Features

What an Experience with Martin Amis

By Danielle Egan

Jun 29, 2000

I buy Experience and my ticket for the reading. I go home and read and have a wonderful time. Experience confirms a lot things and surprises you as well. Martin admits there will be name-dropping from the start but there’s a scrap-book intimacy to it, until I start taking notes and thinking: Interview. Get interview. Must get interview. It spoils the experience a little, I think. I’ll go back later. Get the interview [Doug Coupland was next got the DO LUNCH slot! No offense Doug, you bastard!] and there’s a week there where reality – the weather, what’s in the fridge for dinner, world crises, other people, clean socks – submerges. On top is all the reading, all the fantastic books piled up and bookmarked and “open widely” (decide early: no teeth talk, I’ve always known about that mouth, those teeth, though the horrible experiences with Mike and Todd are an “interesting extra”). So many questions. Too many questions. What will happen?
Meanwhile, (re)reading Martin Amis is a full body experience. You get up and pace, you laugh from all sorts of different parts, you slouch in doorways reading and blocking someone’s way, you’re able to lurk while lying down, and even sitting still and quiet with the book closed perhaps, you are fully taken over with it.
Martin on meeting Saul Bellow: “As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous breakdown in mid-interview. And, as a human, you yearn for the birth of a flattering friendship. All very shaming, I thought…”
Clearly, it will be me having the breakdown: clawing and bawling like Tommy in Bellow’s Seize The Day; or worse, some ghastly gastric “horrorhuman” like Money’s John Self [note to sanity department: discuss Shiterature with Martin]. No, just shitting my pants symbolically. I’m not capable of journalism (no room for book critiquing here) and I’ll more likely puke or pee my pants if it comes to that. It comes to me at the Hotel Vancouver choking on the butterflies. There he is in light suit, colour a sort of aqua green.
I approach and I say something I’m going to save till the end of the piece. Later, Martin will tell a thing about me! Now, I’ve already forgotten. I’m too busy breathing. He says something about how he won’t bite my head off and why don’t I get myself a double scotch while he checks in. Luckily he wants a double espresso because if he’d gone for the double scotch I would’ve and lets not go there. I go off to the lounge and order and wring my hands and he shows up and we’re not going to smoke which may be a shame for him but for me, very strange thing: I don’t care. Plus I have to work a tape recorder. So here he is and I already feel a little better because like he says in Experience, I, the reader, know who he really is, I am a “confidant of [his] unconscious mind.” So, it’s strangely comfortable and his eyes are instantly accommodating so let’s turn on the machine.
DE:How’s it going on the tour? Is this the end?
MA: Near the end. Two more cities: Houston and Miami. So, I’ll end in Miami, I hope with a quiet day or two. But it’s been good really. I had two bad flying experiences. I notice that I spend a lot more time in traffic than I did two years ago on my last book tour. More cars. A lot more cars. And everyone’s talking about traffic all the time. So we circled, stacked quite a long way from Toronto, in bestial turbulence for about forty-five minutes while a sunspot hit. A cosmic what do they call them? Lucky I didn’t hear what the guy said, otherwise I’m thinking an electromagnetic pulse will take us out of the sky. Then a horrible little commuter plane from Portland to Seattle. Didn’t like the look of those propellers. And on an airline that’s just about to be busted, closed down: Horizon/Air Alaska.
DE:At least you didn’t have a big mail sac of books with you [Richard Tull, The Information]!
MA: That’s true. Yeah, responsible for the trouble. But I felt like an attempt on my life.
DE:Too much media.
MA: Otherwise it’s been pretty pleasant. New York Hilton was another low. Don’t go there. Don’t ever go there.
DE:Why?
MA: Hiltons are like Travel Lodges now. They always used to strike me as the height of glamour, but not anymore.
DE:Aren’t you living in New York now?
MA: No. No that’s a hemispherical illusion. I’ve lived in London forty years. I just said I might one day do it and now everyone assumes – It’s a wonderful way that the press – even when it’s quite accurate for once about something, did say I was just thinking about it, but in the public mind that becomes: Oh he’s moved to New York. But I hope to in a couple of years when my sons are at university.
DE:One of those media misconceptions that stuck with me was that your father wouldn’t read any of your books. None of them. That got to me to the point I didn’t want to read any of Kingsley’s books. After Experience I decided I’d give his books a go.
