Martin Amis Read online

  MARTIN AMIS

  MARTIN AMIS

  THE BIOGRAPHY

  Richard Bradford

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011

  Copyright © Richard Bradford 2011

  The right of Richard Bradford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-84901-701-5

  eISBN 978-1-84901-850-0

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Ames and Harry.

  And with thanks to Helen and Gerard Burns.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Before He Left

  2 Wild Times

  3 Oxford

  4 The Novelist

  5 The Seventies

  6 Paris

  7 America, Kingsley and Bellow

  8 Self, Marriage, Children

  9 Dystopian Visions

  10 The Break-Up and The Information

  11 A Gallery of Traumas

  12 Novelist and Commentator

  13 Significance: Is He a Great Writer?

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due principally to Martin Amis for cooperating helpfully with my research. All potential interviewees were encouraged to approach him for reassurance that he had no objections to the project, and he generously agreed to five lengthy interviews with me. Also, he was good enough to permit quotations from both his own writing and his father’s. Isabel Fonseca generously provided assistance with the preparation of the work.

  I am immensely grateful to the following for their time and help: Rosie Boycott; Angela Gorgas; Anthony Howard; Bruce Page; Francis Wheen; Rt Hon. Nicholas Soames MP; Sargy Mann; Frances Mann; Colin Howard; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Will Self; Alan Jenkins; Clive James; Anthony Thwaite; Ann Thwaite; Professor Zachary Leader; Patricia Parkin; Anthony Blond; Laura Hesketh; Dannie Abse; Eric Jacobs; Christopher Hitchens; Alexandra (‘Gully’) Wells; Professor David Papineau; Andy Hislop; Chris Mitas; John Walsh; Professor John Carey; D.J. Taylor; Esmond Cleary; Sam Dawson; Roger Lewis; Steve Foster. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from interviews conducted with the above for this book.

  Thanks are due also to the Huntington Library, California and the Bodleian Library, Oxford for their assistance with my research.

  The book could not have been written without the time allowed for my research and writing through my appointment as Research Professor of English at the University of Ulster.

  Roger Lewis was generous with his time and help, and the assistance of my agent, the incomparable Leslie Gardner, was invaluable.

  I am grateful to Andreas Campomar of Constable and Robinson for his advice, encouraging comments and patience, and to Angela Martin for handling the publicity.

  Rosemary Savage provided careful and reliable assistance.

  A grant from the British Academy enabled me to visit various libraries and conduct interviews in the UK, Continental Europe and the US.

  Finally, enormous thanks are due to Dr Amy Burns, without whom this book could not have been written.

  Reference details of quoted works are provided in brackets in the main text. The bibliography is made up solely of works by Martin Amis. The following abbreviations are used: ‘TWAC’, The War Against Cliché; ‘VMN’, Visiting Mrs Nabokov; ‘TSP’, The Second Plane; ‘TMI’, The Moronic Inferno.

  Introduction

  I was on a plane somewhere above Continental Europe and a man, a seat away, was reading a book while sipping his something-and-tonic. I thought he was trying to control a hiccup or a sneeze but then his whole upper body began to shake and he appeared, to my alarm, to be battling with some sort of seizure. Soon after that he began to shake and within minutes the contents of his nose and throat left for various destinations on his trousers, tray and glass. He was now growling, screaming with previously suppressed laughter. The book, I noted from the cover, was Money. It was, I thought, odd. Nothing wrong with laughing in public, surely? But later I began to understand the poor man’s problem. He didn’t care what anyone else felt; he felt ashamed of what he was doing. The book, brilliantly, makes you feel complicit with the narrator, the hilarious (the sexist, obese, partially deranged, pornographer hero) John Self. Self isn’t simply a one-off, a grotesque; he is an unapologetic representative of what Martin Amis calls the ‘background’. And when you follow him there you feel uneasy about enjoying what, outside the book, you might profess to treat with disdain, or pretend to ignore. ‘Suspending disbelief’ is a familiar cliché. Upending, smothering disbelief, denying us a complacent immunity from the background is something else, something few writers can achieve. I’d met Martin several times already but it was then, in his absence, that I became particularly fascinated by the relationship between the man and his work and decided to write this biography.

  Biographers borrow from the recipes of fiction writing, with qualifications. You can give energy to verbal portraits but, unlike the novelist, you cannot alter fact. And here Martin Amis presents a severe, infuriating problem. You would think that for someone who has polarized the intelligentsia and held the attention of the media for so long that hyperbole would be superfluous. Unfortunately – at least for fans of celebrity biography – there are no extraordinary, portentous, shameful, let alone monstrous, aspects of him to be discovered. Do not misunderstand me: he is not a colourless, dull man. Quite the contrary, he is excellent company, by parts sagacious, funny and bewildering. He is kind, affably short-tempered and as a family man incomparably caring. If there is a mystery about him it comes from the anomalous relationship between his public persona, driven by his writing, and the private individual. It is almost as though he is the mirror image of his father, with everything in reverse. Kingsley’s work is magnificently ecumenical; all human life is there but throughout there are sustaining verities. By contrast, Kingsley the man was a cabinet of fears and dilemmas, sometimes hurtfully unpredictable. His fiction was his refuge.

