Martin Amis
THE SECOND PLANE
September 11: 2001–2007
214pp. Cape. £12.99.
978 0 224 07610 4
US: Knopf. 978 1 4000 4454 2
In the foreword to The War Against Cliché, his 2001 collection of reviews and
essays, Martin Amis recalls his early writing days with some nostalgia:
My private life was middle-bohemian-hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly
debauched; but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read
it all the time, in the tub, on the tube; I always had about me my Edmund
Wilson – or my William Empson . . . . It might have been in such a locale
that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that,
while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential
to civilization.
Taking his cue from Henry James (T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis are also
invoked), Amis characterizes his own literary criticism as “a campaign
against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and
clichés of the heart”. And the opposite of cliché? “Freshness, energy, and
reverberation of voice.” The Amis of the 1970s and 80s had plenty of the
latter.
The War Against Cliché is studded with brilliant aperçus about this or that
writer, including a 1996 review of Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village that
is unusually prescient in its account of the then First Lady’s machinations,
from “Cookiegate, Cattlegate, Travelgate, Fostergate, Whitewatergate to
Thankyougate” – the last having to do with the fact that Hillary neglected
to acknowledge her chief ghostwriter, the head of a team that helped her to
produce words of wisdom for mothers and caregivers such as the following:
“In addition to being read to, children love to be told stories”. “By the
time everybody’s done,” Amis remarks dryly, “we are out there on the cutting
edge of the uncontroversial.” Such reviews – and there are many striking
pieces in The War Against Cliché, whose subjects range from Elvis Presley
and Gore Vidal to Jane Austen and James Joyce – show how seriously Amis
takes his “moral” responsibility as critic. But what happens when the
critic, familiar as he is with the literary specimens he has read so
assiduously “in the tub, on the tube”, turns his attention from text to
event – to the political event of global proportions? Amis has already made
one move in this direction, Koba the Dread (2002), his compelling exposé of
the horrors of Stalinism, based on such sources as Robert Conquest’s
groundbreaking Harvest of Sorrow, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago, and Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind. Never mind
that the controversial case for the moral equivalence of Nazism and
Communism had already been made in Stéphane Courtois’s encyclopedic Livre
noir du communisme (1997), cited by Amis in a single footnote; Amis Made It
New, more or less, by collaging memorable quotes to make a highly readable
book.
But the present poses a different challenge to the writer who wants to take
the longer view. The Second Plane focuses on a single event – the terrorist
attack in New York on September 11, 2001 – and its aftershocks. A short
book, it includes fourteen pieces – two short stories and twelve essays and
reviews – written between that watershed date and its anniversary in 2007.
For Amis, the reference must always be to “September 11”, never to 9/11
(that “blithe and lifeless Americanism”), for, apart from creating confusion
– 9/11 sounds too much like “911”, the emergency phone number in the US –
“numerical shorthand” is deemed unseemly, especially given the fact that
“these numerals, after all, are Arabic”. This clever observation is not made
in jest: Amis’s attack on Islamism, a term he is careful, in his opening
note, to distinguish from Islam (“I was once asked: ‘Are you an
Islamophobe?’ And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe”), is
virulent. Amis wants you to know that what he hates is not so much Islam
itself as what he takes to be the West’s excessive tolerance of Islam.
A fine distinction, to say the least, but one meant to counter those – and
there have been many, most notably Terry Eagleton – who have in recent
months attacked Amis as racist. In the introduction to the second edition of
his book Ideology (2007), Eagleton calls Amis’s father, Kingsley, “a racist,
anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and
liberals”, and adds: “Amis fils has clearly learnt more from [his father]
than how to turn a shapely phrase”. This insinuation led to brouhaha at the
end of last year, in the pages of the Guardian and elsewhere, especially
since Eagleton and Amis are now colleagues at the University of Manchester,
the former as Professor of Cultural Theory, the latter of Creative Writing.
One need not take sides in a nasty war of words – the novelist Elizabeth
Jane Howard, Kingsley Amis’s second wife, called Eagleton a “spitting
cobra”, while Eagleton referred to Martin Amis’s talk of the “definite urge”
to inflict “suffering” on the Muslim community as “stomach-churning” – to
find The Second Plane an off-putting book.
