Martin Amis interview on "Yellow Dog" (2003)

Martin Amos is here his previous books include money the information and experience his new book is called yellow dog it is his first novel since 1995 it made the long list of finalists for the Booker Prize I am pleased to have him back at this table welcome back Thank You Johnny why hit we'll talk about this why is it been five years well looks like a book of your man to me I have been writing almost a book a year but I at a certain point I I decided that I'd eventually have to write about my father and so I put the novel when my father died Kingsley Amis I put the novel aside and wrote a memoir and then didn't feel quite ready to come back to fiction so I wrote another memoir since the one with the emphasis on Stalin and my father's political past as a as a communist and then returned to fiction on around about September the 12th 2001 not the best time to Renee ender well it was around there and on that day like every other writer on earth I was seriously considering a change of occupation meaning well I just thought writing literature was a sort of frippery that we could now would have to do with that we had no longer time to indulge in literature so does me know it more that's the voice coming from your study felt like such a squeak dwarfed by this enormous event and also a sort of sick shocked feeling and and a loss of faith in you know reason and or everything else that you hold dear but then your fighting spirit gets going and and I came back to the novel thinking this is still going to be a comic novel insisting on that but also the comedy itself like everything else had been slightly changed by this event and that it wasn't going to be the same kind of comedy it was going to be something a little bit more rancid and uneasy before I turned to that tell me about what you see is the implications of of 9/11 well I what is it mark the at the end of the age of normalcy well that was what they said as the First World War was coming to an end I think Woodrow Wilson said we will now return to the age of normalcy but there hasn't been an age of normalcy for an awful long time I think but September the 11th marked for me an attack not just on civilization but an attack on on reason and to take up the earlier point although it's you know minor in the greater scheme of things reason the humor depends on reason as the writer Clive James said humor is just common sense dancing and if you haven't got a sense of humor you haven't got any common sense either shouldn't be trusted with anything but an attack on morality and reason and on and on your basic familial trust and such an injection of randomness and danger and arbitrariness that I found that I'd lost faith him I didn't enjoy looking at my children anymore in the same way for a while how did you know look at them when I looked at them with a sort of apologetic air and a slightly sick feeling that I you know you can never protect your children it's it's an illusion that you can but this seems to me to underline the impossibility of that that you know I'm sorry you know I'm sorry you're here because I was getting the world went down in my opinion and therefore certain guarantees that seemed to be present were no longer present you have been opposed to the Iraqi war and just according to what I understand about what you've written at the same time coming out of that do you feel because of that that that the United States lost its way in responding to 911 well yes my theory is that that you wouldn't have expected America to to brush off this enormous millennial event that will reverberate for at least a century no one in the world did I don't think I don't think anybody said America why don't you turn the other cheek well it's not just that but I think I thought of America's of staggering around as if in shock you know and looking for a from an enemy and and perhaps misdirecting it's gay that had an enemy I mean I mean it's I didn't understood a terrorism the al Qaeda did not necessarily know where to find them but well not at all no and there was this very loose connection between posited by Bush time and again in a shameless way saying that you know they brought violence to us we'll take violence back to them but the dam and the US weren't the same so I felt it was not a rational response and a rush of blood and all that but but the minute they went in I did not a second thinking we were right you were wrong instantly passionate they wanted a for them to find weapons of mass destruction and for the occupation to succeed you know a lot has been written about oh it's so tempting to say we were right I don't believe we are proven to be right yet and I said being those the peaceniks those that were opposed to the war but you know having gone E and then then you take up the position that it has to succeed and I'm far more worried now about American retreat rather than you know them having gone in the first place you've written some things about bush but suggesting that religion is central to the way he sees the world well he is called it a faith-based administration he you know invokes God and the whole axis of evil business you know it was originally called the axis of hatred and I saw the way you would sort of trace the earlier draft to that how it went from ending up with axis of evil because Bush wanted it to be more theological now why in a world you're trembling with faith and fear you should want things to be more theological or rather than less September the 11th has been a great blow as it were for for secularism it's shown us has it not that that it is time to discard that along with all other ideologies and this is the most primitive one of all and it's it's very strange to think that Saddam although he for instance has a Quran in the public place written in his own blood he had several transfusions over several years and there it is but that's merely a stop to the mullahs and in fact he is a secularist and the bathroom has always been secular so in a in a very odd sense Saddam is psychologically you know a little bit more sophisticated than Bush who is a passionate believer it's it's I came across a great bit of Conrad the other day one of the most passionate bits of secularist rhetoric I've ever seen where he says it's religion that that vulgarize errs and distorts our most intimate relations with the living and the dead it's time I think that the secular has seized the high ground and should no longer feel that they are somehow less spiritual than the religious folks I think that's just a category error and it's it's more spiritual and it's more demanding to have a realistic idea of what death is and what life is than it is to have this it's more spiritual