In his final months, the novelist Martin Amis had no capacity for complaint, Ian McEwan writes. “I think he gave us a lesson in how to die—and in how to read him.” Read McEwan’s remembrance of Amis, who died last week, at 73:
His memory for people and past conversations was long. He was sweet and uncondescending with children and teen-agers. No journalist could have known or guessed that there was something magnificent about his last few months. Amid such suffering, he had no capacity for complaint or discussion of symptoms. He wanted nothing more than to get himself as comfortable as possible for a day of reading or time with close family.
signing Martin’s name. To set the record straight, Martin began his own letter to the magazine with “I don’t write like that. I write like this.” Then he proceeded to demonstrate. The recent global outpouring of praise has been pleasing, but, for much of his life, Martin had to bear a venomous press. Journalists longed tohim, and, when fate denied them that role, they turned on him, portraying him, for example, as a vain fool who spent tens of thousands of dollars on his teeth.
, and rich in social commentary. His prose was thick with superb neologisms and startling or beautiful imagery. He was a master of the lightning paradox. Thematically, he ranged from sexual mayhem to the routine distortions of the tabloid press to the descent into madness and industrialized cruelty of the Holocaust and the deepest depredations of Stalinism.
Martin was a very serious reader, right to the end. In his final months, he read the complete works of. He wrote two weeks ago to say that he could no longer read with a pencil in his hand. That may have been his one important concession to his illness.
Somehow, we will have to make do without this free spirit, who, in serious and comic modes, embodied all the possibilities of the unfettered imagination. In essence, the body of work he leaves behind is deeply humane. Like Dickens, he loved and revelled in the wild eccentricities of human nature. In the community of letters, Martin will become over time a brother to all his readers. ♦
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