From: stephenjones
Category: Amis
Date: 6/24/99
Time: 10:09:13 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.248.35
[Prof. D asked for old posts so here's one of mine, slightly altered and updated, New AND Improved...]
From John Sutherland's *Where was Rebecca Shot?*:
While discussing contemporary writers' habit of putting themselves in their novels Sutherland remarks that:
"If David Lodge's Hitchcockism is self-effacing to the point of invisibility, Martin Amis's is in-your- face flamboyant. In *Money* (1984), the autobiographical narrator, enigmatically called 'John Self' (he has a friend called Martina Twain), is a porn and pulp merchant, with one foot in London and the other in New York. In a London pub, the Blind Pig, Self has an odd encounter:
'I was just sitting there, not stirring, not even breathing, like the pub's pet reptile, when who should sit down opposite me but that guy Martin Amis, the writer. He had a glass of wine, and a cigarette- also a book, a paper back it looked quire serious. So did he in a way. Small compact, wears a rug fairly long . . . '(p87)
"Self decides to make conversation: 'Sold a million yet?' (No); 'our Dad, he's a writer too, isn't he?' (Yes). One thing leads to another and Self gets stroppy: 'I didn't much like his superior tone, come to think of it, or his tan, or his book. Or the way he stares at me in the street.' (p88). They part, without actually coming to blows, but awkwardly.
"Again, the self-portraiture of the artist is extravagantly self-depreciating. In Amis's case it has an added fascination in light of its eerily accurate prophecy of what was to come. Notably the 'Money' furore about the £450,000 advance in 1994 fot *The Information* (1994), with all the attendant accusations about 'selling out'.
"I would guess that Martin Amis was less influenced by his slightly older campus *confreres* than by the much older American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, specifically a little joke in *Slaughterhouse 5* (1969). The Moment in question occurs as Billy Pilgrim, captured in the Ardennes, is being taken as a prisoner of war to Dresden ...
'The Americans arrived in Dresden at five in the afternoon. The boxcar doors were opened, and the doorways framed the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd. it looked like a Sunday school picture of heaven to Billy Pilgrim. Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, 'Oz.' That was I . That was me. The only other city I'd ever seen is Indianapolis, Indiana.' (p 148).
"This is the second entry that Kurt Vonnegut Jr makers into his own novel. Earlier, in the camp latrine, he is overheard complaining that he has just, 'excreted everything but his brains' (p125). On both occasions it tears a tiny slit in the fictional fabric"
In his after-word Sutherland remarks that:
"Martin Amis, on the subject of his self-presentation in 'Money', wrote to offer 'many thanks ... I look forward to reading [your remarks] when I have a moment'. Interestingly, Zachary Leader points out that Kingsley Amis wrote a novel in 1948-9 called 'The Legacy' which was rejected by some fourteen publishers, has never been put into print, and has a hero named ' Kingslet Amis'."
Perhaps this explains Amis Snrs dislike of his son's "masterpiece".