Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  There is something of Martin in both Gwyn and Richard and the most amusing performance from this double act occurs in Part 3 where they take a jet-hop tour around seven US cities to promote the sequel to Gwyn’s most recent success Amelior Regained. Richard is there as a result of his friend’s patrician generosity; he will write the publicity and profile material – skills he has painfully acquired working for the vanity publisher – while Gwyn enjoys apparently limitless quantities of fawning approbation. On the way out Richard embarks on ‘a journey within a journey’, progressing from his own seat in coach-class where the reading matter is ‘pluralistic, liberal and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, the Lebanon, First World War, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina’ (p. 288) to business world. Here he expects to find ‘lightweight middlemen like A. L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil’ suffused with ‘teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver’ (p. 289). But no, the middle-ranking executives are absorbed by ‘trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tub-like tinglers.’ In first class it is even worse; there the ‘drugged tycoons’ read nothing at all, or at least cannot be bothered with the unregarded books ‘jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon’ that lie face down on the passengers’ ‘softly swelling stomachs’. Gwyn, comfortably supine in first class, is reading something: his schedule of promotional stopovers.

  After reading this I could not help but ask Martin where he was most often seated during his many cross-Atlantic odysseys of the 1980s, generously sponsored by the New Yorker, the Observer, the Sunday Times, Atlantic et al. ‘Well it would depend on the nature of the assignment, and who’d commissioned it.’ But, I persevere, you surely never ended up like Richard in ‘coach’? ‘Usually it was coach. On book tours, business.’

  The cities visited, not accidentally, are those in which Martin established affinities and found inspiration for his portraits of deranged excess and expedient grandeur. New York, Miami, Boston, Chicago and Washington feature prominently. Our perspective throughout involves a combination of Richard and the narrator. Gwyn is ever present, content in his role as feted best-selling author, but always viewed from the outside. The underbelly of America from which he is spared is sampled by Richard, who shambles daily to his friend’s luxuriously appointed suites after vacating his drab motel room.

  Obviously the America experienced by Gwyn comes closer to Martin’s own rather pampered journeys around the country. He did occasionally indulge his taste for slumming, but these were excursions from the norm. Richard is the embodiment of the fears and anxieties that accompanied his creator’s sudden rise to fame during the mid-1970s, when it all seemed rather too good to be true. One of the reasons why Martin stayed on at the New Statesman during the 1970s was that The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies and Success sold so few copies. His advances after The Rachel Papers were relatively generous but as with the standard author’s contract royalties would be paid only once the percentage allocated to the author had been attained through sales. None of his first three novels sold a sufficient number of hardbacks for him to draw anything more than small royalty payments. Martin became successful not because his early work sold well but through his attainment of what became known in the trade as mediagenic status. His early books were the subject of fierce critical debate and his lifestyle and journalism combined, of course, with his parentage guaranteed him a profile that was ready-made for the marketing and promotions departments of publishing houses. Bizarrely Cape invested far more in promoting Other People, his least reader-friendly novel at that point, than in all of his three previous works combined. It too sold relatively few copies but the tide of publicity enabled Pat Kavanagh, his agent, to negotiate the sale of his paperback rights to Penguin, who pooled their considerable resources with Cape to ensure that Money (1984) was spectacularly well advertised, including an American marketing tour not unlike Gwyn’s. It went into paperback six months after the hardback issue.

  Richard follows Gwyn around and accompanies Martin through the novel as a memory of what this author might have been. Gwyn’s Mephistophelian agent Gal Aplanalp is persuaded by him to have Richard’s most recent, shamelessly impenetrable contribution to postmodernism, Untitled, taken on by the self-consciously radical American publisher Bold Agenda. As Gwyn alights upon his scenes of promotional aggrandizement Richard has to take care of his own publicity. In New York he has been given a sack containing eighteen copies of the book with which, space and Gwyn permitting, he will attempt to attract the attention of those booksellers and agents who can spare time from the enchantments of Amelior Regained. By accident or design – we never learn if it is an act of disdainful neglect or malice on Gwyn’s and Gal’s part – the eighteen books in the sack make up the entire print run. Experimentalists, it seems, will be indulged with an ISBN and little more. The episode, darkly comic in its own right, is rooted in fact.