MA: I’m absolutely delighted when people say that. It’s apparently very usual for a writer – and hard to understand – when they die they usually have a five year slump. They tend to go mostly out of print and then if there’s going to be a revival it usually happens then.
Publishers call it purgatory. It’s as if the writer, after five years of being scorched and peed on in hell, has burnt off his sins and is allowed back. I very much hope that’s going to happen.
DE:Do you still dream about him as a dead person or has he now come back to life?
MA: No, he hasn’t come back as a messenger. But he shows up and I’m all over him and I see him as being slightly irritated because I’m too much. I swamp him. But I think about him every day. That’s the trouble when you have a big-figured father, they leave a big hole. But I feel good about him. It’s not regretful, merely sad.
DE:I think the regret is the worst part.
MA: I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d done that. There weren’t any of those. I supposed I wish I’d been a bit more demonstrative. But it wasn’t our style. We’d embrace on meeting and departing with lots of hugs and pats but not much said really, all understood: Really love you man. (laughs)
DE:I think I’d probably have those sort of dreams about my father, where I’d be too much for him.
MA: You’ve lost your father? You’re a bit young for that.
DE:No, no he’s here. He just lost his father though and I wonder if he has regrets. His thing was he didn’t really know his father.
MA: Didn’t know him. Oh, that’s terrible. How did that come about?
DE:The death or him -
MA: No him not knowing -
DE:I don’t know.
MA: Just didn’t hit it off? Did your dad have a nice relationship with his mother.
DE:Oh yes, still does. But, back to you.
MA: Well, actually I think this book, it’s like a test on people. If they’re happy about their parents and their children, they like the book. But if they’re sort of fucked up, then the book is a kind of reproach for them. That’s the feeling I’m getting. But that sounds like a boast and it’s really just a tautology. If this gets up their nose, then they’re full of unresolved stuff. Don’t like the fact that I’m not.
DE:I was disgusted when I saw your Ignatieff interview and he closed it off with something like: Let’s just leave it with it’s very hard to write about good things. To me you’re books are always about good things.
MA: In this book?
DE:In every book.
MA: Well good, I’m glad you said that. I think it’s all there. I don’t think there’s such a huge contrast. There’s a lot of cruelty in my novels as well.
DE:They’re dark. But is that the opposite of good?
MA: No it isn’t. But it’s very hard to write about good things. It’s famously difficult. I remember having a conversation with Ian McEwan: We’re so dark, me and you, he said. But maybe dark is easy but light is hard.
DE:I don’t know. I always get a sense of light when your books are finished.
MA: You mean light-weight?
DE:No! Of the light.
MA: In my books?
DE:Yes,
MA: Oh really. Well, good.
DE:I’ve spent a lot of time this past week checking my Bellow books, especially Seize The Day for some reason, and I get the same feeling with your books.
MA: What did you make of Seize The Day?
DE:It’s incredible. It’s a whirlwind of -
MA: Emotion and him twirling so terribly. That’s fantastic towards the end where he goes out into the street and everyone is saying: I submit, I die, I suffer, I live. A great storm of emotion coming out.
DE:And then he sees the funeral and starts to cry and then he really bawls.
MA: He’s in such bad shape. I love his Hollywood career. Remember the agent? Some Maurice Venice who shows him a photograph: this is a client of mine. ÎNita Christenberry. And Tommy doesn’t respond and Morris says: she’s one of the top stars. Don’t you ever read a magazine? (laughter) When I read it that first time I sort of thought it was good but not great. Then someone sent me back to it and I had a very very good time with it the second time.
DE:And Humboldt too. It’s been strange in my crash-studying of you: back and forth between you’re books and Saul’s.
MA: So, you’re a good little Bellow -
DE:I’m a huge Bellow freak. If I lived anywhere near Boston – I haven’t read Ravelstein or do you say it Ravelsteen.
MA: Which is it? You don’t say Einsteen do you.
DE:But you say Weinsteen.
MA: You do. But [Ravelstein] is a huge treat, that book. Amazing.
DE:That’s the way I felt about Experience. You’re right that it’s an Îextra’ [the writer’s life], but it’s a huge treat. At the end – the photos [of his two young daughters] and everything [Ïthe power of FernandaÓ]: I was quite a mess. You are giving so much. That’s incredible to me. Maybe that’s why some people don’t like you, and love to hate writers, there’s so much you’re putting out there. Maybe it makes them feel cheap.
