From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/11/99
Time: 8:42:44 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.95
[Poster's note: I found the following profile in Lexis-Nexis but I couldn't find it in the *Guardian* archive. Even though the *Guardian* archive supposedly goes back to September 1998. Moss's piece is from October 3, 1998. No frigging link---so I had to type it. Amis broke my heart by using the word *postmodern* with a straight face. "Postmodern road". Hey Martycakes, I got yer "postmodern road". Right here, fella. Courtesy of Ryan's Family Steakhouse in beautiful downtown Las Vegas.....Ah, devil ether. A total body-drug.]
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/6078/lv20.jpg
*AFTER THE STORM* / BY STEPHEN MOSS
Martin Amis is a cliché. Pouting bad boy, famous dad, huge advances, ridiculously expensive teeth, taste for American heiresses, part of the artistic jet-set (whoever *they* are). Read all about it, but don't worry too much about the books; the facts are always more exciting than the fictions.
Forget it all and start again.
I considered writing a spoof report on Amis in terse tabloidese. This would have tested my powers of invention, so I was happy to find that *The Sunday Times* had got there first. Except the paper meant it---this is how it reported Amis's wedding to Isabel Fonseca (they usually call her 'Funseeker') back in July: 'Martin Amis, the millionaire novelist, has secretly married his American heiress girlfriend in a ceremony costing just pounds 106...The author is renowned not only for his literary talent in works such as *The Rachel Papers* and *London Fields*, but also for a headline-grabbing pounds 500,000 book advance and a pounds 20,000 new set of teeth...Amis lives with his family in a three-story mansion near Regent's Park...'
That tells you pretty well all you need to know about the press's view of Amis---all teeth, less truth. He is the author as celebrity, the artist as brand. Sitting in his 'mansion near Regent's Park'---actually a large, airy, open-plan but by no means mansionly house near Camden Town---it is impossible to square this person with the monstrous ego paraded by the papers, the so-called 'Mick Jagger of literature'. He makes the tea; his baby daughter's nanny is half-hidden behind a pile of ironing; and two-year-old Fernanda is the only one with literature on her mind, handing me the cover of a Beatrix Potter book. I coo admiringly---a good place to start reading; 'overrated' says the critic with the teabag.
Amis has had a tough time in the Nineties, with a string of personal and professional misfortunes. The death of his father, Kingsley, in 1995; a highly public divorce in the following year; the revelation that he had a 20-year-old daughter from a brief relationship in the Seventies; the discovery in 1994 that his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared in 1973, had been a victim of Fred and Rose West; the saga of his novel *The Information*; the sub-plot of his dental surgery.
He was attacked on every front: by the press for being greedy, egotistical, too big for his books; by critics, who argued that he was turning literature into a commodity, a branch of showbiz. His novel, *Money*, had become all too real: as far as the press was concerned, Amis was John Self, getting, spending, screwing (in every sense).
He left his long-time agent Pat Kavanagh---and thus alienated his great friend Julian Barnes, Kavanagh's husband---in pursuit of that supposedly monstrous advance. New York hotshot agent Andrew Wylie eventually secured the sum from HarperCollins, and Amis was abused for his success. A S Byatt called him one of the 'strutting boys of the book world', and a debate of sorts began over how much writers should earn, and whether art and money made easy bedfellows. The Amis caricature was complete. 'I felt like I'd lost control', he later said of this literary cause celebre. 'I was hung out to dry.'
Even more personally disturbing was his divorce. He left his wife, Antonia Phillips, and sons, Louis and Jacob, for the writer Isabel Fonseca; the split was messy. The fact that his parents had divorced when he was a teenager and that he had vowed not to repeat the experience with his own children gave the press further ammunition.
Some of the ad hominen attacks were pure bile. Toby Young, writing in *The Sunday Times*, was especially egregious: 'It's difficult to suppress a hint of schadenfreude on hearing the news about the collapse of his marriage...To have abandoned his wife, Antonia, and their children for a younger woman, particularly after droning on about the joys of fatherhood, makes it that much harder to take him seriously. For those of us who find literary novelists insufferably self-righteous, this is undoubtedly a source of real pleasure.' Young's battle with schadenfreude must have been a truly epic one, says Amis, as if considering a mock-heroic poem on the subject.
