22

An Interview With Martin Amis

“You write your first book, actually, to say to the world: ‘Here I am, I’m nice and interesting and have me round, I’ll go to bed with you’,” says English novelist Martin Amis on his first visit to New York (“It seems to me an easy place to live”) since he was ten, to celebrate the publication of his second book Dead Babies. A first, The Rachel Papers, written when he was 21, had served as an effective introduction. “I think that writers write about what it’s like to be a certain age, maybe only tiny bits of being a certain age.” Dead Babies was written when he was 22–23. It is about an English country house weekend (“The most civilized thing you could possibly do, but telling a seventy year old woman my book’s called Dead Babies, I do feel a bit of a pervert”). “People in America will think it’s a shitty, vicious book,” he says, “but in England I’m known as a writer with civilized attitudes and not just a sick scribbler.” His favorite American author is Joseph Heller whom he recently interviewed in London. Interview interviewed him in extremely civilised surroundings – the Upper East Side flat of Jon Bradshaw, the Michael York look-a-like English author of Fast Company, a book about gambling in the US. Martin has borrowed the flat for three days while Bradshaw is out of town.

“Oh there you are,” he says, opening the door before we knock. “Did you get my note?” No. It has fallen off the mail box, which is why we had not known how to open the front door. “The door is open” read the note.

Inside the flat is dark. Suitcases, books, and bottles of whisky are carefully spread out on the floor. Martin’s girlfriend July (the British representative of Woman’s Wear) is kneeling on the floor with a telephone arranging cocktail dates. It’s three thirty and just as cold inside the flat as on the street.

“It’s cold. You’ve managed to bring England to New York.”

“Yes, it’s just that temperature in here. And there’s no TV, no stereo, no radio, no heating and no lights,” Martin nods, satisfied.

“I was looking for a heater and I didn’t see any.”

“Isn’t that some unit over there?”

“No, that’s the air-conditioning unit.”

“Would you like a blanket?”

Straw chairs perch around a glass coffee table in the middle of a starkly furnished lounge. Sitting in the fading light and fighting off the cold with the Haig, I asked the 26-year-old son of Kingsley Amis these questions.

BOCKRIS: When your book appears are you very keen to do as much as you can to [publicise it].

AMIS: I’m very unpushy with my publishers – I don’t hustle the publicity department, I don’t ring them up and ask how’s it going every ten minutes – it’s embarrassing to be too interested, especially financially.

BOCKRIS: That’s a very English attitude. In America, it’s “Are we making money right now?”

AMIS: They can’t believe how casual I am about it. They say “We might have another review in this morning, why don’t you ring up and check.” And I say, “Just send it to me in due course. I don’t want you to make any effort.” But I’m sure if I said – “I think this is the greatest book written since Hamlet, I happen to believe it sums up the modern human condition,” – I would get a couple of hundred sales out of it. Because in America you say you’re great and you’re great. In England it’s the reverse.

BOCKRIS: You say you’re great and everyone says …

AMIS: You’re a loudmouth. And you say you’re lousy and people say you’re great because they’re discovering you.

BOCKRIS: So you’re not coming to America like Oscar Wilde who made a very carefully planned trip to release his personality on the country?

AMIS: Yeah, but he was Irish.

BOCKRIS: Speaking of Oscar, do you ever get scared that as a writer you’ll get out of shape and fat?

AMIS: Well, actually, if you look around the writers in England, they all never do any exercise.

BOCKRIS: But they’re all so poor …

AMIS: They’re poor, they don’t eat right …

BOCKRIS: But you probably won’t be that poor …

AMIS: Well I’ve got a job.

BOCKRIS:… being successful.

AMIS: I think I’m a pretty athletic figure compared to most of the English writers. It is a worry, but they all seem quite fit. They live a life of such anxiety that it keeps them in some kind of shape.

BOCKRIS: Do you do any exercise at all?

AMIS: Yeah, I play tennis, swim a bit, walk up and down the stairs and everything.

BOCKRIS: Did Dead Babies actually come from an experience you had?

AMIS: It was based on a weekend I went through before I’d written my first book, where a lot of people were drunk, screwing, stoned, lying, and for about half an hour it seemed like hell. I thought there was a book there. Then it got stylised in my imagination and two years later I wrote the novel. Throughout writing my first novel I was thinking about it all the time. In fact, everyone agrees that part of writing is subconscious and that does a lot of the work for you. You can have terrible problems in a novel – you just don’t know how you’re going to get from A–B – then don’t think about it for a few months and it’s all ready without your being aware of having attacked it.

BOCKRIS: How long a period was there between your finishing the first novel and getting started on the second?

AMIS: I began the next day. And after finishing Dead Babies I began the next day on my third. It’s the only defense against a terrible post-natal depression and tristesse.

BOCKRIS: Do you feel much more confident and sure of your powers and abilities now that you’ve done two books?

