Postcard from the Shithead File - an interview with Martin Amis

Britain's most important post-war novelist looks back on a career defined by controversy

March, 2010.

In comes Martin Amis, not looking very well, and you want to give him a good time — for a change. You don’t want to give him the bad time the media always seems to give him. You look at him and you think: he’s the greatest living British writer. He’s sixty. He’s a grandad. He wouldn’t hurt a fly — why does he always get his head kicked in in the press? And then you ask him about Philip Roth and without blinking he says: “Philip Roth has written some great stuff, but I think he is really struggling now. All his dildos, he’s not letting it go.”

Does any novelist attract more controversy than Amis? The writer of masterpieces Money and London Fields seems to get it in the neck from everyone. He published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, at 23, and since then has tipped off great whirligigs of scandal with every trip to the dentist, divorce, agent change and public utterance.

Only the other day, retired newsreader Anna Ford, who has known Amis for decades, was at it: writing to a national newspaper to tell the world what a narcissistic scumbag Amis was, tight too, how he smoked at the bedside of her dying husband Mark Boxer (more on him shortly), and how he failed to give her children money at birthdays.

At the mention of her name, Amis, smoking a roll up while nursing a lunchtime beer, widens his eyes conspiratorially and cringes theatrically. “Nuts,” he says. “Nuts. I was best man at her wedding. She’s kept a lid on this for God knows how long. I didn’t not like her. I just didn’t pay enough attention to her. That’s all it is. That’s what it is about.”

Amis sits opposite me in an airy restaurant in one of Dubai’s fabulously over the top luxury hotels. For an author whose metier for so many years was the grime of grimy lives — whose outstanding comic set pieces occurred in working mens’ pubs or hand job parlours or run down and overcrowded Morris Minors — it seems an incongruous setting. Outside on a promontory a helicopter gleams excitingly, just behind it a funfair’s big wheel turns. But in here Amis is pale and when he pours his beer from its bottle he has to use two hands to control the shakes. “Oh that?” he says when I enquire about it, “it comes and goes.”

I ask if he isn’t getting tired of getting his head kicked in in the press all the time. Why, for example, does he still bother talking to journalists? He smiles and shakes his head wearily.

“I think I might stop that. And also you have to stop public events of any kind, readings, Q&A’s. No more Q&As. If I checked into a monastery and took a vow of silence, in about twenty years it would normalise. But maybe not. I am used to it. The big difference is when they turn on the novel, as happened with Yellow Dog.”

When Amis wrote about his literary hero and friend the Nobel prize winning novelist Saul Bellow, he divided his work into early Bellow, middle Bellow and late Bellow, and analysed each section separately. Amis himself, by his own admission, is entering late Amis, and the problem is a lot of people would tell you the second half of middle Amis wasn’t much good, and late Amis so far isn’t looking up. They say the writing is not what it was. And then, usually, they set about vigorously kicking his head in.

After years of attacking him for everything but the quality of his work, it is now easy to detect relish in the viciousness of his knockers’ reviews. Tibor Fischer famously described Yellow Dog as “don’t know where to look bad… it’s like catching your favourite uncle masturbating in the playground.”

This must hurt. He shrugs. Did he read Fischer’s review?