Amis's considered reply to his critics---though he perhaps wouldn't want to see it in such mechanistic terms---is a memoir, which he is writing now and hopes to publish next year. It will survey those years of personal and professional crisis, discuss his relationship with his father, and in some way stand as a memorial to the life of Lucy Partington. He is unwilling to discuss this aspect of the book, and perhaps not yet clear himself how he will treat it, but the effect was clearly profound. 'It was over 20 years of having a gap in your life, a great ingredient of the subconscious, and then a great shock when you realise how much your body has been thinking about it, the physiological worry.'
The discovery of his grown-up daughter, Delilah, in 1996 was another key event, a further incentive to assess himself and his family. 'I'd always known she was there, but it was still a shock', he says. 'I saw a photograph that was given to me when she was two, and I showed it to my mother and she said definitely. Her father Patrick (Seale), who had raised her, said in a letter to me, 'I expect it had been at the back of your mind', but it had also been very much in and out of my fiction, because that's where your subconscious is operating---all these disappeared children, or children whose parentage is in question, and the difficulties about what being a parent means.'
The memoir will be an oddity: an appeal for privacy that exposes his life to fresh examination. I had assumed it would be a catharsis of sorts. He disagrees: 'A crisis is a crisis, and it can't go on. Your stamina for a crisis just disappears.' If he has indeed overcome that period which so painfully combined personal tragedy with professional conflict and middle-aged angst (he is 49, and has bemoaned his age loudly since turning 40), why does he feel the need to put himself on the slab in this way? He answers the question in different ways: there is evidently a degree of self-examination, but there is also an element of having his say without mediation by the press.
'I deplore the drift into the biography age, and I've certainly been stung by it', he says, 'but I want to set the record straight on various counts, with the comfort that this book will last longer than the next *Mail On Sunday*. Five times a day I say to myself, "Why am I bothering?", but I want to take on the culture that coalesces around the press, to ask why is it that writers in this country come in for such a pasting. It's a tale about England---about a culture that accretes literary jealousy---as much as it's a tale about me. The interest in personality is so much more intense that the interest in writing here. It doesn't happen in other countries.' Has the Amis brand, the pouting pop star of mythology, obscured the writer? Can he still be read as he would wish to be read, aside from 'collateral' considerations? 'My true readership, such as it is, gives me the benefit of the doubt, but it does sour the view of some readers. It's not true that a lot of bad publicity does you good. Publicity is not good; publicity is not the voracious idiot that John Updike said it was. A lot of bad publicity is a lot a bad publicity---it doesn't do you any good.
'The tone seemed to linger even when *Night Train* came out last year. Maybe the only thing that will purge it will be the memoir. Which doesn't mean it's a strategic move on my part, it's more that, as the son of a writer, I thought I ought to write about what that was like. I always knew I'd have to write about Kingsley, and now it's become rather broader than that, covering the family, too. I also thought it would be fun to settle a lot of scores, but when I get down to doing that, my pen drags and I don't want to do it. I can't be bothered.'
The death of his father has had a profound influence. 'Martin was tremendously loyal and loving and it made a huge hole below the waterline', says the poet and critic Craig Raine, a friend since they met at Oxford in the Sixties. Raine says Amis's media image is a myth: 'As a person he is very warm and has a real gift for friendship. He's careless, but he's loyal. You sometimes don't see him for long periods, but, when you do, he's warm. He doesn't loll on his laurels or try to be grand---he's a great entertainer, he makes you laugh.'
The key to the memoir will be Amis's relationship with his father, but a few barbs may be directed at old adversaries. He talks, with little sympathy, of writers who 'adopt the foetal position for hours' when attacked. His critics can expect a counter-blast, and he reserves particular scorn for two of his fellow novelists. 'The definition of being upset', he says, 'is when you no longer have the power to choose what you are going to think about, when you wake up with your mind already going on a grievance. That only really happened to me on two occasions, when my good faith as a novelist was called into question. James Buchan claimed that I wrote about the dead of Auschwitz (in *Time's Arrow*) for profit, and how creepy he found that; and Anita Brookner reviewed *Night Train* and said I had contempt for the reader. Both were questioning my integrity in a way I would never accuse Danielle Steel of doing. I wouldn't accuse her of being cynical; cynics don't write novels.'
