OPINION: I had dinner at the end of last month with an old friend, the writer Geoff Dyer, and we spent a good chunk of it talking about Martin Amis, who recently died in Florida at 73. We took turns reminiscing about how important he was to us in earlier days, and how he symbolised a time and place ‒ London in the 1980s and 1990s – like no other writer. In fact, like no other person during that period.
It’s hard to picture it now, but when we were in our 20s and early 30s, there was a novelist – a white male novelist – who was the very embodiment of bohemian cool, with his roll-up cigarettes, rich, slangy posh accent, and pouting poses for newspaper profile photoshoots, always bristling with wit and intelligence.
But contrary to his image as a very male writer who couldn’t understand women, he didn’t attract only fan-boy readers. My wife, who was dining with us, spoke of her own enjoyment of novels such as Money, which brilliantly satirised the new materialism of the 1980s, and confessed she had nurtured a minor obsession with him.
When she arrived in London from New Zealand in the early 1980s, she found herself living a few streets away from the author everyone was talking about, and she would often see him during writing breaks. He’d be taking a stroll around Notting Hill, savouring one of his endless cigarettes, and she told us she would sometimes quietly follow him at a distance – I think the technical word for this is stalking.
She was fascinated by where he was going and what he was doing, but she wouldn’t have dreamt of such a fascination, she explained, with Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes. Amis, though, had this dangerous aura about him, more rock star than storyteller, and that was the magnetic force that drew her to tail him like a private detective.
Dyer spoke about his excitement when he finally met this diminutive prince of publishing, and he was unembarrassed about asking him to sign a number of books. Again, he couldn’t think of another writer who would inspire him to act in the same manner.
I met Amis several times, and we once shared the stage at a joint event at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. It was a packed night that ended in a heated drama with the TV satirist Chris Morris shouting angrily at Amis from the back of the auditorium. This was in 2007, when Amis had started to lose something of his untouchable swagger, having made some ill-judged remarks about British Muslims, and when he had also finally lost his absurdly extended enfant terrible youth.
Yet when he spoke that night in the institute on the Mall, yards away from Trafalgar Square, he held the whole room in rapt attention. He was funny, intellectually and morally challenging, and a magnificent deployer of treasurable phrases. We went out to dinner afterwards and had such a good time that we promised to do it again.
We didn’t. I think I saw him briefly once again at a party, and then a few years later he moved to the US with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca. Maybe his days as London’s hippest wordsmith had passed, but it still felt like a major loss, as though the city had suddenly grown less sharp, less amusing, less interesting.
Times change, places evolve and new writers emerge, but someone would have to do something hugely special to match the excitement Amis generated, not just with his thrilling prose but by his very presence. I shall miss him.
Andrew Anthony is an Observer writer and is married to a New Zealander.