  Martin projects his perplexities and horrors on to the fictional canvas, but not to dispose of them. He feels he has a duty to his audience, to challenge, infuriate, entertain, but not to use his work as a clearing house for his personal fallibilities and crises. His fiction is an index to his honesty. If in life he is confronted by moral and emotional perplexities – and there have been quite a number – he will not like many intellectuals smother pain with ideas. And this refusal to make sense of unkempt reality is the keynote of his novels. The parallels between his weird assembly of inventions and his personal history are fascinating. He is a great writer and the retching man on the aeroplane reminded me of what he does indeed have in common with his father, something that has guaranteed for both a great deal of critical ire. Kingsley put it well: ‘The rewards for being sane are not many but knowing what’s funny is one of them. And that’s an end of the matter.’

  M
artin certainly knows what’s funny, which will not be a surprise to readers of his work. ‘But,’ asked an old friend of mine – we’d been admirers though certainly not unreserved fans of his fiction since the 1970s – ‘but . . . what’s he really like?’ I paused for quite a while. I could have been honest, brief and a little cryptic (see above), or I might have offered a few anecdotes (see below), but I must admit that the question threw me. It pushed into unsettling relief a dilemma experienced by all biographers and rarely, if ever, acknowledged. Each of us – writers or not – will know a small coterie of people intimately, intuitively, but such is the nature of these relationships that the very idea of spreading their emotionally charged uniqueness across several hundred pages of print seems tactless; facts might be recorded but truth will remain elusive. The outsider cannot even claim access to tangents of shared experience, and I certainly belong in that category; I have known him for twelve years but I refer to him throughout this book by his first name for the simple fact that I need to distinguish him from Amis Snr, not because we are close friends. We have talked one-to-one at very great length, for which I thank him; we have talked about everything, laughed about his father’s inimitable manner as a letter writer, argued over nuclear weapons, global warming and Ulysses (I advocate retention of the second, mock doom-evangelists of the third and am bored senseless by the fourth, and he despises my opinions accordingly). He has told me of his childhood, his various families, friends and peers, of how he writes, what he writes; and I have interviewed friends, lovers, intimates. But can I claim knowledge of what he’s ‘really like’? Here we go.

  He can be edgy, uncooperative, slightly neurotic. But which of us can say that we have immunized ourselves from these states, particularly since we exist in a world that appears so programmatized and inflexible? And he has every right to be suspicious and begrudging. Through no fault of his own he became, has become, the victim of a disastrous intermeshing of previously separate cultural trajectories. He is a ‘media star’; his divorce, various relationships and financial status falling prey to the gossip columnists of the tabloid press. It is unlikely that the writers, let alone the readers, of this dross have ever opened any of his books. At the same time his novels are not examples of avant-garde elitism. Some are more accessible than others, but in terms of versatility, a willingness to try anything, he is in contemporarary writing beyond compare. His life has been, still is, exciting and enviable. He is – though he remains ambivalent about it – a celebrity, and his ability with words elicits an exceptional level of jealousy from his peers and competitors. As a man he is equally enviable, because behind the media-generated image he is signally modest and thoughtful. How can these seemingly incongruous dimensions of his persona be compatible? Read on.

  1

  Before He Left

  What makes a great writer? Being born into what would strike most as a scenario suitable only for fiction might play some part. Martin Louis Amis came into this world on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital, Oxford. His father Kingsley reported the next day to his closest friend Philip Larkin that Martin ‘was as blond as P [Philip, his elder brother by a year] and less horrifying in appearance’. His mother, Hilary Amis (née Bardwell), was just twenty. She was as Larkin would later remark, ‘The most beautiful woman I have ever seen without being the least pretty’, a woman, some would say girl, who had encountered as much in her teens as most of her peers would experience in a lifetime. The scion of comfortably middle-class home counties stock – her father was a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Agriculture with a taste for madrigals, folk dancing and ‘traditional’ English culture – she had been sent first to a St Trinian’s-style boarding school for girls in North Wales (Dr Williams’s School for Young Ladies) from which she frequently absconded, and after that to the more respectable Bedales where she was bullied and which she left, by mutual consent, after less than a year. She completed her education at Beltrane, Wiltshire, departing aged fifteen with no qualifications. She then worked, as general helper, with board and lodgings, at a dog kennel in Bracknell run by two amiable lesbians, a period she enjoyed greatly. Aged sixteen Hilly enrolled at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford and after six months, bored with her course, gave up the study of art to become their ‘head model’. This, literally, meant that her head was the subject of paintings and sketches. Soon, however, she was posing in the nude, with little embarrassment or concern except for the draughty ill-heated studios where she was asked to sit for most of the day.

