Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Virtually all the gossip columnists who ran the story in summer 1993 went immediately for parallels between father and son. Kingsley’s career as a serial adulterer would not become public knowledge until the publication of his letters, but there were few in the literary world who had not heard the stories. Therefore to avoid libel actions editors listed Martin’s lovers from the 1970s – or to be more accurate those who had already featured in contemporaneous reports and whose links with him were incontestable, notably Mary Furness, Angela Gorgas, Victoria Roths-child, Emma Soames and Claire Tomalin; Tina Brown was conspicuous by her absence – and pointed up the uneasy parallels between two men who had grown impatient with marriage and family life at almost exactly the same age. The Evening Standard went for a gimcrack version of the Oedipus Complex. ‘Martin betrayed his two children, just as Kingsley betrayed him, and just as Kingsley was betrayed when his father left everything to Kingsley’s stepmother, so that he did not even have a photograph of his mother.’1 The author’s name, Rohan Daft, brings to mind one of Martin’s creations, now turned nemesis. Anne Barrow-clough and Tim Walker in the Daily Mail decided to spread their bets. ‘Regardless of what he did to whom, Amis’s friends agree that his treatment of women left something to be desired. Some say this was because he was trying to emulate his father, Kingsley, who left Martin’s mother, Hilly, for novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard when Martin was just twelve. Others say that the divorce left him deeply insecure and he was just trying to find lasting love and security. Others, more cruelly, say that because Martin is short, he has had to prove he is at least as attractive as the tall guys. But many say that Martin’s behaviour occasionally gave the impression of deep misogyny.’2 It was even suggested in the Mail and the Daily Express that for him lust was concurrent with social climbing. Emma Soames, ‘Churchill’s granddaughter’, was enlisted as the obvious example and the beauty of ‘heiress’ Antonia’s thoroughbred widowhood – her late husband being a brilliant Oxford don – treated as morbidly irresistible bait to Martin’s ambitions. The allegation that Martin’s ravenous libido is a compensation for his shortness is an enduring motif in all of these pieces and all of the more salacious revelations and psychological profiles come from unnamed ‘friends’. The articles fed mainly upon unsubstantiated gossip and were designed to sate an appetite of vindictive prurience among the general public – though whether this was real or a reflection of something endemic to the media and literati is debatable. Peter McKay in the Sunday Times suspected the latter, while also taking a swing at vituperative feminism: ‘This kind of rubbish is driven by sexual jealousy. Amis is seen as a man who has slept with prominent women and is punished accordingly by women writers who fear their own little tyros may follow his example.’3

  One reason why the alleged sources were routinely anonymous, more likely invented, was that the people who knew Martin best were disinclined to say anything at all to the press. Equally significant was the fact that even if someone could have been persuaded to speak they would have had very little to say, at least about Martin. Zachary Leader’s image of him as withdrawn, in a state of resigned passivity is confirmed by David Papineau. ‘I gather that he spoke to his father about the break-up, but I had the impression he thought it wrong to burden friends with his own problems.’ With the exception of Hitchens, in whom Martin did indeed confide and who would later serve as best man at Martin and Isabel’s wedding. The article which caused more pain than the gossip column pieces was by Toby Young, a writer and journalist who had been a friend of Isabel’s at Oxford. Young accuses him of outright hypocrisy, pointing out that not only was he guilty of exactly the same offence of which he had publicly accused his father but that he had made use of his undying love for his children as a conceit in his anti-nuclear diatribes of the 1980s.4 Sixteen years later when I spoke to Young he expressed a degree of regret, if not exactly contrition. ‘Martin, especially during the 1970s had earned himself the reputation as a shit, and not only because of his roll-call of disappointed girlfriends. But still, I regret writing that piece for the Sunday Times. My real concern at the time was that his work was taking on a somewhat pious tone and he seemed to endorse the notion that novelists are particularly sensitive souls who can detect underlying moral failures the rest of us aren’t aware of – a kind of secular priesthood, if you will. Complete balls, obviously, but I should have focused on that and not his divorce. In Einstein’s Monsters he had gone on gallingly about how his commitment to nuclear disarmament was fed by his devotion to the future of his children. Then he dumps them in exchange for a younger, prettier version of his wife. Those were the facts but in bringing them together I committed the fallacy of ad hominem. I learned subsequently that he was seriously harrowed by what happened, that he took full responsibility and so on. Anyway I have nothing but goodwill towards Martin – how could I not towards someone who has brought me so much pleasure over the years?’

