Born to Kingsley Amis, one of Britain’s most influential writers of the 20th century, Martin Amis’s early life prepared him adequately for judgement — from both literary critics and readers. But little did Amis anticipate that most of the rebuke and castigation coming his way would stretch much beyond the realm of literature, often shrouding his work. Whether it is his political views, fallout with fellow writers and agents, accusations of philandering, headline-making pay cheques, or comments on women and Islam, the author of many successful novels such as The Rachel Papers , Money , London Fields , The Information , and Night Train has often received more than his fair share of flak.
Billowing plumes of smoke with his electronic cigarette in an uptown hotel lounge in Mumbai, 67-year-old Amis says this is his fourth trip to India. Irrespective of the destination, the twice Booker Prize-nominated author finds himself confronting the same set of curiosity, one that overshadows his literary merits. But that does not deter the author from being his infamous candid self. “Although what I could do is shut up for life,” says Amis, “which is not a bad idea, but what I don’t do is do it on purpose.”
Amis is arguably Britain’s most controversial and outspoken writer-cum-public intellectual. The author supposes that the reason for the vituperative criticism he receives lies in the greater accessibility of his comments as compared to his literary works. “It’s much more difficult to respond to an old novel. That’s just the way of the world,” he says, adding that the “taint of inheritance” he carries attracts more scrutiny.
Growing up, the author drew criticism for writing under the shadow of his father. “People think I’m like Prince Charles.” Amis says he was conflated with the overpowering presence of his father during his early days as an author. “It’s as if I was born in 1922, and they said, ‘Not another Amis. You’ve overstayed your welcome’.”
From undue sympathy to accusations of inheriting talent, the English author battled unfounded censure. “Writers come from nowhere. That’s always been the rule. But I didn’t come from nowhere,” says Amis, who believes talent is inexplicable and can’t be acquired. “With me, there’s a taste of heredity but that’s an illusion.”
It was much later in his life that Amis realised how rare it is for children of famous writers to become successful novelists themselves. With the realisation came appreciation for his childhood and youth. “It’s given me a much thicker skin,” says Amis, who took note of his father’s disregard for reviews. From the age of 14 to 34, Amis also observed how book reviews deeply bothered his stepmother, actor-turned-novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Having observed the difference in tolerance for criticism between his parents, Amis learnt to remain calm at a time when his generation of authors was easily perturbed by critics.
Amis fondly recalls his close friend, journalist and author, Christopher Hitchens, who passed away in 2011, commenting on the close bond shared by the father-son duo. “He said he had never seen a son get along so well with his father.” Amis appreciates Hitchens’ words even more when he sees his friends struggle to get along with their parents. The writer blames it on generation gap, and moreover on the sexual revolution of the ’70s (a subject he widely explored in his book The Pregnant Widow ). “Because they grew up after the sexual revolution, it created a lot of tension with their fathers,” he says. But Amis seldom faced that problem. “My father wanted his children to be promiscuous, as he was promiscuous himself,” he says candidly, adding that he hasn’t been as licentious as his father wanted him to, at least not after getting married. “In my father’s generation promiscuity started when you got married.”
Drawing from his rather colourful life, Amis has been working, for the past 15 years, on an autobiographical novel about three writer friends. Amis likes his text to be shapely and well-structured, but unfortunately his life isn’t. To compensate for that, the writer has been making up imagined conversations. But what alleviates accountability towards truth for Amis is that all three friends he has written about are now dead. “That gives me freedom, and fiction is freedom,” explains Amis, who found himself feeling creatively confined while his friends were alive. “Now suddenly I can make things up. I’m reconciling fidelity to the truth while not being at the mercy of the truth.”
For Amis, fidelity to the truth can be negotiated in fiction writing, but the quality of innocence is indispensable. Going by the advice of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow, the author says everything in fiction has to be written as if for the first time. “Great effort and great energy are needed for that,” he says, comparing artistic innocence to the gaze of a child. Referring to the quality as “a perpetual naïveté of a writer,” Amis says an author must always ask awkward questions.
Having kept a close watch on British literature as it evolved over the second half of the 20th century, Amis says Indian literature has revitalised the English tome, despite being much younger. “I can’t tell you how dull, flat and unadventurous English writing was when, say, Midnight’s Children was published.” According to Amis, at the time when Salman Rushdie’s book was published in the early ’80s, novels were widely concerned with the problems of the middle class, social mobility and their concerns. “But Indian literature arrived and suddenly it gave us colour and liberated our literature.”
Having spent most of his life in Britain, Amis moved to New York in 2011. He vociferously opposed Donald Trump as President-elect but believes his presidency will affect journalism, not literature. “With literature and poetry, I don’t expect an adequate mature response, because it takes time to incubate.” Alluding to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit , he says the institution of debtors’ prison was discussed in literature more than 15 years after it was abolished. He expects that the phenomenon of the extreme right wing in political office in the U.S. will eventually be reflected in the country’s literature. Literature, he says, is retrospective rather than immediate in its response to reality.
kennith.rosario@thehindu.co.in
