'Even the praise is bad for
you'
[An excerpt from Emma Brockes'
interview with Amis about Yellow Dog, which the Guardian begins
serializing in early September (29 August 2003)]:
"Dadda." Clio Amis,
three-year-old daughter of Martin, reaches for her father from the summit of her
mother's hip. Amis's mind is elsewhere. His photo is being taken while his other
small child, Fernanda, bobs in and out, and his wife Isabel answers a question
about the sofa (it is hell-red velvet, she covered it herself). Casually, and
after some delay, Amis turns to Clio and is met by a look of such fierce
devotion, blowing off the child in nuclear waves, that he bursts into laughter.
"Do you see that?" says Amis. "Daughters! You don't even have to do anything.
You seem to have some primal power just by being you."
Being Amis, one imagines, means being rather more in touch with one's primal
power than most. While the Mick Jagger pout of his early years has been forced
into sardonic retreat, and the knocks have engendered a certain ruefulness,
nothing breaks the surface of his languid charm. "People talk about the big ego
of the writer as if it's fun having a big ego," he complains, languidly,
charmingly. "It's not fun. It's corrosive, the constant..." he hesitates, "the
constant status anxiety." But even a man of his well-staked confidence is
occasionally floored by the intensity of his children's love. After the girls
have gone, he says, "You seem, as a father, to have a value that you never had
to your sons. Boys are always ridiculing you, affectionately, keeping dad in his
place. But girls..."
The mantel of Britain's Greatest Living Novelist settled on Amis young and
has grated and gratified ever since. McEwan has won more awards; Rushdie more
notoriety, Ishiguru greater success in Hollywood. Murdoch was arguably brainier,
Spark funnier. But it is with Amis that the press and the reading public have
chosen to enact "keeping dad in his place". And dad is just about mellow enough
to give a good show of not caring. In fact, bar the occasional stutter, dad is
looking pretty damn chilled right now, in the living room of his north London
home, where his books but not his records are in alphabetical order. "Nor," he
assures me, "are my colognes." It is as well that he is relaxed, for two weeks
after the interview Amis will cop another massive slagging, this time from Tibor
Fischer, writing in the Daily Telegraph. Fischer calls his new book "terrible"
and compares the experience of reading it to "your favourite uncle being caught
in a school playground, masturbating".
Elements of Yellow Dog are ridiculous. It involves a tabloid hack, a mad
cockney, a spoof royal family with a manservant called Love ("coming, Love!"
chimes the King, a joke that goes back to the Captain Darling gag in Blackadder)
and a man who, after receiving a blow to the head, defaults to a
pre-middle-class version of himself. It is about death and violence and
impotence, and, above all, what Amis calls "the male insecurity problem", a
regular theme of his, mixed in with a bit of post-September 11 blather about the
end of the world.
You can spot the sentences that did for Fischer. "The contrails of the more
distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilize the
universe," labours Amis at one point. But there are flashes of brilliance, too;
bad sex is "like someone doggedly trying to shoulder his way through a locked
door". The husband of a distinguished woman exists purely for "the radiation of
quietly relentless approval". A man climbs out of his car as "a boobjob of a
raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot".
. . .
On the subject of style, he says, "I thought it was thinning out. But I don't
think that any more. There's more plot in this book. There's more drive. You
don't want great curlicues when you're pushing forward, hard. You get slightly
less musical, the prose does, but the craft bit gets... you make lots of
decisions very quickly, are much more confident in the craft. It's swings and
roundabouts. Many writers go off in a certain direction at about this point; my
father did. His prose changed. There can be a turning against the reader and
that's the difference between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Joyce doesn't give a
shit about the reader any more. And late Henry James is an awful slog. It's a
disaffection that you must fight."
When Amis pictures his own readers, it's himself he sees, at a younger age,
which he admits is "kind of a wank". (Wank is a big word with him, as in "wank
pit", the natural habitat of the loser male). "I want to be to my readers what I
felt when I first picked up a book by Bellow or by Nabokov, where you think,
this one's speaking to me. Every now and then at a book signing your eyes meet
with a reader and they have a stoned look and you know that they've had a great
time with you, and it's very moving and nice. It's like an antidote to the other
stuff. You feel support, affection."
The "other stuff", to which Fischer's contribution is merely the latest in a
long, and devastating line, has plagued Amis more than his contemporaries
because he is perceived, I think, to have enjoyed that most-loathed thing in
this country, an easy ride. The advantages of having Kingsley as a father were
many - theirs was a literary as well as a filial relationship - but Amis is
aware that his own achievements are belittled, somewhat, by the shortness of the
distance he has travelled. "My writer friends have all come out of comparatively
nowhere," he says, almost meekly. "That must be very gratifying."
. . .
How competitive is he with his peers? "I still feel the odd twinge of
invidious feeling. But the moment it disappeared was when I was coming back from
Germany and the first thing I saw was a headline in the [London] Evening
Standard - "McEwan wins Booker Prize" - and I thought, fuck. But then I felt
great for two days, a real high. The automatic reaction was, fuck, but it's the
realisation that you're trying to do such different things, you're not all
trying to write the same novel. Great relief."
. . .
Amis's child-rearing has about it the symmetry of that board game in which
you roll the dice and are handed either two pink pegs, or two blue ones,
depending on the square you land on. His blue pegs, teenagers Louis and Jacob,
are from his first marriage to Antonia Phillips. His pink ones, Clio and
Fernanda, are toddlers from his second marriage, to Isabel Fonseca - "The boys
were active in choosing their names. If it was a boy they wanted it to be called
Slash after, is it Guns and Roses?" - and he has a daughter Delilah, 26, whom he
didn't know about until five years ago. "My daughter Delilah, my grown-up
daughter who's coming tonight, showed me an example of text messaging. Once you
get going, it's really easy."
Bits of Yellow Dog are written in text messaging shorthand, with slightly
dad-like, behind the curve enthusiasm, and also in emails, which are referred to
by one try-hard character as "e's". Amis turned for help with his cockney speech
patterns to the memoirs of Mad Frankie Fraser: "I took from him charming little
locutions like, 'and otherwise' for 'etcetera'. Eg, 'They had tables for cards
and otherwise.' "
But it doesn't do to do too much research. "You don't want to read too much,"
he says, "but to feel your way into it." Although sitting there channelling a
"feeling" entails the constant risk that nothing will happen.
This is something, he says, no writer can escape, the fear of surrounding
himself with dead prose, with lifeless images. "My father had terrible anxiety
at breakfast every day, before going in to write. He'd take himself by the hand
and say," - here, Amis grasps his own hand and adopting a sing-song voice,
enacts the moment that it all boils down to, the space behind the ego. "Now what
is it?" he asks himself, softly, and in a whisper replies, "Well, it's that bit
near the beginning."
