Martin Amis: the Prospect interview

Britain's most controversial novelist talks to Tom Chatfield about his new book, the sexual revolution, Philip Larkin's sex life, and why JM Coetzee is no good

by Tom Chatfield / February 1, 2010 / Leave a comment

Published in February 2010 issue of Prospect Magazine

Above: Martin Amis, mid-discussion at the New Yorker Festival

I spoke to Martin Amis at his house in January, shortly before publication of his twelfth novel, “The Pregnant Widow.” If you’re not familiar with the book, it may be useful to look at my review of it (available here) before reading the interview.

Tom Chatfield: I wanted to start off by asking you about the new book, which I’ve been very struck by. It has had an unusually long gestation, and yet it read very easily to me, in a way that I hadn’t felt for a while: it felt very much of a piece.

Martin Amis: Well, that’s an accurate apprehension on your part. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I struggled for years with a turgid autobiographical novel, with a fictional structure. It seemed endless and inert. And it’s a funny thing about life that, when you put it in a novel, it’s dead. None of the usual forces that are in a novel—to do with unities and metaphor and imagination—were there. There was this horrible Easter, the Easter before last, in Uruguay, where it seemed huge and endless, no end in sight. I just thought to myself, “my god, this is dead.”

I had a bad couple of weeks, and there was a bit in it that I liked, which was the Italy bit. It was a big bit, but it was a tenth of what I had written. I took it out and it was about maybe 100 pages—and I thought, can I get this up to a novel size and expand it? It was a bit I liked because it was the most fictional: although it all seems very transparent now. And then I wrote for a year, 15 months, and when the proofs came in the book was 470 pages long, so 370 were new and recent. The bulk of it was the latest stuff. So it doesn’t I hope have that feeling. In Mao II, Don DeLillo describes this block in writing a novel: “it was the colour of a monkey, it had alligator’s feet, it was a monstrosity…” which is what that was. And I realised that it was two novels. The other half will be pressed into a literary novel about Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Ian Hamilton [the British literary critic]—he’s the Neil Darlington figure [in The Pregnant Widow]. And there will be one novel in-between.