MA: It is – to show you’re children feels like a great display of wealth, a great luxury: Look at them all. But maybe the hostility will begin to fade away a little bit. I don’t get it anywhere else. [To waiter]: Excuse me, can I have a spicy tomato juice.
Waiter: Spicy Bloody Mary?
MA: No vodka, just -
Waiter: Virgin Mary.
MA: Yes, Virgin Mary. Thank you.
DE: With the kids… say the story [What Happened To Me On My Holiday] you wrote about the beach and Pablo and his dead fish, from Jacob’s point of view.
MA: It was Louis [pronounced Louie] actually.
DE: What did he think about it?
MA: It was interesting the evolution of his response to it. He was tremendously insulted at first. He thought I was suggesting he couldn’t write well. That language, he found very insulting. But then I busted him in my study. He was reading the fax proof coming through from New York. He was just finishing it and he said: I like it. But it took him awhile.
DE: Are they reading everything now.
MA: They’ve read [Experience] and they’ve read those last lot of short stories. They’re much younger than I was when I started reading my father’s books. But they’re much more precocious anyway. Although they still – they’re not properly wised up. They’ve kept their innocence. Louis is street-smart now but they kept it for quite awhile. But they’re one jump ahead of what I was. Childhood is getting shorter and shorter.
DE: Do you see it going? Do you see an event happening and think: there goes? -
MA: There goes a little bit of it. No, it’s very slow. They just suddenly say things that you think: Christ they know all about that. But that’s like a kind of contest. I was telling them something or other – about three years ago – and Louis said: bum fucking you mean? It wasn’t what I meant (laughter) but that’s peer group stuff in the schoolyard. What’s the dirtiest thing you can come up with.
DE: I remember once seeing these two little girls – about five – walking down the street: fuck this fuck that fuck him fuck her.
MA: When Jacob was about two and a half, I stepped on one of his toys – he was playing by the front door on the welcome mat and he said: Jesus Christ! (laughter)
DE: That’s a good one.
MA: It’s a good one.
DE: I love that line in [Experience] where you talk about how […you want men in white to come and take you away and wash your blood.о]
MA: Hmm.
DE: You can have that done now.
MA: Yes, or is it your genes?
DE: Definitely you’re blood.
MA: Yes, in the book. It’s in The Information too. I have about half a dozen self-plagiarisms and that’s one of them. No, it was incredibly horrible [the divorce from his first wife]. Never felt that bad. I gave those feelings to – have you read the short story in Heavy Water about the bouncer?
DE: Yep.
MA: He’s going through that. He says to his wife it’s made him realize what it was like to be a woman. When women are upset they’re not just upset in the head, they’re upset in the whole body. That’s the first time I felt upset in my whole body.
DE: We are different, aren’t we [men and women]? That’s not changing much.
MA: For a little while, probably before your time, you couldn’t say that. You had to say we’re the same. Just for a bit. Didn’t last very long. That’s in The Information too, the lunch where Gwyn says: I don’t think about men and women, I just think about people.
DE: And then the whole thing about the spiders.
MA: I just think about spiders! I remember getting into trouble saying that at a lunch table and being corrected by someone: I just say people.
DE: I hope we don’t get too alike. And with kids and androgyny and more being bisexual.
MA: Or pretending to be bisexual. But then, my boys’ schoolyard stuff was very anti-gay. I think that may be going now. Now you say, I’d be open to the possibility, otherwise it’s discriminatory in some way. But I don’t know what the general – how universal my grown-up daughter Delilah’s scene is, but according to her, in her set, these boys and so on, she says a two-night stand is a rarity, and the boys expect the girl to sleep with them only just once and then not give them any hassle afterwards. Do you think that’s -
DE: Yeah.
MA: Among the twenties. And the girls have to pretend they’re not after love. They have to pretend they’re bloke-like in that way.
DE: What’s happened to love?
MA: Love is sort of taboo? Bullshit.
DE: It’s partly that but it’s partly a word that’s thrown around a lot too. It’s become almost overused. You love the bouncer at the club. You love your shoes, everyone.
MA: But not romantic love.
DE: Yeah.
MA:It’s because they’re I-N-S-E-C-U-R-E. And don’t want to put anything on the line.
DE: Yeah. We’re all manically insecure. Especially now, with Hollywood ruling the world. You have to be perfect. Everyone thinks they should be famous. If they aren’t going to be famous they’ll look like they’re famous. That’s one of those wash your blood things for me.
MA: And act like they’re famous. Definitely have to have a famous ego. Everything has to be – otherwise they’ll freak out.
