Amis, Martin

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Amis, Martin

Career
Sidelights
Selected Writings
Sources

Author

B orn Martin Louis Amis, August 25, 1949, in Oxford, England; son of Kingsley William (an author) and Hilary Amis; married Antonia Phillips, 1984 (divorced, 1993); married Isabel Fonseca, 1996; children: Delilah Seale (with Lamorna Heath), Louis, Jacob (from first marriage), Fernanda, Clio (from second marriage). Education: Exeter College, Oxford, B.A. (with honors), 1971.

Addresses: Agent—The Wylie Agency, 250 W. 57th St., Ste. 2114, New York, NY 10107. Home—London, England, and Uruguay.

Career

E ditorial assistant, Times Literary Supplement, 1972-75, fiction and poetry editor, 1974; New Statesman, assistant literary editor, 1975-77, literary editor, 1977-79; first novel, The Rachel Papers, published by J. Cape, 1973; Manchester Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, professor of creative writing, 2007—. Contributor to anthologies and to numerous periodicals.

Awards: Somerset Maugham Award, Society of Authors, for The Rachel Papers, 1974; James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, University of Edinburgh Department of English Literature, for Experience, 2000; National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, for The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, 2001.

Sidelights

M artin Amis is one of Britain’s most famous living literary figures, a writer as lauded for his books as he is reviled for the acclaim they have brought him. The son of novelist Kingsley Amis, he has produced a string of postmodern novels and strongly opinionated essays since his career began, which have earned him a reputation as the quintes-sential English malcontent. In 2006, his tenth novel, House of Meetings, was published to glowing reviews in the British press, which hailed it as a return to his earlier, more succinct prose and plotting style.

Amis was born on August 25, 1949, in Oxford, England, 12 months and ten days after the birth of his older brother, Philip. The Amis parents had met at Oxford when Kingsley was working on his degree and fell in love with art student Hilary Ann Bard-well; they married in 1948 when she became pregnant with Philip. A sister, Sally, was born in 1954. By then Kingsley was teaching at the University College of Swansea, Wales, and his fiction debut, Lucky Jim, appeared that same year. The novel made Amis’ father famous overnight, and was hailed as a comic masterpiece of postwar British literature. Its plot centers on the dejected, disillusioned title char acter, a lecturer at a lesser university whose career prospects hinge upon his cultivating a good relationship with his mentor. The snobbish professor and his music-loving family were allegedly modeled after the Bardwell clan.

Amis’s parents’ marriage deteriorated over the next decade as Kingsley’s literary fame grew and, with it, his penchant for alcohol and extramarital affairs. He was a disciplined writer, however, and his son recalled the household rules in an interview with Lewis Burke Frumkes of Writer magazine. “When I was growing up, it was only in the direst emergency that you knocked on the study door of my father, who’d whip around in his chair and say, ‘What?’—although he was very soft and friendly when he wasn’t in his study.”

The family moved to New Jersey when Kingsley taught at Princeton University for a year, where the eight-year-old Amis was ridiculed when he wore shorts to school on the first day. Back in London, he attended a grammar school in South Kensington, then a boarding school, where he showed himself to be entirely uninterested in much beyond drugs and comic books. When Amis was 17 years old, his father’s second wife—novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard—encouraged him to take up classic English writers. She also worked to get him into a “cram school” to help him prepare for university entrance exams, which he aced to the surprise of many.

Amis earned a bachelor’s degree in English, with honors, from Exeter College of Oxford University in 1971, and went to work as an editorial assistant at the venerable Times Literary Supplement, the separate book-review section of the Times of London. His de-but novel, The Rachel Papers, was published by his father’s publisher, J. Cape, in 1973. The tale of a rakish young man hoping to enter Oxford on a scholarship but distracted by the two young women with whom he is romantically involved, The Rachel Papers earned an unfavorable comparison to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye from Times reviewer David Williams, who conceded that Amis “is very funny though, has a mensa mind beyond any doubt, and can make nice phrases by the score.” The novel was adapted for the big screen years later, with the story updated for the 1980s and becoming one of the cult-classic teen romance films of the decade.

Amis’ second novel, Dead Babies, was followed by Success in 1978, by which time he was working in his final year as literary editor of the New Statesman. His first work of nonfiction was Invasion of the Space Invaders, a 1982 tome with an introduction by film-maker Stephen Spielberg. Its essays discussed films, contemporary politics, and the current video-game craze. Sharp-tongued and famously opinionated, Amis also began to accrue a following on the other side of the Atlantic for his novels, which the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani commended as a distinctly “recognizable fictional world. It is a place defined by Swiftian excess and metropolitan satire, a place where variously shabby characters partake of lust and violence and guilt in hopes of being allowed a second chance.”

Amis’ next novel, the tale of a debauched would-be filmmaker, was set in both New York and London. Money: A Suicide Note was published by J. Cape in 1984, and cemented his reputation, at age 35, as one of Britain’s leading literary talents of his generation; many were surprised when it failed to be nominated for that year’s Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious literary honor. Eric Korn in the Times Literary Supplement lauded “the astonishing narrative voice he has devised, the jagged, spent, street-wise, gutter-wise, guttural mid-Atlantic twang, the buttonholing, earbending, lughole-jarring monologue” of its anti-hero, the slovenly, chain-smoking television commercial director John Self, who is struggling to bring his script to life. At one point, a writer named “MartinAmis” is brought in to fix it.