  Isabel Fonseca was thirty-one in 1993, and to call her glamorous and cosmopolitan surpasses understatement. J. M. Kaplan, her maternal grandfather, had once owned Welch’s Grape Juice and was a multi-millionaire. Her mother Elizabeth was a painter and her father Gonzalo, a Uruguayan and internationally acclaimed sculptor. Her brothers Caio and Bruno – the latter dying tragically early, aged thirty-six – also became painters. Her sister Quina is a costume designer. Isabel grew up in a townhouse of bohemian aspect in West 11th Street, Greenwich Village and summers were spent at her grandparents’ house in East Hampton. Aged eighteen she spent her gap year in Paris mixing with artist friends of her parents and attempting distractedly to begin a novel. After taking a degree in Comparative Religion at Barnard College she was accepted by Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Wadham in 1984. To be a Fresher at twenty-two was not that unusual but, if you looked like Isabel – olive skinned, fine boned, with piercing dark eyes and hair soulfully black – and came with a spellbindingly cosmopolitan heritage, an Ivy League degree and a wardrobe that bespoke chic maturity, the response by post-sixth-form female peers was easily predictable: envy.

  She did not make too many close friends at Oxford, at least not female ones, but within a year she had become a magnet for men who expected their intellectual reputation to guarantee other attractions. She commuted regularly between London and Oxford and would eventually rent a flat just off Ladbroke Grove. She was several times photographed in London restaurants with the American film star John Malkovich. But the only serious relationship she had during this period was with a man of roughly her own age, the late poet and critic Mick Imlah.

  After Oxford she worked briefly at the Independent, then, for a year, at Bloomsbury Publishing and finally settled, for five years, at the TLS. She first ‘met’ Martin on the telephone, having been asked by her editor to persuade him to do a feature article. She knew who he was, of course, but was intrigued by the sound of his voice.

  Peter McKay, in the Sunday Times, stated shortly after news broke of her relationship with Martin that she ‘is described as a literary groupie’.5 In fact, she was, and is, an impressively independent figure. While working at the TLS she invested a great deal of time in a research project which had fascinated her since her undergraduate years, and which she discussed with her brother Bruno, who shared her interest. The gypsies of central and eastern Europe had been persecuted for centuries, more recently large numbers were murdered by the Nazis, and little was known of their fate following the descent of the Iron Curtain. Isabel scrutinized all available sources in print and on record but after the Soviet bloc disintegrated in 1989 she began to make tentative enquiries about visiting countries thought to have retained a considerable population of gypsies. From this she prepared a synopsis and sample chapter and approached Random House. The advance offered was sufficient for her to give up the TLS job and to fund the large number of visits she undertook between 1991 and 1995 to Germany, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Moldova, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.

  The book Bury Me Standing, published in 1995, w
as well reviewed and eventually translated into twenty-two languages. Much of the research was done prior to the beginning of her relationship with Martin and her life during that period utterly belies the term ‘literary groupie’. She spent roughly half of the four years it took to research and write the book outside of London in areas of eastern Europe about which little then was known. Beyond the urban centres of some of these countries – particularly Romania and Albania – not much had changed since the nineteenth century and strangers were treated with a mixture of curiosity and outright hostility. Isabel did not court attention as a dazzling attractive extra at literary soirées. She was invited, and talked to, because she was engaged in a daring and original project.

  Alan Jenkins, who has known Isabel since the mid-1980s when she began to review for the TLS and he was Deputy Editor, is particularly aggrieved by the ‘literary groupie’ slur. ‘When she was doing research for the book [Bury Me Standing] she faced very real dangers. Many writers, many male writers, would not have gone near those regions. But it is a token of her human gifts that she did not glamourize, even mention the terrifying risks she took, either in the book itself or as part of the publicity campaign. We are bombarded with authors who advertise their bravery and recklessness in newspaper profiles on their books about remote, dangerous regions. Virtually every week on Start the Week or Midweek a vainglorious adventurer will turn up. But Isabel kept quiet about what her research involved, very often grave physical threats. That, I think, is genuine courage. She cared greatly about the book’s subject but would not allow her ego to have any part of this. She is immensely unassuming.’

  The parallels between European gypsies, a wilfully dispossessed ‘tribe’ with a legacy and language of their own, and the much larger more integrated Jewish population are engrossing – Isabel herself, through her mother’s line, is Jewish – and this became the subject of conversations between her and Martin at parties and dinners after the publication of Time’s Arrow, the same year she began her research.

  Everyone who met him during the period between the summer of 1993 and autumn 1994, when in the US he made final agreements with Antonia on their separation and forthcoming divorce, confirms the picture of withdrawal and introspection offered by Zachary Leader. By October 1993 he had moved out of Chesterton Road and lived permanently in his flat in Leamington Road Villas. The occasional visits by Louis and Jacob prior to this, indulging their concern about where father was during the day, became more formalized. He would pick them up on Friday evenings and drive them back mid-afternoon on Sunday. He was not barred from the house but it was agreed that random visits would add further to the boys’ ongoing sense of confusion and disquiet. He still went to the tennis club, but less frequently, and, according to Chris, played with a noticeably reduced amount of tenacity. He held conversations but through a combination of nuanced hints and body language made clear that he was for the time being treading water and that some things would not be discussed.

  The Information was begun in 1990 but its gestation can be sourced to this period. Here was a man obliged to privately scrutinize his state of mind and his ability to act upon circumstances caused by himself. Irrespective of what this entailed in life – divorce and most painfully separation from his sons – he encountered also a peculiarly fruitful idea for a novel.

