'Even the praise is bad for you'
[An excerpt from Emma Brockes' interview with Amis about Yellow Dog, which the Guardian begins serializing in early September (29 August 2003)]:
"Dadda." Clio Amis, three-year-old daughter of Martin, reaches for her father from the summit of her mother's hip. Amis's mind is elsewhere. His photo is being taken while his other small child, Fernanda, bobs in and out, and his wife Isabel answers a question about the sofa (it is hell-red velvet, she covered it herself). Casually, and after some delay, Amis turns to Clio and is met by a look of such fierce devotion, blowing off the child in nuclear waves, that he bursts into laughter. "Do you see that?" says Amis. "Daughters! You don't even have to do anything. You seem to have some primal power just by being you."
Being Amis, one imagines, means being rather more in touch with one's primal power than most. While the Mick Jagger pout of his early years has been forced into sardonic retreat, and the knocks have engendered a certain ruefulness, nothing breaks the surface of his languid charm. "People talk about the big ego of the writer as if it's fun having a big ego," he complains, languidly, charmingly. "It's not fun. It's corrosive, the constant..." he hesitates, "the constant status anxiety." But even a man of his well-staked confidence is occasionally floored by the intensity of his children's love. After the girls have gone, he says, "You seem, as a father, to have a value that you never had to your sons. Boys are always ridiculing you, affectionately, keeping dad in his place. But girls..."
The mantel of Britain's Greatest Living Novelist settled on Amis young and has grated and gratified ever since. McEwan has won more awards; Rushdie more notoriety, Ishiguru greater success in Hollywood. Murdoch was arguably brainier, Spark funnier. But it is with Amis that the press and the reading public have chosen to enact "keeping dad in his place". And dad is just about mellow enough to give a good show of not caring. In fact, bar the occasional stutter, dad is looking pretty damn chilled right now, in the living room of his north London home, where his books but not his records are in alphabetical order. "Nor," he assures me, "are my colognes." It is as well that he is relaxed, for two weeks after the interview Amis will cop another massive slagging, this time from Tibor Fischer, writing in the Daily Telegraph. Fischer calls his new book "terrible" and compares the experience of reading it to "your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating".
Elements of Yellow Dog are ridiculous. It involves a tabloid hack, a mad cockney, a spoof royal family with a manservant called Love ("coming, Love!" chimes the King, a joke that goes back to the Captain Darling gag in Blackadder) and a man who, after receiving a blow to the head, defaults to a pre-middle-class version of himself. It is about death and violence and impotence, and, above all, what Amis calls "the male insecurity problem", a regular theme of his, mixed in with a bit of post-September 11 blather about the end of the world.
You can spot the sentences that did for Fischer. "The contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilize the universe," labours Amis at one point. But there are flashes of brilliance, too; bad sex is "like someone doggedly trying to shoulder his way through a locked door". The husband of a distinguished woman exists purely for "the radiation of quietly relentless approval". A man climbs out of his car as "a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot".
. . .
On the subject of style, he says, "I thought it was thinning out. But I don't think that any more. There's more plot in this book. There's more drive. You don't want great curlicues when you're pushing forward, hard. You get slightly less musical, the prose does, but the craft bit gets... you make lots of decisions very quickly, are much more confident in the craft. It's swings and roundabouts. Many writers go off in a certain direction at about this point; my father did. His prose changed. There can be a turning against the reader and that's the difference between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Joyce doesn't give a shit about the reader any more. And late Henry James is an awful slog. It's a disaffection that you must fight."
When Amis pictures his own readers, it's himself he sees, at a younger age, which he admits is "kind of a wank". (Wank is a big word with him, as in "wank pit", the natural habitat of the loser male). "I want to be to my readers what I felt when I first picked up a book by Bellow or by Nabokov, where you think, this one's speaking to me. Every now and then at a book signing your eyes meet with a reader and they have a stoned look and you know that they've had a great time with you, and it's very moving and nice. It's like an antidote to the other stuff. You feel support, affection."
The "other stuff", to which Fischer's contribution is merely the latest in a long, and devastating line, has plagued Amis more than his contemporaries because he is perceived, I think, to have enjoyed that most-loathed thing in this country, an easy ride. The advantages of having Kingsley as a father were many - theirs was a literary as well as a filial relationship - but Amis is aware that his own achievements are belittled, somewhat, by the shortness of the distance he has travelled. "My writer friends have all come out of comparatively nowhere," he says, almost meekly. "That must be very gratifying."
. . .
How competitive is he with his peers? "I still feel the odd twinge of invidious feeling. But the moment it disappeared was when I was coming back from Germany and the first thing I saw was a headline in the [London] Evening Standard - "McEwan wins Booker Prize" - and I thought, fuck. But then I felt great for two days, a real high. The automatic reaction was, fuck, but it's the realisation that you're trying to do such different things, you're not all trying to write the same novel. Great relief."
. . .
Amis's child-rearing has about it the symmetry of that board game in which you roll the dice and are handed either two pink pegs, or two blue ones, depending on the square you land on. His blue pegs, teenagers Louis and Jacob, are from his first marriage to Antonia Phillips. His pink ones, Clio and Fernanda, are toddlers from his second marriage, to Isabel Fonseca - "The boys were active in choosing their names. If it was a boy they wanted it to be called Slash after, is it Guns and Roses?" - and he has a daughter Delilah, 26, whom he didn't know about until five years ago. "My daughter Delilah, my grown-up daughter who's coming tonight, showed me an example of text messaging. Once you get going, it's really easy."
Bits of Yellow Dog are written in text messaging shorthand, with slightly dad-like, behind the curve enthusiasm, and also in emails, which are referred to by one try-hard character as "e's". Amis turned for help with his cockney speech patterns to the memoirs of Mad Frankie Fraser: "I took from him charming little locutions like, 'and otherwise' for 'etcetera'. Eg, 'They had tables for cards and otherwise.' "
But it doesn't do to do too much research. "You don't want to read too much," he says, "but to feel your way into it." Although sitting there channelling a "feeling" entails the constant risk that nothing will happen.
This is something, he says, no writer can escape, the fear of surrounding himself with dead prose, with lifeless images. "My father had terrible anxiety at breakfast every day, before going in to write. He'd take himself by the hand and say," - here, Amis grasps his own hand and adopting a sing-song voice, enacts the moment that it all boils down to, the space behind the ego. "Now what is it?" he asks himself, softly, and in a whisper replies, "Well, it's that bit near the beginning."
