The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  Are you less worried about nuclear war/ecological crisis than a decade ago? If so, were those anxieties more to do with you rather than the planet?

  Liam Knights, Winchester

  The nuclear situation has changed radically, and so have my concerns about it. We are no longer in the age of Mutual Assured Destruction; we are in the age of Uncontrolled Proliferation. It’s still a mess, but the species has made a great evolutionary advance and clawed its way clear of the most obvious firebreak: arsenal-clearing thermonuclear exchange.

  Ecology will soon be a universal obsession: just wait. More generally, it’s natural for us to identify with the planet now, because the planet seems to be aging at the same rate we are. That the planet is getting older would not have occurred to a native of the eighteenth century, any more than it would have occurred to the dog sleeping at his feet.

  Do you ever worry about turning into your father, Kingsley?

  Jonathan Connolly, Bristol

  This question cannot but sound sinisterly comic to me. If the Kingsley we are referring to is the Kingsley of his last years, then I could naturally do without the physical metamorphosis for at least the time being. Probably the suggestion is: am I worried about inheriting his political curve, worried about waking up one morning as the apoplectic reactionary he would sometimes (morosely but playfully) impersonate? No. Our political histories are antithetical. I have always been pallidly left-of-center. In our more vituperative disagreements (about nuclear weapons, for example), I used to counterattack by saying that he was the politically excitable creature, not me (my father served as an active Communist from the late 1930s to 1956). In other ways, I wouldn’t mind turning into Kingsley. I would like to maintain such lifelong affections with all my children. And I wouldn’t mind writing a novel as good as The Old Devils, when I’m sixty-four.

  I saw A High Wind in Jamaica [the film in which Amis appeared aged thirteen] and thought you died quite movingly. Why did your acting career pack up at such an early age?

  Chloe Sinclair, Norwich

  My acting was not a career but a blip and a fluke. I was spectacularly talentless. They had to shoot my final scene ten or twelve times, because I kept falling to my death (in fact a three-foot drop onto a mattress) with a look of glee on my face.

  Why have you persistently smoked roll-ups over the years? They’re messy and fiddly, they’re always going out, they hurt your throat, and they must drive you nuts while you’re writing.

  Claire George, Gloucestershire

  I didn’t just happen upon roll-ups. I tried every other smoke on the planet (and had long cohabitations with Marlboro and Disque Bleu) before crystallizing into Golden Virginia and Rizla Greens. It’s simply the best burn available. Also, on long plane journeys, during epic movies, et cetera, you can stick your nose into the pouch and snort up some aromatic nicotine: it postpones the craving, and feels genuinely and impressively detrimental to your health.

  One of the websites about your work had a poll a while ago on which was your best novel. Money (1984) won by quite a way. Do you agree with the verdict, or at least understand the reasons for it? And is there an emotional impulse not to agree, as it implies that you haven’t written anything better in seventeen years?

  Stephen Pepper, Kingston upon Thames

  In Money, I dispensed with form and trusted entirely to voice, and this released a great deal of energy. I’m glad that gamble worked, but I have not felt the urge to repeat it. If the urge resurfaces, I will obey it. Anyway, it doesn’t mean much to say that Money is a “better” novel than, say, Time’s Arrow. Money is just more fun. Nowadays I look back less and less. Even to check the proofs of a completed work feels like a chore and a distraction. I think about the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that.

  Is writing novels regulated by the law of diminishing returns, or do you still get the same surge of adrenaline that must have come during the creation of Success, Money, et cetera?

  Tom De Castella, Brixton, London

  Well, it’s not the same surge. And, on the page, I suppose your musical energy can expect to proceed diminuendo. But put it this way. A decade ago, when I wrote, I used to say to myself, “I’m too busy to shit.” Now I say to myself, “I’m too busy to pee.” And busy is shorthand: I do not face a blizzard of engagements, I sit alone in my study all the working day. Busy means fascinated to the point of being incapable of doing anything else.

  Which of your books do you think will be most valued in 100 years’ time?

  Linda Grayburn, by e-mail

  Your books are like your children: you try not to have favorites. When asked to name his favorite novel, Anthony Burgess always said, “The next one.”

  Do you feel you have ever successfully portrayed a female character? Does the heroine of Night Train count?

  Linda Grayburn, by e-mail

  An early novel, Other People, was written entirely from the heroine’s point of view, as were about two hundred pages of London Fields. The heroine of Night Train, Mike Hoolihan, is about as butch as a woman can get, but she certainly “counts.” She’s my only first-person heroine, and going from the “she” to the “I” is like a slow zoom inside you. It felt natural, all the same.

  State your preferences, Martin: Coke or Pepsi? Regular or Ruffles? Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck? Oreos or Hydrox? Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? Sean Connery or Roger Moore? Budweiser or Miller or Coors? Levi’s or Wrangler? Cheez-Its or Cheese Nips? Hemingway or Fitzgerald? Ford or Chevy? Beatles or Rolling Stones? Domino’s or Pizza Hut? Gielgud or Richardson? New York or L.A.? Twinkies or Ding Dongs? Kingsley Amis or Martin Amis?

