'Insulting people in print is a vice of youth': Martin Amis on The Rub of Time
Martin Amis is most well-known for his works of fiction, but his new book The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage highlights his non-fiction writing from the past two decades.
The book explores everything from sports to politics to entertainment. He also shares personal essays about the people who influenced his life.
Amis spoke with Day 6 host Brent Bambury in our Toronto studio. Here's part of their conversation:
Brent Bambury: In 2012, you stated that the role of writers, for the time being, will be to take America's temperature and check its pulse as it heads down on long road of decline. Six years later, how is she doing?
Martin Amis: Very poorly. In fact, the decline is being hastened by the current president and it's a decline in several directions. It's not just political power or economic power, which is all I meant really. It's now a moral decline and a dramatic decline in the discourse.
Are you expecting, as some are, a constitutional crisis?
You would need a responsible Republican Party for that to actually blossom. And that is among the most shocking things, is how rotten the Republican Party has revealed itself to be.
You covered the Republican Party during the primaries. Has the party declined since the time of the primaries?
Well when I covered the 2012 Republican Convention in Tampa, Fla., they were already lying their heads off. Paul Ryan made a speech that was quite worryingly effective, I thought. Then I read the next day in the New York Times that it was a pack of lies. And the Republican strategist told me, and they were saying in public, 'there is no downside to lying.'
And I thought, that in itself is such a lie in the larger scheme of things. Of course there's a downside to lying. You devalue so many things if you habitually tell lies. But this is a lesson that Trump has long learnt — that you can just lie ahead of and it won't do as much harm as it'll do you good.
When I look at the full title of your book The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta and Trump, one name stands out as not belonging with the others: John Travolta. You wrote about his career comeback in 1995, and that comeback was short lived. Why did you include that essay in the book?
I was very interested in the part played in it by [Quentin] Tarantino and Elmore Leonard and that was a little configuration of people I was really interested in. And I thought it was just a good in-depth profile. I got on really well with him and he took a lot of trouble with it. And it's a great shame that his revival didn't sustain itself and it's a recurrence of his inability to spot a good part.
But time also changed things for him in a way that wasn't expected at all. You begin by talking about his son, who died when he was a teenager. There is also discussion of scientology in the book, which is quite perfunctory. It's not critical of scientology; it doesn't identify scientology as being quite as complicated or as dark as we've come to find it is.
That's true. That's true. There are weaknesses in that piece. But I still thought it was a good example of what an in-depth profile can be.
You write about the death of Princess Diana. How sympathetic were you to the Queen's plight following Diana's death?
Quite sympathetic. I respect the Queen; she has integrity, no doubt about that. And she looks rock solid compared to poor Diana who was not just a candle in the wind, but a leaf in the wind — a completely fabricated figure. So I continue to respect the Queen.
Did Kingsley Amis [Martin's father] have strange dreams about the Queen?
Yes he did. And I'd say, 'What happens in these dreams?' And he said, 'Oh, nothing. She's on my lap and I'm kissing her and feeling her breasts, and I say 'come on let's go to my flat' or something.' And she said, 'No Kingsley, we mustn't!' It's obviously a transgression dream as well as a sex dream.
You write about competing in the world series of poker in Las Vegas and you write that if you were forced to choose one adjective to describe Las Vegas, you would choose 'un-Islamic.' Of all the words you could choose to describe Vegas, why one that includes Islam?
It gets everything in. You know, music — constant music everywhere. It's profane. Utterly profane. And the human image in the human form is everywhere on vulgar display. All things frowned on in Islam.
And it's utterly irreligious. Someone wrote a book that called Las Vegas "the last honest place in America," simply because hypocrisy is rather thin on the ground in Las Vegas. There's no pretense of any values except sex and money, basically — and both frowned on in the Qur'an. You know, it's a usurious holiday spot. I thought it packs a lot in, "un-Islamic."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear our full interview with writer Martin Amis, download our podcast or click the 'Listen' button at the top of this page.