  Kingsley was at this time in the third year of his degree in English, having returned to St John’s after war service with the Royal Corps of Signals. In 1947 he gained a first, an achievement which he greeted with unconvincingly modest surprise. He had, he knew, a razor-sharp critical intelligence and his only flaw was a tendency to allow derision to intrude upon measured evaluation.

  They met in 1946, via mutual friends, in a tea shop in the Cornmarket. Kingsley had noticed her before on several occasions, assumed she was an undergraduate and was mildly unsettled to learn that she was just seventeen ‘and hence not nearly so depraved as I had hoped’, he reported to Larkin. Within a year Hilly was pregnant and Kingsley, determined upon a literary or academic career, greeted the prospect of family life with horror. Hilly felt trapped and confused, pregnant by a man she had known for only twelve months, whose magnetic amusing social persona belied a well-protected seam of hapless despondency. At Kingsley’s apologetic promptings they went in search of an abortion, not a locally sourced back-street termination endured by those with no alternative but the more expensive, almost legal services provided by indulgent, venal practitioners in West London. The operation was booked with a ‘Central European Private Practitioner’ who asked them for £100 in advance. Only after taking advice from a GP, a friend of his old army comrade Frank Coles, that such procedures even when practised by trained gynaecologists could be ‘brutal and dangerous’ having no legal protection, did Kingsley decide that Hilly’s welfare should be given precedence. So began the brief, one-month, engagement of Kingsley Amis and Hilly Bardwell. Their marriage in the Oxford Town Hall Register Office was attended by both sets of parents but only after Kingsley’s mother had persuaded her husband and the Bardwells to lift their horror-stricken boycott. Nick Russel, a fellow undergraduate at St John’s and the only other guest, treated the couple to dinner in The George, a nearby pub. Both sets of parents departed separately as soon as the brief ceremony was concluded. On the morning of his wedding day Kingsley composed a letter of application for admission as a B.Litt research student. He would for the time being survive on a grant in the hope that he would eventually obtain an academic post. The couple first took a flat in Norham Road but by the time Martin was born they had moved into a quiet nineteenth-century terrace house in Banbury called Marriner’s Cottage.

  In letters to Larkin written during this period Kingsley professes his happiness at being with Hilly, complaining only that marriage obliged him to spend inordinate and unendurably boring periods in the presence of his in-laws. What he also discloses without explanation or contrition is the Kingsley Amis he would have been had a combination of fate and social convention not contrived to turn him into a married father of two, desperately seeking regular employment. In one letter he offers an ardently detailed report on a dark-haired, slim, sullen-looking girl with ‘noticeable breasts’ who returned his stare ‘disinterestedly, half-closing her eyes’. His prose discharges a hint of something much more intimate than glances exchanged in a dance hall, but most striking of all is the fact that Hilly was alongside him when this occurred. She knew nothing of it but the frisson of sharing this secret with his friend, fuelled both by guilt and excitement, would set the tone for much of their subsequent correspondence during Kingsley’s marriage to Hilly.

  Marriage and children created two versions of Kingsley Amis and by the end of the 1950s he would often allow them to coalesce. He had by then grown tired of the ritual of deceit
which in any event he practised with little competence. He frequently used Robert Conquest and even Larkin as bearers of alibis for his adulterous excursions, but Hilly too had become aware that her husband and the father of their children lived in a manner that any good-looking lecherous bachelor would envy. Despite an extramarital affair of her own – begun much later and somewhat despairingly – and Kingsley’s seemingly ingenuous apologies, Hilly never countenanced an open marriage. The dinner party at their Swansea house when Kingsley went into the garden three times to have sex with each of the women guests is a verified fact yet the implication that the non-participating observers were indulgent debauchees-by-association is inaccurate. Hilly struggled to control her distress. Martin: ‘Hilly, a virgin when she met Kingsley, was a very reluctant “swinger”, and never stopped minding the other women a lot.’

  Even after much of the lying and secrecy was undone there remained in Kingsley’s psyche, and certainly in his writing, a propensity towards guile and doubling. Whether his unplanned early marriage was the cause or a symptom of this is a matter for psychoanalysts but what is certain is that throughout his adulthood there was never one Kingsley Amis. He became a cabinet of gestures – some genuine, others fabricated – and release mechanisms, the latter allowing him to simultaneously advance and retreat from the same position. Friends, interviewers, critics; all would, for a moment seem to gain knowledge of the essential Kingsley Amis only to have the illusion dispelled by an act or statement variously moving, candid or quixotic, and on further inspection anomalous.

  Martin was of course far too young to have knowledge of this aspect of his father’s personality in the 1950s but later when he too had become a writer the past began to interweave with the present: he saw in Kingsley things that he recognized and wished if possible to suppress in himself. He succeeded only partially and his endeavours would certainly leave an imprint on his work.