Martin Amis on grief, Libya and leaving London

I wondered who would bring up the Islamist episode first and, in the event, it was Amis — as cool and breezy as can be. I had arrived early and killed time sitting on a bench in the gardens opposite the substantial Chalk Farm house Amis has lived in on and off for the past 18 years — but is now leaving.

A few minutes before the arranged hour, I cross the road and see him standing with his back to the window in the middle of the room where we are to conduct the interview, and I am struck by there being something melancholy about his bearing, as though he were momentarily marooned.

This thought evaporates the moment he sees me, and comes down the steps to open the gate, a friendly kiss on both cheeks — a faint but not unpleasant smell of nicotine and, perhaps, aftershave — as he takes my arm and shepherds me into the house. Before we sit down he makes a jauntily relaxed, almost off-the-cuff comment about the trouble he got in when we last met for an interview, five years ago.

This had taken place in the verdant gardens of the family holiday home of his American wife, Isabel Fonseca, in the Hamptons, Long Island, in August 2006, in the same week of the foiled plot by Islamist terrorists to blow up ten planes en route to the US from the UK. The previous year I had flown to New York, shortly after the bombs in London that claimed 52 lives, to interview Amis’s old friend Salman Rushdie. It was in this climate that Amis made his inflammatory comments, which, as was later commented on, went completely unnoticed at the time.

To requote those much-quoted quotes, he had said: “There is a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’ … What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation farther down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

These words became “news”, more than a year on, when the academic Terry Eagleton, at the time a professor at the University of Manchester (where Amis has taught a creative writing course for the past four years), attacked the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An Introduction.

For a while, it was a debate that raged — with a blurring of the old lines between left-thinking intellectuals and the righteous Right. Amis had to defend himself against accusations of racism and wrote a number of articles reinforcing his position that he respected Islam but not Islamism: “just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta”.

I say that I was grateful that he didn’t take the coward’s way out and blame it all on the hapless journalist for misquoting him or taking his comments out of context. Were you a bit shocked by the delayed reaction? “Well, it was sort of rigged wasn’t it? And I still stand by … you know, that the novelist is meant to say what really happens, not like a politician who’s always covering his back, and I think there was an urge to say that. It was a bad idea because, as I saw the next day, you can’t do anything that resembles collective punishment . . .”

The next day? “The day after we’d had the interview, I repeated to a friend who was staying [the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides] what I’d said to you, you know, ‘Don’t you think, there’s an urge to say this . . .’

“And he said, ‘Yeah, but the trouble is that you’ll make them all hate us if you say that’, and I thought [as though, rather comically, it had just occurred to him] ‘Oh … yes’.”

Amis goes off to get a beer for himself and a glass of white wine for me. He returns with the drinks and I raise a toast: “To pandemonium, outrage and the vilification of Martin Amis.”

So what does he make of the so-called Arab Spring? “Well, it’s revealed a lot of things, hasn’t it? It’s revealed the hypocrisy of Western policy towards those leaders, you know, very embarrassingly, and it’s also revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood etc constitute a kind of paper tiger that’s been used to more or less shore up these tyrants — ‘better the Devil you know’ and all that — and that’s had the carpet pulled out from under it. But also it seems that the nature of political Islam has changed. It’s become more political and less rejectionist and extreme and impossible.”

Does he have fears that one sort of despot could be replaced by a religious despot? “Well, let’s take Egypt, which is the great hero, this great model. During all those demonstrations there wasn’t so much as a Coke tin thrown over the wall of the Israeli Embassy or indeed the American Embassy. The whole pattern has changed.

“It’s not about Islam or Hamas, it’s other elements. It’s to do with them seeing what the West has and wanting it for themselves. The magnificent maturity of those great rebels in Cairo … that they forswore violence. I kept on thinking, ‘They’re going to start giving in to their frustration and their fury and start wrecking things and then it’s all going to change’, but it never happened.