  Chris Mitas tells of how in 1990 a surprise birthday party had been arranged for him at a dining room in the Queen’s Park Rangers Stadium. He had supported the club since his childhood and was now on good terms with its owners and directors. Present were Martin, Charles Saatchi, Emma Freud, several QPR players and other figures from Chris’s complex social and professional life. Among them was Suzy Hammond, a US TV presenter and producer. In his characteristically affable manner Martin asked her about her work and chatted with interest until she enquired about his. He was, he replied, a writer and she insisted that if he needed any help with agents or publishers in the US she would be happy to put him in touch with influential figures. They exchanged cards and during the journey back to West London with her husband and Chris she told of how she had met this charming amusing man who was working on a bizarre novel about time travel. She thought it was a long shot but she was confident that one of the wackier specialist publishers in New York – not unlike Bold Agenda – might show some interest. They roared with laughter. Martin was amused but has confessed that a twinge of horror accompanied their conversation. ‘I thought, well yes, but what if I were the person she thought she was talking to, with the same name, the same mannerisms and a complete failure. I shivered.’ The incident occurred as the figure of Richard was forming in Martin’s imagination, shortly before he began his affair with Isabel, and sometimes one has cause to suspect that they were linked by an implied subheading: mea culpa.

  It is of course impossible to disentangle The Information from the media frenzy which preceded its publication. The first hint that Martin might have somehow acquired an improbable source of wealth – his broken marriage was already well publicized – came in a short anonymous piece in the Evening Standard6 reporting that he had recently returned from the US ‘during which he allegedly spent $20,000 having all his molars removed and new ones pegged’. The article slyly infers that the dental work was prompted as much by vanity as distress. By December press speculation, fuelled by unattributable sources in the publishing industry, began to focus upon Martin’s alleged demand to his publisher Cape, who had put out all of his previous books, for an advance of £480,000. Cape insisted that £300,000 would be their limit. It was also stated that Martin had ‘dumped’ Pat Kavanagh, his lifelong agent, and wife of his friend Julian Barnes, for Andrew Wylie, which is only partially true. Wylie had negotiated Salman Rushdie’s contract for The Satanic Verses and secured an advance payment from Viking of £500,000 for the American rights, and he was often present at the morale-boosting drinks parties for Rushdie at Martin’s house and other locations long before his name became associated with Martin’s in the gossip columns. In Hitchens’s view Martin was impressed less by Wylie’s much-vaunted skills as a high-stakes negotiator than his conscientiousness, ‘even his daring. I would say that Martin’s decision to change to Wylie was made during a weekend at the latter’s house in Watermill, Long Island. I was there too, and during the evening Martin learned of how Wylie had
been solely responsible for getting Salman’s Satanic Verses into paperback. Agents and publishers were running scared but Andrew was determined, and he was not motivated by financial reward, no, he was infuriated by the cowardice of the Western publishing industry. His role went largely unrecorded, and not because he too feared reprisals. He was surprisingly modest. You see Salman was there too, at Long Island that weekend. He insisted on telling us about what our host had done. Martin, for all his flaws, values courage and integrity greatly. That, I’m certain was the decisive moment in the Wylie affair, that was why Martin chose to move to him.’

