Martin Amis (1949-)

Martin Amis was born in Oxford on 25 August 1949. The second of the three children of the writer Kingsley Amis and his then wife Hilary (Hilly) Bardwell, Martin Amis has consistently enjoyed the highest profile of the three. His brother Philip is barely a year older, and his younger sister, Sally, died aged 46 in December 2000. Amis family life during the 1950s was peripatetic. Most of it was based in South Wales, where Kingsley Amis taught at University College, Swansea, until the success ushered in by Lucky Jim made an academic career unnecessary. From an early point, Martin Amis was used to the domestic presence of prominent literary figures such as Philip Larkin. There were periods of residence in Spain (Mallorca, where Robert Graves lived), the United States and even the West Indies, and his high school education was frequently interrupted.

The Amis children were to see their parents’ marriage founder in 1963. In 1965 Kingsley Amis married the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Martin Amis lived with and (if we are to believe him) in due course off, the couple, until graduating from Exeter College, Oxford in 1971. Later, in 1983, Howard and Amis senior were to divorce, and the last years of Amis junior’s father’s life were spent in a curious ménage with Hilly, who was now remarried, and her husband Lord Kilmarnock. Kingsley Amis died on 22 October 1995, and the quite astonishing strength of the influence he exerted, particularly on his second and third children, has only become fully apparent since then. Nor can any biographical sketch omit the extraordinary events of the mid 1990s: among them Amis’ discoveries that he (not Patrick Seale) was the father of Delilah Seale (by then a student) as the result of an affair with Delilah’s mother Lamorna (who would later commit suicide) in 1974; and that his cousin Lucy Partington, who had disappeared without trace aged 21 in late December 1973, would turn out to be one of the victims of the Gloucester psychopath Fred West.

These events, together with the break with his former friend and fellow-novelist Julian Barnes, are all detailed in the 2000 memoir Experience. In 1994, Martin Amis had held out for a £500,000 advance for his new novel The Information (1995), along with a collection of stories (later published as Heavy Water (1998)). His then publisher Jonathan Cape (a division of Random House UK Ltd) declined to pay such an amount, on the grounds that it could not, given Amis’ sales record, possibly be earned back. After the failure of the best efforts of Amis’s British agent, Pat Kavanagh, wife to Barnes, matters became complicated when Amis’s American agent, the notorious Andrew (“The Jackal”) Wylie was brought in but likewise failed to secure a deal with Random House. The title was taken by HarperCollins. The affair (and the sums involved, which at the time were quoted at anything between £480,000 and £505,000) is still not wholly cl
 

This article in full comprises 2234 words but only the first 600 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 17 November 2002 ; revised 23 October 2003

Citation: Todd, Richard. "Martin Amis". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 November 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5097, accessed 5 November 2008.]

Reading The Literary Encyclopedia helps reduce global information inequality. All entries, data and software copyright © The Literary Dictionary Company Limited ISSN 1747-678X

http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5097