Liberation profile
At Vanity Fair
by Francis Sergeant, 24/1/97
Translated by Stephen Pepper
From: Stephen Pepper
Martin Amis: Amis's Works
Date: 4/29/99
Time: 9:26:34 AM
Remote Name: 195.171.125.1
[As I haven't had much to contribute lately (taking some Bill
Bryson by way of light relief- does he sell in the US or is he just an honorary Brit?) I
thought I'd at least translate the Liberation article posted by, er, Mr. or Ms Poppin'
Fresh; this for the greater good (and as a quid pro quo for Jarma for the 'Holiday' stuff.
Though he's probably a polyglot already, goddammit.)
Anyway, here goes (and apologies for any solecisms, this is
my lunch break]:
Martin Amis is not a gentle man. At 47 years of age, the angry young
man, enfant terrible of English letters, is getting no softer; though Fernanda, nine weeks
old, who he holds with the infinite tenderness and the awkward clumsiness of all fathers
in their forties appears to make him gentle. "My genre is cruel comedy," he
acknowledges with an odd smile, incomplete and strained. "I could tell stories of
good women with five children, who run a pharmaceutical company, do golf and charity work,
but what of any interest could happen to them?" His world comes from the underbelly
of London, peopled with ambiguous personalities with amorphous morality, who live in the
areas where, as Amis says, "rich and poor are separated by the thickness of a credit
card."
Since he crashed onto the scene at the age of 25, Martin Amis, son
of Kingsley Amis, one of the great post-war English writers, has cultivated success and
scandal. He is hailed by Malcolm Bradbury and Saul Bellow as one of the most talented
novelists of the Anglo-Saxon world, but it's his stories of women and money which have
brought him a devilish notoriety.
"No other writer gets as much press coverage, he can't do
anything without causing a scandal," explains Boyd Tonkin, chief literary editor of The
Independent. At the time of his divorce, treated with similar discretion in the UK to
the separation of Charles and Diana, there were tabloid journalists and photographers
outside his front door, as well as that of his mistress and that of his wife. When Martin
Amis submitted to long and costly dental treatment in the US, the operation and its price
were for days the subject of articles and photographs in the English press. As Amis
himself wrote in a collection of essays, "the great stars of the post-modern world
are elements of their own publicity machine, and all you do is write about their publicity
machine."
"I often wonder why I get such attention," Amis asks
himself, a rather frail man, cramped into a stained overcoat, who has nothing about him of
the generally-depicted monster or seducer. "I searched for sophisticated
explanations. Julian Barnes (another English writer since mixed up with Amis) said that
I'd had too much success with literature and women, which is an agreeable but insufficient
explanation. I rather think that it all comes from my father," he adds, "writing
implies much emotion, egotism, it is corrosive and people react badly when things go too
well for someone."
The fates have always been kind to Amis. After Oxford, his talent,
charm and kinship with his father created one of the young Turks of London's artistic
world. One of his friends from that time compares him with Mick Jagger, surrounded by
women and a regular producer of articles, then books, of which some, like London
Fields, have become successful both among critics and the public.
"It was accepted that I produced a 'good' first book (The
Rachel Papers)," explains Martin Amis, "as one accepts that the children of
artists produce one sole work and then shut up. I should have disappeared or become a
journalist, but I continued to write and that was seen as unforgivable; as Gore Vidal
said, 'it is not enough that we succeed, others must fail.'"
"It's as if I forced my own destiny, as if I had contradicted
the English work ethic which dictates that anything you get, you have earned. Which I
have, of course, but for some I just inherited the talent of my father."
His father, moreover, fifteen months dead, averred he had never read
his son's books, even London Fields which was dedicated to him. "He found
their style a bit strange," explains Martin Amis, "and I found his not strange
enough, but we often used to talk about our work and we concluded that if I had been born
in his epoch and he in mine, we would have written each other's books. We like the same
irony, the same cruelty, the same blackness."
His last novel, The Information is thus a crushing and
pitiless picture of the London literary world, see through two writers, one a success,
repulsively vain, the other a deceitful failure.
Some critics wanted to see this work as a quasi-incestuous roman a
clef, with Julian Barnes (notably author of Flaubert's Parrot and A History
of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters) in the role of the successful writer, dull and
insipid. A more comfortable explanation is that the two men, friends for twenty years, are
mortally at odds since Amis's change of literary agent, abandoning Barnes's wife, Pat
Kavanagh, for an American, Andrew Wylie.
"The Information is not autobiographical, it's a
personal novel." Amis defends himself while nevertheless recognizing that for the
first time, he has written of a world close to him. He quotes Nabokov who said that the
reader shouldn't identify with the characters but with the writer. "At the end of a
book, the reader should want to telephone the author," explains Amis, adding,
"It's true that I write in an aggressive and offensive manner, that I ridicule and
punish my characters. This cynicism disturbs people."
"He is truly arrogant and provocative," sighs the Independent
critic, who doesn't see Martin Amis softening with age and abandoning dark and unpleasant
characters.
He has just finished a thriller, Night Train, which says
much of his admiration for his father's only 'positive' book, The Old Devils.
"It's his best book and there is a large feeling of redemption and forgiveness which
is uncharacteristic of his first works, his vice was to judge people too harshly."
"Perhaps I'll change," he says without trying too hard to be believed. He says
he is preparing a book of memoirs. "I'm going to settle some scores," he
promises, wickedly and avidly, clenching his fist as if he'd like to wipe out some of his
enemies.