  London Fields is his most ambitious novel, Time’s Arrow his most daringly significant and The Information by far his most enthralling. In it we encounter two versions of the author, a split that occurred in life after he left Antonia for Isabel and retreated into a state of almost masochistic self-contemplation. The first time that he mentioned the book in public was during an interview in 1990 shortly after Time’s Arrow had gone to press. He had not as yet written anything but he was preoccupied with an idea; ‘it feels at the moment like a light novel about literary envy’. ‘At the moment’ it did but within the next three years the envious, mutually hostile relationship between two novelists – Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry – would mutate into a far more singular, personal and irresolvable antipathy.

  The former has published two novels. Of the first, Aforethought, we are informed that ‘nobody understood it, or even finished it, but, equally, nobody was sure it was shit. Richard flourished’ (p. 40). He was feted as a challenging radical new presence. His second novel, Dreams Don’t Mean Anything, was published in Britain, but not in the US. His third, fourth, fifth and sixth remain unpublished; his current, most ambitious piece, is unfinished and he supports himself and his family, just, by working for a vanity publisher, editing an obscure literary journal and reviewing for those newspapers still prepared to pay him. Richard’s friend from their university days, Gwyn Barry, succeeds magnificently with his first novel Summertown and is about to do even better with his second, Amelior. Richard treats both with the special kind of disdain that those with claims to cultural hauteur reserve for the merely competent and, even worse, the popular ‘. . . purest trex: fantastically pedestrian. It tried to be “touching”; but the only touching thing about Summertown was that it thought it was a novel’ (p. 43).

  The Information is one of the best novels about writing novels of recent years. It does not address this subject by turning in upon itself, by employing self-referring, metafictional devices; it is at once more accessible and compelling than that. The third-person narrator – in truth Amis himself – allows us into the emotional landscapes of a number of its characters but none is so intimately scrutinized as Richard’s. Indeed we intuit that Richard and the narrator are two dimensions of the same person. The irony which makes the novel fascinating is generated from the curious spectacle of a writer with immense, elevated conceptions of the value of writing, but who cannot write, being disclosed to us by one who most certainly can. We are told that

  He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. The difficulty began when he sat down to write. (p. 11)

  Richard’s problem is that the ‘first principles’ which underpin his idealistic, ambitious conception of what a novel should do – a combination of an epiphany and a thoroughgoing analysis of the state of everything – are what ensure his failure to realize these ambitions. Barry, however, has opted for the kind of writing that improves upon reality, makes it far more agreeable for the reader. And what of Amis, one is inevitably prompted to ask? The ‘information’ of the title is something never properly disclosed. It is capable of causing terrible dreams, animating unease, distress and destroying relationships, but its nature is coterminous with its effects. We never learn precisely what it is, but we know that had Richard been in charge of the book he would have attempted to disclose its essence, and the novel would never have been written. Amis, the narrator, is of course ever-present, with his taste for the darkly comic, his beautifully executed mixture of pathos and cruelty substituting for an attempt to expose, explain or confer meaning upon the events of the narrative.

  He is comprised of elements of each of his creations. He shares with Richard a preoccupation with the transformative power of language. Even permanently hungover narrators such as John Self cannot in Martin’s hands be content with the routine lexicon of things and movement. Cars ‘tunnel’ through the ‘grooves and traps’ of a street, their posture is supinely ‘low slung’ as they ‘shark’ through New York. Martin abhors the lazy predictability of language but he does not, like Richard and other adherents of the avant-garde, subject the reader to the grievous agony of high modernism; he prefers the conjuring tricks of the literary impresario. Martin has popularized literary nonconformism, created a hybrid in which anti-establishment originality is blended with something that the purist experimenters had failed to achieve, books that are compulsively entertaining and often make us laugh out loud. In this respect he begins to bear a superficial resemblance to
Gwyn. True, he has certainly not produced fiction which flatters the reader’s intellectual self-regard while pandering to their fantasies and delusions. He does not write like Gwyn but in terms of their public image they have much in common, that rare combination of media-promoted celebrity and high-cultural ranking.

  In 1992, eight years after its publication, Money had sold 270,000 copies and London Fields, over three years, 210,000. Compared with mass market novelists such as Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham and Barbara Taylor Bradford, these are modest figures but even when well-publicized prizes such as the Booker push ‘serious’ writers into the realm of the bestseller a quarter of a million would be treated as a successful total. Martin frequently matched his more popular compatriots in the serious literature compound, and his public profile, albeit unsolicited but ever present, left his peers in the shadows. Few writers whose mid-career work had been scrutinized in such unforgiving journals as Literary Onanistic Studies (1987) and allocated chapters in books called Exploring Postmodernism (1987) or Doubles: Studies in Literary History (1985) had also been pursued by scandal-hungry tabloid hacks and joined by royalty, rock stars and disgraced politicians in the gossip columns of the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard.