Dear Readers,
Good evening and welcome to a rare Wednesday outing for Off The Fence, the paramilitary newsletter wing of the UK’s Only Magazine. Yesterday, we spent all day uploading the magazine’s greatest hits to our new website, and it’s now almost ready for your viewing pleasure. There are some small glitches left to iron out, and we look forward to announcing its official launch next week, when we look forward to boring you – in great detail – about the mechanics of website migration.
After some stern words with the postal authorities and the procurement of scurrilous kompromat on every senior post office manager from here to Dundee, it seems that the full complement of our readers have now received Issue 15. If you still find yourself outside that lucky cohort, please let us know at subscriptions@the-fence.com and we will descend once again upon Post Office Towers, our sleeves rolled and elbows bared.
We’ve had some lovely feedback from readers already, not least from one of our favourite comedians to emerge in recent years, Stevie Martin. She left us altogether full of bash by declaring us ‘the perfect antidote to zonking out on algorithmic gif-drowned newsfeed journalism’. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, which is worrying since it’s a fairly large part of our job. Heads will roll for this Stevie, so do apply with a CV when you have the time.
Elsewhere, Cornelius Logue earns scenery points for his beauteous shot of Issue 15 in the bucolic splendor of Donegal. Ditto Alice Daisy Pomfret who snapped this pic of it in-situ at that even more gorgeous of landscapes, the local independent magazine shop - in this case, her toothsome Norfolk mag store, Akin. We thank both for their patronage and remind anyone reading that we do love to see our babies in the wild, so please don’t scrimp on snaps.
But enough vainglorious bleating, we have much to discuss. Raunch and ribaldry at the FBPE grindstone! Soaraway Sun In Stolen Sun-Cream Stunner! But first, a nod to the passing of a true man of letters, words and sentences.
Amis, For Five Minutes
As the above subheading attests, we’ll keep this brief. A lot has already been written on the passing of Martin Amis, the novelist, critic and all-round cultural colossus who died this week at 73. Here at The Fence, he also bears a particular – perhaps unique – distinction in having been caricatured twice, in both Issue 5 and Issue 12, by John Broadley and Davey Jones respectively.
There are no fewer than ten tributes over at the Guardian, with Geoff Dyer’s personal paean, and John Self’s Observer elegy the pick of the bunch in our opinion. ‘Critics and the reading public loved him or hated him’ intoned The Times, ‘they did not ignore him’. All, however, centre Amis’ influence on his literary peers and descendants, and the shadow his writing cast on the last half century of English language prose. Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Will Self (on whom more below) are just a few of those who’ve chimed in to claim him not so much as an inspiration, but something like an invasive virus of life-giving prose.
The best of these pieces dispensed with encomia and focussed on aphorisms, phrases and sentences taken directly from his work, which is the best tribute for which such a quotable writer could hope. Better still has been the secondary market in older, lesser known articles now being shared, which present such things with the sliders of posthumous respectability dialled down a little, not least this 2018 Book Forum essay/review by James Camp, which might have the best quote- to-word ratio we’ve found anywhere in the Amis thinkpiece market. One can even move through time and clock a snapshot of Amis writing on masculinity for the LRB in 1991, or on pornography for the Guardian in 2001 or this piece by Christian Lorentzen about his move to New York from 2011,
Younger readers, however – and all of our staff among them – had not encountered one intriguing footnote in the dizzying network of Amis’ influence, covered by the New York Times’ obit.
‘Many Americans first heard the name Martin Amis’ wrote Dwight Garner, ‘because of a plagiarism scandal. In 1980 Mr. Amis accused Jacob Epstein – the son of Barbara Epstein, a founder of The New York Review of Books — of lifting multiple passages from Amis’ first novel and placing them in his own first novel, Wild Oats. Mr. Amis wrote that ‘Epstein wasn’t influenced by The Rachel Papers, he had it flattened out beside his typewriter.’
Things did not end there, however. ‘Mr. Epstein later admitted copying passages, and apologised,’ it continues. ‘For nearly three decades after, Mr. Amis’s books were not reviewed in the New York Review of Books’.
At time of writing, the NYRB have not yet posted an obituary, nor tweeted a nattily dressed catalogue of his finest quips, so we await their entrance to the marketplace with interest.
Where There’s A Will, There’s Affray
Novelist and commentator, Will Self, used some 2,600 words in detailing his obsession with Adrian Chiles’ Guardian column, a piece which begins with the sentence ‘I think about Adrian Chiles’ cock more than is strictly necessary’ – before referring to Chiles’ member a further 27 times, while making rather crude references to Chiles’ relationship with his partner, Kath Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian.
Even establishment figures like Daniel Finkelstein were shocked by the tone of the piece – ‘an act of professional suicide’ in the words of one critic. We asked a number of eminent New European heads for their views on the piece, but none of them replied apart from Alistair Campbell, who because he is on book tour, put us in touch with the editor, Matt Kelly, who very generously told us that the piece was submitted on spec and that after it drew some laughs, it was published. In Matt’s telling, things ‘deteriorated from there’.
It’s worth reading the piece and comparing it to Jeremy Clarkson’s own effort on Meghan Markle in the Sun, which made global headlines. But it’s also worth remembering that Kath Viner is one of the most powerful people in British media, and she is currently dating her most famous writer. It’s completely valid to make jokes about their relationship – just as long as they’re funny. We are the nation of Gilray and Hogarth, after all.
Twice Looks Like Carelessness
We were proud to receive this from the hollowed desks of the Shard this week, cementing ourselves as very much the Wikileaks of purloined errata in Fleet St kitchens. Look, we’re not saying there’s an epidemic of thefts in the Murdoch news empire, but we’re not not saying it.
If YOU are in possession of any such scuttlebutt of missing merch or pilfered products, heated, cooled, refrigerated or frozen, know that you can always play Deep Throat to our Bernstein, by getting in touch at the usual address.
In Case You Missed It
A searing classic from the archives, now sadly relevant once more, as Andrew O’Hagan examines the history of child abuse in British light entertainment.
Meanwhile, Features Editor Séamas O’Reilly surveys the shrieking horror of the National Conservative Conference 2023.
Scaachi Koul gives you the deep dive you never knew you needed on Girls Gone Wild, for Buzzfeed News.
Les Carpenter pens a stirring and enthralling account of Kirsten Neuschafer’s globe-spanning boat trip
And, for seemingly the 400th time, a magazine piece about the affordability of New York has forgotten to consider the input or interests of anyone who does not own a superyacht.
And Finally
Look, we know we have a certain reputation when it comes to these featured videos; old-timey footage in which luvvies, aristos and fag-ash-strewn BBC journos declaim on the issues of an earlier age. But, with the passing of Martin Amis, we didn’t see the harm in leaning into this perception, and thus we suggest his Face To Face interview with Jeremy Isaacs.
Like seemingly all BBC footage from 1993, it looks and sounds like it could have been shot sometime between the first and second world wars, albeit in colour, and focusing on Martin Amis, but the format works: television, a medium that Amis affected to despise, and for him was a great force for stupidity, makes for a more compelling interview than print or radio, especially when the presenter is a person as quietly clever as Jeremy Isaacs, and the subject is Martin Amis. Worth watching on the big screen if you can:
That’s it for this week, we’ll be back on Tuesday with a real information dump about the new website, just so everything is clear for you, our readers.
If you’d like to speak to one of us, do get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com, and we hope you’re enjoying this lovely late spring weather. Summer is almost here.
All the best,
TF