Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Over the years, I’ve probably read half of Martin Amis’s novels and liked them in parts, but I’ve never been a great fan, though more so than I was of Barnes (crushingly dull in my experience) and Rushdie, and less so than McEwan. What made me take Amis’s final novel, Inside Story (Vintage, 2020), off my local library shelf and borrow it the other week, I don’t quite know; I’m jolly glad that I did though, because I enjoyed it from start to finish, all 500+ pages of it.

That Amis called it a novel, rather than a slightly or partly fictionalised memoir, must be due to his disdain for ‘life writing’. Regardless, it interweaves reminiscences about his best friend (Christopher Hitchens), his father’s best friend (Larkin), and his other, literary father (Saul Bellow), with the story of a relationship he apparently had in the late ’70s with a woman whom he calls Phoebe Phelps. Among other things, he’s very good, and moving, on death, or, rather, dying. (He himself died, in May this year, at the same age, 73, as his father; and Hitchens died at 62, a year younger than Larkin, but from the same cause, oesophageal cancer. Bellow outstripped them all, by living to 90.) I found myself chortling frequently too, which can’t be a bad thing.

Curiously, he also throws in top tips for prose writers – and writers of any kind really, none of which is hugely original; even so, the following paragraphs contain sound advice, particularly for those haiku poets who imagine they are the world’s only true Existentialists:

Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent – don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.

So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting – yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting.

The book also includes a concise verdict on Larkin’s poetry which I’ve never seen bettered elsewhere, but more of that another time.