No More Illusions
Martin Amis is Getting Old and Wants to Talk About
It
by Alexander Laurence and Kathleen McGee
We looked forward to talking with Martin Amis,
British novelist, and author of the new book, The Information (Harmony).
He is the author of numerous books, including Money, London Fields, The
Rachel Papers, Time's Arrow, and Visiting Mrs Nabokov.
Like many, we had read the pre-publication
publicity articles in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The media circus
treated his new book as if Kato Kaelin wrote the next Ulysses. Amis complained
about being misquoted in The Chronicle, an article which came out the morning
we interviewed him. He called the article sloppy and atrocious. Amis pointed
out that the writer had misquoted him as saying "desperation" instead of
"desertion;" while he drank a "Virgin mary" not a "Bloody mary." He ordered
another one while we talked to him in a hotel around Union Square about
his new novel. Much hoopla had already been made about his large advance,
his new set of teeth, his mid-life crisis, his divorce, but we focused
on the art of fiction.
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Alexander Laurence:
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Do you do e-mail?
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Martin Amis:
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I went on-line yesterday on the internet and answered
some questions and typed up some answers. It was weird because I don't
use a computer as I said when they asked me how I worked. I said "I work
in a velvet smoking jacket and write with an ostrich quill." It's not quite
the truth.
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AL:
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Good to hear it. In the spirit of Ronald Firbank....
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MA:
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Exactly.
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Kathleen McGee:
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Have you gotten many writers asking you for advice?
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MA:
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You get a little of that. Some advice or encouragement.
If someone is struggling with their first book, the only advice I would
give them is "Just get to the end, then worry. But do finish it." Then
you'll know what you have in front of you. Don't worry about the little
decisions along the way.
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KM:
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You didn't worry too much with your first novel
The Rachel Papers?
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MA:
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No. Also because I was the son of a writer, there
was never any question of its getting published. I guessed that, simply
out of mercenary curiosity, most publishers would have taken it. Children
of writers are usually good for one or two books, and that's it. There's
a curiosity about book number one, rather less for book number two, and
then you shut up. That's been the pattern. I'm still at it. I think that
some people do think that I've inherited a full set of writer's genes,
and that I lie on a hammock drawling into a type recorder, but it's just
so easy for me.
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KM:
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I was wondering how you were affected by being
around an author growing up, your father, Kingsley: how has that influenced
you?
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MA:
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What it does is it de-glamourize the job, because
nothing is more banal than what your dad does for a living. I'm the same
as all writers but I'm different in that way. I can get off the train of
these thoughts of being a writer. I can just let them run on, and not take
them too seriously. I'm detached about it. But say you're dad was an army
man like Ian McEwan; it seems like a big achievement to write books. But
with me, it doesn't seem like an achievement or an oddity. So when I get
a bad review I don't lie on the sofa in the fetal position all day.
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AL:
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In The Information there are two types of novelists:
there's Gwyn Barry who writes effortlessly like you did with Rachel Papers,
which you wrote so young; and there's Richard Tull who writes compendiums
of knowledge which don't interest anyone. Do you think that these writers
are not so much based on other people so much as them being a struggle
between two sides of yourself?
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MA:
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Yes, except that Gwyn Barry writes crap effortlessly.
Neither one of them is me. Many writers would just have one writer as the
main character, then there would have been a been a subtle psychological
conflict in a writer's mind, but I'm a broad and comic writer, so I get
the two and force them apart. Gywn is a compendium of all stupid and vein
thoughts you get when you're feeling pleased with yourself and smug, and
when you feel slightly over-rewarded. Tied up with that too is the idea
that this worldly success is irrelevant, and no big advance, no prize,
no sash, no yarn is going to tell you what you want to know: are you going
to last after you're dead? It's locked in. You're never going to know the
answer.
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AL:
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Richard Tull is obsessed with the idea of immortality:
reaching a vast audience, getting good reviews, and it's somehow going
to redeem him, that he's considered in the same light as Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare....
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MA:
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That's right. Funny enough, as a subject, it's
failure that is rich and complex, and poignant. Success is a drag as a
subject: it's what Jackie Collins writes about. Success is for the soaps.
Failure is what's interesting. Failure is where we live. On the whole,
we don't walk around gloating over our little triumphs. We walk around
aching about our defeats and disappointments, and since the writer's ego
is infinite, there's always some damn thing you're not getting. Even if
you won the Nobel prize, you'd be thinking, well, I didn't win it last
year and I'm not going to win it next year.
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AL:
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So you think that they're going to give you the
Nobel this year for this book?
