Martin Amis: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Martin Amis
Martin Amis is son of author Kingsley Amis. Normally I don't trouble myself with such details -- I figure you'll discover them, if you don't know them, easily enough when reading the interviews yourself. Still, his father's presence haunts the dialogue as much as the fatwa haunts Salman Rushdie's interview, so much so that the father begin to function like place in a story. The all important stage.
Somehow, then, it makes sense that the homey particulars of the writing life fill the interview--so different from Rushdie's discussion of conflicting worlds, colonialism, and politics:
Interviewer: Do you have any superstitions about writing?
Amis: It's amazing -- I do sometimes feel tempted by computers until I realize what an amazing pleasure a new Biro is.
Interviewer: A new Biro?
Amis: A Biro, you know -- a ballpoint. The pleasure you get from a new Biro that works. So you have that childish pleasure of paper and pen.
Interviewer: New supplies.
Amis: New supplies. Superstitions . . . I think someone must have told me at some point that I write a lot better if I'm smoking. I'm sure if I stopped smoking, I would start writing sentences like, It was bitterly cold. Or, it was bakingly hot.
He has an office away from home. He goes there all day long, but finds two focused hours a good day's work, particularly at the beginning of a project.
As I said earlier, it never feels remotely like a full day's work, although it can be. A lot of the time seems to be spent making coffee or trolling around, or throwing darts, or playing pinball, or picking your nose, trimming your fingernails, or staring at the ceiling.
You know that foreign correspondent's ruse: in the days when you had your profession on the passport, you put writer; and then when you were in some trouble spot, in order to conceal your identity you simply changed the r in writer to an a and became a waiter. I always thought there was a great truth there. Writing is waiting, for me certainly. It wouldn't bother me a bit if I didn't write one word in morning. I'd just think, you know, not yet. The job seems to be one of making yourself receptive to whatever's on the rise that day.
Amis is also good at conveying what that receptivity is, physically -- and making fun at how writers and writing are written about in the process:
The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer's block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he's sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it's never like this. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a shimmer, an act of recognition on the writer's part. At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about.... The idea can be incredibly thin -- a situation, a character in a certain place at a certain time. With Money, for example, I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film. That was all. Sometimes a novel can come pretty consecutively and it's rather like a journey in that you get going and the plot, such as it is, unfolds and you follow your nose. You have to decide between identical-seeming dirt roads, both of which look completely hopeless, but you nevertheless have to choose which one to follow.
And what about those roads that look completely hopeless -- what if you seem to have taken one?
[W]hat sometimes happens is that you get stuck, and it's really not what you're about to do that's stumping you, it's something you've already done that isn't right. You have to go back and fix that. My father described a process in which, as it were, he had to take himself gently but firmly by the hand and say, Now all right, calm down. What is it that's worrying you? The dialogue will go: Well, it's the first page, actually. What is it about the first page? He might say, The first sentence. And he realized that it was only a little thing that was holding him up.
Given such a fatherly lesson, it does not surprise to learn that Amis values prose over all other aspects of the writing craft:
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence [. . . . ] Most modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, et cetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.
Interviewer: Out of limitation.
Amis: Out of limitation. So if the prose isn't there, then you're reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterization, psychological insight, and form. I get less and less interested in form, although I have the English writer's addiction to it. Form seems to me like decor in a restaurant. Form is easy. You can make shapely novels, everything working like a well-made watch. You can do all these little balancing acts and color schemes -- like an American campus novel, meaning a novel written on campus, rather than about campus. A creative-writing novel. What is important is to write freely and passionately and with all the resources that the language provides. I'm not interested in limiting the language to the capabilities -- or the accepted, obvious capabilities -- of my narrators. I'm not interested in writing the realistically stupid novel. Some of my characters have been semi-literate, but I fix it in one way or the other so that I can write absolutely flat out in their voice. Nabokov said something like, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letter, I talk like an idiot. The first and third propositions are true of everyone.
And as for the second proposition:
What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they're not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They're always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they'd do it on the page. Always this disinterestedness . . . as if it really isn't to do with you, a certain cold impartiality. That faculty, I think, was pretty dully developed in me quite early on. One day, when I was still living at home, my father came into my room and I placed my hands protectively over the piece of paper in my typewriter. I didn't wan him to see it. He said, later, that was his first suspicion. But then I did announce that I was writing a novel; I left home, and a year later the novel was done. I left the proofs of it on his desk and went off on holiday. When I came back, he'd gone on holiday. But he left a brief, charming note saying he thought it was enjoyable and fun and all that. I think that was the last novel of mine he read all the way through.
The interview is almost a birth story. No, it is.
Martin Amis is the author of Money (1986), London Fields (1989), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (2003), and The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (2008). Being released this year, 2010, is The Pregnant Widow, out this February.
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