Yahoo Finance Martin Amis: 'I was horrified that Trump got in. Now it’s looking scary'
The new novel by Martin Amis, Inside Story, which combines elements of memoir with fiction and in which Amis himself is the protagonist, features a pseudonymous ex-girlfriend called Julia, who complains about the kind of male-authored book in which it’s just “him going on”. Among the many drive-by assassinations featured here – at mention of the antisemitism espoused by Ezra Pound, John Wyndham and TS Eliot, for example, he summarises the trio as “two nutters and a monarchist” – the most enjoyable is the one Amis turns on himself. The novel is a revisitation of the author’s now familiar obsessions – Christopher Hitchens, his father, Kingsley; Larkin, Nabokov, Bellow, the New Statesman books desk of the mid-1970s. In it a series of women, including a fictionalised version of Amis’s wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, tell him repeatedly: “I can’t believe you’re still going on about that.”
At 71, Amis, banging on still, remains highly entertaining, partly because his hangups coincide with universal anxieties and partly because the memoir aspect of the novel – if some of the names are real, much of the dialogue is invented – grounds his wilder impulses as a writer of fiction. A few years ago, Anne Enright took him to task for being all voice, and while Inside Story has a few gimmicky elements, including a central and (to my mind) entirely fabricated character named Phoebe Phelps – an ex-girlfriend who turns out to be that load-bearer of female meaning in Amis, an escort – it is a different beast to his other novels. Less schematic, more loose-limbed and rangy. We find the author fretting around the edges of his lifelong preoccupations, while wondering what precisely his own game has been. “What is the good of the novel?” asks Amis, the character. “What does it do, what is it for?” For that matter, he wonders, what is any of it for? Through the lenses of love, death and poetry, the novel attempts to find answers.
We are on the roof of Amis’s penthouse in downtown Brooklyn, where he and Fonseca moved several years ago after their Brooklyn townhouse caught fire. The night before we meet, he travelled into the city from the couple’s other home in East Hampton, where they and their two grownup daughters, Clio and Fernanda, have been weathering lockdown. (His other children are, variously, in Las Vegas, London and Istanbul.) The penthouse is gorgeous but it’s not in a posh part of town. There’s a bail bonds office nearby and over the rooftops, an uninterrupted view of Brooklyn Detention Complex. And while, in the distance, you can see the Statue of Liberty, the sound of every siren in New York seems to funnel up to the landscaped roof deck, where Amis sits with the straight posture a bad back demands, and that gives his movements a slow, almost dandyish air. By nature an optimist, he’s not feeling very hopeful now. “I was horrified that Trump got in but thought, well, it will be interesting,” he says. “But now it’s looking … scary.”
This election is going to be a referendum on the American character, not on Trump’s performance
A few months earlier, when the pandemic first hit New York, Amis and his wife considered returning to Britain. He’s glad that they didn’t – “you can’t say they’ve done any better in England with the virus” – besides which, as he writes in the novel: “Trump’s not a reason to leave, he’s a reason to stay.” But the presidential election in November promises greater upheaval and “God knows what’s going to happen”.
To his grim amusement, Amis has called every political race wrong for the last few years – “I got Brexit wrong, I got Trump wrong,” not merely the fact of Trump’s victory, but the kind of president he became. “I thought he was a stupid bastard who lucked his way into the job,” says Amis. “It was a frivolous vote for a frivolous man, in easy times. Now times are hard and you don’t want a frivolous man. You want a serious politician who can make deals and get things done and organise.”
Still, he says, “when the pandemic really presented itself, I thought: ‘Surely Trump can’t lie 10 times a day now? Because this is life and death.’” Of course, nothing has changed, and what fascinates Amis is how it exposes the shrewdness with which Trump understands his followers. “He realises that there’s no meaningful hypocrisy, any more. People are proud of being dishonest, sharks and vultures; they care as little about marital fidelity as they do about the deficit. This election is going to be a referendum on the American character, not on Trump’s performance.”
There is something comforting, in this context, about going back over old crises, old stories, as Amis does in the new novel. Times when things seemed at their bleakest and yet still one survived – the death of his sister, Sally, of Hitchens, of various relationships. It’s a period piece in some ways, too sharp to be called nostalgic, but nonetheless soothing. Amis is so assured, so brilliant, on Kingsley and Larkin’s friendship, on his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and the consolations of poetry, that it’s a treat just to hang out by his side. The conversations with Hitchens in the 70s are more self-indulgent, scenes set over long, boozy lunches while both men worked at the Statesman, that serve no greater purpose than to remember his friend. Still, it’s hard not to enjoy them. “Janet’s a major chick,” says Hitch, never quite convincing in his bro-ishness, and one feels instinctively protective of them both.
Amis first tried to write the book 10 years ago and it didn’t work. “It was so leaden. It had no life. I wasted something like 18 months, then I forced myself to read it through, and it was dead as a door nail. Everyone was still alive back then – not Larkin, but Christopher. And Saul [Bellow, who also features in the novel] was still vigorous. And I just put it aside and wrote another novel that came quite easily.”
What was the diagnosis of the dead one? “It’s happened once or twice to me, and it’s a block in the sense that everything comes from the subconscious, and the subconscious hasn’t got much to do in an autobiographical book. It’s underemployed. You learn to humour it. If you can really train your subconscious, when an event like this happens ... ” – he gestures to indicate the world in its present state. “Zadie Smith has already written about it,” says Amis and looks a bit stricken; Smith’s collection of lockdown essays, Intimations, came out in August. “It’s clever of Zadie to write about this in essay form, because fiction will take two or three years to come through, like it did with September 11th. There was a series of September 11th novels that came out in 2006 or 2007; Don DeLillo, Claire Messud, Jay McInerney; that’s how long it takes. Remember Howard Jacobson – I like him – but he wrote that novel about Trump called Pussy. Ugh. He wrote it in 2016 or 17, and I thought, don’t you know anything about how these things work?”