DE: Everyone wants to be a character out of a book. Maybe that’s why you don’t see a lot of couple writers. Have you ever had a long term couple relationship with a writer?
MA: Long term. Well my wife [Isabel Fonseca], she, so far has written one terrific book [Bury Me] and she’s had babies.
DE: Isabel.
MA: Yeah. No, not a long term one. I’m not with a novelist. Certainly not novelists; biographers yes. I had one scene with a novelist but not concerted enough for it to be a difficulty. Oh, remember, Nicola Six says: what do women want, they all want to be the bitch in the book. So they all want to be in novels?
DE: Yeah, or better, movies from novels.
MA: The democratization of fame. It’s the next thing but it can’t work can it?
DE: How? In a six hundred channel universe who’s watching?
MA: Another one other famous person, and you watch them.
DE: And corporations will be full of creatives with their little sitcoms.
MA: That’s a real no-win. It’s like karaoke isn’t it? You’re no longer prepared to just sing along with the songs, you want to be the guy.
DE: Do you do karaoke?
MA: Never done it.
DE: Me either. I’m petrified of my own voice singing. Even by myself, I feel embarrassed.
MA: Oh, I like singing by myself.
DE: I find it very emotional.
MA: To sing?
DE: Yeah.
MA: You put everything into it?
DE: Yeah.
MA: (laughing) That’s sweet. By yourself?
DE: Oh yeah.
MA: (chuckling now) And it embarrasses you?
DE: Oh yeah, it’s all warbly and I’m petrified.
MA: It would be a great thing to be able to sing. To be able to carry a song.
DE: I have notes here. Oh dear. So, you’re still set up in London. Are you an alphabetizer of your bookshelves?
MA: I did it when I moved in.
DE: And yours are there with all the others?
MA: I have a bookshelf over the doorway and then on either side of the room. Shakespeare at the top and poetry that way and literary and social stuff and then fiction that way. It took me forever, a nightmare. And slowly there are holes in the shelves and books all over the house and I won’t put them back.
DE: What about the desk?
MA: When I was at The New Statesman a horrible realization came over me. Went into Julian Barnes’ office and he only had a paperclip on his desk. My desk was a sort of haystack like that. Then I went down to James Fenton’s office and he just had one pen. The I went into Christopher Hitchen’s office and it was a mountain. And I thought: I see, I’m like him. And James and Julian are, you know, anal retentive types. No, I’m a clutter-guy and capable of losing books forever in my own study. Forever, so I’ll just go out and buy another one rather than attempt to -
DE: Did Hitch really lose a finger?
MA: He didn’t. We desisted. If I hadn’t desisted the glass would have broken and he wouldn’t have minded. He would have made his point. He’s totally implacable. I’m going to have a big argument with him about Lenin. I’m writing this political memoir that really is amateur historiography in the end. Trying to open a debate to get the Russian experience a bit up there near the Holocaust. To give it a bit more dread and terror and pity. They’re so uneven and they shouldn’t be. He thinks Lenin is still a great man. He said huskily on the telephone: Lenin was a great man. And he wasn’t. He was a ferocious little bastard. So we have to have a big argument about that. But I know he – I’m pretty bad about not admitting I’m wrong, be he’s on a whole other magnitude. That’s kind of what’s so great about him.
DE: With Putin in there stirring up the patriotism, this is a good idea.
MA: He’s minting coins with Stalin’s face and he’s having lunch with the queen. Austria’s Heider makes one remark about one Hitlerite employment policy and Europe spits him out like a bad oyster: typical disparity. They had a holocaust under Lenin and Stalin, make no mistake. Tens of millions and the west has never come to terms with that. Historically they’ve been doing this for awhile. I don’t think there are any romantic historians left for Lenin. Whereas someone like Edmund Wilson was up their ass, star-struck by Trotsky and Lenin. Writing about them: wearing a simple overcoat, removed his simple cap, his simple face, simple honesty. With that terrible sentimental glow. And they were ferocious and doing it with the aim of future good. They’re the people you really have to watch. What is it with the early paradise? What would that look like? Ten seconds of sober thought tells you that would be a nightmare. Completely alien. Not human at all.
DE: This is human. All of it. This is what we must want. Or maybe we’re just too lazy to change it. Or maybe -
MA: This being this reality?
DE: The whole thing.
MA: The whole canopy [or panoply?]. Yes, absolutely.
DE: I don’t mean that in a passive, nothing can be changed sort of way because things will change. But we seem to be working hard so isn’t this our utopia?
