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Morality As Style

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Morality As Style BOOKS Morality as Style Benjamin Kunkel forced collectivization and the resulting fam- ine: "in the actions here recorded about twenty KORA THE DREAD: human lives were lost for, not every word, but LAUGHTER AND THE TWENTY MILLION every letter, in this book." Amis goes on to com- by Martin Amis ment: "The book is 411 pages long." Such a Talk Miramax, 2002 306 pp $24.95 book fulfills, in the blackest possible way, the novelist's dream—of a language almost unbear- ably thick with human significance. Who could ignore a book in which, as Amis writes, "guile- LL NOVELISTS are Stylists, but only a less prepositions like at and to represent the few are known chiefly for having what murder of six or seven large families"? A Vladimir Nabokov called "a fancy The sorry answer, of course, is that it was prose style." Over the past twenty years, no possible among several generations of Western well-known British writer has seemed more a intellectuals to ignore or minimize just what stylist than Martin Amis. Amis is fancy in the book of revelation Stalin's regime was spelling hip, urban way of mixing a thrift-store find out. The novelist Kingsley Amis, for one, with a designer piece; his prose is notable for though he wound up viciously and cartoonishly its slanginess as well as its lexical hauteur. Ad- on the right, was a loyal member of the British dressing the ghost of his father in his curious Communist Party from 1941 to 1956. In Koba new book about Stalin, he writes: "I suppose the Dread, his son Martin follows up an out- . that there is one chance in a googolplex raged résumé of Stalin's crimes with an open that [your daughter, also dead] is now at your letter chiding Kingsley's ghost for this utopian side." We hear the echo of the colloquial "one indulgence and another to Christopher in a million," and the dictionary will tell you Hitchens, calling him to account for failure to that a googolplex is the number 1 followed see, as an erstwhile Trotskyist, not the mon- by a thousand zeros. It is all too easy to un- strosity of Stalinism, but its preparation at the derstand why in writing about Stalin Amis hands of Lenin and Trotsky. Yet Amis's tone of should associate death with impossibly large personal grievance, his affrontedness and an- numbers. But for now the point is only that ger, seem directed less at his father and his Amis developed early on a distinctive idiom— friend Hitchens, or even at eager dupes on the showy, jokey, repetitive, fierce, sentimental— Old or New Left, than at Stalin himself—that and has stuck with it ever since. You may not "passionate lowbrow," Lenin's "underbred mas- always recall what his characters were and cot," who detested "anyone higher or better: a did; you can always remember the language numerous company." in which they were dressed. Koba the Dread has not been generously Yet Amis isn't only a stylist; he is also a mor- received, and you can see why. These days, a alist. And to him these are one and the same. denunciation of Stalin seems almost apolitical, As he says in his memoir, Experience, "Style is like coming out against cancer. Moreover, the morality: morality detailed, configured, inten- book contains no original research (the histo- sified." We can see, then, why it might have rian Orlando Figes has even shown that Amis especially appealed to him to begin Koba the gets a few facts wrong); it forgets the embattled Dread (Koba was Stalin's nickname) with a decency of left oppositionists; it treats differ- quote from Robert Conquest's book on Soviet ing analyses as loose "talk" rather than argu- DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 9 5 BOOKS ments; and it collapses into bathos when— fectibility should reward, glorify, encourage and many reviewers seized on this—Amis likens the indeed necessitate all that is humanly base." cries of his infant daughter to those that must There is something funny about people have been heard in "the deepest cellars of the who exactly misdescribe themselves, and this Butrkyi Prison in Moscow during the Great is part of the answer to the question burden- Terror." It might also be added that its anti- ing Amis: how, knowing the nature of Stalin's utopianism is taunting and crude. After his rule and the approximate number of his vic- right turn, Kingsley Amis could still concede tims, can we ever laugh at communism? Yet it that "The ideal of . the Just City, is one that is comic, bleakly but genuinely, that Stalin re- cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings acted as he did