Martin Amis - Like father like son

BY MICHELE HEWITSON

On the cover of Martin Amis' memoirs, Experience, is a photograph of the author with a cigarette stuck defiantly in his determined-looking mouth. He is about 8 years old.

The 51-year-old Amis, once dubbed "the Mick Jagger of literature" and, by A.S. Byatt, one of the "strutting boys of the book world," is sitting in his study in the London home he shares with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters, with a cigarette in his hand "as I speak to you."

He was a late starter, he says, in a household where "you were allowed a cigarette on Christmas Day once you turned 5. Sort of Bohemian standards, you know."

This must be some sort of Amis family in-joke. Not the fags at 5, that's a true story. But nobody in their right mind would think of Kingsley Amis — who is, of course, the famous Martin's famous dad — as having ever been a paid-up member of the Bohemian set.

Bohemians, you might have imagined, would have been about as acceptable to Kingsley as a low-alcohol lager — he required, says Martin, "vandal-strength beer."

"Gone all lefty," Kingsley complained in 1986 when his son came out publicly to declare his support for the anti-nuclear movement.

Although Kingsley, to the panting excitement of the British press, ended his days living in a melange a trois (most definitely not a menage) with his ex-wife Hilly and her third husband, it was an arrangement interesting for compassionate rather than prurient reasons. Kingsley, who had recently been left by his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, had a phobia about being alone in a house after dark. Hilly took him in until he left for the last time in 1995, to die in a hospice.

The public perception of KA (as Martin refers to him) — and he did rather grow into his own caricature as he aged — was of a curmudgeonly, drink-sodden reactionary who hated women.

He certainly hated phonies, Bohemian or otherwise. On meeting one of Hilly Bardwell's brothers, he wrote to the poet Philip Larkin: "[He wore] sandals and saffron trousers and NO socks and a green shirt, and plays the recorder (yes) and likes Tudor music."

And it was Kingsley who created the unforgettably awful Professor Welch in his first novel, Lucky Jim, published in 1954. The professor, it turns out, was based on Hilly's father, whose sin was to entertain a liking for folk music. Putting him in a book saved Kingsley's father-in-law from more violent retribution: "I don't see how I can avoid doing him in fiction if I am to refrain from stabbing him under the fifth rib."

The reason for talking to Martin — and for talking to him at length about his relationship with his father, who died in 1995 — is that he has "done" his father in non-fiction. His Experience has been released in Britain in the same month as Kingsley's Letters (due for release here in September), a serendipitous publishing event which highlights the contribution father and son have made to British literature — and the lurking animosity which underscores that contribution.

KA was labelled the Angry Young Man of Literature in the 50s (and nothing made him angrier); Martin, in turn, became the Bad Boy of English Letters. He has been the bad boy for so long that it comes as a shock to realise that the strutting lad is now 51; that he is now a grand-father.

Martin Amis has always been regarded as the boy who was born with a silver fountain pen in his mouth. In the 80s the New Statesman ran a competition calling for the most unlikely book titles. The winning entry was "My Struggle" by Martin Amis.

It is difficult, from this distance, to understand why Amis has been so reviled. His major sins have been, not folk-dancing, but financial success. Where's there's a whiff of an Amis scandal there will be an accusatory scent of money. (His first book was presciently titled, in retrospect, Money.)

He fell out with long-time friend, writer Julian Barnes, after he dumped his long-time agent, Pat Kavanagh, Barnes' wife, for the American agent Andrew Wylie, who negotiated a huge advance for Amis' novel The Information.

In 1993 Amis left his wife and children for the heiress Fonseca, who was quickly and cruelly nicknamed "Funseeker." He has been castigated for years for spending a reported $60,000 on dental surgery for his rotten teeth; the British press insisted the work was purely cosmetic.

The golden boy had officially become, in the best Amis tradition, an adulterous, money-
hungry bastard about whose marriage breakup
a Sunday Times columnist wrote that he was "having trouble containing my schadenfreude."

The teeth are there, in harrowing detail; the marriage breakup is there, although perhaps not in the tell-all, mea culpa detail the tabloids might have been praying for.

What is also there is the story of Lucy Partington, Amis' cousin, who disappeared in 1973 and whose remains were discovered in the grisly burial ground that was the basement of serial killer Fred West. Lucy is, in a memoir of grief and loss, never far from Amis' experience. Her sister, Marian Partington, has since accused Amis of exploiting Lucy's story; of having
hardly known her.

They have since made up a row which, as with much of the Amis family story, has been carried out on the front pages of newspapers. Amis says he "always knew there would be a sting in the tail. I tried not to upset anyone, but I did upset Marian ... It's been hard for her because she's writing about it too and everyone's very possessive and protective of the past."

Until now, the one topic that shaped Amis' past that he has been conspicuously reticent about is his relationship with KA.

Experience begins with one word, "Dad," and ends with two: "Kingsley Amis."

"You're right," Amis says, "in singling that [Kingsley] out as the reason for writing the book."

He couldn't have written about his father while Kingsley was still alive. "It would have felt completely wrong. I certainly couldn't have published when he was still alive, too personal."

But Amis knew from the time he was 30, "when I felt myself to be a writer, that I would have to do it. It goes back at least 20 years and I would occasionally make a note of something or transcribe a conversation. I didn't really think about it, I just accepted it as a future responsibility."

The nature of that responsibility, "because of the more or less unique nature of the case," is nicely contained in a footnote: "I bought your book today," said Hylan Booker (godfather to one of Martin's sons). "I bought your Daddy's book, too." Kingsley loved this, adding: "That sentence will only get said once in the history of the world."

Yet Kingsley was known, famously, for not reading his son's books. You might expect Amis the younger to nurse some wounded feelings about his father's very public rejection of his career but what emerges from Experience is a father-son relationship to be envied.

"It hasn't been a breeze, being the son of a writer," says the son of the writer who some have chosen to believe was born with a full set of writing genes, a notion he rejects as "clearly nonsense. I'm sure the reason it was all right for me was that it was all right in lots of other respects, too. It was the right kind of relationship I had with my father, and you know, although he didn't read me and praise me, maybe that was part of whatever he did. So, it did work. Kingsley obeyed instinct and it worked out."

His own instinct turned out to be for acceptance. He writes about Kingsley's drinking ("he was not an alcoholic; he was a heavy drinker") with affection: "He is, of course, the laureate of the hangover … There was never anything namby-pamby about his admission that getting drunk, or, failing that, being drunk was what he had in mind."

It is this sort of affectionate portrait which has led reviewers to conclude that with Experience a kinder Amis emerges. He's not quite convinced, "but, you know, you change when your father dies and when you turn 50, when you've got five children, of course you get less stupid. I agree with Tolstoy that we stay the same while time moves past us."