“And they cleaned up after themselves. A marvellous sort of civic-mindedness, as if they suddenly realised they had a country and wanted to look after it. From what you read, it was the genuine, best kind of revolution experience, and absolutely admirable. I feel proud to be alive to witness it. And now compare it with Libya . . .”

What does Amis think of Prince Andrew (apropos the stories about his secret meetings with Colonel Gaddafi)?

“I feel pretty appalled by what trickles out,” he says and alights on the Prince’s controversial house sale: “When he sold his house to that Kazakh [the President’s son-in-law] at £3 million over the asking price, and his comment was, ‘I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’ — well, you bloody well should have done. That’s what gift horses are all about. You should look them in the mouth because you’ll see the seed of your own undoing.”

I don’t think he will be undone, however, do you? “No, but he’s an embarrassment to me and I’m sure every other thoughtful citizen of this country.” Amis doesn’t really seem to have an awfully high opinion of this country.

He gives the impression that it’s all a little parochial and small fry on this side of the Pond. He’s always been a kind of honorary American, having lived there as a child when his father taught at Princeton; both his current and previous wife, Antonia, are American; his brilliant collection of interviews in the Eighties, The Moronic Inferno, was made up of encounters with all the big beasts of American literature (from Capote to Updike to Bellow) as well as the likes of Hugh Hefner, Steven Spielberg and Gloria Steinem. It’s where his dearest, cancer-stricken friend, Christopher Hitchens, also married to an American, lives and became a US citizen in 2007.

Even the way Amis is unafraid to be provocative and make waves about current issues is more reminiscent of an American writer, such as Norman Mailer. What Amis seems to crave most is a big stage peopled by epic characters.

When I ask him what he thinks of the coalition Government, for instance, he says: “I’ve never been very interested in British politics except in the Thatcher years.” You did spend time with Tony Blair for an article, however. “Yes, that was fascinating and I had to get interested in British politics when I did that piece and” — lest we find him guilty of looking a gift horse in the mouth — “I was grateful for the chance to do it. I read books about Blair [for whom he developed protective feelings, as I recall] and I got to know all these people who I’d vaguely heard of and never cared about, like Mandelson.”

Oh, don’t you find Mandelson a bit intriguing? “No. I hardly know who he is.” Are you embarrassed about England? “I’m embarassed that they don’t see that England doesn’t matter in the world.

“I’m sympathetic in that it’s a disappointment in the old sense … that things don’t live up to expectations but that appointment is taken away from you — dis-appointment. Your position has been removed and that’s a very painful thing. Painful for the individual and painful for a country. It’s not easy to accept but since we’ve been a second or third-echelon power for more than half a century now, I think it should have sunk in. It’s very difficult to deal with and in 30 years time, you watch America dealing with it. It’s not a smooth process.”

Are you still fascinated by American politics? “Yes, because that’s still something important in my lifetime and I think if you are interested in politics you’re interested in power, and if you’re interested in power you’re interested in the most powerful country.”

He was “madly excited”, he says, when Obama was elected and watched the coverage that night with his younger son: “I was very moved and I — much too wishfully — thought this was the first step, and it probably is, to heal the great wound of the American psyche, which is slavery. And I’ve become confident in the last three to four weeks that he is going to be a two-term president. He’s been very good on the transition in the Maghreb.

“He’s looking more and more presidential;healthcare, for instance, is a vital thing.”

Amis says that Obama was probably not as shrewd as he should have been about how things work in Washington when he first got in: “He knows ten times more now than he did when he came to power. But it is wonderful to have a very good writer in the White House — that’s something we haven’t had since Lincoln.

“If you’re a writer it’s a thrill to have someone whose cadences are so convincing and melodious. And you can’t write like that without feeling like that. It’s not a superficial thing.”