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Comments

Gregory Norminton
February 1, 2010 at 14:59
Would that Amis might turn his talent to the 'green' issues that he briefly touches on. The climate crisis deserves its own EINSTEIN'S MONSTERS: in which Amis created a model for writers to follow who would tackle the enormity of our potential for self-annihilation. The opening essay is in my view a masterful instance of engaged polemic: engaged because it dares to assert a moral course of action to avoid the unspeakable. Yet I fear that same anger which he felt about nuclear weapons is absent in Amis when it comes to the ecological crisis. He observes it with interest but without passion; and if he consults someone as ideologically motivated as Nigel Lawson [http://www.desmogblog.com/nigel-lawson] on the subject, that suggests we may have to look to Amis's students for that polemical and novelistic fire which, twenty years ago, their tutor might have turned on the subject.
Angel Bacon
February 1, 2010 at 19:07
This is a great interview. Thanks boys. Once the weeping and wailing is over, humour can be the silk-woven frame to a rewardingly philosophical vantage point ( albeit , sometimes limited to the beholder ? New Yorkers still aren't buying Eminem's Shady Bin Laden rap ? Arabs have never enjoyed cartoons - period ? ). I've laughed tears over, and later at, Amis' novels ( tho' hated Yellow Dog ). Vonnegut too was a high-wire comic ( " the good thing about suicide is you don't have to get your teeth fixed after all " ) but it is none the less just as scary to witness just how much of the school exam curriculum read Slaughter and Monkey House sci-fi novels now mirror the modern State, as indeed the 1989 London Fields ( and the Prince of Wales' ) climate change forecast... Luckily for us ( if not always for them - enter 'the muse'? ) male writers do sometimes marry harridans ( aka hard core feminists ), perhaps because these women can enable free-form access to his essential creative innocence ( aka ethyl alcohol - Vonnegut quotes Ken Hubbard " Prohibition is better than no liquor at all " )to produce work worth publishing, while she gets to wear the grown-up swanky pants around the VIP-by-proxy lounge ?
Lismahago
February 3, 2010 at 18:22
'Yet there are whole reputations built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph breaks?' Amis probably meant Thomas Bernhard, whose gallows humour is always evident and in quite a similar vein to Kafka's. That moot point aside, a fine interview.
Tom Chatfield
February 3, 2010 at 18:48
Lismahago, thanks for that: yes, it looks increasingly like Thomas Bernhard (an Austrian writer) was whom Amis meant. I should probably have edited my response to make it look like I knew exactly whom he was talking about… One note based on some of the analysis the interview has had elsewhere: I don't believe for a moment that Amis was critizicing Coetzee as a publicity stunt. I think he was offering a considered literary opinion—which one may disagree violently with, but it's absolutely of a piece with his beliefs as articulated elsewhere. In the footnotes to Experience, for example, he writes pace Nabokov that "style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified." This has always impressed and alarmed me: the nagging question I never got around to asking him was about how he squared this view with the idea of style as something one can impose or remove upon ideas independent of it. If you take a profound, eloquent sentiment and ruin its wording, do you now have something morally ugly? Or, again, if you take a stupid or amoral idea and express it beautifully, does the content shift? I'm sure that he didn't mean this—he's talking about one's duty to language as a writer, to every sentence, and often writes as though the best reader can invariably sniff out moral failings via an author's failures of style: Trotsky, for instance, Amis excoriates (in Koba the Dread) as a superficially good stylist whose moral rot becomes apparent on closer reading. All this continues to trouble me, partly because cliché will always be with us, wearing a new set of clothes for every generation, and partly because I simply don't trust even the most exquisite taste as an infallible moral compass (bad people can sincerely love great art, and aren't inexorably barred from creating it either; can we really tell from the Odyssey how good a man Homer was, or even if he existed?). Then again, if you are only interested in the very, very best, perhaps such battles become the only ones worth fighting.
vanessa
February 4, 2010 at 13:13
What a self-publicizing prat. The German writer with no paragraphs is probably the great Sebald: wouldn't expect Amis or Tom Chatfield to appreciate him. As for Coetzee, makes me think of margaritas ante porcos.
rae
February 4, 2010 at 13:25
I wish we had writers who were the unacknowledged legislators of the world - as they do in France - and made public pronouncements when demanded by what's happening in the world, rather than when they need to advertise their latest book. What a sad world we live in. Could the German writer be WG Sebald?
total nosher
February 4, 2010 at 13:34
Come on, Bernhard is hilarious - Cutting Timber, the Voice Imitator, anyone?
Tom Chatfield
February 4, 2010 at 14:37
Vanessa—gosh, have we met? I like Sebald, and I like to think MA would have known who he is. I also enjoy and admire Coetzee, but I didn't go to interview Martin Amis to tell him what to read. Though I like to think I could have had him chuckling at "Disgrace" within the hour if I'd really turned on the charm. Rae—er, hasn't Mart been trying to do exactly that for about the last ten years? He made a few comments about terrorism, religion, world peace, wrote some essays, made the headlines…
Jason Kennedy
February 8, 2010 at 22:10
I don't see that much innocence in Amis' work. The thing about him is that he is articulate, like Will Self, but that his novels are not that interesting, like Will Self. Oh, they are friends. The German writer sounds very much like Bernhard, who indeed has no paragraphs, just as the mind has no paragraphs, and happens to be a great writer, far greater than Amis, and who is extremely funny, though not across his whole output. Perhaps Amis only read Corrections, which is not that great (but is well regarded critically). Gargoyles, Walking, Old Masters, Yes, The Loser. All excellent. Amis has spoken out on politics, terrorism, etc, but the unfortunate thing is the content of his words. 'Some societies are just more evolved than others,' he said. 'I am not saying these people are genetically incapable of not being terrorists. 'These societies are arming themselves with weapons like the AK47 and blowing people up on buses and Tubes.' When one member of his audience suggested not all Muslims were terrorists he retorted: 'No one else is doing it.' Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488239/Martin-Amis-launches-fresh-attack-Muslim-faith-saying-Islamic-states-evolved.html#ixzz0eys9f4de Somehow Martin Amis thinks that the capacity to blow people up using bombs dispensed by pilotless drones is a measure of the West's moral superiority. Irish, Greek, Basques, all are still employing so-called terrorism to achieve their goals. Mr Amis is factually incorrect, perhaps he would like to tell the above peoples of how morally superior he feels to them, also.