MA: The incredible variety and disparity is our utopia. Utopia is always something over there, beyond and means, of course, nowhere in Greek. I tell you what, a good image of a utopia is a book Tempian Villages of Shoga Arms [spelling? library is no help here!] where the Russians used to take George Bernard Shaw; to where the milkmaids are all KGB women, farmers are all singing songs, and they’re all KGB. All the food and animals have been shipped in from miles around, even the trees have been placed in the ground and dug up the next day. That’s the utopia. This is a fascination that struck me over the New Year, the millennium. I thought: first item of business in the new century when I look back at the old century, that seems to be the cataclysmic injustice of the century. It’s the way we feel about it. It’s the way I feel about it too. I would say the Jewish Holocaust was worse but not by much. We all joke about it and I’m going to end this little pamphlet-length thing: My younger daughter, my one year old – she was one on Saturday - used to scream so loudly and horribly, not as if she was sick but as if you were torturing her as hard as you possibly could. So, I nicknamed her Butyrki which is the name of one of the prisons in Moscow, where, during the purges, there were terrible tortures. I said she would not disgrace the deepest cell in the Butyrki prison. So she’s called Butyrki and the Butyrkster and all sorts of variations.
DE: How do I spell that?
MA: It’s beautifully spelt: Butyrki. There’s a chapter in Evgeniia Ginzburg’s book Into the Whirlwind – fabulous book – called Butyrki Nights. Which we often refer to when she’s up (laughter). It’s very funny and Fernanda calls her Butyrki: Where’s Butyrki? (laughing, laughing). But you wouldn’t do that about one of the Berlin prisons.
DE: But the name is funny, too.
MA: But you wouldn’t joke about Nazi torturers. But the funny sort of local irony here is that her real name is Clio, the muse of history. That’s what it comes down to. All those victims have not had the respect and the grief they deserve. It’s a serious thing and that’s what it’s all about in the end. All those jokes about Soviet life – there aren’t any Holocaust jokes. People say the Russians always laugh about disaster but the Jews are famous for jokes about adversities, but no Holocaust jokes.
DE: There were moments in Time’s Arrow [the narrator is born into the body of a Nazi doctor when he dies and becomes a sort of subconscious entity who lives his life backwards: brilliant! please read!] where you’re laughing, there are funny moments in there but at the same time – that’s one of the beautiful things about your writing, the subject matter is serious but you put a funny [meaning absurd but not saying it] - you make me laugh and there’s a release there and -
MA: It’s release.
DE: In my studies this week I did some cheating and got an audio tape of Time’s Arrow Abridged -
MA: Oh I’ve never -
DE: It was my first audio book but it brought back a lot of the images like of the baby being put back through the hole in the wall and the universal Ssshhhh. But there’s a lot of really funny stuff there, like the narrator thinking Tod Friendly is stealing candy from babies.
MA: Yes and all that. But I don’t think there’s anything funny at Aushwitz, once you get there. But it’s true that you can use humour horribly. Humour is a varied thing, like Lolita proves that I think. You laugh at some terrible things, it’s part of your response to terrible things.
DE: [seeing the Publicity Lady hovering] Ah, Doug [Coupland] gets to DO lunch. So unfair. Doug barely does face-to-face interviews [meow].
MA: You know Doug?
DE: I did an E-MAIL interview with him once.
MA: You coming to my reading tonight?
DE: Definitely.
Martin gets up and says some pleasant goodbye and goes off and I feel a huge sense of loss come over me, sitting there in the lounge of the Hotel Vancouver.
I look down at al the notes in front of me and all the questions I didn’t ask but I’m not thinking regret. It’s a childhood kind of loss feeling. I feel like having a tantrum. Maybe it’s the nicotine too. I leave the hotel and hit the street and light up. It’s a perfect “blue planet afternoon.” I smoke aerobically and start walking and next it’s relief: He was genuine and he was inspirational and he was kind and even curious. Which is what, I guess, you expect from a great mind. And I didn’t have a full-scale nervous breakdown. I didn’t barf or pee my pants. I wasn’t a complete lunatic. And he was a grand human and a smasher!
So, relief and then reality: run home, change the shoes (both big toes bleeding, that’s why I never wear those shoes!), rush rush drop people at airport, traffic, cars, cars, pick up photographer friend Mark, back to Hotel Van, lurk around while Martin does CBC interview.