He’s read both of the President’s books and was most impressed by the first: “You only have to read a couple of sentences to see that this is someone with a feeling for words. After the recent run of people who can’t complete a sentence without putting their foot in it and stepping in dogshit and coming out the other end licking themselves, particularly Bush the second.”

What does he make of the Tea Party? “Christine O’Donnell — ‘I dabbled into witchcraft’. She can’t even say that right. Dabbled in. Looked into.” He screws up his face in scorn, looking remarkably like his father, for a moment. “And I think Sarah Palin is the most shameful thing that’s happened in America since McCarthyism.

“Don’t you think that, at its source, this is all a subconscious reaction to having a black president?”

Well, they seem to have a hard time coming to terms with his middle name.

“… one of the many elements, when Obama made his speech in Cairo, was himself as a sort of human example. There were millions of young people thinking, ‘I’m young, I’ve got dark skin, my middle name is Hussein and I’m living on five dollars a week and he’s the President of the United States’. So certainly a contrast there.”

Amis leaves to get us another drink and I stroll around the ballroom-sized living room, with its blood-red velvet sofas and big flowery carpet under a coffee table with a single art book of the work of Bruno Fonseca, his wife Isabel’s late brother. A pinball machine is snuck in a corner by one of the windows. An antique sofa is covered in faded decorative cushions. Many shelves of books, of course, and a guitar.

When Amis returns, he points to a lovely portrait of Fernanda, his dark-eyed daughter, now 14 (Clio, her younger sister, is 11), saying that it’s by his mother-in-law — who is an amateur painter; but, as he says, it’s very accomplished. The guitar belongs to Fernanda and her father used to play when he was her age and was in a couple of bands: “The only one that was any good was Hard Edge.” He was a drummer in the first band, “but only because I had a drum set and then I was the rhythym guitarist but I couldn’t do a solo. I stopped getting better after about eight months, which is a great shame because I did love it.”

I’d never read about Amis’s rock-star ambitions — strange because his looks as a youth are invariably compared to Mick Jagger’s. Old photos show a smoking, pouting, velvet-jacketed Marty; I say that there’s one famous image in particular where he looks as pretty as a girl. “I was often mistaken for a girl when I was 14 or 15,” he says. “But you never feel pretty at the time. Well, they say youth is wasted on the young. You’re always worried about your ear or your leg or your neck, your legs.”

Which brings us neatly into some of the themes in his most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow — youthful neurosis and narcissim — which has recently come out in paperback. I say that I don’t much care for the cover of two bikini-clad babes, which looks very “airporty”. “Well, I said that [to the publishers] — that it was rather airporty but in an inviting way, I think. But I could do with some being in airports. When you write literary fiction … do you want an austere cover?”

The novel is set in a castle in Italy in the summer of 1970 — “when sex”, as the back cover line proclaims, “is very much on everyone’s mind”. When we met in the summer of 2006, Amis was 300 pages into this book, which he descibed to me as a “blindingly” autobiographical gossip novel featuring his father and Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Ian Hamilton, the Hitch and so on. But in that list, only the last two names feature in the novel — Hamilton in a sort of walk-on part and Hitch as the brother of the main character, Keith.

By the way, what is this thing Amis has for Keiths? (There’s Keith Whitehead in Dead Babies and Keith Talent in London Fields and now Keith Nearing.) “Oh yeah, yeah,” he says. “Love the Keith. And the name had to begin with K because of K in The Castle.”

So what happened to the blindingly autobiographical novel? “Well, I had to eat those words because I had to abandon it. We were back in Uruguay and I was looking at it and I just realised that the whole project of writing autobiographically about the sexual revolution was a complete dead end. And life is dead. What I say towards the end of the book is that even the most crude, kitchen-sinky kind of novel is, in fact, very stylised. Our lives actually have no shape at all and they are just one thing after the other. There can be lives that have a kind of shape but it’s a fluke if they do. It’s the difference between a lady’s court shoe and your actual foot. Life is the foot.”

