4.20.2007
Famous Amis
[Posted 12:49 PM by Stefan Beck]
The Amis boys, père and fils, are everywhere these days. Presumably you’ve seen Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of Kingsley’s life—that is, of Zachary Leader’s Life. (I’m not the biggest fan of Gopnik, but I never tire of reading about the Old Devil and this essay is no exception.) What you may not have seen is Paul Johnson’s “And Another Thing” column in the latest London Spectator. I’ve always found the capacity for uncontrollable, diaphragm-busting laughter to be a good indicator of character, and, as will surprise nobody, Johnson has it in spades:
There are certain people one is always glad to see. For instance, if I
go into a room and find Henry Kissinger there, or if he comes into a
party I am attending, I am delighted. For I know from long experience
that, even in a short conversation with him, I will learn something I
did not know and which is worth knowing. In a gregarious lifetime, I
have accumulated a list of such stars. I don’t suppose there were ever
more than 20 names on it, and many are now dead, alas. Most were
included not because they added to my grasp of events, like R.H.S.
Crosman, or my perception, like Harry Lee of Singapore, but because
they made me laugh. We are weak creatures—I am, anyway—and prefer
to have our spirits lifted to having our minds enlarged. Thus, pleased
as I always was to see Isaiah Berlin in a room, it was because I knew I
would soon be laughing rather than in anticipation of becoming wiser
(though he could sometimes do both).
He goes on to crown the king of laughs:
The performer who made me laugh most often, even painfully, was
Kingsley Amis, not so much in company but face to face, especially (in
my experience) with George Gale making up a trio and contributing his
contemptuous grumbling noises. As a laugh-maker, Kingsley exercised
great art and occasionally flashes of inexplicable genius. This is
something the immensely long biography of him, published last year,
largely omits, and it leaves a huge hole in the heart of the book, so
that future readers who never knew the man, or knew those who did, will
wonder what all the fuss was about.
Sometimes the apple falls from the tree, and sometimes the apple jumps out of the tree and makes a run for it. Martin Amis, who in an earlier time would have seemed an odd match for Mark Steyn, has reviewed America Alone in the London Times. What does he take exception to? Whereas most of the anti-Steyn contingent complain about the severity and “Islamophobia” of Steyn’s predictions, Marty worries that Steyn “writes like a maniac.”
I hope that his admonitions will gain some momentum, despite the efforts of
his prose style to impede this. Here is a writer who makes the English
language blush at its own vulnerability to pun and play. Two jokes per
sentence is the norm, and Steyn keeps to that even when, for example, he is
citing the filmed decapitations of the hostages Ken Bigley and Nick Berg in
Iraq. Why would anyone want a laugh while reading about that? As I closed
the book I found myself deciding that Steyn’s sense of decorum must be
almost inhumanly thin.
Steyn may well be a maniac in the sense that he just can’t help himself: If the japes and cracks came as easily to you or me, could we help ourselves, either? But at no point does his book trivialize the matters under discussion, and that’s the real test of his sense of decorum. If you’d like to make sure for yourself, you know where to go.