A family affair: remembering the personal side of Martin Amis and his father, Kingsley
Eleanor Wachtel interviewed the late English writer in 2007
This summer, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, Eleanor Wachtel presents 10 of her favourite episodes chosen from the show's archive.
This episode originally aired on February 4, 2007. It contains part of Eleanor Wachtel's 1992 interview with Kingsley Amis.
It's not always the case that the children of literary greats manage to achieve similar success. But that's exactly what happened for Martin Amis, son of Sir Kingsley Amis, one of postwar Britain's most renowned writers. The younger Amis became a celebrated novelist in his own right, whose books Money, London Fields and The Information defined the British literary scene in the 1980s and '90s. Martin Amis died on May 19, 2023 at the age of 73.
Born in 1949, Martin Amis attended Oxford University and published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973 while working at the Times Literary Supplement. Along with acclaimed novels, essays and criticism, Amis also wrote a memoir about his family life, romantic relationships and literary friendships, called Experience. Many of those friendships were with an impressive cohort of writers, including Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.
Upon news of his death, McEwan called the younger Amis a "fearless" writer, while Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and many others noted his signature style, which influenced the generation that followed. The day before he died, Martin Amis was knighted for services to literature, as part of the King's Birthday Honours.
Innocence as a value in fiction
"The positive value in my fiction is innocence. That's what I prize most. Whereas for my father, it would be something a bit more like decency or doing the right thing. With me it's innocence, since that's not something you can work on, is it?
The positive value in my fiction is innocence. That's what I prize most. - Martin Amis
The great trajectory of our species is becoming less innocent. We all know that our children's period of innocence is shorter now than that of our own, just as ours was shorter than that of our parents. It's a shrinking thing any way, but also shrinking on the large scale in that the planet, all the time, is getting less innocent simply because of the aggregation of experience in its ugliest sense."
On his relationship with his father
"Well as Christopher Hitchens said, years ago, 'I've never seen a father-son relationship as good as the one you have with yours.'
"And all my contemporaries had their relationship with their father poisoned by one thing. There's the usual stuff about authority and rebelliousness and wanting to slough off the last generation and all that, but I think the tenor of it for people born around the middle of the last century was that they had to get round a lot of sexual disapproval from their parents. And the form it took was, you know, sexual envy really posing as high mindedness.
"My father had this battle with his father and so it was completely out of his system. So there was never anything like that between him and his sons or his daughter.
"When my father was 22 and in the army, he was advised, was urged, was commanded by his father to give up an affair he was having with a married woman.
He was the kind of father who didn't spend much time with you or on you, but whenever you passed him in the house, it would only take him, you know, half a minute, but he would make you laugh.- Martin Amis
"Also he wasn't a sort of authoritarian at all because it bored him. He would have died of boredom if he'd said, 'you're grounded for the next two weeks.' Imagine him forcing that. It's just so humourless and literal-minded. He had no time for that.
"He was the kind of father who didn't spend much time with you or on you, but whenever you passed him in the house, it would only take him, you know, half a minute, but he would make you laugh. He was that kind of man and that bred a great happiness. Laughter is happiness.
"We had a few ideological and literary disagreements, but nothing at all, basically. He was very loyal and supported you, especially when times were rough. I didn't think it was an unusual relationship because I hadn't known any other — but I now see that it was."
Men don't know how to die
"When they start to die, men change the habit of a lifetime and start blaming themselves for everything that went wrong in their lives, having not done much of that, whereas women do the opposite. They also change the habit of a lifetime and stop blaming themselves for everything and can die gently and calmly.
"But men, they have all this stuff they've been avoiding, which is self-reproach. They've had some self-reproach, but usually not enough.
"And all your achievements just melt away, and you're left with just the human toll."
Writing with a sense of positivity
"There is something a bit too easy about the pessimistic side. It looks great when you're young. It's sort of great fun being a nihilist and all that. It's perhaps too easy sometimes to write about what is dark.
"It's kind of always a misunderstanding too. If you're depressed by a dark book, no matter how dark, it lifts you, either through catharsis or just admiration of something well-realized. But, if depressing works of art depressed you in that literal way, then people would be staggering out of King Lear with thoughts of suicide. But they're not. They come out braced.
"You come to value the light as well, and it's more difficult to do, and it's certainly more difficult to do on the page.
Writing can never be the work of pessimists. They all have to be lovers of life, because the work of art defeats the argument.- Martin Amis
"There was another little axiom that my father and I decided on, which is that there is a solemn duty to be cheerful. And I believe that.
"Human infamy and weakness is as elaborate as any cathedral or epic poem. But writing can never be the work of pessimists. They all have to be lovers of life, because the work of art defeats the argument. If it's good, we've produced this out of that, so it's not all bad."
Martin Amis' comments have been edited for length and clarity.