We talk about pornography and the depressing thought that because of the internet our children may find their fledgeling attitudes towards sex informed by it. (Incidentally, he’s very amusing about his failure to be a disciplinarian father. He gave up, he says, 20 years ago, when he marched into his sons’ room to bawl them out, and his older son, who was about 7, said, “ ‘Oh, taste the wrath of Daddy’, and that was the end of that, basically.”) “It’s tremendously depressing,” he says. “You know, when my brother [Phillip, an artist] and me were growing up in the sexual revolution — he was born in ’48, me in ’49 — there was never any doubt that it was love that you were after.

“Kingsley was talking to us about love once and said the physical sensations of sex are very much enhanced by love — and my brother and I looked at each other … we were after love for the sex but actually we were always after love. We always used to say, ‘I want to fall in love’. And I don’t think you hear that now — ‘I want to fall in love’.

“From what I can gather — and I’m referring to feminist writing — Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls is quite a chilling piece of work where she is talking to girls of about 20 or 21 — including many Cambridge undergraduates — and she quotes one as saying, ‘I like the boys who don’t give a shit’.”

I think, Martin, that it may have been ever thus. “Oh no, it wasn’t — come on — girls saying they like boys who don’t give a shit!” Oh, I think so … it’s a syndrome when you’re young that you’re drawn to boys who are hard to get, surely? “Playing it cool?” Yes. “Well, low self-esteem.” This seems strange for someone who acknowledged the truth in Tina Brown’s assertion (one of his many cast-off girlfriends; he even invented a word for chucking — “aimed”) that Amis had never had his heart broken.

The one autobiographical element that remained from those first jettisoned 300 pages was that of Sally (who becomes Violet in the book), Amis’s younger sister who died in 2000 of an unspecified infection after five days in intensive care, at the age of 46. Do you think she was emotionally or mentally challenged? “Yes.” Was this part of your protectiveness? “Yes. She spent time in America with my mother during her second marriage, and during that period — 12 to 14 — my brother and I always used to think that she took a lot of drugs and she never really advanced much beyond those years intellectually.

“She was always a very difficult kid. I mean, adorable and good-hearted but hard to manage, rebellious and chaotic really.”

I refer to several desperate episodes of drunken mishaps in the book: “You won’t believe it but I played it down — she was more extreme than that.

“She was in a state of panic, I think. She was a child in an adult world surrounded by what she felt were hostile forces unless they were neutralised by sex. And the blokes were more and more terrifying.”

He says that he doesn’t think he would have written about Sally — and the passages about her are by far the most affecting section of his novel — if she hadn’t given him permission to do so. After one spectacular rescue mission, Amis had taken her home “back to her little flat — she was very house-proud and her flat was a tiny council flat — and I got the feeling she wanted to thank me for that rescue and various other rescues”.

And, then, mindful that in the end the only way he could cope with Sally’s downward spiral was to absent himself from her: “It was my mother and Kingsley who did endless stuff. Kingsley did a great deal. If you look under Sally in the index of his biography you’ll see that he had a daily schedule of taking her to a shrink, taking her to this, taking her to that.”

Do you think she was saveable? “No, because you’d have had to spend your whole life doing it and she wouldn’t have wanted it.” There’s a suggestion in the book — on the other hand — that if it were the other way round, Violet (Sally) would have devoted her life to saving her brother’s life (as she devoted herself to the needs of her father during the last years of his life), “that it would be possible, all your life, to do nothing else but lift someone out of the mire, clean them up, lift them out again, and clean them up again”.

Anyway, that night in Sally’s flat: “She just looked at me in a strange way, a clear way, and she said, ‘Write about me … you can say anything you like, just write about me’. Not that she wanted to be memorialised, she was giving me a sort of present.”

