A Moment with Martin Amis
On “...looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done."
I’m sorry to hear Martin Amis has passed on. Though I can’t say I knew him well, we were able to chat a time or two. I was asked to interview him, ages back. He and I both were twenty-three years younger than we are now, than I am now, than he was or is or would be. Since that afternoon, time has run like a river—or shot like an arrow—over days and words. Martin Amis once wrote, “Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.” (Times Arrow).
When I look back at my own words—and maybe this is true for all writers?—I can only consider how I’d revise. Writing captures a younger self.
The interview was assigned as a quick piece tied to a minor paycheck. I read his novel, Night Train, then The Information, The Rachel Papers, and perhaps that is also when I read Money….In other words, I prepared.
I came to the interview with respect and interest. He seemed nervous, tightly wound, waiting for any moment of journalistic attack…I was careful, there to learn and to listen. We didn’t always agree—(1973 is definitely not “pre-feminist”?)…—still, I think we got along well enough.
The interview is here:
https://www.thestranger.com/books/1999/06/03/1174/no-clout-in-the-home
Others have written at length about his relationship to the press, and to America. There are article headlines like, “Amis Bites Back at His Critics,” and “Martin Bites Back,” as well as “Ready, Amis, Fire,” and “Martin Amis Braves America,” all gesturing toward the unease and potential hostility or perception of offense, demanding a quick defense. We didn’t really have any of that, though.
He said a lot more than I transcribed. Somewhere in a drawer I have old-school cassette recordings of Amis talking about life and art…
Elsewhere, he has written, “To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.”
I remember moments.
He used the word “euphony.” He said he wanted a sense of euphony in his work. Later, I carried his word choice in mind: Euphony, euphony, euphony…I still think of it at times, and when I do, it calls back the moment of that early interview in the same way that the scent of orange peel can bring back a summer night or all of childhood. A word can carry far more than its collection of letters, imbued with more than any literal meaning, and when a person reaches for a particular word, sometimes the sound and gesture becomes linked with their voice. Martin Amis said he hoped for a sense of euphony.
He mentioned a single-panel cartoon in the New Yorker. He’d been thinking about the cartoon. He said it was a drawing of two guys in a bar, each with a beer. In the moment of the frame, one man has turned toward the other, saying, “What I don’t get is, in ten years we’ll be seventy?”
Or maybe it was in twenty years… Or five?
Maybe it was now.
It’s not really a joke at all, is it? It’s mortality, the furthest thing from a joke, but sometimes a shared laugh is the only tool we have.
Here we are. He has passed away. He was seventy-three years old.
We’re human bodies traveling through time.
Take care of yourselves and each other, and keep telling your stories, okay?
xo
All those article headlines, and not with a play on the word Amiss. Missed opportunity or too obvious a pun?
Thank you for sharing the 1999 interview.