  Gooch McCracken, by e-mail

  Coke. No opinion. Tom Jones. Oreos. Tolstoy. Sean Connery (are you kidding?). None: Corona or Beck’s. Levi’s (said mutely). No opinion. Fitzgerald. Chevy. Both. Pizza Hut (and Pizza Express). Gielgud. New York. No opinion. No strong opinion.

  What inspires you to write?

  Nick Flach, by e-mail

  The inspiration for a particular novel can be a phrase, a sentence, an image, a situation. But novelists aren’t poets. They are grinders. What sends me up to my study is a feeling in the back of the throat—like the desire for my first cigarette. Writing is a far more physical process than is generally believed. Half the time you seem to be mutely and helplessly obeying your body.

  When you write about your own emotions—as when discussing the deaths of your father and Lucy Partington [Amis’s cousin, murdered by Fred West]—how hard is it not to lie?

  Laura Cartwright, Cambridge

  It was my intention in Experience [a memoir published in 2000] to show all my nearest and dearest in the most generous possible light. There are no lies in my book, though there are lapses of memory, chronological snarl-ups, and so on. Some of these surprised me, startled me, but did not distress me. I suppose it’s integrity of memory that’s important. In writing a memoir you also find out how screwed-up you are—how many beefs and grudges you harbor. “When a writer is born into a family,” said Philip Roth, “that’s the end of that family.” It hasn’t been the end of mine, because I had no familial scores to settle.

  What’s the one question you’ve never been asked? And the answer?

  Janet Spence, by e-mail

  There are millions of questions I’ve never been asked. These do not include the one that goes: Do you set yourself a time to write each day or do you just do it when you feel like it? Answer: both. The related question I’ve never been asked is the one that goes: When you write, how hard do you press on the paper?” I suppose my imaginary answer would be: “quite” or “fairly” or “reasonably.”

  The Independent 2001

  * “You,” in this case, referred to readers of The Independent (in 2001). The questions and answers were written, not spoken—hence their inclusion here. For the vital difference between spoken and written, please turn to the first paragraph of the piece on Christopher Hitchens (p. 329).

  The Fourth Estate
and the Puzzle of Heredity*

  I was born in Clapham in 1922. My literary career kicked off in 1954 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, Lucky Jim. This was followed by That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You, among others; but my really productive period began in 1973, when I published both The Riverside Villas Murder and The Rachel Papers. Nineteen seventy-eight saw the appearance of Jake’s Thing and Success; in 1984 it was the turn of Stanley and the Women and Money; in 1991 it was The Russian Girl and Time’s Arrow. This last was short-listed for the Booker Prize; but I had already won the Booker Prize with The Old Devils in 1986. I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham Award twice—the first time for my first first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

  That period, alas, came to an end in 1995. Since then, though, I have been far from sluggardly. This year, at the age of eighty-eight, I publish my thirty-seventh work of fiction, The Pregnant Widow, and next year will see another novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England—my sixty-seventh book, which nicely sets the scene for my ninetieth birthday. I am responsible for fourteen volumes of nonfiction; I have taught at Swansea, Princeton, Cambridge, Vanderbilt, and Manchester. May I quote Anthony Burgess? “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.” I have been married four times (two of my wives are novelists), and I have eight children and seven grandchildren—so far. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention my Collected Poems (1979).

  The writer described above is of course semi-imaginary. But such a phantasm, such a basilisk of longevity and industriousness, seems to exist in the minds, or in the anxiety dreams, of a tiny stratum: British—no, English—feature writers who occasionally address themselves to literary affairs. Incidentally, this is what they’re groping to express when they say I’m “turning into Kingsley.” They should relax: I’m already Kingsley. In truth, it is easily the most unusual thing about me: I am the only hereditary novelist in the Anglophone literary corpus. Thus I am the workaholic and hypermanic—and by now very elderly—Prince Charles of English letters. And I have been about the place for much too long.

  About 95 percent of the coverage has passed me by, but some new tendencies are clear enough. What’s different, this time round, is that the writer, or this writer, gets blamed for all the slanders he incites in the press. Some quite serious commentators (D. J. Taylor, for one) have said that I’m controversial-on-purpose whenever I have a book coming out. Haven’t they noticed that the papers pick up on my remarks whether I have a book coming out or not? And how can you be controversial-on-purpose without ceasing to care what you say? The Telegraph, on its front page, offers the following: “Martin Amis: ‘Women have too much power for their own good.’ ” This would be the equivalent of “Ian McEwan: ‘Climate change science is a vicious lie.’ ” I suppose The Telegraph was trying to make me sound “provocative.” Well, they messed that up, too. I don’t sound provocative. I sound like a much-feared pub bore in Southend.

  And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, “Why do you do it?” They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It’s something the newspapers do. The only person in England who can “manipulate” the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price (a.k.a. Jordan). But there I go again—victimizing Katie. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story, too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn’t it?

