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?

“I didn’t read it. I saw enough quotes. That was opportunistic. That was just to make a scandal. Very unpleasant. It did hurt the book tremendously. Because suddenly people thought ‘we can say anything we like about this book.’ It was pre-publication too. It was sour. But then everyone, not just reviewers but anyone who could hold a pen, was shitting on that novel. And that is horror. That is like watching your child being beaten up in the schoolyard.”

For his part, and with admirable pluck given the seeming unanimity of contrary literary opinion, Amis will not concede his novels are getting worse, nor that the writing is no longer able to touch the heights scaled in the late 1980s. He argues instead that the violence of the criticism is the curse of his lineage — that people, thanks to the fact he is the son of Kingsley Amis, are bored of reading novels by an author with his surname.

He says: “I wrote a satirical piece in the Guardian, giving my explanation for it. I began this piece by saying: ‘I was born in London in 1922, my literary debut came in 1956 with Lucky Jim, my really productive period began in 1973 when I published two novels, and this pattern went on till 1995 when I was still not idle.’ I think subconsciously, only subconsciously, people are fed up with the Amis franchise. That is why they have been telling me since I was forty that I am finished, that my talent is gone. Because they think I am now ninety years old. I have been around the place too long. That is what it is.”

Martin Amis has a wonderful speaking voice: a well-modulated, leathery drawl. Transcribing it, I am struck by the precision of his utterances — there are none of the woolly sentences most of us speak in, the ones that start off as one thing and finish up another. Take this, for example: “I am not an atheist, because I do not think that is a very rational position given our stunning ignorance about the universe. The universe is just too clever for us. We’re twenty Einsteins from even a fundamental understanding of the weirdness of the universe. It is crabbed and arrogant to say there is no higher intelligence when the universe itself is a higher intelligence.”

Until now Amis’ experience of Islamic countries, he says, has consisted of two holidays spent in Morocco and a day trip to Iraq covering a Tony Blair visit in 2006. “That’s not how you see a place,” he says. Looking mildly sheepish, he tells me his knowledge of the Islamic world is “infinitesimal,” which might surprise anyone who has read some of his more corruscating attacks on ‘Islamism’ — the collective noun he uses to refer to Islamic extremism and terrorism. He tells me now that his comments on Islam have previously been taken out of context, grotesquely, and that he has always respected the Prophet Mohammed.

“By the force of the continuities he set in motion, he has to be one of the greatest men who ever lived. Something like a third to a quarter of humanity adheres to his teachings, thirteen centuries on.”

In Dubai to take part in the Emirates Literary Festival, Amis seems likeable. Everyone I speak to, in fact — organisers, audiences, journalists — seem only to have good things to say about him. He’s a charmer, by all accounts. So why the reputation for falling out with absolutely everyone?

“It’s bullshit,” he says, levelly. “There was a thing in the Independent — I mean, the weight, the specific gravity of injustice gets to you — there was a double page spread in the Independent after the Anna Ford business. It said ‘people who don’t know him don’t like him, and people who know him don’t like him either’…. It is true I had a froideur with Julian, but that is healed. It is based on nothing. It is based on untruth. But it all goes into the shithead factfile, and every time you are mentioned in the press, it is there.”

Uh, hang on one second. Rewind the tape. Did he just say he is friends with Julian again? Novelist Julian Barnes? Julian Barnes who was his best friend until Amis famously sacked Julian’s wife Pat Kavanagh as his agent after 22 years in favour of Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, Wylie and his promises of half a million pound advances? Amis vs Barnes was the most famous modern literary spat in Britain, culminating as it did in 1995 in a short note from Barnes to his former bezzer which finished, as Amis described it, “with a well-known colloquialism. The two words consist of seven letters. Three of them are Fs.”

You speak to Julian again now?

He nods. “Yes. We just started being pleased to see each other at parties. In fact he is coming for dinner in a week or two. And I sort of made it up with Pat, too, thank God, because she didn’t have very long left to live [she died in October, 2008]. It’s not the same, but it is very friendly and we correspond regularly, two or so emails a week. I send him things that are of interest to him, and talk about what he writes. It is a two way thing.”

So he doesn’t go around falling out with people all the time, then?