to have that yeah it's more more grown-up and most animals pictorial yeah to have to accept what death is and what and what life is without these these ancient distortions and palliatives of religion you also said that the death of your sister affected the writing in Cobra the dead yeah right yes cope with the dread you know I I was blamed for comparing small things with large and I did do that I mean I talked about my sister's death in a book that was about the death the deaths of at least 20 million people and the hands of Stalin at the hands of Stalin and and you know I make no apologies for extrapolating from you know if you know you know you know prosperous middle-class life on terrorized on the whole by society and you're utterly free doing what I want to do if if a familial death can have this effect on me then this gives you a clue to what happens when it's on an enormous scale Stalin said that the death of an individual is a tragedy the death of a million is a mere statistic you know profoundly untrue that the death of a million is a million tragedies to say the least and and and more than that because these tragedies proliferate in concentric circles around every day it also led to this conflict in this dialogue between you and Christopher Hitchens what was that about but that was about boys being boys it was about you know just as you my father was a communist until 1956 when he was in his mid-30s and you know Christopher Hitchens was a trot you know perhaps a little longer than he ought to have been but you start these arguments when you are boys perhaps when you're young men right and and you continue them in your head and you know we were all having an argument with our fathers whatever it's about men every son is heading over this father always and funnily enough the death of the father doesn't doesn't halt that dialogue it goes on and on and perhaps you feel now at last I can win it now that he can't answer what does this also mean that your life was driven by the notion of meeting your father's satisfaction well I think I think that again is universal most children of writers who write as themselves tend to write one novel or one book of stories and then shut up shop because the rival was feeling with the father or the mother the right of mother or father has been satisfied by that but I would I never felt that way when and grabbed and achieved and and and worked through itself to death to earn Allura reputation oh yeah oh right I mean you did it too right I mean you hope that a literary reputation would be a byproduct of it was more that's I felt I was in it for the long haul and I wasn't really doing it to have an effect on him it was for myself but it doesn't mean that would you always feel like he was over your shoulder there judging I often feel that I have to run a sentence past him and get the nod from him but but I think you know in comparison to other sons of writers that I clearly did that wasn't it you know that it was a recognition in myself that I was there for the long haul the does that mean is that in fact a tribute to him to his example yeah idea that you are there for the long haul that that you know you looked at his life and it was one that had meaning to you yeah and his his work ethic and his his you know modestly stated ambition which was to find a little niche niche in literature and occupy it to be as he put it some good that was enough for him and you same I mean of course another part of your brain is jabbering at you that you want to be the Dickens of your era but to have made to have made an impression on literature seems to be a good baseline to have made an impression yeah you've certainly done that oh yeah I suppose I have or do is a pursuit well it's the pursuit that is the thing like the pursuit of happiness you know you you you can't realize it by pursuing happiness you have to pursue something else which brings me to this critics are having a field day they are blood eating you well yes I'm only the exception but yeah on the whole yes and all I can say to that is that it's it's you know Norman Mailer said you don't want to be assimilated and patted on the back too quickly I I was would aim you know would hope for strictly 5050 reviews I'd like some people to be very keen some people to be appalled by a new novel of mine this is perhaps tipped more to the 60/40 or 70/30 but I like a violent response and I think it's I think it's an original book and it's gonna take a little bit to sink in okay let what it is but just stay with this idea because it was all you know it is the narrative we were on do you you do dramatically and and vigorously reject the criticism that you see and read saying yourself that just wrong they didn't get it or do you say well maybe I didn't get there this time no I don't say that I felt very much in England that it wouldn't have mattered which of my books it was so when you asked you were you were right for with and it's a culture war culture war what between well it's you know it's a stratum and a generation of circulatory journalists who felt that if it was time to turn the tables on me in England in America it's not so violent one way or the other but in England there's a unconscious feeling that I was born in 1922 that nonetheless I wrote lucky Jim when I was seven that I'm now in my mid 80s yeah I'm gonna be around for another 20 years so it began with Kingsley knee extends to you yes and I've outstayed my welcome and I'm seen as a kind of genetic elitist as if you know my novels were all hardwired into me at my birth and it's just been a question of taking dictation you know here at the same time you know you think you think about and write about in essay form or in review form a lots of powerful big ideas whether it's the whether it is the notion of where we are and normalcy in not normalcy whether it is the meaning of death and all of that but are you what is this book about it's I think it's about what I've always been writing about what it means to be a man yes exactly the the paradox of masculinity and and how male insecurity leads to violence now that that's not a original thought but it's dramatized in original ways I think in that book tell me about the book I mean how you came to construct it that way it's uh it's one of those novels it's actually a Victorian convention you could say where it begins with three or maybe even four plot lines right and the reader should be thinking how are these going to be brought together they're all to do each story is to do with crisis in in in masculinity in in male potency both literal and metaphorical and and they're brought together and resolved against a slightly exaggerated and satirized modern reality where frig's well