In a carpeted hotel, the great writer smokes. He holds a magazine, squints his eyes pretending to read intently, and asks, "Like this?" It's Xan Meo, and at the same time it's Guy Clinch, and Keith Nearing, and above all it's Richard Tull, the writer who once told his wife, sitting at the kitchen table, on a desperately gray day, not to ask him to stay just with that, not to ask him to stay just with life. His wife was fed up with none of his novels working, and had just given him an ultimatum. He was going to have to look for a job, he was going to have to stop writing. If there is a heart, and it is a huge heart, at times dark, gone, broken, always beating, in the work of Martin Amis (who died on Saturday at the age of 73), the great writer, the great stylist, the man who did not kill the father but let his powerfully living work crush him, is right there.
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Writer Martin Amis dies at 73
"That's perfect," says the journalist who also writes but above all reads and who, someday, in a then unimaginable future, will carry that moment in Richard Tull's life like armor, and will contain it forever in everything she writes. He will not do it with his name, but with that of Keith Whitehead, his bizarre other self – the most bizarre of all – in Dead Children, one of those novels without which the world, at least, his world, would not be the same. There is nothing more like a writer than another writer, she tells herself, and Amis's need to collect oneself, to share oneself, the need to be not one but at the same time all his characters, is intimately related to Tull's words, and to the idea that the imagined life will always be superior to the real one. Vaster, of apparent infinite possibilities.
The great writer poses, absentmindedly, with the magazine, and it is a musical magazine, the magazine in which the then very young journalist – she is only 21 years old and I am the one who writes this now – publishes reviews of albums, and from that day on, interviews with writers. Writers who will never, ever pose for her with the generosity of that man who was, like every great writer, the only soldier in a lost battle against himself. A battle that, however, he waged passionately, deeply and playfully until the end, rehabiting tradition – Samuel Richardson, and erotically puritanical literature are deconstructed in The Pregnant Widow, and are reinvented in Nicola's unconsummated obsession in Champs of London – and electrifying, muscularizing, English literature – and in what would be in its still unknown future – at the same time: Money, Night train, Stray dog.
The flash of the old digital camera jumps – mobile phones are then, year 2003, armatostes without a screen – and the great writer looks at the camera, frowns, pushes away the cigarette. In Martin Amis's novels, as in Tom Wolfe's, the journalist thinks, men are the weaker sex. And they are in a more cruel, less naïve, colder and self-destructive way, less American, more English than in that one. Women always know what they want and are ready to achieve it, when they are not simply forces of nature, like detective Mike Hoolihan, a very brazen formal bomb, still very far from everything explored by noir since then, a tour de force, like the one that prevailed in the Nabokovian and impossible The arrow of time: Tell a story backwards, literally.
When everything ends, the journalist smiles, and the great writer too, and they timidly shake hands, and say to each other until another, and they do not know it, but they will see each other again, and in the dedications of their books a little story will be written, and she will come to think that all that had been and would be forever, that neither of them was ever going to leave that carpeted hotel, because it wouldn't have to happen if life were still imagined.
And that's part of what will happen every time you open one of your books. I'll run into Keith Talent again at the Black Cross, and Richard Tull in that kitchen. And with the various incarnations of his cousin Lucy Partington, who was brutally murdered by a couple of serial killers. The writer missed her so much, so much so that he used to look at her photograph when he wrote. He said of her that she was "where we really are when we die, in the hearts of those who remember us." Our hearts overflow with it, he also said. Today, they overflow with you, dear Martin Amis.
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