Amis, despite his reputation for being a difficult subject, evidently enjoys talking. He speaks slowly, with that much-imitated, tobacco-inflected transatlantic drawl you feel he may have subconsciously picked up from Gore Vidal. (Vidal, Bellow, Updike, his father---odd role models for this supposedly brash, brattish figure.) Listen hard, and a different Amis starts to emerge---more vulnerable, more questioning than the caricaturists would allow.
'I feel much more weathered now', he says. 'I was never at my limit. I have a coarse skin---you learn to shrug. The only thing that really astonished me was when the Eric Jacobs thing happened, and the press managed to rig up a kind of relativist echo chamber when the case was as open-and-shut as you could dream up.' Jacobs was the friend and biographer of Kingsley Amis, and they spent a great deal of time together in the last six months of Kingsley's life.
Immediately after Amis's death, Jacobs announced he was writing a diary of those final months, and *The Sunday Times* ran extracts from it. Martin was furious---'He started negotiations to sell extracts from the diaries before my father's body was even cold'---and retaliated by resigning his book-reviewing contract on the paper and saying that Jacobs would not, as planned, be allowed to edit Kingsley's letters.
'He was patently in the wrong, and I watched with absolutely genuine fascination as the press turned it into a slinging match', Amis says now. 'It was unspeakable to have that time immediately after my father's death contaminated by a massive intrusion. Never look for anything resembling justice from the press. It's always an argument you're going to lose. Kingsley (he invariably refers to his father as if he were a friend and colleague, and still alive) described the tone well when he said it was a cruising, omnidirectional hostility---that is the tenor basically: it goes around looking for things to be hostile about. It's gonzo; hypocritical window-smashing.'
Amis has now entrusted the task of editing his father's letters to the academic and critic Zachery Leader, who also happens to be his regular tennis partner.
Amis has spoken increasingly of his father in recent years, and the memoir is the culmination of that growing feeling of identification with him. He lives in the road where his father used to live, has this summer been re-reading (and feeling intimidated by the quality of) his novels, and still has a sense of his father looking over his work---'my ghostly sub-editor'. 'I am very much still protected by my father', he says, 'by those 45 years of seeing all this happen to him, going through his own divorce and so on. In terms of staying power, his career was phenomenal---he wrote his best book (*The Old Devils*, which won the Booker Prize) in his sixties. He produced a terrific body of work, and I feel transfused by his presence.'
Much of the 'window-smashing' is visited on Martin Amis because of what he is thought to be---the quintessentially laddish novelist who likes cars but has a problem with women. One person who knows him well offers a reading of Amis's attitude to women that some critics have claimed to detect in his novels: 'The key to his psyche is that women are devil-bitches who seduce you and exercise power over you.' In this analysis, Nicola Six, the arch-seductress of Amis's 1989 novel, *London Fields*, is the archetypal woman; or, as Amis's critics would have it, the archetypal non-woman, the cold (or perhaps hot) fantasy of a male imagination. The female narrator in *Night Train* was judged a success, a move forward, a step away from stereotype, but the 'devil-bitch' critique is still tacked on to his writing, and his life.
Another friend's view of him is the time-honoured one: 'Every writer has a splinter of ice in his or her heart; Martin's splinter is quite a chunk.' He is a writer; his life is dominated by his art. He talks of his writing as his 'stuff ', but the term is a disguise. His writing is everything to him; when he talks of his father, of his father's legacy, it is his work to which he is referring. He is acutely conscious of the canon, of the relative merits of writers, of his own place in contemporary fiction.
His close friend, the writer Will Self, is suspicious of the canonical Amis. 'If anything, his sense of mission, of the importance of being a writer, has got stronger in the Nineties. I sometimes toy with the idea of giving it all up and becoming a plumber, but that thought is anathema to Martin. He has this credo of what it is to be a writer.'
Self says that, though Amis would like to see himself as an intellectual, his great strength is that, perhaps like his father, he is not. 'He is part of Grub Street, a journeyman', says Self. 'He's at sea with a lot of these big ideas. He feels that to be taken seriously he needs to have intellectual credibility. But a good writer has a calculated stupidity---first-rate intellectuals don't make good novelists. Good writers have a raw feel for entertainment and words; they are intuitive and empathetic. No great book is created by thought power---it has to be felt.'
Leader agrees, though says it is Amis's non-academic status that makes him want to establish a canon and perhaps seek his place within it: 'He's not an academic and he has none of the current academic reticence about value judgments.'