which reflects the feeling you get and it can be either productive or not that when you reach a certain age the world begins to look not wrong or right or attractive or unattractive but it begins to look slightly alien to it's part of your preparation for leaving it but I'm looking at that the culture of I suppose the next generation after me and finding it strange and writing about in the whale okay next generation after you is you know so what do you mean fine what do you find strange about it I feel that that a whole carapace of inhibition has been cast off in the last few years about about well loss of our license about but loss of shame loss of embarrass ability it's it seems to me a very contradictory culture that's coming up because the emphasis is on equality which has never been a very powerful American idea liberty and fraternity maybe but not in a gala tea right but the idea that looks are being trip democratized that you know all the scarification where you've got your door keys in one eyelid and your car keys in the other as if as if the tyranny the hierarchy the elite of looks we just always been very mysterious why we find certain appearances more attractive than others but this is is to be obliterated you know kind of commonality but while it's said as long as me this it's a it's the pursuit of belonging yeah and identification with a try right so exactly but at the same time you have rampant individualism in which you know this is a country consisting of 150 million superstars what about sex the degradation of sex I mean what do you you spent time researching this in conversation with a porn star I did it and I wrote a piece about pornography in preparation for writing this book well I call it the Santa fication of everyday life and it's um it's you know we thought we were doing this when I was in my twenties we thought we were scandalizing the previous generation and now they're scandalizing us but it seems to me that it's you know what we worry about when they're talking about sex and the next generation is that all significance will be drained from it and having asked around I now get the impression that sex education is not in the hands of some school marm with drawing a diagram on a blackboard it's it's being administered by pornography and the young are getting their sex education that way and to what conclusion so well to to reduce it you know ad infinitum or advert aghanim it's it's it's a question of performance and repertoire and and it doesn't stem from feeling yeah exactly yeah it is about performance yeah yeah and and and all the ads on the on the internet or about performance yeah and how to improve it yeah okay this where do you go from here and so now you back writing novels yeah some critics said you know we wish he would address big ideas you know I guess big ideas may be in the eye of the beholder you would think this is a big idea I think there's plenty of big ideas in that and and then you get attacked for being above your station but that in England the views of novelists on big ideas and on politics in general are considered a rather less interests than those of the man in the street but I think I'm going to right now a long ish quarter baguette what a biographical novel to combine you know the memoir experience and fiction in some way the mark name is story you really yeah no wine well I've left myself alone in that sense for 30 odd years my first novel was autobiographical because when you're in your early twenties there isn't anything else so I stacked up you know it would talk to me a moment about how you prepare to do that you you say the magic words of navicomp you say speak memory speak memory yes and you train the memory is never got spoke of doing that you memory is like a muscle and you immerse yourself in it and see what it shows you and it will have made all sorts of selections for you and you will remember what you ought to remember of all the writers who has informed you the most among four or five six three well I would have said not long ago I would have said Nabokov and Bello but no I think bear they were above never never Carly yes I mean a couple of years I've come because it has to do with you not him he hasn't done anything the last couple of years that would not lead you to make that conclusion his greatest work for not at the last two years no indeed but you know you keep rereading your your your personal guards and okay but who else I'm never carving and Saul Bellow and Joyce Kafka but but they they don't speak to me with the immediacy that fellow does why well I think he you know he can't when you finish an avakov not you want to write like never cough when you finish a bellow novel or a long bellow novel you don't want to write at all because you feel it's all gone you know i am i doing yes yes you feel or you feel I can never be this good so therefore would since about you couldn't even write the instructions on a you know ask for impact yet when you've read The Adventures of Augie March is that the great one in yours i well i've recently reread Hertzog and i and realized that i was I wasn't old enough to read it until recently and that book struck me like Augie March as a kind of force of nature that is where the competition is between the two in it yes yeah but that does that come closest to being a great American novel Augie March yeah yes I think it does because it's yeah all the trails went cold in 1953 when it came out yeah because it it tells America what it is from the immigrant experience outward and let me let me make one point here go ahead I mean you know one point here about this is it you have said what you would love for your readers to feel to feel if you could achieve some something it would be the same enthusiasm you had a young man reading Nabokov and Bello and yeah that's that sense when you're what was that the way it's it's the sense but you're browsing through a library and you're picking up books and trying on various writers like almost like outfits and then sudden suddenly you read someone and you could tell after half a page you saying this one is speaking directly to me he has me in mind it's an illusion yeah but and then with a sudden nod you say to yourself that that I will have to read everything they've written and and then reread it because he is inside my head or she is inside my head exactly yes she understood she it's as if she knows me and she's telling me exactly I want to hear this book is called yellow-dog Martin Amos is always a pleasure to have him on this broadcast and again read yellow-dog and decide for yourself thank you

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Id: Aj_QP_7h4CA

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2017