For Martin Amis, celebrity, narcissism and tabloid superficiality are the villains of modern British life
An old story: bad news arrives from France. A celebrated English writer, to whom the label enfant terrible has stuck, thinks that English politicians are worthless, and the dear old place is finished, more or less. England is "rotting now", and quite soon will disappear. His words cause uproarious agreement and disagreement. Many (perhaps most) people, however, can't quite get the hang of what's given the writer the hump. "This is a letter of hate. It is for you, my countrymen … I fear death. I dread it daily. I cling wretchedly to life, as I have always done. I fear death but I cannot hate it as I hate you … There is murder in my brain, and I carry a knife in my heart for every one of you." A straitjacket, please. What on earth was the poor fellow banging on about?
The leftwing weekly Tribune published John Osborne's famous "Damn You, England" letter only four months short of 50 years ago – on 18 August 1961. Osborne was then 31, half the age Martin Amis is now, and spending the summer in France at a farmhouse rented from Lord Glenconner. The austere Roman nobility of the letter's title, To My Fellow Countrymen, suffered when the reader got to the end and discovered the treacherous address – "Valbonne, France" – but that turned out to be the result of a misunderstanding between Osborne and his secretary in London, who'd taken the playwright's dictation and not realised that he wanted his sunny location omitted. But then little in Osborne's circumstance was especially conducive to clear thinking. As John Heilpern writes in his excellent biography, Osborne was enduring "a besieged holiday with his aggrieved mistress while having a passionate affair with his future third wife as … his current wife gives birth to a son that isn't his."
Heilpern discovered Osborne's handwritten original to be a mess of crossings-out and Ricard stains. Later the writer came to see his letter as "a slovenly, melodramatic misuse of my so-called gift for 'rhetoric'", but at the time he was floating high on a mixture of alcohol, love, fame and vanity; rather than anything smaller, such as his personal life, it was the generality of England that offered the best scope for self-righteous complaint. By England, he meant the British state, which Osborne, as a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (though not an enduring one), detested for its atomic warheads and the idea that its citizens would be better dead than red. The threat of nuclear extinction seemed higher in 1961 and 1962 than at any other time in the cold war, hence the knife in Osborne's heart was intended particularly for prime minister Harold Macmillan and, even more particularly, for CND's bitter enemy, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Osborne wrote that he would willingly watch them and their kind die for the west "if only I could keep my minuscule portion of it".
This is Osborne writing about Britain as Harold Pinter wrote later in free verse about the US – denunciations scrawled on paper napkins, between drinks. What brings him much closer to Amis is his sorrow for Englishness and national decline. In this week's interview with the Nouvel Observateur, Amis thinks modern British politicians are "nothing", the Queen and her family "philistines", the aristocracy "pathetic". Meanwhile, the country – the Paris magazine describes it scrupulously as Grande Bretagne, though Amis is happier with Angleterre – is infused with "moral decrepitude". Since the second world war, a country that was once the centre of the biggest empire the world has seen has shrunk to a "power of the second or third order". What goes on here doesn't matter any more. But when his interviewer, imagining perhaps that these are unusual attitudes, asks him if he'll try to make peace with his compatriots, Amis replies: "Je n'ai jamais eu de problèmes avec les 'Anglais'. J'ai eu des problèmes avec la presse britannique." He adores the English, their spirit, their tolerance, their good humour – but the press is une saleté, filth.
The young Osborne would have nodded happily at many of these observations. Like Amis, he felt damaged and traduced by the media, and for him, too, the best qualities of the country remained the spirit of its everyday life, with a backward tilt in Osborne's case to the musical hall and a near-mystical nostalgia for the Edwardian age. ''If you've no world of your own, it's rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's," says Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and Osborne did his best to recreate this world towards the end of life by wrapping himself up as a country gent in Herefordshire.
The interesting difference between the two lies in what they choose to hate and whom they blame. To judge from Osborne's earliest (and best) plays, as well as his famous letter, the enemy comprised the old elites that still ruled postwar Britain: generals, industrialists, churchmen and Tory leaders. For Amis, celebrity, narcissism and tabloid superficiality are the villains: "All these excited models and these rock stars in short shorts." You might interpret this as a contrast between how the young and the old view the world – Amis will be 62 this year. On the other hand, it wouldn't be so unreasonable to see Britain's attachment to populism as a symptom of national decline. Osborne may have preferred the vulgarity of Max Miller to a sermon from the Archbishop of Canterbury, but did he want Simon Cowell? Going the other way, Amis may favour the dignity, restraint and quiet hard work of 1963, but how would he feel about life under Alec Douglas-Home? The trouble with pasts and futures is that they are all or nothing.
Amis is leaving to live in the US (again) and this week's stories implied that he was leaving in disgust. I at first refused to read them. I don't want to go all Robert Browning on the man, but there's sloe blossom in the hedgerows and bluebells in the woods and gorse blazing across hillsides under clear, blue skies. Who cares where he lives? The pre-emigration curse on the homeland has become a tiresome syndrome, especially as the destination is invariably America, which shares many British faults, originated some of them, and on the decline-of-empires timetable, must be around where Britain stood in 1946.
In fact, the Nouvel Observateur interview has nothing about his leaving, which is said to be for family reasons. What he says is no more than many other people say or think: Britain has become a tacky kind of place, vulgarised beyond Osborne's wishful imagining, with governments cowed by events beyond their control, except when it comes to military adventures. And, by this miserable but not irrational view, we continue to rot, but have not yet quite rotted. People of Amis's generation (and mine) have known this downhill prospect for Britain all our lives, despite the occasional fillips and salvations promised by the new Elizabethan age, Harold Wilson's promised white heat of technology, North Sea oil and financial deregulation. Somehow the crunch never arrives. When it does, an era will be over – an era that might be called the Long Postponement, with Osborne near the beginning and Amis very close to the end.