Mention of his name frequently cleaves readers. Some love him, others claim to hate his style, some take offence to his portrayal of women, many great writers cite him as an influence. His father famously devoted little time to reading his son’s work, complaining of the “terrible compulsive vividness in his style…..that constant demonstrating of his command of English.”
Whatever your view, he’s one of the most famous and commercially successful British writers alive today. Money, London Fields and The Information are the three big London novels he is supposed to be discussing this evening. It becomes instantly apparent that this topic is limited and doesn’t particularly interest the writer – it’s merely a hook on which to hang the discussion – the initial premise to be abandoned once you get down to the real meat of the thing.
Amis says within the first five minutes: “I feel I’ve got nothing to say about London” which is a relief because no one in the audience really gives a toss about hearing much more on the London of his fiction (do they?) having read it themselves. For posterity I will note what he did say – not about the London of his fiction but about ’70s London: “empty and white”. (He briefly recounts how, aged five, he started crying the first time he saw a chap from Zimbabwe.) And that’ll do on the topic thanks very much.
Hay Festival co-founder Peter Florence does a grand job of steering the novelist vaguely in the direction of certain topics; obviously the very nature of such a loose theme is rather scattergun. Comically, I don’t think Amis actually answers any of the questions Florence asks. They merely give him an idea for where he’s going next – sometimes (often) inspiring a journey in a completely different direction. Florence’s role is to guard against him banging on for too long or meandering off too deeply into pastures of indulgence. But these meanderings are the interesting bits. Allowing the writer to talk about what fascinates, what worries, who inspires – and express what he’s actually like. These are the things I’m here to understand.
“I am pretty homosexual in my tastes” he says of his mainly male reading habits. His relationships with the work and approaches of his “twin peaks” – Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow – is fascinating. Both Russian, both dead, they are people about whom he talks at length. (In fact he discusses Nabokov more than his own work). He said of Bellow, in an interview with The Independent: “One of the extraordinary things about Bellow was that his pre-eminence stared you in the face.” Praise indeed. Nabokov is “the greatest ever poet of dreams” and “the master of the one sentence declaration of genius”. He considers Lolita “one of the most variously funny novels in the language”, believing that Nabokov “pushed out the boundary of what can be considered funny with a book about serial rape”.
London Fields, the “gothic love story” – his longest novel, despite beginning life as a novella then growing (“I met another character”) – was inspired by something D. H Lawrence said: “there are natural murderers and natural murderees”. Amis has copped a lot of flack from over-sensitive readers for Nicola Six – his comely murderee and so-called ‘murderer’s dream-girl’. The title was reportedly removed from the Booker Shortlist in 1989 by critical panelists – a perhaps hysterical protest against its alleged misogyny. Tonight a criticism masquerading as a question from a front row female references “not feeling very loved” when she’s reading him and admonishes him for his “sneering about Jordan” and his chauvinism in print. He doesn’t rise to the bait, but instead bats away the loaded question, replying that his male characters actually fare much worse. (Calling someone a misogynist because you don’t like his portrayal of a female character – or because you assume he identifies with certain male characters and their views – seems to be taking things a bit far, and misunderstanding the concept of satire.)
But he does spend a lot of time talking about Katie Price and taking the piss out of her two volume autobiography. The words ‘No. 1 bestseller’ on the front of the book are “more terrifying than anything inside”. But the man does seem to have a fascination with the “monstrous” Jordan (and clearly bought her books), despite questioning the nation’s obsession with the celebrity: “She has no waist, no arse…..an interesting face….but all we’re really worshipping is two bags of silicon.” (This casual objectifying may have been what pissed off the questioner.)
Interesting then, given his tendency to alienate or offend certain women, that he wants the reader to love him. “I am in love with the reader and I want them to love me back.” He says. “You open yourself up with everything you’ve got and attempt to be as delightful and interesting as you can be.” He likens the writer’s contract with the reader to being invited to their house. “Nabokov invites you in, gives you the best chair by the fire and his best wine – then leaves you with a chess problem to solve. You arrive at James Joyce’s house and he’s forgotten you were coming. He leaves you in a drafty corridor for half an hour while he fixes a drink of peat and conger eel.”
At 60, as he enters what some might regard as the ‘autumn’ of his writing career, the question of age is inevitable. He agrees that writers begin to lose it as they get older. “You feel it round the edges – the erosion. Your craft improves, so does your modulation and variation, but you lose the energy for the voice novel.”
“Writers die twice” he adds. “First the talent dies, then the body. But you get to live twice too so it all evens out.”
Lowri Clarke 