“I have fallen out with two very close friends. Mark Boxer and the poet Ian Hamilton. Ian Hamilton over a girl. Mark Boxer because he drew the most violent cartoon of his life, about me. He was normally a gentle cartoonist. It was incredibly insulting and aggressive. He was a best friend, but now he is dead. He drew me walking between girls’ legs, being so small [Amis is famously short], having a cock for a nose, and the caption was “Amo, Amis, Amat, Amoramus, Amoratis, Amor-runt.” Pretty strong. It was published at Tatler. Whole page. He biked it round to me. So I rang him up and said: ‘So you want to break this friendship do you?’ He said: ‘Well I am sorry you are taking it this way.’ I said: ‘How else am I meant to take it? I hope I get over it, but that is it for now.’ It took about a year, less than a year, and then we were best friends again.”

Of all the many charges against his work — too flash, too macho, not politically correct enough (or, according to his own father: “breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself”) — the most common is that it is anti-women. Amis is constantly accused of hating women. Married, with two daughters, Amis refutes allegations of misogyny with a casual waft of the hand.

“There are perhaps one or two examples in world literature of women-hating writers, but it is like racism, it is not for civilised discourse. That is psychopathic stuff, pathological stuff. No sane person is either of those two things.”

Does he think perhaps he gets his head kicked in by feminists because the women in his novels are too sexy?

“You can’t have pretty women in books because then they are male fantasy figures. That is all that means: they are pretty. Think what an insult it is to my wife, whom I have been with for eighteen years. She is married to a misogynist, is she?”

But why always the strength of opinion? There seems to be no middle ground — no readers who will express ambivalence about an Amis novel. It’s either love or hate.

A faint smile turns up the corners of his mouth. “I would like to think it is the nature of the prose which gets people on edge. I did an event for Nabokov in New York and I said to the audience: ‘let’s all imagine we are in a Nabokov novel and we have just entered the room and are about to be described by Nabokov.’ And there was a silence, and then I said, ‘that wasn’t very nice, was it?’ And I think something of the kind might apply to me, in that they think they’d get beaten up in my novels, they’d see their own weaknesses.

“Let’s not neglect Julian Barnes’ explanation for it all, which was very simple and may be true. He said the combination of literary success and, quite modest, sexual success is absolutely unbearable. And I do have a geo-historically beautiful wife. So maybe that is what it is.”

Ah, yes, Isabel Fonseca, the beautiful writer, the woman with whom he shares his life and at the very mention of whose name comes over all uxorious. Recently, fans of Amis have heard him talking again and again of the increasing importance, as a man gets of older, of the question of “how it went with women.” So, how has it gone with women?

“Pretty well. There has been a perfectly average number for my age. I like to think they were very good women. Although my wife doesn’t agree. She says they were a collection of dogs. And when they have these charts in the papers of my ex-girlfriends, she says ‘another gallery of dogs.’” He laughs the laugh of a heavy smoker. “But I think there are always things that will bother you till the day you die…

“Larkin said in a letter he wrote to another poet when he was about 59, he said: ‘Middle old age is depressing, the things one tries to forget get bigger and bigger.’ I treasure my past, it is a huge resource. But it doesn’t come into your life until you are about 50. It is a marvellous place to revisit in your mind.”

When a young Martin Amis interviewed Kurt Vonnegut, he noted the older writer had a mocked up school report tacked to the wall above his desk, grading his novels: Breakfast of Champions A, Slaughterhouse 5 A++, and so on. Asked to do the same thing with his own work, to grade the novels, he says immediately: “I would have them on an ascending curve, all the way up. That is truthfully how I feel.” He explains he doesn’t read his early work anymore — “the craft is crude. I can see they are alive, but it is only the infelicities I notice now” — but attests he is still maturing as a writer, that he felt the need to excise virtually nothing when reading the proofs of The Pregnant Widow.

Talking to him, there is a strong sense he is very much aware that at 60 he is coming to the end of his career, that soon the talent that made him great will be gone — and that today, no matter how lugubrious the manner, he is a man in an elegant hurry.

“Time is running out, so you don’t go back. It’s funny, you just don’t,” he says quietly. “People ask me which is my favourite novel. ‘The next’ is quite a good answer.”

Let’s see.