Ian McEwan's Speech from Martin Amis's Memorial

Ian McEwan spoke at Martin Amis's memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London on June 10. The text of his speech was published in the London Times and is reprinted below with the author's permission.

Around 20 years ago I was sitting at a kitchen table in a friend’s house with two or three poets, a couple of novelists and academics — you might say, a pretty accurate cross section of British society. This question came up: of all poets, whose work in fragments or whole poems did we remember best? Not necessarily who was the greatest, but which poet’s works was most memorable? Which poet had got under our skin? Shakespeare, in the interests of fairness, we set aside. We had a think and a sort of consensus emerged. 

Since you’re dying to know who came top, I can tell you it was Yeats. Larkin, Auden and Wordsworth were among the runners-up. 

If we had considered novelists in the same way, if we asked ourselves whose prose, whose lines or half-remembered lines won’t let us go, I think there would have been two possibilities. Either Martin Amis would have come out top, ahead of Dickens, Jane Austen or Evelyn Waugh, or, in fairness, we would have had to set Martin aside. All his books are on my shelves and I did not need to reach for any of them when I recall for you the seedy character who notes that the thing about his black underpants is that, unlike the white, they never need washing. Or the perception that in sophisticated Paris, even the dustmen speak French. Or the frustrated Amis persona trying to cross a road in Los Angeles observing that to get to the other side, you have to be born there. 

Then, in his journalism, writing of the fatwa against our friend Salman Rushdie, who had gone into hiding, Martin famously noted that he had “vanished into the front page”. Finally, from my shortlist, the man overheard in his stall in a public lavatory going at his business as though “emptying a sack of melons down a deep well”. I remember at the time much discussion about this simile — Martin’s comic sense and prose mastery are turning all the cogs — not bricks or potatoes, but melons, not one or two but a sack, not into a pond but a well, a deep well. In the extraordinary international outpouring of sorrow and celebration of his achievement that followed Martin’s death, many wrote of their own pieces of indelibly inscribed Amis. It was gratifying to read how few overlaps there were. The critic James Wood invoked Martin’s description of his overweight father, Kingsley, falling over in the street — “And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was a work of colossal administration.” A beautifully turned phrase that passed into legend within the James Wood and Claire Messud household. The poet Craig Raine, also a melons fan, remembered a 30-year-old book review of a Michael Crichton novel in which Martin promised readers they would see “herds of clichés roaming free”. 

Here, today, we are a gathering of seven or eight hundred readers who will have their separate accounts of those gems of the Amis fictional universe that they will not, cannot forget. Over a lifetime, the writers we love, the handful who get under our skin, subtly shift our consciousness, make us see and feel differently. They bend the flow of daily thought and speech. In Martin’s case, it is not a matter of a few quotable party-trick lines. The elements of his prose I’ve summoned — the lightning paradox, the inverted clichés, the faux naif absurdities, the exquisitely convoluted ironies — have a warmth about them, a delight in human difference and sheer glee in creation that make me think of Dickens, a writer Martin adored and occasionally despaired of. And this warmth comes through despite the cool detachment and muscularity of the prose. 

He was the funniest man I ever met. When we were getting to know each other in the mid-Seventies, we would sometimes meet two or three times in a week. Whereas I was a secretive writer, Martin would delightedly tell me, with long quotes, what he had been up to that day. He was joyous in the act of composition. He happily confessed in interview that he made himself laugh at his desk. 

Towards the end of his life, he said he felt pleased and privileged to have lived by writing. His prose and his conversation were part of one lifelong enterprise. Of an evening, launched on a riff, he could transform obscenity into a form of hilarious sacrament. Over the years, in different company, different contexts, hundreds of exquisite lines were lost to the air and to everyone’s next glass of wine. But Martin, with his furious work ethic, captured even more on the page. That he has vanished is still, for those who were close to him, hard to comprehend, but his parting gift to us is his prose. It will remain under our skin. 

© Ian McEwan 2024 

 

Ian McEwan ~  Lessons

Ian McEwan, our foremost storyteller, has written an ambitious, mesmerising new novel, Lessons. The novel is a chronicle of our times - a powerful meditation on history and humanity told through the prism of one man’s lifetime.

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Order from Jonathan Cape, Alfred A. Knopf, or Random House Canada. Translations are also available in numerous countries.

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About Lessons:

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.

Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.

From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means - music, literature, friends, sex, politics and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?

About Ian McEwan:

Ian McEwan’s works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). Atonement was also made into an Oscar-winning film.

In 2006, Ian McEwan won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards where McEwan was also named Reader's Digest Author of the Year. Solar won The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2010 and Sweet Tooth won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year award in 2012. Ian McEwan was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2014 he was awarded the Bodleian Medal.