  Hitchens adds that it was he who had urged Martin to consider another agent. ‘Yes I actually suggested Andrew to him. He was my agent at the time and I knew how well he worked.’ Originally, according to Hitchens, Martin had ‘misgivings’ because of Wylie’s reputation as a ruthless advocate and negotiator, the ‘Jackal’ as he was known in the trade. ‘Martin is not particularly avaricious, and he never wishes to cause distress. It took a long time for him to be persuaded to even consider Andrew. As I say the weekend at Long Island was the turning point but that is only part of the story. The notorious dumping of Pat [Kavanagh] and the bust-up with Julian as reported by the press was a half-truth, which Martin to his enormous credit did not overturn in Experience.’ So what really happened? ‘First of all, even when he had accepted that Andrew could do a good job on his behalf he couldn’t bear the thought of having to tell Pat, and of course Julian, that he was moving to Wylie. In a way it was rather like the break-up of his marriage. He could not forgive himself for being part of something that had to happen. So he even attempted to take them both on as his co-agents, with Pat dealing mainly with the UK and Wylie with the States, simply because he was distressed by the prospect of upsetting her, and Julian. But it was absurdly impractical, it could not work. As I said to him, if Pat is genuinely your friend then she will accept that your business decisions – because writing is your sole means of support – must override nostalgic attachment. He had to be shown the facts before he accepted that his two-agent idea was impossible.’

  Then there was the notorious letter from Barnes to Martin written shortly after the latter had informed Pat of his decision. The document is in Martin’s possession but copyright means that it is not quotable verbatim without Barnes’s permission. Nevertheless, Martin’s friends commend him unreservedly for abstaining from at least an indication of its content. It affected him greatly and one detects his mortification in Experience but to his credit he didn’t indicate what his erstwhile friend actually wrote.’ According to Hitchens, Martin was left stunned by two passages in particular. In one he stated that Salman, through his association with Wylie, would be killed, but appeared to feel no anguish at the thought. Next he offered Martin hearty congratulations on the break-up of his marriage and the distress caused to Antonia. According to Hitchens, ‘it was beautifully, evilly, crafted, especially the last comment on Martin’s marriage. He didn’t of course compare this explicitly with Martin’s decision to leave Pat but he didn’t need to. Julian is an excellent, compelling stylist. Without actually saying so he made Martin feel like he had sold his soul to the devil. I mean, it was hardly as though Pat had gone bust, she was still one of the most prestigious, prosperous agents in London. But let’s be blunt, she wasn’t as good as Andrew. Business is business and Julian’s response was made up of pure malice. I’d never seen a letter like that. Martin eventually got back with him, to an extent. But I have not.’

  Martin had discussed the financial prospects for The Information with both Kavanagh and Wylie as early as 1993 and it was only when Cape refused outright to move beyond their £300,000 that Martin elected to follow Wylie’s advice and, in effect, put the novel up for auction. HarperCollins took it, along with a volume of stories, for £505,000, following intense negotiations with Wylie. Harper, unlike Cape or the other mainstream London houses, was a multinational conglomerate with New York and San Francisco offices of their own rather than alliances with US counterparts, and in this respect Wylie was fully within his professional remit to conduct these exchanges. Rather than taking over from Pat Kavanagh, he was doing a better job as Martin’s other agent. It was not, therefore, all that surprising that he was thereafter retained as his sole representative on both sides of the Atlantic; few would expect that in business nostalgic fidelity should overrule financial necessity.

  Patricia Parkin was at that time a senior editor for Harper and while she was not directly involved with The Information she provides an intriguing perspective on the deal. ‘You have to understand that Harper had become less a literary publisher than a branch of a gigantic media organization. It was already an amalgam of a number of once independent houses but with the takeover by [Rupert] Murdoch the atmosphere changed noticeably. There was talk of “Loss Leaders” and as much attention was paid to the publicity potential and saleability of the author as to the quality of the book. At the popular end of the list we had recently advanced twenty million pounds to Jeffrey Archer for three books. Twenty million! I mean, compared with that, Amis’s half a million was peanuts.’ Did the new regime at Harper, I ask her, affect the offer for The Information? ‘Oh of course it did. Even among what one might call the “serious” literary authors there was a feeling that the new publicity culture would guarantee sales. Obviously there was the famous horserace of the Booker Prize. Until Waterland, for instance, Graham Swift was a respected but largely unknown presence but once that reached the Booker shortlist in 1983 his advance for his next [Out of This World] was, I think, £125,000 pounds. That was almost a decade before The Information so take into account inflation and it is not too far off. Ian McEwan got £250,000 for The Innocent (1990), mainly because of his adaptations for film. Amis had not won the Booker of course but he had, aside from Rushdie, attracted far more press attention than any other writer at the time.’ Did this play a part in Harper’s bid? ‘It did, yes.’

