From: I. Zelnik
Category: Amis
Date: 8/27/99
Time: 7:35:26 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
*THE TWO AMISES* [FROM *THE LISTENER*. 15 AUGUST 1974.]
[Twenty years ago, Kingsley Amis's first novel, *Lucky Jim*, won the Somerset Maugham Award. This year, the award has gone to his son, Martin Amis, for his novel, *The Rachel Papers*. Kevin Byrne talked on *Bookcase* (BBC World Service) to the two authors. He asked Kingsley if he had had any influence on his son's work.]
KINGSLEY AMIS: I had absolutely nothing to do, except genetically, with Martin's novel, because---quite properly, I think---he refused to show me any of the work in progress until it was far too late for me to make any suggestions. He did ask me about one phrase, which I think I improved. Apart from that, I had no direct influence on what he wrote in his first novel at all.
MARTIN AMIS: My father's last novel, *Ending Up*, was all about a lot of crappy old people living in a house and getting on each other's nerves and ending up more or less killing each other. My next novel is about a lot of young people living in a house in the country, slightly secluded, ending up getting on their nerves and killing each other too. But it's not called *Starting Out*.
BYRNE: I wondered if the two authors could see any similarity between Kingsley's character, Jim Dixon, in *Lucky Jim* and Martin's Charles Highway in *The Rachel Papers*.
KINGSLEY AMIS: No, I think they are totally different characters objectively, if that means anything, and also viewed in very different ways by the respective authors. I feel that Lucky Jim is probably a little more like me---he's a piece of me, let's say. But I feel that Martin's Charles Highway is much less a piece of him. The first pages of *The Rachel Papers* are what you might call anti-autobiographical. Reading it with the eye, not only of another novelist, but also of a father, I thought: 'Let's see how much autobiography we are going to get here.' And I don't say that Martin intended to do this, but the effect for me was that he was deliberately disavowing any possible autobiographical identification---which I think is valuable, because it helps the reader to know where he stands. Twenty years after the event, I'm still confused with my character. I decided that Jim Dixon couldn't be mistaken for me, even though, as I was saying, he might embody a slice of me, so I made him a North of England person. I am a London person. But to this day there are people saying things like: 'Well, there are various Northern dialect forms denoting the horse-fly---I needn't tell *you* that.' They still mistake me for a Yorkshireman. Even intelligent readers, it seems, can't help identifying author and protagonist.
MARTIN AMIS: Yes. Everyone is so naive. People come up to me and say: 'If I were Rachel I'd want to kill you.' As if Rachel were a real person. Especially in the first-person novel, you take a certain rather disliked aspect of your personality and boil it up and distil the very worst aspect of it and try and look at it ironically.
BYRNE: Kingsley, you taught in the United States for a bit, and Martin, you went to school in America for one year. What do you think of English fiction as opposed to American fiction? I mean, a lot of Americans think English fiction is rather tired and sort of old-maidish.
KINGSLEY AMIS: Well, I can be quite forthright about that. I think that the state of the English fiction written in Great Britain is deplorable, and that the state of American fiction is far, far worse. There are still some English novelists, like Anthony Powell and Elizabeth Taylor, and, not to put in too much of a plug for the family, my own wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, who transact the novel in the way it has always been done. But the way I look at America, I can see various important or interesting or great books, but I can't see an author. Not a single American novelist has ever established an oeuvre.
BYRNE: I suppose Nabokov would be considered an American author now.
KINGSLEY AMIS: Well, of course, I hate him like poison.
MARTIN AMIS: I think he's marvellous.
KINGSLEY AMIS: There are a large number of American novelists some of whose individual works I admire---Hemingway, Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger. But I think that the steam or energy going into fiction in England, and perhaps also in the United States, goes not into the straight novel or mainstream novel, but into other things, into espionage fiction, crime fiction and science fiction. The practitioners of the mainstream novel in England, and even more in the United States, have totally run out of steam, except those few exceptions I've mentioned, and the intelligent chaps are writing thrillers.
MARTIN AMIS: I think American fiction is far more hopeful than English fiction at the moment. I have always thought it remarkable that someone who is as linguistically aware as my father should never have sought to experiment in prose at all, or to have seen any virtue whatever in slightly experimental prose.
KINGSLEY AMIS: Experimental prose is death.