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MA:
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Yeah. But it matters and it doesn't matter. I
read in L. A. at a place called Book Soup, partly a restaurant, and then
I ate there at the bar, so I could smoke while I ate. I looked down the
bar and there were ten people, and eight to nine of them had my book in
front of them. They were chatting and having drinks. I thought "This is
the way the world is supposed to be." I want to go to any bar in the world
and have people with my book. You want everyone to read you and no one
else, basically.
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AL:
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Do you think that since this is a book about two
novelists that it's self-conscious or Postmodern?
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MA:
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It isn't really. I've written things that are
more Postmodern than this. The fact that it's about writers takes care
of that kind of tricky-ness. There's no messing around with the narrative,
there's no levels of reality or unreliable narrators. Although the publication
of the book has become surrounded by all these Postmodern ironies.
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AL:
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Is it a third person narration? I thought that
there was an "I" repeated a few times subtly through the book. Who is this
narrator?
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MA:
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There's an "I" in the first sentence. The narrator
is me but he disappears halfway through the book. I wondered about that:
I think that I wanted to tell the reader where I was coming from. It is
a book about mid-life, and for me the mid-crisis came in the form of blanket
ignorance, I felt. I just didn't know anything about the world. Milan Kundera
said that "We're children all our lives because we have to learn a new
set of rules every ten years." Which is a good remark. But I think that
the real new set of rules is when you hit forty. All of what you knew up
till then is of no use, and you have to start from scratch. I felt that
I had to open up to the reader about that and say "How can I be an omniscent
narrator when I don't know anything." Which is what it felt like.
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AL:
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Perhaps, besides the mid-life, was this novel
trying to track down a modern consciousness in some way?
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MA:
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Like Richard Tull thinks he's going to do. This
novel is a "cride coeur" rather than a way of indirection like some Postmodern
novels. This is direct and straight me. As I say in this book, I think
that most books are written in a language thirty years out of date, a generation
out of date. The rhythms of thought that are actually out there don't correspond.
We write in a kind of pedagogic code. Maybe writing does lag behind the
times. I wanted to suggest the new rhythms of thought which change all
the time. I think that the modern consciousness gets more and more to be
an ungodly mix. What was Timothy J. McVeigh's consciousness like? He probably
sees it as kind of straight, that he has a motive and he knows what he's
doing. I guess it's a ragbag of Rambo movies and repressed homosexuality.
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AL:
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Do you think you were criticizing self-obsessiveness
or vanity?
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MA:
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Um. We need all this vanity and egotism if you're
going to write.
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AL:
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Yeah. You need that to get going, but were you
creating a critique of vanity, that this was a contemporary problem?
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MA:
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It's a sad thing, but it's an inevitable thing.
Writers are really like everyone else in that department. Although I think
that everyone sees a bit of their own egotism in these extreme examples.
But what are we going to do about being self-obsessed? Try stopping them.
I don't think that they're any more self-obsessed than they used to be.
Some things have changed: the language, the setting, the furniture. One
difference is that we're so much more clued up about what we're supposed
to be thinking and feeling. I'm sure that people freaked in the middle
ages when they had their mid-life crisis at age twenty-five. We know what
we're going through.
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AL:
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A classicist would think that since Homer, there's
not much new under the sun, and with Modernism, there are different levels
and they chop it up a bit differently.
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MA:
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That's all true. Funny you should mention the
chop up, the William Burroughs thing, where you chop up a page, throw it
up in the air and reassemble it in some different way. Some monk in the
12th century was doing the same thing, "art of the scissors," everything
has been tried. There is nothing new. What is new is the background. The
observable world changes. The rhythms of thought about the world are always
changing, heading in some direction, heading away from innocence. That's
all we really know about the world: that it's getting less innocent just
by the accumulation of experience.
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KM:
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There's a theme in the book of continuing meaninglessness
in the world, that Richard is fighting a losing battle to find meaning
or control his existence against what is out there, which is nothing.
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MA:
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Yeah. Nothing is the void we come from and return
to. You're dead for a lot longer than you're alive.
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KM:
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What can happen at the end of a mid-life crisis
than to discover that?
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MA:
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Well. You do come through a mid-life crisis. I
sailed through it. (Laughter) Bought a new sports car. It does end because
it's an over-reaction to a certainty that you're going to die. You just
end up with a reaction. But a huge element of a mid-life crisis is what
Richard has to cope with, which is that he's failed at what he tried to
do. He didn't attract anyone to his internal thought processes. They weren't
of interest. That's why people freak out. A guy was saying to me at a bookstore
in Iowa City, he said "I wake up, and one by one, I think of all the things
I thought to myself when I was twenty-something: I was going to be a great
writer, and I was going to re-think the theater...." He said "I didn't
do any of that." Richard has some of those thoughts, but I don't. I've
done more than I thought I would. I've made a contribution of something
or other.