  To return briefly to the longevity theme—and all the stuff about street-corner suicide parlors, and the “silver tsunami” (demographer shorthand for what has been described as “the most profound population shift in history”). The press reacted with righteous dismay; but I saw no recent headline saying “Terry Pratchett is mad,” by way of commentary on his remarks about euthanasia. In addition, it turns out that 75 percent of Britons (but none of the political parties) agree with him and agree with me.

  Thus the euthanasia question, eerily, is the reverse image of capital punishment at the time of its abolition. The people were still in favor of judicial killing, but the government insisted on reform. That was in 1968. Forty-odd years later, the people, while no longer keen on judicial killing, are strongly in favor of medical killing, or mercy killing, but this is a reform that no politician dares countenance.

  Of course, Sir Terry’s dignified statement was taken from a public lecture; mine was a mishmash of half quotes from a sardonic novel. For the interested, the passage reads (I am referring to Europe’s distorted age structures):

  Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers). And we will be hated, too. Governance, for at least a generation, he read, will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old. And they won’t like that, the young. They won’t like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing.

  Then, too, Sir Terry has Alzheimer’s—a condition made yet more tragic by the liveliness of the mind it here afflicts (I am thinking also of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow). And Sir Terry is older than I am. Or is he? Well, yes and no. I am eighty-eight—but I am also twenty-four (look at the photographs). A sixty-year-old grandfather, I am, in truth, still the “bad boy” (not even the bad man) of English letters. Who could possibly “manipulate” perceptions as chaotic as these?

  Writers should come from nowhere. This sounds right as a slogan, and I like its spirit. Writers do almost always come from nowhere, the children of schoolteachers, entrepreneurs, accountants, traders, bankers, and (especially) miners. I didn’t come from nowhere; an English novelist, I am the biological issue of an English novelist (and if you hold that these things can rub off by mere propinquity, then bear in mind that for a formative eighteen years I was the grateful stepson of yet another English novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard). Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances, was in her day a well-known writer; we have the Alexandre Dumas team, Sr. and Jr.; Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) looked the part for a while, but then gave up fiction; we also have Susan Cheever (and, briefly, David Updike). And that’s about it, in any language. I accept that the two-generational thread is offensively unegalitarian, bearing the taint of inherited privilege. But perhaps its freakish quality is what some people find alien (and I too am sometimes disquieted by it). Writers should come from nowhere. But what at this stage am I meant to do about it?

  The Guardian 2010

  * This piece was satirical in intent, and satire tends to need a bit of commentary, or in this case a bit of cladding (hence the introductory footnote and the appended last paragraph, which is technically a postscript). There had been a flurry in the British press, supposedly in answer to some (approving) comments of mine about euthanasia. In my opinion the hostility of the response boiled down, as so often, to the fact that I was the writer child of a writer parent. Such an alignment is for some reason extremely rare—writer siblings are by comparison ten a penny (the Brontës, the Jameses, the Manns, the Powyses)—and gives rise to strange apprehensions. Parent and child are subliminally conflated, so that (for example) the child’s welcome in the world is quickly overstayed.

  On the Road: The Multicity Book Tour

  A coinage has forged itself in the media community of the West Coast: O.J., as a verb. Thus, to O.J. Or, passively (and much, much more commonly), to be O.J.-ed or to get O.J.-ed. O.J.-ing, generally, has nothing to do with sports, with movies, or with sexual jealousy (let alone with orange juice). It has to do with media reschedulings caused by extra coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial.

  “People are always getting O.J.-ed off of things,” expla
ins Kathi Goldmark, my media escort in San Francisco.

  “So for example you’d say…?”

  “ ‘Norman Mailer was going to do national TV, but he was O.J.-ed off of it.’ ”

  I glance at my schedule and say, “Look! I’m meant to do a radio interview at eleven-thirty. Live. But it says here they’ll tape it if I get O.J.-ed.”

  Among other things, Kathi runs a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, composed of writers—with, for instance, Stephen King on rhythm guitar and Amy Tan on backup vocals. Like Amy, Kathi is a Remainderette; she plays me a live tape of the band as we drive around town (Amy Tan’s voice is hauntingly deep and steady). On her car phone Kathi calls Amy about something else (a favor: I want to pick Amy’s brains). Kathi gets Amy’s car phone, which is answered by Mrs. Stephen King, who hands her over to Amy. And Kathi hands Amy over to me.

  After my reading, at the bookstore in Berkeley, Kathi and I dine with Jessica Mitford. Kathi has recently started up a record company called Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Jessica’s nickname, Decca, happens to be the name of a record company, but it is on the Don’t Quit Your Day Job label that Decca has just released her first CD: a stalwart rendering of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Decca is currently updating her classic study The American Way of Death (which reads like a nonfiction version of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One). But there remains the question of the follow-up to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” We tentatively decide on “When I’m Sixty-Four,” which should be appropriately retro, because Decca is seventy-seven.

  I know all this will feel like a dream when I get back to England (to London and my study). For now, though, I think I like the hotels and the plane rides and the many fresh encounters; and I think I like the cultural unfastidiousness and the postmodern promiscuity. To O.J., I think, is a good verb, and a welcome guest to my prose. But you do have to remind yourself, from time to time, that O.J. means someone accused of cutting his ex-wife’s head off.