From: stephenjones
Category: Amis's Works
Date: 7/1/99
Time: 11:15:36 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.248.35
Extracts from an Interview by LynnBarber with Andrew Wylie, Amis' "Jackal" like agent, in The Guardian
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3818486,00.html
There is no consensus view of Andrew Wylie - he has friends and he has enemies and they don't even sound as though they're describing the same person. His friends - most eloquently, Salman Rushdie - talk about a warm-hearted, passionate enthusiast, a 'lion' for his authors. Martin Amis calls him 'generous, entertaining, and very loyal'. His enemies talk about a cold-eyed predator stalking the book world, 'driven by a sort of rage' according to one publisher, 'evil' according to another. One American editor told Vanity Fair, 'I sense a violence in him - in those watery, pale-blue eyes.' One English publisher told me, 'I think there's an enormous rage in him just below the surface and sometimes it bursts out. When you watch him walking around Frankfurt [book fair] and everyone follows in his wake - he is a monster. I think one day it'll explode because he is psychotic. He flatters his authors and talks to them about world domination, but I do believe it will go phut because I think he's mad.' He inspires extraordinary fear among publishers - several told me privately that they loathed him but could never say so on the record because they still have to do business with him.
He is known to the British tabloids as the Jackal. He acquired the nickname when he poached Martin Amis from his agent Pat Kavanagh, wife of Amis's old friend Julian Barnes - and got him half a million for his novel The Information. Bizarrely, Martin Amis's teeth came into it - the popular on dit was that he needed the half-million to pay for cosmetic dentistry. Amis hotly denied that it was cosmetic - he needed to get his teeth fixed because he couldn't chew any more - but, of course, the half million was for his talent, not for his dentistry. AS Byatt then weighed in - quite a weight! - and said it was disgraceful for Amis to snatch all this money from the mouths of starving authors. I never understood the logic of that one, but it was obvious that Andrew Wylie had somehow thrown a great rock into the normally placid waters of the English literary scene and that lots of comfy little publishing boats were being capsized.
Naturally, I was predisposed to like Andrew Wylie because I do warmly endorse the idea of writers being paid a lot of money. We are far too mean towards talent in this country. I particularly treasure Wylie's dictum: 'I don't see why good writers shouldn't be paid as well as bad ones.' If Jeffrey Archer deserves £3 million - or whatever ridiculous figure he claims these days - then how can Martin Amis not deserve half a million? AS Byatt's idea that literary authors should somehow club together to keep themselves in penury is ridiculous. When one good writer ups the ante, he ups it for everyone - witness Nick Hornby's recent £2 million deal with Penguin. Publishers moan that they used to have a nice friendly relationship with agents - they were all 'jolly good chums', according to Dan Franklin of Cape - but for a writer, this is like hearing that one's doctor has a very good relationship with an undertaker. Anyway, as far as I was concerned, Wylie was preaching to the converted . . .
. . . Then, in 1995, Wylie bagged another great English author - Martin Amis. Wylie had been trying to get him for years, but Amis always said no, for the very good reason that he already had an agent, Pat Kavanagh, the wife of his good friend Julian Barnes and godmother to his first child. But at the end of 1994, the publishing world was all abuzz with the rumour that Martin Amis wanted half a million pounds for his next novel, The Information. And at this point, Wylie decided, 'You know, something's wrong. Because either you should keep your mouth closed and the price shouldn't get out, or you should get the price. If you say you're going to appear walking on water, you'd better not show up drowning. So Martin was in New York. I had a conversation with Martin. He said, "What would you do?" And I explained to him what was wrong with his publishing picture…'
What was wrong, according to Wylie, was that Amis had different publishers in hardback and paperback (Jonathan Cape and Penguin, respectively) who were not acting in tandem. He thought he should be published 'vertically', ie by one house, and he tried to do a deal with Cape and its paperback imprint, Vintage, but they wouldn't pay enough. 'So that's where the negotiations got a little rough, and that's why HarperCollins had to come in as a temporary minder of Martin.' HarperCollins came up with the requisite half-million for The Information, but the novel sold disappointingly in paperback, and Amis is now back with Cape.
It could all be interpreted as a bit of a disaster for Martin Amis, given that he lost a close friend, upset his old publisher, attracted loads of hostile publicity, and has left The Information stranded at HarperCollins while all his other books are with Cape/Vintage. Amis says only: 'The deal on The Information, and the general outcome, was rendered anarchical by the media.' But he evidently feels no ill will towards Wylie, whom he describes as an 'amazingly vigorous and well-informed' agent.
In 1996, soon after the brouhaha about The Information, Andrew Wylie split from his long-time partner Gillon Aitken. They have not spoken since - and Aitken was 'disinclined' to talk to me about Wylie. The crunch came over a diary of Kingsley Amis's last days written by his official biographer, Eric Jacobs, and sold by Gillon Aitken to the Sunday Times. The first Wylie knew of it was Martin Amis phoning him in a fury to say what is this? Wylie had no idea but rang Aitken who said he hadn't mentioned it 'because that would be betraying the confidence of a client'. Whereupon Wylie retorted, 'But Martin is a client of yours, too.' Anyway, he shared Amis's view that it was 'insensitive' to sell a deathbed piece when Kingsley Amis was barely in his coffin and 'that was the deciding event'. Martin Amis believes that 'Aitken used the Jacobs deal to signal his disaffection from Andrew, who understood this.' Apparently, their partnership was already under strain.