From: Vivian Droptrou
Category: Amis
Date: 8/28/99
Time: 7:38:09 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
FROM *NOVELISTS IN INTERVIEW* BY JOHN HAFFENDEN
AMIS: I think the novel is moving more and more closely to what life is like---not the same thing as realism---and that is why it's so autobiographical at the moment. I am not a particularly autobiographical writer, but I notice that the only thing you trust is something you have been through. It doesn't mean that you set things down as they happened, but the idea of the imagination romping free doesn't quite make it any more.
HAFFENDEN: In *Money* you anticipated that problem, I think, by including a me-persona, 'Martin Amis', so that nobody might identify you with your hero, John Self, indulging a wet, drunk fantasy.
AMIS: I was wondering whether I did put 'me' in there because I was so terrified of people thinking that I was John Self. But actually I've been hanging around the wings of my novels, so awkwardly sometimes, like the guest at the banquet, that I thought I might jolly well be in there at last. Also, every character in this book dupes the narrator, and yet I am the one who has actually done it all to him: I've always been very conscious of that, and it is perhaps an index of how alive and unstable my characters are to me. I learned this lesson from writing *Dead Babies*, since I kept on coming across people, usually women, who were so tender-hearted and so full of generous belief in characters that they couldn't bear to finish the novel---because they knew that terrible things were going to happen to the character Keith Whitehead. At the time I used to think, 'It's only *Keith*! Who cares what happens to *Keith*?' This guy is carefully divested of every possible reason for being liked, and yet people really do care about his character. I wrote about Keith with a sort of horrible Dickensian glee, and it never occurred to me that his unlovableness could awaken love.
HAFFENDEN: You do admit to schadenfreude, or a sort of gleeful superciliousness, when you are dealing with such a character?
AMIS: Absolutely, yes, and in *Money* I say that the author is not free of sadistic impulses. But it isn't real sadism, because I don't believe in Keith in the way some readers do. It's double-edged: I do believe in him in some ways, but not in the same way that I believe in real people. The glee might be creative glee of an irresponsible kind.
HAFFENDEN: Some readers might carry away the notion---if I can put it crudely---that the logic of what you write points to the idea that the ugly are unsatisfactory people...
AMIS: Unacceptable, inadmissable? No. It is funny that what assails me most strongly when I walk the street is the thought, 'Pity the plain', which I say to myself again and again. And by 'plain' I mean a lack of luck, conspicuous disadvantage. I have a huge amount of sympathy for them: I think the plain are the real livers of life, the real receivers; they have great vividness. My feelings are always the opposite of dismissal of those people.
HAFFENDEN: And yet you can treat them on the page with novelistic ruthlessness.
AMIS: It's perhaps because of the intoxication caused by the sense of freedom you have as a novelist: there is no limit to what you can do. The antecedent for me appearing in this book, by the way, is a novella I started writing---between *Dead Babies* and *Success*---in which I was to be the central character: I was going to summon Charles Highway from *The Rachel Papers*, Andy Adorno from *Dead Babies*, and Gregory from *Success*, and put things right with them; but that novella didn't work out. I wondered how something so self-indulgent could be such murder to write, and I soon abandoned it.