jethro
February 9, 2010 at 12:58
I enjoy Martin Amis enormously (although I do find his essays more enjoyable than his fiction) but I am also a huge fan of Coetzee. Mr Amis can obviously read what he likes but I think he errs by kind of suggesting Coetzee's fans are just a bunch of seriously gloomy souls (I read miserable Coetzee but I read all kinds of works, including many of the writers Mr Amis admires). Mr Amis is naturally able to read deeper than a lot of us, and I envy him this skill, but I don't think that the cliché phrases in Coetzee's work really deflect his admirers from the author's many admirable qualities.
Lawrence
February 10, 2010 at 18:01
I admire Martin Amis for his courage to go up against the tide of political correctness and moral relativism and Islamophilia that sickens the Dying Isle like a cancer. However Amis is no literary giant any more than his father was, so when he says a truly masterful writer, J M Coetzee, one whose place in the literay canon is assured (unlike Amis), is no good, one simply has to laugh. Amis only belittles himself, not Coetzee, in this regard. Do I sense some jealous hostility for the superior writer?
jorrocks
February 12, 2010 at 18:19
I don't think it can be said that Coetzee lacks a sense of humour. He is at least funny as Amis's friend, Ian McEwan. But then Amis doesn't think much of Beckett either, does he?
Malcolm
February 15, 2010 at 21:28
Yes I too think the German writer is probably Sebald. It's true he does not write with paragraphs ... but I'd challenge MA to write sentences half so beautifully organised and with such a melodious internal rhythm. In Austerlitz there is I think an 11 page sentence describing the clearance of a Jewish ghetto. One of the most breathtaking literary experiences I have ever had.
victor crebolder
February 19, 2010 at 10:43
Some sense of humour, even in the (darkest) hour, is of (pivotal) importance. Amazing this seems to be the one thing publishers tend to forget. Seriousness is a (serious) disease, which gives us headache, suicide and what not... So yes, how can those people with s. and without h. get across anything, really!
mark ramsden
February 22, 2010 at 12:24
The notorious 'house in order' comment about Muslims was a deliberate misquotation from senile Marxist Terry Eagleton, missing out the 'Don't you feel that..." beginning. Unfortanetly his factoid will now be repeated till the end of time even in the broadsheets because journos can't be arsed checking. He's not upper crust incidentally, although he was fortunate to get a free pass from his father's fame it doesn't mean he's wrong about Jihad or Islamists. The Pregnant Women is superb, and as for (Ha!) misogyny, he loves women and they love him. Sorry to post this here but then I'm a subscriber and, unlike MA, my Dad wasn't famous, I'm no longer published by Serpent's Tail and I need the attention! Martin Amis Jihad Rap MA quotes mashed up with lounge jazz. Just what the world needs right now...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PfB5QxUZyo
mark ramsden
February 22, 2010 at 12:28
and Tom Chatfield absolutely rocks...Thank heavens not everyone goes for the kneejerk Anti-Mart rubbish. MA is BURNING right now. Best he's ever been.
tempo dulu
February 24, 2010 at 10:23
Amis wrote some great early novels but his tendency to over intellectualize things can get boring. He's not as funny as he once was, unfortunately.
Paul Doolan
February 24, 2010 at 22:28
So MA thinks Coetzee lacks humour and is a bad writer. Well, hhe is not alone. In Coetzee's newest novel a biographer is researching a South African novelist called Coetzee. This is what she dhears from an old lover of his: "After Disgrace I lost interest. In general I would say his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight.....Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion". Now, if that's not hilarious then I don't know what is.
Andy
March 24, 2010 at 18:13
I've read both Amis's and Coetzee's literary criticism, and found both incredibly bland and shallow. I'm not a Brit, but I do admire and envy the quality hournalism of UK, so many articles are well-written and interesting that I just can't get enough of them (if you're a snob, you still have something like The Economist to love). So I'm really surprised that Amis and Coetzee, as Literary Writers, can be so revered.
Ganpat Ram
April 29, 2010 at 17:56
I am sure Trotsky would have been crushed if he had known Kingley's boy would sniff out his "moral rot". Terrifying.
Ganpat Ram
April 30, 2010 at 17:00
Martin Amis complaining that anyone else lacks humour is just.....funny. His solemn, fatuous self-importance is what strikes one about Amis. Julie Burchill is usually wrong, but she was dead right about what makes Amis embarrassing: The spectacle of a light-weight mind struggling with heavy-weight topics.
Ganpat Ram
April 30, 2010 at 17:22
Richard Preston in the Daily Telegraph caught the frivolity of Martin Amis very well: "...maybe, unlike Amis’s circle of Oxbridge baby boomers, Coetzee and other novelists from Africa and India and Eastern Europe have seriousness in their bones and aren’t principally trying to show off when they write. The old “Who’ll be most read in 50 years’ time?” test is not infallible – no one cared much about Bach until Mendelssohn revived him – but let’s just say, quietly and calmly, that Disgrace and Age of Iron, to name just two, will be appreciated long after Amis is being footnoted as son of Kingsley, friend of Tina Brown."
Peter Hayes
January 4, 2011 at 19:58
I always find Amis interesting, but he doesn't get out enough. In the fresh air, among the real people. In fiction you can claim inaccuracy and ignorance are the fault of the narrator, but not when he (and it always is) is supposed to the there. Example: Child and animal pornography available freely anywhere in the Western World - sorry never was. Peddling a myth. Apart from in Denmark and the dark recesses of the internet. Not places MA ever goes, anyway. I often find his lack of knowledge - about the professions the characters are supposed to inhabit - rather strange as well. Does he, for example, ever consult with people who work in advertising? In Money he claims (with great confidence) that simply shoving sex forward will sell any product. Eh, it doesn't and I can prove it. (Would he - after I proved it - simply use the "unreliable narrator" cop out?) Sadly Amis never has much critique of the USA (where he lives some of year according to Wikipedia) simply, I believe, because he does good commerce there. Where that that false veil of being an intellectual (which he most clearly isn't) still hangs over him.
Wypadki Samochodowe
March 14, 2011 at 22:58
@Angel Bacon - im totally agree with you
What is the point of fiction if not to expand horizons? » Spectator Blogs
April 8, 2013 at 09:01
[...] has little time for such work. He finds Coetzee humourless, artless and worst of all talentless: ‘His whole style is predicated on [...]