Early life
Amis's paternal grandfather was a mustard clerk from
Clapham, and his maternal grandfather a shoe millionaire.[3]
His parents,
Hilary Bardwell and
Kingsley Amis, divorced when he was twelve. Much later,
Martin lived in a house with Kingsley, Hilly, and Hilly's third
husband,
Alistair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock.[4]
Amis has described it as "[s]omething out of early
Updike, 'Couples' flirtations and a fair amount of drinking,"
he told
The New York Times. "They were all 'at it'."
[1]
Born in Oxford, England, Martin was the middle of three
children, with an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister,
Sally. He attended a number of different schools in the 1950s
and 1960s including
Swansea Grammar School. The acclaim that followed Kingsley's
first novel
Lucky Jim sent the Amises to
Princeton, New Jersey, where Kingsley lectured. This was
Amis's introduction to the
United States.
Martin Amis read
comic books until his stepmother, the novelist
Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to
Jane Austen, a writer he often names as his earliest
influence. After teenage years spent in flowery shirts and a
short spell at
Westminster School while living in
Hampstead, he graduated from
Exeter College, Oxford with a "Formal"
First in
English — "the sort where you are called in for a
viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed
reading your papers."
[5]
After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at
The Times Literary Supplement, and at age 27 became
literary editor of The
New Statesman, where he met
Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for
The Observer, who remains a close friend.
Early writing
According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no
interest in his son's work. "I can point out the exact place
where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air;
that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking
the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to
himself," Kingsley complained
[1].
His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) won the
Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels,
made into an unsuccessful cult
film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which
Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with
the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.
He also wrote the screenplay for the film
Saturn 3, an experience which he was to draw on for his
fifth novel Money.
Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, has a
typically "sixties" plot, with a house full of characters who
use various substances. A number of Amis's characteristics show
up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with
the
zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to
sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a
defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much
about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was
made in 2000.
Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers,
Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling
fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for
symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been
a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and
Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in
The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in
Night Train).
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young
woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it
was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the
narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's
descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be
influenced by his contemporary
Craig Raine's 'Martian' school of poetry.
Later career
His best-known novels, and the ones most respected by
critics, are
Money,
London Fields,
Time's Arrow, and
The Information.
Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note) is a
first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and
would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth
century." The book follows him as he flies back and forth across
the Atlantic in pursuit of personal and professional success,
and describes a series of comic episodes with darker undertones.
The vivid and stylised use of language and black humour was a
critical success and the book remains Amis's most highly
regarded work.
London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes
the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999,
as a climate disaster approaches. The characters had typically
Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the
lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme
fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class
Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined
to come between the other two. The book was reportedly omitted
from the Booker Prize shortlist in its year of publication,
1989, because of panel members protesting against its alleged
misogyny.
Time's Arrow (1991), the autobiography of a doctor who
helped torture
Jews
during
the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique —
time runs backwards during the entire novel, down to the
dialogue initially being spoken backwards — as well as for its
topic.
The size of the advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and
obtained by Amis for The Information (1995) attracted
what Amis described as "an
Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he
left his agent of many years, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to
be represented by the
Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh was
married to
Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends for many
years, but the incident caused a rift that, according to Amis in
his autobiography Experience (1999), has not yet healed.
Night Train (1997) is a short novel in the stylised form
of a US police procedural, narrated by the female, but mannish,
Detective Mike Hoolihan, who has been called upon to investigate
the suicide of her boss's daughter. Amis's American vernacular
in the narrative was criticised by, among others,
John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere,
notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor
Saul Bellow.
The memoir
Experience is largely about his relationship with his
father, Kingsley Amis, though he also writes of being reunited
with long-lost daughter, Delilah Seale, the product of an affair
in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19, and the
story of how one of his cousins,
Lucy Partington, became a victim of
Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about
the crimes of Stalinism. The book provoked a literary
controversy for its approach to the material, and for its attack
on his longtime friend
Christopher Hitchens, who rebuked his charges in a stinging
review in The Atlantic. Asked recently if they were still
friends, Amis responded "We never needed to make up. We had an
adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or,
more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the
Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose
month is ever May."[6]
In 2003,
Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was
denounced by
Tibor Fischer, whose comments were widely reported in the
media: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or
slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I
was reading my copy on
the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my
shoulder . . . It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a
school playground,
masturbating". Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews,
with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but
most considered the book to be a great disappointment. Amis was
unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow
Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for
the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult
literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how
thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making
writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice,
and that's what I go to literature for."[7]
In September 2006, Amis published House of Meetings, a
short novel about two half-brothers who loved the same woman and
who were incarcerated together in a Soviet
gulag.
