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1. The Amises on American Literature: Nabokov, Bellow, Roth
- University of Wisconsin Press
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1 The Amises on American Literature Nabokov, Bellow, Roth I think it's merely true that standards are shot to hell, so nobody knows whether anything futuristic or modernistic is good or not. So you can get away with anything, and anything that seems to be merely new in some way or other, that's to say, it hasn't been done for the last eighteen months, is certain of a reception, is certain to be published. - Kingsley Amis, interview by Peter Firchow When he was not reeling from the racism of the American South or lambasting the tedium ofAmerican literature in general, Kingsley Amis was fascinated with the United States. He visited the country only twice, in 1958-59 and in 1967-68, both times on teaching assignments, first at Princeton, then Vanderbilt. When Princeton offered to renew his contract for an additional two years, he briefly considered relocating. Only persistent, unmitigated fear for his children's education prevented his migration. In his Memoirs (1991), he confessed to being "strongly pro-American" in his attitudes, despite being shaken by "a glimpse ofan episode ofDallas, a glance at a novel by Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov , or a conversation with one of those people that Americans themselves mysteriously call 'liberals."'l Throughout his life, he referred to the years he spent in America as among the happiest ofhis career. 33 34 • Critical Cartography By contrast, the dominant literary influences upon Martin Amis have always been American. Perhaps this is a sign of the shifting balance of power that marked the literary and political arenas in the decades following World War II. Or perhaps it is a sign of the impact America had on Martin when, as a child, he accompanied his father to the United States as Kingsley fulfilled his teaching obligations in New Jersey and Tennessee. Whatever the cause, Martin is arguably the most American writer living in England today. He has written one collection ofessays that is wholly devoted to the country and its representative figures , The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986). Another compendium, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), features numerous essays on American cultural life and literature. The country figures significantly in many of his novels, and Martin himself has gone so far as to label some of his novels as American rather than British. Although he admits to being "inescapably" English, he nonetheless confesses to needing "the North Atlantic, just for air as much as anything else," and yearly it seems the English press seizes upon the idea that he is considering relocation, repeating the historical march of other famous emigres such as W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and, more recently, Salman Rushdie.2 Counterbalancing America's seductive appeal, both authors acknowledge the country's ravenous tendencies with writers. America was not as damaging as France, Kingsley felt, but it nonetheless ruined the likes ofNorman Mailer andJ. D. Salinger, mostly by elevating them to levels ofreputation they either did not deserve or could not handle. The root cause of this problem, the energy that animated it, was America's love oftransience, innovation, and eclecticism, whether in politics or in literature. Consequently, ''American literature"- a term Kingsley always wished to place in quotes- seemed marred by stylistic eccentricity, a "characteristically innocent readiness to take the will for the deed, ifthe will is signaled boldly enough." Distinctive voice and idiosyncratic tone seemed to drown other, more traditional elements like structure and characterization. Kingsley felt that this narrative imbalance- this "literary elephantiasis" as he once called it-resulted in the unrelenting quest for the Great American Novel, the inclusive, all-encompassing tome. As Martin himself explained in the title essay in The Moronic Inferno, [54.152.5.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:03 GMT) The Amises on American Literature • 35 "in a sense every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called USA." For his own part, Martin believes the quest ended in 1953, when Bellow's The Adventures ojAugie March appeared, and although Kingsley confessed that Mailer's The Naked and the Dead once made him think that "someone the size ofDickens was among us," he later retracted his endorsement, admitting that he had not "allowed for the fact that Mailer was an American."3 Regardless ofthe mutual respect the two Amises shared, their artistic allegiances divide neatly along national lines, adding a topographical tension to their generational battles. Throughout his life, Kingsley never forgave...