Amis's consciousness of a pecking order among writers, of posterity's pitiless glare, is usually seen as arrogance; but it could also be taken as fear---a fear of failing, of being forgotten. Despite the diamond glint of his prose, the confidence of the authorial voice, the strident public image, he is human. 'Everyone fears they are a joke which other people will one day get', is one of his better aphorisms. It helps to explain the competitiveness that underpins his fiction, his relationships, his life and, of course, his tennis. (Leader says Amis's form has slumped recently, and assumes that having a young daughter is taking its toll.)
Raine says Amis may once have conformed to the brash stereotype, but no longer: 'He has become more domestic, more vulnerable. He adores his new baby. He's fond of children, but you wouldn't know that from his books, where children are seen as exhausting. You can't judge Amis by the cruel comic style of his books. 'Raine recalls the old, pre-domestic Amis from the time he stayed in his flat in Bayswater when Amis wasn't there. When Raine tried to use the grill, the room quickly filled with smoke---it had never been used, and couldn't be used without setting fire to the building.
In another of his flats, he had a pinball machine in his kitchen but no stove, and, according to Raine, used to resort to cold baked beans when hungry.
Amis made a striking statement recently: happiness, he said, was the hardest thing of all to write about. So will his future books be infused with happiness? 'There is some happiness in my next novel, but it's a very qualified happiness. There will be a paragraph or two, leading on to the view that there's a very strong mixture of paranoia in happiness. When you are down, you think they can't throw anything else at you, but when things are going well you expect a 747 to crash on your head every time you go outside. I've got used to that element of it; it's just very hard to write about.'
His critics would agree that there is too little happiness and---a neighbouring absence---too little humanity in his novels. One writer who knows him goes further, extending the critique from writer to man: 'Martin doesn't have the gift of happiness. He's a complex and brilliant man, but he doesn't seem to have his compassion circuits connected.'
It's a standard view, one Amis dismisses. 'When you're young, you want to come on all cynical. That phase is getting further and further behind me. I feel that my stuff teeters on the brink of bottomless sentimentality, and I think that's true of a lot of writers who are thought to be slick. Kurt Vonnegut said that he's as soft as a sneaker-full of shit beneath that jivey talk.'
His work can also be very funny---witness the marvellous story, *Career Move*, which opens *Heavy Water*, his new collection of short stories. This is wonderful satire, but it is also laugh-out-loud comedy. His treatment of comic situations, of moments of acute embarrassment, in both his journalism and his fiction, are a delight. His squirming description in *The New Yorker* of going to see *Four Weddings And A Funeral* with Salman Rushdie---they loathed it, but once in the cinema couldn't move for security reasons---is a delight.
I would hazard a guess that future Amis novels---he has just embarked on a new one, which he is writing concurrently with the memoir ('I notice the drop in temperature when I turn from the novel back to the memoir')---will be different from the cynical, voice-driven novels we have become used to. 'I am not consciously attempting to write a novel of emotion. None of this is conscious. You're really spared all that decision-making; all the executive and administrative stuff is done by the unconscious. That's what makes it exciting. What new books never are is a reply to your critics who say you can't do women, you can't do emotion. You spend no time fretting about this because it's not a question of choice. Many critics think you read the reviews and then sit around in gaping contrition for weeks, saying, "I'll change my ways", but by then you're normally deep into the next book.'
In any case, even his past novels have been driven by emotion---it's just that we failed to see it. Take *The Information*. The preoccupation with the cash and the teeth, and the book's apparent underperformance in terms of sales, led it to be presented as a morality tale of an author who wanted too much and got his comeuppance. That ignored the real story, that the novel was a funny, sad, poignant book born of personal torment.
'The book isn't autobiographical, but it is very personal', he says. 'A lot of emotion that I was feeling went into it---not directly, but displaced. It was written in a great crisis, and that would have been more detectable, that tone would have been more easily appreciated, if people hadn't been seeing me as a strutting idiot.' The subtext of the novel is that the literary failure of the central figure, Richard Tull---who spends the book attempting to kill the slickly successful Gwyn Barry---is a reflection of the personal sense of failure that Amis was feeling at that point, when his marriage was disintegrating. 'People say why do you write so well, or at least so often, about failure. I have my answers for that---that I have always found failure more interesting than success; that success is always the same, failure is somehow always different---but there is no sense of failure as great as the end of a marriage, so I felt an intense understanding of the feelings surrounding failure. Your whole sense of your manhood is challenged.'