The title essay, written within a week of the attack, is a bravura
performance, graphically describing the horror on the ground in response to
the recognition that not just one plane, but a second, had turned itself
into a missile and was crashing into the other tower of the World Trade
Center. “The moment”, for Amis, “was the apotheosis of the postmodern era”,
and he gives a dark forecast of the violence and horror to come: “Our best
destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been
called ‘species consciousness’, something over and above nationalisms,
blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I
have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility”.
Unfortunately the eloquent and humane mood doesn’t last. In the next piece,
“The Voice of the Lonely Crowd” (originally published in the Guardian in
2002), a self-protective knowingness sets in. Citing Lord Rochester’s “Satyr
against Reason and Mankind”, Amis finds that “On any longer view, man is
only fitfully committed to the rational”. This truism prepares us for the
recognition that “September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood
revealed as a veritable Walpurgis night of the irrational”.
However terrible “the twentieth century – that ‘age of ideology’” with “its
scores of millions of supernumerary dead”– the incipient “age of religion”
is judged to be ten times worse. For – and here we come to Amis’s key
obsession, both in this essay and throughout the book – “an ideology is a
belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; religion is a belief
system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason
and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful”.
Which leads to the punchline: “if God existed, and if he cared for humankind,
he would never have given us religion”. Such aphorisms become tiresome.
Rather than do anything as lowbrow as to argue his case, Amis soon puts on
his memoirist hat, recalling with some pride that “My apostasy at the age of
nine was vehement”:
In my house, it would please me to claim, God just never came up. But that’s
not quite true. Later – we were now in Cambridge – my father spent a day
with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, during which there was the following exchange. YY:
“You atheist?” KA: “Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him”. And in the
home, when things went wrong, there was a certain amount of hating God, who
was informally known as BHQ, or Bastards’ Headquarters. At Cambridgeshire
High School for Boys, I gave a speech in which I rejected all faith as an
affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was twelve: it seemed
open-and-shut.
The sleight of hand whereby an ostensible discussion of how to respond to
Islamic terrorism has turned into name-dropping anecdote about the author’s
charmed household is characteristic of Amis’s discourse. An index to its
curious self-absorption is the use of the initials KA, for an author whose
full name (not exactly a household word in twenty-first-century America) has
nowhere occurred earlier on. Dates are not allowed to be abbreviated, but
the names of celebrated novelists are. Literature, in any case, trumps
religion as “the most persistent candidate for cultification, partly because
it nonchalantly includes the Bible and all other holy texts”. But even the
study of literature, as personified by such critics as F. R. Leavis, was
soon debased: the Leavisism of the master’s “clerisy” – and here Amis
digresses to take a potshot at Leavis’s favourite Modernist – “might have
ended up with a single text; and that sacred book would have been the
collected works of an obvious sociopath – D. H. Lawrence”. Bad literary
taste, it seems, is synonymous with religion, which is, in its turn,
synonymous with PC (another abbreviation!). “PC is low, low church, like the
Church of England; it is the lowest common denomination.”
The smart rhetoric should not blind us to the flabbiness of Amis’s
propositions. There is, in fact, no necessary connection between a devotion
to literature and an ability to make sound political judgements, and surely
no connection between sound political judgement and the rejection of all
religion. In “The Wrong War”, itself a fairly PC piece published shortly
after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Amis returns to his religious
theme, this time to do a little bashing of George W. Bush. For example, “All
US presidents – and all US presidential candidates – have to be religious or
have to pretend to be religious. More specifically, they have to subscribe
to ‘born-again’ Christianity”. The first sentence is true. But except for
Jimmy Carter and, in his recent incarnation, the younger Bush, none of the
Presidents of the past half-century have been evangelicals. John F. Kennedy
was Roman Catholic, Richard Nixon a Quaker, George Bush and Gerald Ford
tepid Episcopalians, Ronald Reagan a Presbyterian who almost never went to
church, and Lyndon B. Johnson a reluctant member of a sect called the
Disciples of Christ. Which of the above was misled by his religious
convictions? And if evangelicalism stands behind war, how did Jimmy Carter
end up with the Nobel Peace Prize?
The most substantial piece in The Second Plane is “Terror and Boredom: The
dependent mind”, written in the wake of yet another “day of
de-Enlightenment”, July 7, 2005, when terrorist bombs exploded in London.
