Success!

England's endless Amisian struggle with being two things at once

Little Keith gives it some smoulder

Success is the title of Martin Amis’s third novel, published in 1978, the year before England made the first of their appearances in the final of a World Cup. It’s about twelve months in the lives of foster brothers, the rich, aristocratic and handsome Gregory Riding, and Terry Service, a self-described ‘yob’. As the book opens, Gregory has, to his mordant horror, received an obscenely dirty poem from a lovelorn ex-girlfriend called Miranda and briefly considers calling the police to get rid of her. Terry listens in on the details of the poem while admitting to the reader that he’s deeply in love with Miranda, but because he’s short, fat, losing his hair and drinks too much, can’t attract her, or indeed any women at all.

Although Gregory and Terry were each comic exaggerations of parts of his own personality, the Martin Amis of 1978 was a lot more Gregory, a hip young novelist with a famous dad, a West London scenester possessed of Jagger-esque looks, good hair and a linguistic flick-knife in his back pocket. But his deepest insecurities were contained within Terry. A legendary ‘shortarse’ (as he put it) who was nicknamed ‘Little Keith’ by his friends, Amis had terrible problems with his teeth, a youthful obsession with the size of his backside and something he referred to as ‘tramp dread,’ which was a fear that all of his good fortune could disappear as quickly as it had arrived and leave him out on the streets.

Throughout his imperial phase as a writer, this kind of doubling was a favourite technique: in London Fields came aspiring darts star and petty criminal Keith Talent and the good natured, naive patsy Guy Clinch, and then The Information’s Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry, one a writer of unreadable literary fiction, the other the author of a superbly terrible bestseller called Amelior. Each of these characters, wittingly or unwittingly, is out to destroy the other.

Amis loved sport and some of his greatest comic writing, fiction and non, comes in that context. There is the set-piece tennis scene in Money where fat boy ad man turned film director John Self is humiliated on court by his producer Fielding Goodney. As preparation for Keith Talent’s attempt to win the unbeatably-titled Sparrow Masters in London Fields, Amis wrote a feature for the Observer, reproduced in Visiting Mrs Nabokov, about a trip to meet the 1983 world champion Keith Deller, which is one of the best pieces of sports writing I’ve read (and how Mart would have loved Luke Littler...) Visiting Mrs Nabokov also has a tremendous story about a chess match between Garry Kasparov and Boris Karpov, and his stellar outing to China with Watford FC, then managed by Graham Taylor and owned by Elton John, both along for the ride. At the end of The Information, Richard Tull’s ultimate humiliation comes over the course of a single day when Gwyn beats him at tennis, snooker and chess before telling Richard that he’s been sleeping with his wife.

He never wrote about cricket, but he didn’t have to. It’s clear that he saw in sport the same exchange of fortune that shadowed much of what he published. In worlds of comic inversion there is no real middle ground, no nil-nil draws, no shared trophies or halved matches, and there’s something deeply English about the trajectories that he played with.

English cricket is usually divided in that way, or at least it has been throughout most of my lifetime. Dynasties are for West Indies and Australia, and now India. Perhaps the closest England have got is the 2010-11 era team that made it to number one in the Test ratings and won a T20 World Cup. Those bickering heroes aside, it has been a long history of one thing or the other. Never both, and quite often neither.

Why is that? It’s not a question of resources or money. Teams with far less of either have succeeded while England failed. And England has produced generations of fine cricketers, so it’s not that, either. But here we are again. After a few years of an all-conquering Test team came an ODI side that failed so dismally in 2015 that a four-year plan which uprooted the rest of the game was deemed necessary to correct it. It worked, but at the expense of of the red ball team, hived off for a moribund few years under Root, before BLAM! Here comes Bazball to mark the start of an exciting if erratic Test era just as the greatest white ball generation hits the skids.

Reports, regrets, handwringing, stats, enquiries, new leaders, different coaches, fixture list changes, seperate teams, combined teams, individual captains, one captain, round and round it goes, a doom loop of feedback that can never resolve the central problem of the Yin and Yang of England. When one is up, the other must be down.

It is not something that has applied elsewhere. The truly dominant teams of West Indies, Australia and India offer the same ideas and combinations that England try. All they have that is different is the national character itself.

Martin Amis was born and died in America. His literary idols were (mostly) American too, and soon after 1978 he landed a gig to travel there and write about what he saw. But he remained, to me at least, a writer of the England and the English of his time. That was his subject and somewhere within its character he devined this central, divided condition.

Sure, it’s a leap to apply it to England’s cricket, but really, have you got any better ideas, anything that has not yet been thought of and tried, usually at tremendous expense and with a heap of unintended consequences?

I had a message the other morning to say that David Gower was on Radio Four proposing James Vince as the new 50-over captain, and he is not alone in his opinion. That, in a nutshell, is England. Knocked out of a clownshow of a tournament that was pre-destroyed as any sort of a viable contest by the conflicting interests of its participants, gaining even fewer points than a host team that played precisely one game in their home land, the new idea to put it all right is very much the same as the old ones.

It’ll change when the deeper states of England change with it.

NB: Martin Amis never wrote about cricket, but The Information does have a passage about baseball that I used in Bat, Ball & Field. It comes during a viciously comic scene when Richard Tull is attempting to publicise his novel on a Chicago radio show while the host, Dub Traynor, deals with a breaking story about sponsorship “for the ball club…” It’s not about cricket, but it could be:

‘Have you been to Wrigley Field?’

‘No. Should I? What is it?’

‘It’s the ball park. It’s sixty years older than any other ball park in America. The slopes, the hardboard. It’s sad there, as it should be. Even the best teams lose fifty games a year. That sadness gives the game its poetry. Like no other. Just look at the writers it attracts.’

Vale, Martin…