While leav­ing a com­ment at Johannes Göransson’s blog today, I remem­bered an essay by Martin Amis that sug­gests another avatar for the Bovary-dandy-hipster daisy chain I assem­bled last Friday. In the midst of a long recon­sid­er­a­tion of Lolita (the last essay in The War Against Cliché) Amis writes:

Shock­able Hum­bert, who finds bad lan­guage so “disgusting.” I shud­der to think how his ghost, attired in its ghostly smoking-​jacket, would round on me for call­ing him a vul­gar­ian and a philis­tine. Actu­ally he is of a more dan­ger­ous and rarer breed (though one very fully rep­re­sented in Nabokov’s corpus): such people, because they cannot make art out of life, make their lives into art. Hum­bert is the artist manqué…The weep­ing Hum­bert sheds above-​average teardrops, “hot, opales­cent, thick tears that poets and lover shed.” He is “her Catullus,” he is “poor Catullus”: “The gentle and dreamy regions though which I crept were the pat­ri­monies of poets—not crime’s stamp­ing ground.” This is all blas­phe­mous flan­nel, nat­u­rally. Who but Hum could refer to the gauged post­pone­ment of his orgasm (on the sofa, with a still inno­cent Lo) as a “nicety of phys­i­o­log­i­cal equipoise com­pa­ra­ble to cer­tain tech­niques in the arts”? “Emphatically, no killers are we,” Hum­bert pleads: “Poets never kill.” But this one does. Before he pulls the trig­ger he recites a poem: a parody—under the cir­cum­stances, a travesty—of “Ash Wednesday.” And Nabokov never had much time for Eliot.

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.

I’ve never seen the show, but Emily Nuss­baum has my vote for Stuart Gilbert of The Sopra­nos. It’s like read­ing Martin Amis on Lolita, and with a sim­i­lar point: caveat lector.