OPINION: When Martin Amis moved from London to Brooklyn, his American wife made one thing clear: the greatest obstacle they would face ‒ “the most time-consuming and labour-intensive, the most tediously labyrinthine and the most extortionate” ‒ would be healthcare.
Once he’d looked into it, Amis concluded that if any of his family came down with an ailment, it would be “far simpler and thriftier” for all four of them to fly first class to London, book four limousines, check into the Savoy and visit the NHS.
He was soon embroiled in American healthcare, as he helped his friend, the writer Christopher Hitchens, undergo treatments for oesophageal cancer. Hitchens’ long medical ordeal is recorded in Inside Story, Amis’ 2020 novel in which the principal characters included Amis and Hitchens.
In the US, he watched Hitchens (aka the Hitch) go through elaborate and gruelling treatments. He wrote about it in brilliant and moving detail, and then he must, not long after publishing, have received the same cancer diagnosis. He would have known exactly what he was in for. In Inside Story, he effectively wrote about his own death.
It’s tragic but not surprising that Amis and Hitchens went out the same way, given their extraordinary devotion to alcohol and cigarettes. While Hitchens was undergoing treatment, they would frequently knock off for a roll-your-own or a tailor-made, a wine or a whisky. It seems a very British attitude. In the face of American healthcare, they kept calm and carried on drinking and smoking. And talking and writing, and being outrageously clever, and outstandingly funny.
When I was young, I loved Martin Amis. I remember sitting in the library of the law firm Simpson Grierson, where I was supposed to be researching some legislation, and instead reading his great novel Money. I had never encountered such exhilarating prose. It was powerful, and so funny I must have looked as if I was having a stroke, back there among the shelves. It ruined me as a lawyer. I became increasingly languid about legal research once I’d had a taste of what I really liked.
I remember a London party where an English poet asked me, in a needling tone, how I could think Amis was a better writer than Ian McEwan. I didn’t answer; I was already turning away. If he thought this was a real question, I couldn’t take him seriously.
There was the extraordinary prose and the savage humour that made him a true heir to Charles Dickens. I went on loving his prose even though his output became uneven and flawed. He made absurd, grandiose pronouncements about 9/11, the War on Terror and Israel. He appeared naive about geopolitics, and overconfident about his ability to comment.
He seemed to have fallen face down in his own bullshit when he attributed his sister Sally’s death, at 46, to the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. Sexual freedom, he argued, put pressure on women, and took away the restraints that would have curbed his sister’s wild behaviour and “pathological promiscuity”. It seemed more plausible that excessive drinking had finished her off, as it did their father, Kingsley.
Perhaps Amis’ grand pronouncements and bouts of sentimentality also had to do with drinking. There’s only so long the body and brain can hold out. And yet you have only to open Inside Story to relish the brilliance and humour.
The book records how Hitchens, famously an atheist, is plagued by Christians after his diagnosis. A pushy believer comes to his hospital ward and is seen off by Amis. When the Hitch asks what he was like, Amis airily reports, “Oh. The standard peanut. All aglitter.”