The essay is sprinkled with such ominous statements as “All religions,
unsurprisingly, have their terrorists: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even
Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from
Islam”. Amis tells us that “in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy”, his
decision was to abandon the “thriving novella” he had been writing, for
“Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer
can no longer proceed”. There are indeed times so dark that writing fiction
feels like a gratuitous activity, but Amis then goes on to recount the plot
of the novella he hasn’t yet written. Its narrator, Ayed, “a diminutive
Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan” (Osama bin Laden
country), is planning a terrorist attack. Ayed’s story prefigures a short
story that did get written, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”, but whereas
Atta’s tale has to honour at least the outlines of that terrorist’s actual
biography, Ayed is a polygamist with four wives and a succession of
“temporary wives”. Purchasing a belt by mail order from Greeley, Colorado,
he is last viewed summoning his wives whom he plans to murder en masse. He
is thus “the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own
home”.
Why does Amis dwell on Ayed’s brief stay in Greeley, Colorado? Because – and
here a second narrative intersects the first – this boring little dry town
was where the Egyptian philosopher Sayid Qutb came, in 1949, to study at the
Colorado State College of Education. Amis draws on Paul Berman’s well-known
study Terror and Liberalism (perhaps also on the New York Times Magazine
extract from that book titled “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror”, March 23,
2003). The leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the
1950s and 60s, Qutb wrote volumes about Islamic law as a complete system of
morality, justice and governance. But Amis is less interested in the
philosophical argument running through these books, than in an imaginative
re-creation, drawing on Qutb’s own commentary, of the repressed sexual
obsessions of this puritanical zealot, especially his remarks about the
provocative appearance of the American women to whom the young man, a
lifelong virgin, was exposed. Whereas Berman “goads himself into
receptivity” of Qutb’s philosophical writings, calling the work “rich,
nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt”, Amis invokes the parallel of Hitler.
Qutb’s Milestones, he writes, “is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism”.
Sayid Qutb deserves a more substantive dismissall (or acceptance) than Amis
cares to give. Perhaps Amis knows this, for, as is regularly the case when
he makes pronouncements about days of de-Enlightenment, he is soon changing
the subject back to the personal: in this case, a little anecdote about how
annoying and boring it was, en route to New York from Montevideo, to wait at
the ticket counter for half an hour while airport officials carefully
searched the carry-on rucksack of his six-year-old blonde daughter. All of
us have had similar boring experiences; few of us would draw the following
lesson:
The age of terror . . . will also be remembered as the age of boredom . . . .
a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of
suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war
against terror, or will reduce it, as [Norman] Mailer says, to a “tolerable
level” . . . we haven’t got a chance in the war against boredom. Because
boredom is something that the enemy doesn’t feel. To be clear: the opposite
of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an
ism; it is independence of mind.
Like its crudely contrived fictional counterpart about Muhammad Atta, “Terror
and Boredom” displays a failure, not so much of doctrine, as of imagination.
Those in the last century who fought in the trenches on the Western Front in
1918 or were imprisoned, twenty-five years later at Auschwitz, at Katyn, at
Treblinka – all surely sites of massive boredom that occurred between the
“terror” suffered – have uniformly testified that they would have gladly
given up any and all “independence of mind” in order to survive. The mind
can come back; it is the dead body that cannot.
It is always risky to picture one’s own “crisis” as unique – more terrible
than all those other crises our parents and grandparents lived through.
Thus, despite moments of brilliant wordplay – the narrative of Amis’s
travels with Tony Blair, for example, paints a witty, nasty, but also
endearing picture of the Prime Minister going about his daily routine – one
is hard put to take Amis’s elegantly turned sentences seriously.
The war against cliché has a curious way of morphing into the cliché against
war. Consider the following, from a passage praising secularism as the only
reasonable alternative for the twenty-first century: “Secularism contains no
warrant for action. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists
crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages,
they shout, ‘God is great!’ When secularists do that kind of
thing, what do they shout?” The question is meant to be rhetorical. But
there’s a simple answer: they shout “Heil Hitler!”
Marjorie Perloff’s recent books include The Vienna Paradox and
Differentials: Poetry, poetics, pedagogy, both 2004, and
Twenty-First-Century Modernism, 2001.