  The ascent of Gwyn is based on a combination of experience and hard-headed prescience. Martin knew, halfway through the novel, that like his creation he too would soon enter the egregious cultural marketplace but he could only guess at the outcome. His speculations were offered compass by a somewhat unlikely source. Martin ranks Milton’s Paradise Lost the greatest non-dramatic poem in English; and Papineau, Leader and Will Self all agree that during the period of the novel’s composition, particularly as the draft went through a number of major revisions in 1994, conversations with Martin would turn with unerring frequency to Milton. Leader: ‘He seemed preoccupied with the fact that both poems [Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained] rely upon dialogue as the engine for decision and indeed fate.’ In Paradise Lost the exchanges between Satan and the fallen angels, Gabriel and Adam, Eve and Satan, Michael and Adam and in Paradise Regained between Satan and Christ are more than turning points in the narrative. For the first time figures who had previously been immune from such questions as motive took on the temperamental complexities of Shakespeare’s characters. It was in this groundbreaking moment in literary history that Martin found his cue for the relationship between Richard and Gwyn. Their ‘dialogue’ is uneven, weighted predominantly towards the perspective and dilemmas of Richard, yet like Milton’s figures they seem more like contrasting versions of the same presence than irreconcilable opposites.

  The Information is a fascinating book for the simple reason that it pre-empts and sometimes outranks Experience as a story about Martin Amis. In the latter he takes cautious steps back, edits, magnifies and diminishes emotional registers, slices up his chronology into digressions, anecdotes, sometimes epiphanies. The novel, however, is a far more painfully transparent account of his most troubling memories and his ongoing state of mind. It is a Miltonic dialogue, shot through with precedents set by Freud, Proust, Joyce; a conversation with himself.

  Open the novel almost at random and tortured, sometimes repentant fragments of his life will burst into sharp relief. Consider Martin and sex. Despite his radical por
traits of the contemporary world – a touch of arch modernism shot through with the baroque – he has frequently been judged reactionary verging upon misogynist in his representation of women (see, famously, Laura Doan on Money).7 I asked him if he had read the opening passage of William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach. ‘I haven’t.’ To remind the reader, in the opening pages of Boyd’s novel (1990), the narrator, one Hope Clearwater, having already disclosed her gender in the prologue, begins her story by reflecting upon two acquaintances, both male (p. 3). Hauser is not present, but she comments on his ‘cynical gossip, all silky insinuation and covert bitchery’. Clovis, however, is sitting close by. He is, apparently, a curious figure, prone to shifts between ‘raffish arrogance’ and ‘total and single-minded self-absorption’ and given to ‘instinctively and unconsciously cupp[ing] his genitals whenever he was alarmed or nervous’. Hope then describes how an ant seems to have trapped itself under her shirt and how ‘Clovis impassively watched me remove my shirt and then my bra’. Clovis’s indifference to what some men would treat as a sexually provocative gesture is eventually explained when we are told of how soon afterwards he clambers into a nearby mulemba tree, swings with ‘powerful easy movements’ through the branches and is ‘lost to sight, heading north east towards the hills of the escarpment’ (p. 4). Clovis is an ape. Boyd provokes in the reader a composite network of assumptions on maleness and follows up with an implicit glance towards the way that some women deal with these same issues. In Hope’s case the blurring of the distinction between a subhuman and the general condition of maleness is in part a reflection of her enlightened post-feminist singularity and in equal degree her sense of affinity, as a human, with the apes which she and her colleagues are studying in Africa.