American Vogue’s deputy editor Taylor Antrim reflects on the time he wrote MartinAmis a letter while working as a young journalist.
The editor in question was a little in love with me – he took me to dinner on his expense account and politely invited me into the showers at his gym after squash – but he also published me in the paper’s literary supplement. It was in those pages that I wrote an essay about Amis. I can’t bear to re-read this essay – and you won’t find it online – but in it I took seriously something I knew Amis took seriously, what you might say was his central preoccupation, his faith.
That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Amis was chided for pyrotechnics, as if his sentences were ornamented, as if the way he wrote was a choice he made to dazzle and show off. FromThe Rachel Papers : “I fidgeted with matchsticks to grime up my fingernails; I consigned my feet to cheesy death; I nourished ray-gun halitosis.” Every sound, every syllable, mattered to him. FromDead BabiesIn Amis, what word followed what was a holy question. It was the reason Nabokov and Bellow and Austen were his touchstones. Whywere books he wrote about again and again.
I argued all this in my essay, writing that style mattered above all else, and that not enough new writers wrote the way Amis did, or the way Lorrie Moore did, or the way John Updike did . Like I said, I’m not rereading this piece of fan mail, but I do know that I boiled my entire 25-year-old literary sensibility into it and the editor told me it was great and he put it on the cover of the supplement and paid me something like $200.
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