In 2008, Amis will publish The Pregnant Widow which marks
the beginning of a new four-book deal.
Amis has also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's
Monsters and Heavy Water), three volumes of collected
journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno,
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and The War Against Cliché),
and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines (Invasion
of the Space Invaders).
Current life
Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in
Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the
writer
Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters.[8]
He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me,
in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing
when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had
moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same
place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as
increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United
States.[8]
Political opinions
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of
nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on
this theme,
Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled 'Unthinkability'
in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "nuclear
weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they end all thought."
He wrote in "Nuclear City" in
Esquire of 1987 (re-published in
Visiting Mrs Nabokov) that: "when nuclear weapons become
real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and
actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some
throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe."
Amis expressed his opinions on terrorism in an extended essay
published in
The Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of
9/11 in which he criticized the economic development of all
Arab countries because their "aggregate GDP... was less than the
GDP of Spain", and they "lag[ged] behind the West, and the Far
East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job
creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human
development, and intellectual vitality."[10]
On Muslims living in the West, in an interview conducted by
Ginny Dougary in The Times Magazine, Amis said, "There’s
a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim
community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’
What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel.
Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms.
Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle
East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the
whole community and they start getting tough with their children."[11].
The critic
Terry Eagleton in the 2007 introduction to his work
Ideology attacked Amis for acknowledging this impulse.
Eagleton observes that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a
British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin
Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary
world".
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an op-ed piece on the subject
condemning Amis and he responded with an open letter to
The Independent which the newspaper printed in full. In
it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown
and Eagleton.
[12]
In response to these criticisms, Amis told the Guardian
newspaper:
|
“ |
And now I feel that this was the only serious
deprivation of my childhood - the awful human
colourlessness of South Wales, the dully flickering
whites and grays, like a Pathe newsreel, like an ethnic
Great Depression. In common with all novelists, I live
for and am addicted to physical variety; and my one
quarrel with the rainbow is that its spectrum isn't wide
enough. I would like London to be full of upstanding
Martians and Neptunians, of reputable citizens who came,
originally, from Krypton and Tralfamadore.[13] |
” |
On terrorism, Martin Amis wrote that he suspected "there
exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a
Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder," and added: "I
will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome
of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather
airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in
anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a
mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my
children was something for which he now had warrant."[10]
In comments on the BBC in October 2006 Amis expressed his
view that
North Korea was the most dangerous of the two remaining
members of the
Axis Of Evil, but that
Iran
was our "natural enemy", suggesting that we should not feel bad
about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the
Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran
would have been a much more destabilising presence."[14]
His views on
Islamism earned him the sobriquet
Blitcon[15]
from the
New Statesman (his former employer), argued to be
wrongly applied.[16]
His opinions have been viewed in some quarters as hostile and
racist, as written in The Guardian[17].
He has, however, received support from other writers. In
The Spectator, Philip Hensher noted,
|
“ |
"The controversy raised by Amis’s views on religion as
specifically embodied by Islamists is an empty one. He
will tell you that his loathing is limited to Islamists,
not even to Islam and certainly not to the ethnic groups
concerned. The point, I think, is demonstrated, and the
openness with which he has been willing to think out
loud could usefully be emulated by political figures,
addicted as they are to weasel words and double talk. I
have to say that from non-practising Muslims I’ve heard
language and opinions on Islamists which are far less
temperate than anything Amis uses. In comparison to the
private expressions of voices of modernity within Muslim
societies, Amis is almost exaggeratedly respectful."[citation
needed] |
” |
His new collection of pieces about Islam,
The Second Plane, has received mixed reviews. Writing in
the Sunday Times, William Dalrymple described the book as
"a book that is not just wilfully ignorant, a triumph of style
over knowledge, but that, for all its panache and gloss, is at
its heart disturbingly bigoted."[citation
needed] In
The Independent, Cal McCrystal described the collection
as "trenchant, deeply informed and informative".[citation
needed] Despite mixed reviews, the book is
already on its third print-run.
Current employment
In February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a Professor of
Creative Writing at The
Manchester Centre for New Writing in the
University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He
runs postgraduate seminars, and is expected to participate in
four public events each year, including a two week summer school
for MA students.[8]
Of his position, he said: "I may be acerbic in how I write
but... I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students]
in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly
sweet and gentle with them."[8]
He predicts that the experience might inspire him to write a new
book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an
elderly novelist, that's what the world wants."[8].
It has been revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the
university is £80,000 a year.[18]
The
Manchester Evening News broke the story claiming that
according to his contract this meant he was paid £3000 an hour
for 28 hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines
in several national papers. However like any other member of
academic staff his teaching contact hours constitute a minority
of his commitments, a point confirmed in the original article by
a reply from the University.[19]