Amis’ next novel, London Fields, appeared in 1989 and was set in a London ten years into the future. Its central character is an American writer, ill with cancer, who moves to London as the world teeters on the brink of both the millennium and impending nuclear disaster. Critics consider it to be one of Amis’ finest works, with multiple plotlines that remain strong throughout, unlike some of his other novels. It was followed by Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense in 1991, whose plot centered around the Holocaust. This was the first work of his to be nominated for the Booker Prize.

In the early 1990s, the British press seemed to turn on Amis. Part of the disenchantment came after stories surfaced that he left his wife of several years and their two young sons for another woman, and then famously ditched his British literary agent of 23 years, Pat Kavanagh, for the American agent Andrew Wylie. Adding another element to the drama was the fact that Kavanagh was married to one of Amis’ closest friends, the novelist Julian Barnes. Wylie then negotiated an immense book deal for Amis’ next work, just completed, that set a new record in publishing of half a million British pounds, or about $794,500. Sales of Amis’ works had never been particularly strong, and publishing-industry insiders noted that his forthcoming novel would probably not earn back that amount in sales. The press derided Amis as ungentlemanly in the kinder reports, and un-English in the vitriolic screeds. Furthermore, much ink was given over to the fact that Amis had used some of the advance money to have major cosmetic dental work done, and had it done by an American dentist, too.

The novel in question, The Information, was published in 1995 and also prompted some sniping, for some thought it had been modeled after Amis’ friendship with Barnes. Its tale centered around two longtime friends who are both novelists; the less successful one attempts to sabotage the other’s career, which backfires and serves to bring even more acclaim onto his rival. Roz Kaveney, critiquing it for the New Statesman & Society, found some positive elements, noting that “the descriptions of Richard’s and Gwyn’s books make one amusedly glad to be reading any other novel—even this one,” but asserted that much of its contrivances were recycled from Amis’ previous works. Kaveney concluded by declaring that “no reviewer should blame Amis for making a lot of money. We are entitled to express concern that a brilliant career has come to this: the overpriced sale of secondhand shoddy.”

Amis’ father died later in 1995, after a career that had spanned 40 years, 20 novels, and several collections of essays and poetry. Later in life, reportedly guilt-stricken over the end of his marriage to Amis’ mother, Kingsley’s drinking intensified, and he often reached a point in the evening where he became unable to walk. Divorced from his second wife, he entered into an unusual arrangement with Bard-well, now married to a titled but impoverished member of the House of Lords, whereby she and Lord Kilmarnock lived in separate quarters in her ex-husband’s London home and cared for him. Amis summed up his literary relationship with his father in an interview with Charles McGrath in the New York Times in 2007. “He was always saying, ‘I think you need more sentences like “He put down his drink, got up and left the room,”’ and I thought you needed rather fewer of them.”

Over the next decade Amis continued to produce works of fiction like 1997’s Night Train—a police procedural—and Yellow Dog, a 2003 novel about a pornography addict that was the target of so much critical scorn that it was said to have prompted Amis to move to Uruguay with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, who had ties to the South American country. There were also several works of nonfic-tion published over the years, including 1993’s Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions and a 2000 memoir, Experience. In the latter work, Amis wrote of meeting a daughter he had never known until the mid1990s, when she was 19 years old.

Amis earned mixed reviews for his 2002 book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, an examination of Soviet leader Josef Stalin and the years of praise given to the leader of the world’s only Communist state by leftists in the West. The revelations that came after Stalin’s death in 1953 that he persecuted millions of his own citizens in a war of terror through sham trials, labor camps, and government-instigated famines was a blow to the left from which it has yet to recover, Amis argues in the book. The work also incited a minor literary feud with a friend of Amis’, journalist Christopher Hitchens.

In April of 2006, the New Yorker published Amis’ short story “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” an imagined tale of the final days of the alleged ring-leader of the 9/11 hijackers, which was an excerpt from a novel in progress. Asked why he made Atta a subject of fiction by Newsweek International writer Silvia Spring, Amis replied that it was Atta’s “face, so rich and malevolent that it haunted me.” Later that year Amis published an 11,000word essay in the London Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11. He drew upon his as-yet-unfinished novel about radical Islamic operatives and discussed the war in Iraq, Palestinian suicide bombings, and the West’s ineffectual responses to the threat of militant Islamicism. Several passages were inflammatory, but this one was often singled out: “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,” Amis writes in the essay. “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.”

The essay, titled “The Age of Horrorism,” ignited major debate and prompted strong rejoinders from scholars of Middle Eastern politics and Islam. The furor served to inadvertently publicize Amis’s next work, the 2006 novel House of Meetings, which is set in a Soviet gulag camp and features a doomed romantic triangle. The Economist praised it as a comeback for the writer, declaring that “Amis has suddenly—and unexpectedly, even to his publishers— turned in a work of real worth, a novel that not so much makes the spine tingle as the heart race at its passion and richness.”

For Amis’ next novel, 2008’s The Pregnant Widow, he described it in one interview as autobiographical and touching upon the themes of Islamicism and feminism. Having moved back to London with his family in 2006 after two and a half years in Uruguay, he was nearing the age of 60 and untroubled by the attacks he regularly received in the British press. “Nearly everyone I know likes me,” he told the Guardian’s Sally Vincent, “and nearly everyone who doesn’t know me hates my guts.”