A review by ailsapeacock
Experience: A Memoir by Martin Amis
5.0
“But writers write far more penetratingly than they live. Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang.”
I bought a new 4B pencil to annotate this beast of a memoir.
Amis bemoans the messiness of life (“forget about coherence of imagery and the Uniting Theme”) but does a fantastic job of imposing some kind of pleasing biographical structure here. He seamlessly weaves and digresses between areas of his life. Focusing on his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, the disappearance of his cousin in 1973, and having his top teeth completely removed at age 45. Dishes the dirt on his falling out with Julian Barnes and with KA’s biographer Eric Jacobs.
Footnotes were usually very interesting and worth stopping for.
Prose - pristine as always (“hobnob with Nabokov”). In parts, one of the most amusing books I’ve ever read. So much so that I’m contemplating a reread. Of a biography.
Just read it.
[Reviewmay be biased - currently in the first flush of feverish obsession with Martin Amis. In case you couldn't tell.]
“This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.”
“Well it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.”
.
.
.
LITERATURE
“after very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through me…’Here is a writer I will have to read all of’ … I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And there are other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.” 268
“Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with Herzog, with Henderson, with Humboldt, frowning, nodding, withholding, qualifying, objecting, conceding - and smiling, smiling first with reluctant admiration, then smiling with unreluctant admiration.” 224
“What was I reading? I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading.” 207
“It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. In life, Joyce was a desperate chancer. But in his work he was a hard man. Tell a dream, and lose a reader, said Henry James. And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit. Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams. The result, Finnegan’s Wake, reads like a 600-page crossword clue. But it took a hard man to write it.” 116
“I agree with my father’s entry on ‘Shakespeare’ in The King’s English (1997): ‘to say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best.’” 117
“Nabokov clearly derived sensual pleasure from being dismissive: it is the patrician in him.” 119 - “over-cultivated contempt” 120
KINGSLEY
“Edward Upward said that he felt the aging process at work in him when he experienced ‘little failures of tolerance’. Well, Kingsley was never much of a tolerance-cultivator; and his failures were big failures.” 91
“Jeremy Bentham, like Kingsley Amis, was a man who addicted himself to the endorsement of unattractive opinions.” 325
About MA’s maternal grandfather: “In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Kingsley described him as resembling ‘a music-loving lavatory attendant’ - and I’m sorry, Mum, but the writer in me knows a bullseye when he sees one.” 130
BAD TEETH
“My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.” James Joyce 114
“My tongue feels like someone coming home and finding his furniture gone.” VN 115
“Still, I claim peership with these masters in only one area. Not in the art and not in the life. Just in the teeth. In the teeth.” 117
“Vladmir, James and I, however, have blackballed Updike. His teeth are too good… It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov.” 118
“I thought I would slip out of the country and head off to a land - Albania? Uzbekistan? South Wales? - where nobody else had any teeth either.” 122
“his was the harder course, but mine had to be lived by me.”235 Paraphrase PL
WRITING PEDANTRY
“singlehanded is already an adverb” As is regardless, over. (Must stop using the word overly)
“Can’t believe the US proofs of The Info. A termitary of imported commas, each one like a papercut to my soul.” 209 (Google tells me that termitary = termite colony)
Don’t begin a paragraph with the same word that you started the last paragraph with. Unless you do three or more in a row as a conscious stylistic choice.
OTHER STUFF
“Jerusalem, the city without smalltalk.” 22
“’Virtually’: the signature tune of the idler and the charlatan.” 231
“Poets can’t, don’t, shouldn’t drive. (British poets can’t or don’t drive. American poets drive, but shouldn’t.)” 266
“beauty is accepted slang for yes” Larkin, 245
“(E.M. Forster said that ‘women and children’ was the ‘phrase that exempts the [English] male from sanity’. Now it’s ‘taxpayers’ money’.)” 82
I bought a new 4B pencil to annotate this beast of a memoir.
Amis bemoans the messiness of life (“forget about coherence of imagery and the Uniting Theme”) but does a fantastic job of imposing some kind of pleasing biographical structure here. He seamlessly weaves and digresses between areas of his life. Focusing on his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, the disappearance of his cousin in 1973, and having his top teeth completely removed at age 45. Dishes the dirt on his falling out with Julian Barnes and with KA’s biographer Eric Jacobs.
Footnotes were usually very interesting and worth stopping for.
Prose - pristine as always (“hobnob with Nabokov”). In parts, one of the most amusing books I’ve ever read. So much so that I’m contemplating a reread. Of a biography.
Just read it.
[Review
“This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.”
“Well it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.”
.
.
.
LITERATURE
“after very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through me…’Here is a writer I will have to read all of’ … I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And there are other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.” 268
“Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with Herzog, with Henderson, with Humboldt, frowning, nodding, withholding, qualifying, objecting, conceding - and smiling, smiling first with reluctant admiration, then smiling with unreluctant admiration.” 224
“What was I reading? I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading.” 207
“It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. In life, Joyce was a desperate chancer. But in his work he was a hard man. Tell a dream, and lose a reader, said Henry James. And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit. Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams. The result, Finnegan’s Wake, reads like a 600-page crossword clue. But it took a hard man to write it.” 116
“I agree with my father’s entry on ‘Shakespeare’ in The King’s English (1997): ‘to say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best.’” 117
“Nabokov clearly derived sensual pleasure from being dismissive: it is the patrician in him.” 119 - “over-cultivated contempt” 120
KINGSLEY
“Edward Upward said that he felt the aging process at work in him when he experienced ‘little failures of tolerance’. Well, Kingsley was never much of a tolerance-cultivator; and his failures were big failures.” 91
“Jeremy Bentham, like Kingsley Amis, was a man who addicted himself to the endorsement of unattractive opinions.” 325
About MA’s maternal grandfather: “In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Kingsley described him as resembling ‘a music-loving lavatory attendant’ - and I’m sorry, Mum, but the writer in me knows a bullseye when he sees one.” 130
BAD TEETH
“My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.” James Joyce 114
“My tongue feels like someone coming home and finding his furniture gone.” VN 115
“Still, I claim peership with these masters in only one area. Not in the art and not in the life. Just in the teeth. In the teeth.” 117
“Vladmir, James and I, however, have blackballed Updike. His teeth are too good… It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov.” 118
“I thought I would slip out of the country and head off to a land - Albania? Uzbekistan? South Wales? - where nobody else had any teeth either.” 122
“his was the harder course, but mine had to be lived by me.”235 Paraphrase PL
WRITING PEDANTRY
“singlehanded is already an adverb” As is regardless, over. (Must stop using the word overly)
“Can’t believe the US proofs of The Info. A termitary of imported commas, each one like a papercut to my soul.” 209 (Google tells me that termitary = termite colony)
Don’t begin a paragraph with the same word that you started the last paragraph with. Unless you do three or more in a row as a conscious stylistic choice.
OTHER STUFF
“Jerusalem, the city without smalltalk.” 22
“’Virtually’: the signature tune of the idler and the charlatan.” 231
“Poets can’t, don’t, shouldn’t drive. (British poets can’t or don’t drive. American poets drive, but shouldn’t.)” 266
“beauty is accepted slang for yes” Larkin, 245
“(E.M. Forster said that ‘women and children’ was the ‘phrase that exempts the [English] male from sanity’. Now it’s ‘taxpayers’ money’.)” 82