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AL:
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That reminds me of Krapp's Last Tape with Krapp
thinking about his past life and non-achievement while listening to tapes
of himself when he was younger. His last thoughts were "I do not want those
days back." Beckett was harsh.
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MA:
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That's a kind of a bitter thought too, isn't it?
At forty, you realize that this is more or less it, no sudden expansion.
If you haven't done it by then, you're not going to do it. You have a sudden
certainty that life is finite. When you're young almost the definition
of youth is this idea that it's going to last forever, and clever "you,"
you're not going to get old like everyone else. It's just a rumour.
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AL:
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You have animosity for older people as if they
were never young!
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MA:
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You think that being young is a terrific achievement.
At forty, the jig is up. You know damn well your place. That's why people
run off with three year old girlfriends.
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KM:
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The mid-life crisis is essentially male.
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MA:
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Women have it demarcated biologically. They have
something called "The change." Terrifying! They freak out. They have a
hot flash. They lose their biological raison. Men don't.
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AL:
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Men just have problems getting it up.
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MA:
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Right. I was reading Larry Kramer's book Faggots,
about old men in bars getting rejected dozens of times, and then they would
find some other quite older guy. It would take him thirty minutes to get
an erection and thirty seconds to come.
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AL:
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Richard Tull is battling against the cosmos as
well as his own insignificance.
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MA:
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There's a sense that you're just a speck or a
dot in the infinite void. Of course all his energies become malevolent
because he's filled with envy. Also Gwyn stands for the culture: if Gwyn
writes shit, and if the world likes shit, then the world is shit. That's
how he works it out. Gwyn is not just Gwyn, he's the whole inoffensive,
politically, euphemistic culture. He personifies that, pretending that
there's no difference between men and women, and that he doesn't have a
prejudice.
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KM:
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Is the book also a comment on book publishing?
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MA:
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Not really. It's about the fact that the audience
has an agenda now, in a way it didn't used to, and sometimes the press
does too. Like with Tantulus Press, the vanity publishers, those people
aren't really writing, they're just screaming. When Richard does the reading
in Boston, he has a fat person, a black person, and an Indian person. What
they want is stuff about them. Everyone's so tied up in themselves and
their own little political arena. It's a satire, but not a serious investigation.
The stuff about Gwyn becoming a high-tech product as a writer while he's
in America: interviews, photographs, movie deals, etc.
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AL:
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Could you talk about the influence of Milton on
you?
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MA:
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Yes. The poem that is mostly referred to in the
book is Paradise Lost. I did reread it before I wrote the last draft. I
was in a flood of tears often. It's awfully good. I made a lot of notes.
It was my intention to put in lots of Paradise Lost. It just seemed right.
It's the basic tragic story of our culture.
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AL:
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Lost innocence. A struggle of good and evil.
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MA:
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Yes, exactly. Lost innocence above all, and lost
godhood with Adam and Eve working out between humans and angels, and the
intention was that they would win a promotion to heaven. The bank of immortality
and joy. Before the fall the rose grew without thorns, animals moved among
with human beings and other animals. The lion layed down with the lamb.
One little mistake, the minute Eve eats the apple, the rose grows thorns
and the animals snarl and cringe. Adam is taken upon the mountain and given
a cinematic preview of the history of the world. Disease and wars are blamed
on this one act, and the film begins with his oldest son killing his youngest,
and this infinity of agony and ruin. There's Adam sobbing on the hilltop
because it was his fault. Then there's a great assertion of human love
between Adam and Eve where they forgive each other and wander out of paradise.
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AL:
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Then there's Milton arrogance saying that he can
tell this story better than anyone.
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MA:
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Because he's connected to blindness. There's that
passage that he rails against the darkness that he's in. But he liked the
devil. Milton gave the devil the best lines.
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AL:
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And he got paid fifteen pounds for it.
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MA:
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And he got another fiver when they reprinted it,
but it's the central English poem.
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AL:
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There was something about modernity: losing innocence
and gaining knowledge.
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MA:
That is the history of the world. Getting
rid of illusions. Shedding illusions. For instance, one's place in the
universe was an illusion till Coprnicus came along. The earth was the center
of the universe. Part of the energy of the renaissance came from shrugging
off that illusion. Even Einstein thought that the Milky Way was it. He
was deluded. Since then, the universe has been expanded hugely, observationally,
and it's exciting to know that everyone before me didn't know the truth.
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