Martin comes out and for a split second doesn’t recognize me. I see that because he has a real face. My stomach drops out from under me (my stomach is where the fan lives), but the next split second is recognition. Martin sits down on the couch with his photograph look which is serious and sort of menacing. I’m being a really horrible photographer’s assistant. The light reflector thingie hangs by my side so the light is bouncing beautifully off his feet. I say he should go to the Museum of Anthropology and The Law Courts. I still have to sign your book, he says to me. I sit down beside him on the couch and say: I’d love to smoke you up. I said I’d say it but now it’s out! His eyes get a little spark and he says: yes, good, or something like that. I say I’ll roll an extra for you, for the weekend and find a way to pass it to you discretely. Or indiscreetly he says and then see you later. Drop off photographer friend Mark, who’s appointed me hero thanks to smoke you up thing. Who says pot doesn’t get you anywhere!
Traffic, cars cars, home, change again (who am I Barbie?), smoke, eat at same time (no, more like Ab Fab Patsy, smoking and rolling easily enough, but the food goes down like a nightmare). Become boyfriend Derek’s hero. Go to reading at Bukowski’s- ah, the bloody traffic, hurry.
Bukowski’s is packed with all sorts. Martin does reading, talks about pornography industry [his next novel will mix royalty and the porn industry but no we didn’t get to that, sorry friends] and reads from Experience. Michael Turner comes out and makes a big boob – and gets a lot of boos – of himself. It was like watching a child stabbing someone really big but somehow tolerant with the tip of a paper airplane. What a shame, a man nearby said at one point, what a waste! Of valuable time and questions. But you could see the father in Martin there, the patient side, the gentleman. What a gentleman. What a smasher.
The gentlemanly smasher signed books and it’s a long line, an England queue. So, now the butterflies still flapping, but getting restless, cocky. Let’s smoke a joint already Martin! Martin is in and I’m included in the little Chapters party upstairs. We go out on a patio and I spark up and pass to Martin and that’s the way it goes: me and Martin having a hoot. Fantastic. We talk about some of his characters like we we’re talking about a great and hilarious movie we just saw. Remember when Marmaduke [LONDON FIELDS and he was based on live, in the flesh Hitch’s baby who grew up! fine thanks]… and Martin adds why are people always interested in the bad baby and not the good baby?
[Little Kim: “A bit of sock elastic could turn sections of your calms into Roman pillars.”]
We talk about other writers the same way, like about pornography and Nicholson Baker [golf, the fan, the cranberries, the stoppage of time]. We talk about our first meeting (already reminiscing!): I’m Danielle and I’m a wreck! We talk about the writing process and he gives me a piece of advice on not getting anxious until the end.
Then, I notice my high-charged enthusiasm all of a sudden. I become aware of myself here on this planet in East Vancouver on a patio post-op with Martin Amis. I start to get anxious, paranoid. The Chapters brigade – ah yes, other people – around the table are just sitting there. Can’t they speak? Am I speaking English? Oh my god, I’m hanging out with Martin Amis and now the nerves. So I literally spill hot wax – Christ – all over myself (don’t ask!) and what an ass! Now I clearly am the centre of something. I hate centres.
Soon Martin makes his smashing exit and so what if I’m the dork with white splotches of wax all over my black skirt, I get a more than flattering goodbye. And I didn’t pee my pants either, thanks for asking.
This is what Martin wrote in my book and remember this is while I’m plying him (Danielle’s Tourism Vancouver: Arthur Erickson and Buds Flora] with drugs: Lay some on me.
Back to reality, weather and the news. Memoirs are not supposed to keep out the weather, the news, the crises. Some people are getting tough with Martin about Lucy Partington. But we’re already creating or finished our own fictions about Lucy because we’ve all taken up ìacquaintance with infinite fear” through our experiences. But, like Martin says: ìEven fiction is uncontrollable. You may think you control it. You may feel you control it. You don’t.” But the impulse to try is powerful and difficult and sometimes terrifying and, when (paraphrasing Martin here) run past ìthe soul,” gives release to ìthe silent anxiety”; release ìtowards the light.” We should leave this one alone, though, to the Amises and the Partingtons.
If you’ve never read Martin Amis (and you’ve gotten to the end of this haven’t you?) it doesn’t matter where you start. I started in the middle [Money] and then went backwards and now there’s forward to go and I hear there will be movies [Dead Babies is in post- production but we didn’t get to that either] too. I can hardly wait. But I’ll try not to be anxious.