistake:
Which at least proves the old assumption that reporters don't bother to read the subject material -- in this case spectral -- about which they aim to report.
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