After Sally’s death, five years after their father died, Amis had a nervous breakdown. His mother, Hilly, died last year and his male other half, the Hitch, has oesophageal cancer and has acknowledged that he would be lucky to live for another five years. It’s scarcely surprising that Amis, for all his courtesy — and it is a form of courtesy to give a good interview, which he always does — seems depressed. In print his answers are full of his usual brio and thoughtfulness but his delivery was uncharacteristically subdued. He talked into his chest and his body seemed etiolated with psychic fatigue. When I ask him about Hitchens, at one point he lets out a deep, strangled sigh, as though the question has mugged him.

“Well, they’ve stopped talking about a cure and what they say is that he may live long enough for them to be able to try various cutting-edge treatments,” he says, miserably. How are you coping? He’s as close to you as a family member. “Closer, really, because you don’t choose your family, do you?

“I’m always hoping and he’s always hoping and we correspond very often and he’s incredibly lucid and more than lucid, he’s as lucid as ever but also very delicate in terms of feeling and trying to map out this new area that he’s in.

“But if it’s inevitable, all I can feel — apart from loving him as I always have — is that if he does die, say in the next year, on top of everything else, is just what a terrible job of work it’s going to be to get over it. And I am more and more depressed by that. When my mother died last year — just how much somatic work, work of the body, there was lying in bed and sort of juddering. Just how much of that there is with grief — working, working, working just to get through it and you never get past it.

“What I say in the novel is that it’s the deaths rather than the living that takes so much out of you. (‘It’s the deaths of others that kill you in the end.’) One of the most mischievious falsehoods that’s ever gained currency is that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It doesn’t. It makes you weaker and kills you later on — it’s a really mortal wound, a spear through your soul.”

The last time he saw the Hitch was in September, but he was about to go to the States to see him again. Amis has sold his house — another bereavement of sorts — leaving the street where his father used to live, too. The family is moving to Brooklyn but hanging on to a flat in Queensway. “It all began last June when my mother died. It was such a shock to me and to Isabel that we immediately started thinking about her mother,” he says. I suppose we all think our mothers are going to live for ever. “Well, you just do and then they don’t and then … her mother is almost exactly the same age as Hilly [was] when she died. It is finite and Isabel very much wants to be there.”

Being near the Hitch must be a factor? “Well, he got sick after my mother died, very soon after, so we’d already decided — but it was an incentive to go to be with him, not because he was sick but because he was the Hitch.”

Hitchens has said that he feels some guilt about his unhealthy lifestyle having been a factor: “Well, guilt about his children mainly. But he has got an incredible consitution. We’re all banking on that because he was having such horrible treatment that only an ox could get through it. But he is an ox and he has a marvellous sort of naval constitution. His father was a Navy man.”

I mention Hitchens’ waterboarding exercise. He didn’t last very long but he did come back for more. Amazing. I wouldn’t have done it, would you? “No. He said that they asked him his age and he told them it but he said, ‘I didn’t tell them about the 17,000 cigarettes I’d been on for the last 50 years’.” A big smoky laugh.

“He’s very brave. There were times when I was with him when I’d say, ‘Hitch, let’s walk away’, and he never would. But he always got away with it because they looked in his eyes and saw that he wasn’t kidding. It was just this great principle that if you’re in the right you don’t stand down. Where with me, you know — discretion being the better part of valour … I was that way, he wasn’t at all.”

Amis is getting anxious about time. There’s a party for Edna O’Brien’s 80th birthday, and he doesn’t want to be late. Before he goes, I ask him what he makes of Julian Assange. “He reminds me of Andy Warhol; that sort of creepy upper lip that I sort of suspect and, obviously, an egomaniac, up to a point,” and then a slyish grin. “Who has made such an impression as he has in the past ten years, and you’d have to say there’s only one — Osama.”

You’re comparing Julian Assange to Osama bin Laden? “Only in human type — they’re both stirrers on an enormous scale.” Oh no, Martin, are you sure you want to say this? “Yeah, he’s a mixer — just as Osama was — or is.”

And with that, Amis — something of a mixer himself — walks me to the door.

The Times