Novelist Martin Amis dies at 73
Martin Amis, who once said he felt like Prince Charles, living a long life wondering if he would ever be crowned, has died at 73.
British novelist Martin Amis, who has died at the age of 73, had a reputation for being a touch caustic, but actually? He could be quite a lot of fun.
A former literary editor of The Australian, Stephen Romei, recalls meeting him at the Perth Writers Festival in 2014. “The first question he asked me, after we were introduced, was: ‘Do you have any weed?’ ” Romei said.
To his amusement, Amis added: “You look like the sort of person who might.”
Romei did not at first know what to say. He is admittedly a long-haired, rakish type but not a dope smoker. And anyway, as he eventually told Amis, he had just disembarked a plane from Sydney, and drugs and airport do not mix.
“I’ve never been into marijuana,” Romei said on Sunday, as news of Amis’s death broke across the Australian literary landscape, “but on that evening, I preened inside.”
Literary agent Jeanne Ryckmans told The Australian she was dismayed to wake to a text that announced Amis’s death, followed by a rather pious note from a publishing type, saying “It’s not smart to smoke”.
Amis was for years an enthusiastic smoker, and he died of cancer of the oesophagus.
“To me, that basically sums up the current writing and publishing climate,” Ryckmans said. “So censorious. So much judgment.
“I thought about Amis’s own words: ‘Any smoker will sympathise when I say that after your first cup of coffee you have a sobbing, pleading feeling in the lungs as they cry out for their first cigarette of the day … my desire to write is rather like that. It’s rather physical’ … he was a titan.”
ABC presenter Tony Jones, who interviewed Amis at the Perth Writers Festival, said he had been delighted to learn that the apparently-not-so-snooty giant of British literature had spent the afternoon ahead of their event “sitting with his notebook at Dunkin’ Donuts in a Perth shopping mall.”
They ended up at a hotel bar after their event “sharing a bottle of vodka. Our main topic of conversation was (Amis’s dearest friend) Christopher Hitchens, who had died a few years earlier.”
Jones says Amis “shed completely the cool aloofness, a characteristic which so many found intimidating.
“He was very, very funny at times; he was also sentimental and warm.”
Amis spoke at the festival about the tendency of prize committees to overlook him, saying he felt kinship to the then-Prince Charles: born into royalty and having to wait his whole life to be crowned.
His father, Kingsley Amis, was a huge figure in the literary world when Martin was a boy. Kingsley won the Booker Prize in 1986, for The Old Devils.
The younger Amis published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973 while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement.
It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1974 – and then the prize world seemed to hesitate.
While Amis continued to write, and his novels are regarded as brilliant, he would never win another major prize.
Famously, the Booker eluded him, although as he told Jones: “It’s not just the Booker I don’t win; I don’t win any others either.”
He told The Australian’s literary critic Geordie Williamson that he had often wondered if it were because “I’m my father’s son”.
“People sort of assume that because I’m the son of a writer, it was easy for me,” he said.
Williamson told The Australian on Sunday that Amis “may have been too controversial in fictional subject matter and personal opinion to win the larger eminence that he deserved, but his imprint on post-war Britain’s self-conception is deep.
“In literary terms, the best of the generation that followed him were given permission by him to be ambitious and experimental.”
The author’s most famous work was the 1984 novel Money, about greed in Thatcherite Britain and the US under Ronald Reagan, and follows the life and times of an alcoholic advertising executive, John Self.
His novel Time’s Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Yellow Dog was longlisted.
Amis published 15 novels, including a rather daring Holocaust comedy.
Romei recalled asking Amis what happened when he turned in a manuscript for a new book: and did editors or publishers make suggestions or offer edits?
Amis immediately replied: “F..k no! That would be insulting.”
Amis was among the few who refused to abandon his friend Salman Rushdie after the ayatollahs issued a fatwa on his life.
Amis was then accused of Islamophobia, a description he regarded as ridiculous.
In a statement on Sunday, Rushdie remembered Amis: “All he wanted to do was leave behind a shelf of books … to be able to say ‘From here to here, it’s me’.
“His friends will miss him terribly. But we have the shelf.”
Among little known facts; Amis’s cousin Lucy Partington was murdered by Fred and Rosemary West.