Brief encounters of a sobbing Martian
Tom Shone
VISITING MRS NABOKOV AND OTHER EXCURSIONS by Martin Amis Cape, £13.99, pp. 274 Ahis new collection of journalism shows, exaggeration has always been one of Martin Amis's great strengths. Where another writer would visit a movie actor and come away with stars in their eyes, Amis visits one and sees his career as an interstellar progression of 'white dwarf, red giant, black hole'. Many writers go through the roof about nuclear weapons: Amis goes into orbit. Interviewing a clutch of nuclear experts, he notes 'the orbits of strain, of moral care' in one face. And not just the once. Later on in the same piece, he spots another and notes 'the orbits of care and strain' in his as well. Oh well, I suppose repeating yourself is the whole point of an orbit.
Stratospheres, black holes, orbits, more orbits: cosmic imagery is one of the most consistent threads in Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions. According to Amis, the pieces here are linked by only one thing: they all 'got him out of the house'. It's much too self-deprecating: what he for- got to say is that in most cases he'd fitted in a round trip to Mars to pick up some duty- free disdain en route. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, for example, poring over such titles as The Crisis of Secondary School Education in Uganda, 1960-70 and The Sec- ond Quilter's Companion, he marvels over `the super abundance of earthling enthusi- ams'. Likewise, following Watford Football Club on a tour around China, he feels `assailed by the evidence of earthling vari- ety'. Arnis's friend Craig Raine pioneered the Martian school of poetry: Amis has simply applied the technique to journalism. To adapt one of his own jokes, he's practi- cally called Martian, for heaven's sake.
And the earthlings he takes a closer look at, the ones that aren't part of an abun- dance or a variety? Even they don't look all that human. Gabriella Sabatini strikes him as 'a (successful) experiment in genetico- aesthetics, engineered, cultured, and condi- tioned for optimum gorgeousness'. Peering at Mick Jagger, Amis decides that he doesn't dance exactly. Rather:
His head, his shoulders, his pelvis, both his arms, both his legs, both his huge feet and both his buttocks are wriggling, at great speed, independently, all the time
— which gives Clive James's hilarious description of his own discotheque flailings a good writhe for its money.
The humour of all these pieces lies in one simple trick: though adept at blending in with the earthlings — he can do a good donnish interviewer, a pretty decent sports fan, and a fantastic bloke — Amis delights in letting the disguise slip, in moulinexing his registers. Jutting out of the vellum respectability of his interview with the young American writer Nicholson Baker, for example, is this loutish admission:
Somehow I felt the need to devastate Baker with the news that one of his supposed coinages . .. had been casually tossed out by me two novels ago.
Standing amid the louts at a Stones con- cert, on the other hand, he writes:
as in the hells of Blake and Dore, the vault- fuls of shadowy supplicants stretch up high into the middle air ...
Amis's ability to coast so effortlessly between high and low culture in this way is what makes him so vulnerable as a writer, since it exposes him on multiple flanks where other writers just have a single front to defend. It has made him, among a younger generation of university-educated males breast-fed on such high-low eclecti- cism, the most reviled and (secretly) revered writer of his generation — the most conspicuously attacked, the most con- sistently aped. In university bars up and down the country, opinion on Amis has reached saturation point, a critical mass of near meaninglessness. Which makes it all the more pleasurable to read this collec- tion: occasionally scrappy (a travel piece on `Is it me, or are members of the public getting older?' St Lucia, that Baker interview), it is mostly inspired, particularly when tackling one of two subjects: competitiveness — darts, chess, women's tennis — and excess — RoboCop II's violence, Isaac Asimov's hor- rific prolixity, John Updike's miraculous fecundity, nuclear weapons.
The bureaucratised barbarism of the lat- ter is, for example, expertly satirised with two details culled while interviewing Wash- ington's nuclear entourage: a secretary's telephone manner ("`Present Danger?" sings the lady on the phone'), and the no- smoking signs on the walls: how odd, writes Amis, that 'these connoisseurs of thermal pulse and superstellar temperatures . . • should go all green at the sight of Marl- boro'. On the other hand, those very same thermal pulses — their moral charge extin- guished, and rekindled as devices of comic conflagration — come in dead handy when it comes to describing a sunset Ca thermonuclear explosion') or the wrapping around Madonna's book, Sex Ca kind of nuclear-hardened polythene sachet'). Amis is the stylistic equivalent of a double-agent: scrupulously disloyal, fastidiously faithless. It makes him singularly qualified to disentangle a modern world in which nucle- ar weapons are referred to as 'umbrellas', lies rechristened 'bloopers' and 'the desper- ate confection of an ageing scandal-addict' (Madonna) dressed up as 'erotica.'
That Amis went to interview Madonna and ended up describing her book's pack- aging is perhaps not just a reflection on Madonna. It is that too, but Amis is fasci- nated by the wrappings and trappings of status. As in vintage Tom Wolfe, some of the best moments in this collection come when Amis turns his attention to the atten- dant courtiers of the famous: effortlessly populating the background of his piece on women's tennis with a troupe of 'fixers, helpers, PR people'; casually baptising the hired beef on a movie-set with the typically Amisian monikers, 'Tug and Tiff and Heft'. You can tell the Cannes report was written early in his career: there, he sees only a `posse of photographers, tom-peepers, etc.' Etc? A rare inarticulacy for someone so fond of writing everything in triumphant triplicate.
It's one of the pleasures of Amis's jour- nalism, in fact, spotting his novelistic idiosyncracies surfacing like this. The dis- tinctive use of italics, for one; the Rabelaisian lists, for another; those cosmic metaphors. The other main thematic leit- motif? The bizarre number of sobbings. Young girls, he imagines, want to take Roman Polanski to bed just so he can 'sob himself to sleep in their arms'. Losing at poker for GQ, Amis imagines that all card sharks `go home and sob in our wives' arms: tears of loss, tears of gorgeous relief. Failing dismally again — this time at darts — he 'tearfully skewered the double.' The Amis persona is perhaps not as flashily amoral as we had thought: a Martian, then, but a sobbing one. Homesick, perhaps.
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