AMIS: No, I don’t think one grows in that way at all. I may worry about different things, but I do the same amount of worrying. I never feel I can relax. It’s not that I want to get on or anything, but I feel uncertain about how good I am, how much talent I’ve got. I’m more aware now of just how likely I am to be second rate rather than first rate. A sort of sadness enters your work at this point. When you’re writing your first book, it could be anything; it could be King Lear or it could be nonsense. And then you get an idea of how good it is and it’s quite good, but it’s not very good, and will you improve at all? You hope you’re learning, but you also hope you’re not getting more timid and that you won’t try for bold risky effects. So you’ve got to fight against caution as well.

BOCKRIS: Do you think Dead Babies is going to be very successful?

AMIS: I shouldn’t think so, no. I can see reviewers playing it cool about the decadence. “We don’t want anymore bad news.” I told my publisher that my next book would be about a puppy that won the love of the village. He was very keen and said, “That’s the sort of book people in America want.”

BOCKRIS: What is an average day in your London life?

AMIS: I live with my girlfriend in Pimlico in a flat. Three days a week I go to the office of the New Statesman about ten, do what needs to be done there and meet friends for lunch, work through the afternoon and come home, perhaps go out to a party, or dinner, or stay in and write. So, quietish but with a fair amount of incidents. I’m talking to writers a lot, which is sometimes exciting. I’m throwing ideas around all the time, and that’s good, and actually having, as far as I can see, a fucking marvellous time compared with everybody else. I’m aware a hundred times a day what a horrible life everyone has compared with me, although, of course, no one’s perfect. But it’s buzzing a bit in London and actually I find it quite stimulating the way everyone is re-examining life from the point of view of not making enough money and the mild danger you live through every day. It’s not a bad decade to be in London.

BOCKRIS: Do you still have a job for economic reasons or do you want to keep having a job?

AMIS: I like the idea of two bases; a home and an office.

BOCKRIS: Why not rent an office and go write in it?

AMIS: I need company. It’s a very nice office, there are a lot of people there I like, and there’s gossip.

BOCKRIS: Would you say perhaps the major reason you live in London is because it’s a good place for you to work?

AMIS: It’s more natural caution. The idea of movement seems like a wrench to me, a frightening prospect.

BOCKRIS: Do you think it would throw you off your rhythm to move to New York for a year and write here?

AMIS: Yes, it might do. I’m very conscious, in spite of the subject matter in my book, of working in a tradition, and the British is a more sedentary tradition than you have in New York where I keep getting electric shocks.

BOCKRIS: Do you make more money from your books in the States or in England?

AMIS: If your book gets to number fifty on the American bestseller list, it’s selling twice as well as the number one book in England. So I sort of can’t help but make more from here. I think it’s about three or four times as much actually.

BOCKRIS: Can you make enough money from your novels to live on if you want to?

AMIS: Just about, but I would never like to try and do that because then writing becomes work and not a mixture of work and play which is the way I want to keep it. You could imagine yourself rushing through a book just to get the advance and I don’t want to go in that direction. No doubt I’m going to end up that way.

BOCKRIS: Have you ever met anyone else whose father was a writer?

AMIS: Auberon Waugh. Evelyn Waugh’s son.

BOCKRIS: Do you talk about that much between yourselves?

AMIS: We would both be embarrassed to talk about it. I always knew I was going to be a writer, that’s what I always wanted to be. I think from the age of twelve I would start looking at life as possible novel fodder.

BOCKRIS: Do you feel a lot of pressure on yourself because people are obviously expecting a third book?

AMIS: Only pressure from inside. I have an image of myself as middle-aged and people say “He wrote two novels in his early twenties and look at him now.” You don’t want that to happen to you. But I think people are actually rather wary of talking about it. My father, for instance, never gave me a word of encouragement, bless him, you know, from that point of view. When I told him I was writing a novel he just said “Oh really?” And he didn’t see it until it was published. People treat me with a bit of reserve in that way, which I’m grateful for. It’s probably not the same in America where everyone is much more concerned with what’s going on and it’s not a private business, as it is in London, until publication.

BOCKRIS: What’s your vision of yourself in the next 5–10 years?

AMIS: I think I’d only stop writing novels if I dried up or if I was very short of money or something like that. Then you get into the Norman Mailer circuit of having to write more crap than good books. I think you should tap your central energy first which for me is fiction. That’s the stuff that falls upon you and there’s no one else involved. If you get tired of that perhaps write some other sort of books. When I’m old and fucked up and can’t write anymore and no one wants to see me and I’ve been rejected by all my friends, I’ll write those other books.

BOCKRIS: What do you do if you desperately need to relax?

AMIS: Drink. Do you want some more Scotch?

High Times sent me to Berlin in 1978 to pick up on the vibe in that strange, alienated city. My visit coincided with a Patti Smith concert and the opening of a German film on punk rock. After London, it was the punkest city in Europe.