The writer Martin Amis, (1949-2023), died this week after a life in the literary spotlight.
His appointment as a professor at Manchester University, in the late 2000s resulted in a storm in a literary tea-cup. The academic spat was stirred up with some help from the Guardian. However, in that paper’s obituary this week, it is glossed over, within a brief comment about ‘his stints as a creative writing professor at Manchester University’.
My recollection of the time is of the arrival of a celebrity within the circle of brilliant new writers intent on rescuing English literature from its necrotic state. Already installed with a stellar reputation as a literary critic and culture theorist was Professor Terry Eagleton.
They could have been ideal protagonists in a campus novel by Amis, or by his equally famous father Sir Kingsley Amis whose early success was through one such novel Lucky Jim.
Eagleton was a leading Marxist scholar from nearby Salford educated in a catholic college, and then Cambridge.
Their very different world views erupted in a battle of high intensity waged in the literary pages.
The dispute seems to been triggered by a much quoted interview by Amis at the time of the two towers terrorist attack in NY in which he said
"There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan."
Regardless of ironic intent, the quote prompted the start of the feud between the two which seems to have eventually subsided to a weary truce. Amis relocated in Brooklyn, NY. Eagleton moved the shorter distance up the M6 to the University of Lancaster ...