when a Soviet census gave a of disappointment and loss." To Martin this smaller figure than he'd wanted: where, won- sentence "has no meaning—indeed, no con- dered their murderer, could all these missing tent." (That would make it the opposite of people be? Stalin had the census-takers killed. Conquest's language.) "Just what is this Just Koba the Dread's grievance against Stalin City? What would it look like? What would its is so manifestly personal and—with no large citizens be saying and doing all day?" Such company of Stalin-fanciers out there— so po- words and deeds are indeed difficult to pre- litically negligible, that one goes looking to dict, since a just city would also be a free one. Amis's other work for its source. His novels But if it is a totalitarian paradox to prescribe from The Rachel Papers to The Information are, in advance the uses of freedom, it should not above all, comedies—playful, riffing, splashed be beyond us, or Amis, to conceive of condi- with one-liners—and they inspire the thought tions of greater liberty than most workers and that the laughter troubling Amis these days is citizens enjoy, or to realize that speech and ac- his own, heard as an echo. In the letter to tion become more circumscribed as jobs be- Hitchens he borrows Hamlet's words: "I have come more repetitive and exhausting, political of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my choices fewer, and forms of culture more ho- mirth." What was this mirth like when he had mogeneous. it? Suppose we want to know what morality it entailed: what, then, was its style? TILL, MARTIN Amis has produced a use- In Amis's book of criticism, The War Against ful book. It offers such a quick, pained, Cliché, the most decorated writers are Nabokov S and vivid account of Stalin's psychopathic and Saul Bellow, and Amis evidently would like career that Amis and his intelligently marshaled to be considered the successor of both. Yet sources can't help but induce that pity and dis- Amis lacks their sharp eyes, and is visually gust that segments of the Western left for many acute mostly when his senses have been quick- years failed to feel. (For myself, I was made ened by disgust. He sees more clearly than freshly ashamed of certain casual ideas about anything else such things as a cabbie's neck, the Soviet Union I'd had as an undergraduate, "pocked and mottled, with a flicker of adoles- and glad to have left no record of them.) The cent virulence in the crimson underhang of the astronomical quantum of suffering endured by ears," and Indian dogs with their air of being Stalin's victims "will not"—as Pasternak said, "abruptly promoted rats, bemused by their sud- and Amis quotes—"fit within the bounds of den elevation." consciousness," but the mind's best approxi- But Amis's prose is rhetorical rather than mation has got to be in shuttling back and forth imagistic, and likes to proceed by incremental between the anecdote and the statistic, and variation on repeated words or notions. Its char- this Amis does with a skill made brisk by an- acteristic and paradoxical moods are of a work- ger. Besides, in many instances Amis's language manlike gaiety, an energetic weariness, a rel- is furiously apt, as when he refers to the "ideo- ished disdain. Here is unprepossessing Terry, logical debauchery" of Stalin's remark that "to- from an early novel, Success (1978), lament- gether with the Germans we would have been ing his reversals of sexual fortune, especially invincible," or when he notes the killing irony as these compare with the triumphs of his "that a ruling order predicated on human per- toothsome brother: "Ah but from that 96 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 BOOKS highpoint, let me tell you, from that proud global woe to wondering if you could use a peak, things definitely took a turn for the face-lift or a new shirt. Martin Amis's novels worse, things ceased to gel in the way they had are peopled mainly by educated liberal urban- been doing, things started to go wrong." Nine ites, among whom (and I am no dissenter here) years later, in Einstein's Monsters, a collection it might be hard to find more consensus than of parables and black fantasies on the theme on how terrible mass murder is, and how nice of nuclear war (another case of death allied it must be to look nice. What you do in the with astronomical figures), we have: "The world morning is look in the mirror, then look in the gets older. The world has been to too many paper. parties, been in so many fights, lost its keys, The great passions of Amis's characters, es- had its handbag stolen, drunk too much.
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