Amis's belief in *The Information* was unaffected by the critical battering it took, and it remains his favourite work: 'The only one I'd pick up now and read for more than a minute or two.' He believes that critical responses to the book were affected by the surrounding media hysteria. 'A line was crossed with that book, where the atmosphere of the features page was transferred to the books pages with a very small addition of cunning and dissimulation. That was very shocking. I thought that's one thing, this will be the other thing, but it wasn't.'
'Even people well-disposed towards me here regard it as the weakest of my longer books, but that's not the case elsewhere---it was the mud sticking. It's become a commonplace to say it was weak, but it is the most popular of my books in other countries. I think of England as a special case. My Italian publisher said that if they wrote about you in Italy the way they write about you here, they would go to jail...They can't believe it happens here, just as they can't believe that America is lacerating itself over a negligible affair. It's very English and it all made me realise that I didn't understand the English, which I thought I did.' Not understanding the English---and the English not understanding him---has become a frequent refrain for Amis over the past few years. He says he feels out of step with the UK and that his creative impulse comes from the US. Passionless, apolitical, chummy Britain leaves him cold, and at some point---perhaps in five or six years, when his sons are reaching adulthood---he plans to seek out the creative warmth of the US.
'I'll always be an English writer', he says, 'but the subject matter of America appeals to me. The novelist is trying to get a taste, a vignette of the future, and America is the place to be for that. English genteelism can be inhibiting, and British writers are gravitating towards America. Novelists are always going to be looking at society with a critical eye. What novelist have we ever read who adored their country and had nothing ill to say of it? The trouble is that England is in a rather embarrassing situation: it's in post-imperial decline and in the process of becoming an efficiency state, a bit like Switzerland, with this great history but increasingly submerged. This puts the writer in a difficult position, because he's laughing at the country when it's going down, sniggering in the church at the funeral.'
'The country is becoming more prosperous, the environment more pronouncedly dependent on efficiency, more toned up. It is not the casual country it was 20 years ago. A novelist thrives on extremes and on disparities. I was in Denmark recently, and that is a society without social problems---the taxi driver and the university don are paid about the same. The result is a very calm society, where the only viciousness is on the roads---it all comes out there. Such writers as Denmark has produced have all left. You need a ladder to write about, not a horizontal surface. You need a slope.'
'In England, the tensions have eased. As Christopher Hitchens has said, all the piss and vinegar has gone out of it. When I was at *The New Statesman* (he was its literary editor in the late Seventies), I was surrounded by political people, and that was reflected a thousand times a day, in resentment, condescension, hostility. That seems to have been democratised away. Thatcher was probably the last ideologue, and now there's going to be a narrowing distance between party A and party B.'
Amis is not normally thought of as a political novelist, but he argues that his books did depend on an underlying political tension; that they were dealing with a society that was being conditioned by Thatcherism. '*Money* needed Margaret Thatcher in its subliminal background', he says. 'It's hard to imagine writing a novel that needs Tony Blair; whereas in America, although the gap between the parties is narrowing, there are all these other phenomena pointing to a possible future. They are much further along the postmodern road.' According to Amis, the urge to leave the UK has given his critics another stick with which to beat him. 'A new fact has found its way into the shithead fact-file on me, which is that I'm unpatriotic', he says. 'It was another one of those facts fished out for the marriage.' He talks of his aim of 'becoming an American novelist'. 'It's unrealisable, it won't happen, but right up to and including that is what I look forward to.' The writers he admires---Bellow, Roth, Nabokov---encompass America and appear always to be of the moment and inventing a style to encapsulate it, the very opposite of English genteelism, with its neat borders, deep logic. He is seeking that energy, that stylistic brio, that sense of renewal in the US.
If he leaves, it will be part out of distaste for a culture that is more interested in his private affairs than his public statements, that puts his dentistry before his artistry. More than that, however, America is a creative dream for Amis. It is about rediscovering and redirecting himself. 'Novelists want to know where the future is leading---that's why they've become so preoccupied with science in the past few years.' The memoir will deal with the past, with personal ghosts and public ghouls; then he can plot that fictional future.