Like most people, Amis’s experience of lockdown has been variable. “It’s tremendously – ominously – informative how you feel when you wake up; your first thoughts. I used to wake up and a mixture of greed and curiosity would get me out of bed. Now I wake up and sometimes I think: ‘OK, accept that you’re depressed. Officially depressed.’ I think about what Michelle Obama said about how we’re all in a low level depression, and maybe you should give that to yourself. I’ve been finding it very difficult to work in a regular way and sometimes I just say: ‘Well, I’m having a rest.’” It doesn’t last. “There’s the horrible protestant work ethic that says otherwise. The word ‘God’ didn’t come up in the house when I was growing up, but the ethic was there by osmosis. I remember once having a really nice drink in Paris with my wife and a friend of ours; and being really uneasy because I wasn’t getting on with something.”
It’s ruinous. “It is. It’s a right bastard.”
Appropriation means taking without permission – who do you ask? I got bollocked for writing about the working classes in Lionel Asbo
There’s a pugnaciousness about Amis that it’s hard to imagine staying in check for too long. In July, he signed what is now referred to as the Harper’s letter, an appeal against cancel culture in which various writers and thinkers urged elements of the left to stop pursuing and enforcing “ideological conformity”, and which caused an instant storm on social media. The fact that Amis hasn’t himself been cancelled is surely only a matter of timing; all his outrages happened too early.
Which isn’t to say he isn’t expecting it. When he is able to work these days, he is writing a short story about lynching. “What happened to Ahmaud Arbery was a classic lynching,” he says, referring to the 25-year-old black man shot and killed by two white men while out jogging in a city in Georgia, in February. “The ‘citizen’s arrest’ because he ‘matched the description’ of [a suspect] ie he was black. So they got their guns and got in their pickup and went roaring after him. That’s a lynching. Trayvon Martin was arguably a lynching. What happened to George Floyd wasn’t a lynching; it was a police killing, and another huge tragedy. When we saw that video of Chauvin, the policeman – that look on his face, knee on the neck. It looked premeditated. Nine minutes went by – the cruelty of it. It’s the great American stain, and it’s so powerful; someone called slavery an organic crime; you own the body and soul. And it ruined the white southerners, too.” Amis is, he says, hoping to write an entire book of short stories on the subject although “Boy, will I cop it.”
He may be right. Depending on how the stories are executed, an Amis collection on slavery is vulnerable to accusations of cultural appropriation, something that “every fibre in my being resists. It’s a philistine manifesto. It’s anti-creativity. Appropriation means taking without permission – who do you ask permission of? It’s getting that way in every direction. I got bollocked for writing about the working classes in Lionel Asbo. But I’d been doing that since I started.”
There have been other accusations. Amis points out that 30 years ago, he got into trouble for aspects of his novel London Fields, specifically the character Nicola Six, who arranged her own murder: “Two judges on the Booker prize put their foot down and said [it] was a sexist idea.” This in spite of the fact, says Amis, that Muriel Spark employed a similar idea in The Driver’s Seat and no one batted an eye. There is, many argue, no reason why a man can’t write as a woman, or a white person as a black person, but when it is done badly the failure of imagination frequently extends beyond literary into political considerations, specifically the politics of privilege.
Hitchens wrote about being in love with Amis: 'It’s one of my regrets that I didn’t take that very seriously at all; I didn’t respect that'
One suspects that, as with most things, he would like to hear his old pal Christopher Hitchens on this. Hitchens died of cancer in 2011, and Amis still talks to him. “Not every day. Every other day I want to tell him something. Ask what he thinks.” He imagines Hitch is still around, in some form, feels his aura, a notion Hitch would have thoroughly despised. “He would’ve been very hard on anything to do with the supernatural.” But it is comforting to Amis, somewhat to his surprise.
In the new novel, there is symmetry between descriptions of his father Kingsley’s friendship with Larkin, and Amis’s relationship with Hitchens, although the latter, he says, was in some ways much healthier. “Larkin was crucified by envy [of my father]; sexual envy, too.” There was no professional envy between Amis and Hitch, but there was, on Amis’s part, emotional jealousy. Amis recalls the painful time that Hitchens went off with a new BFF, Alexander Cockburn, “a biggish lefty who came to America and Hitch was very keen on him”. Amis was as crushed as if he’d been stood up by a date. “I wouldn’t deny for a second that physical attraction is a part of male friendships, even between Larkin and Kingsley. Kingsley used to say, when he had a date with Larkin at some pub, he’d feel the same kind of excitement as when he was going to see a woman. Because they stimulate you, you feel more alive when you’re with them. I didn’t feel romantic about Hitch; but possessive, yes. And hurt. Sorry for myself. He felt much more romantic about me.” Hitchens wrote in his own memoir about being in love with Amis. “It’s one of my regrets that I didn’t take that very seriously at all; I didn’t respect that,” Amis says.
But what could he have done with it? “There’s nothing I could’ve done with it. But I could’ve said: ‘I’m sorry if it’s painful for you.’ I’m sure it was, a bit.” Amis says this gently, and gentleness is, unusually in his fiction, the tone one takes away from the new novel. It was started long before Trump and the pandemic, and it was finished in a changed world in which it has been the preoccupation of everyone and not just the novelists to wonder what really matters. “You get up and you read 15 articles about the end of the world, and then you’re supposed to go into your study and ...” He trails off. Perhaps the wisdom of these months is in understanding the value of now, and the luxury of contemplating tomorrow. It’s OK to call off the day. “Why not give that to myself?”
• Inside Story by Martin Amis is published by Jonathan Cape (£20).
