Martin Amis, "The Rub of Time"

it's really a treat to be hosting Martin Amis who's in over more than 45 years is a professional writer has distinguished himself in both fiction and nonfiction since his first novel the Rachel papers in 1973 Martin has gone on to write something like 16 works of fiction and more than a half a dozen works of nonfiction his sharp nimble intellect and engaging prose have contributed to his reputation as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fect fiction and one of the most literate and entertaining authors of nonfiction pieces it's also a matter of record of course that Martin's charm talent linear lineage oozes the son of Kingsley and good looks and attracted women have Lloyd gossip columnist and no small amount of envy over over the years now in a new collection of his essays and reporting the rub of time Martin has brought together 44 pieces and appeared over the past two and a half decades in various publications they cover a range of topics literary political sporting and personal in an admiring review in The New York Times The Critic a Oh Scott call the book quote a vital addition to any Amos fans bookshelf and the perfect primer for readers discovering his fierce and tremendous journalistic Alex for the first time other reviewers have yoots used such terms as witty erudite full of flair and certitude to describe the writings in the collection Martin would be in conversation with no faithful errant writer based here in Washington a Washington Post profile of top a several years ago called a time when out of work he come to PAP almost daily and sit in the coffee house not to eat or drink but to copy poetry into his notebooks he was too poor at the time to by books but determined to learn his crap and in 2013 this road scholar the son of Nigerian immigrants was awarded the prestigious cane fries given annually for a short story by an African writer and with that came instant legitimacy copays debut novel the proximity of distance is due to be published probably next year by Simon & Schuster so please join me in welcoming mark Namath tobei flower Martin it's such a pleasure to meet you have long admired your work and I really loved reading this collection I learned a great deal about topics I thought I knew a great deal about and I think that actually leads to the first thing I wanted to ask you about the collection your essays cover a wide range of topics you talk about tennis literary figures movie stars etc does your interest in a particular subject precede the writing or do you write about something because you're interested it's that way around and I'd like to say by the way that thank you all very much for coming and Washington is very resonant to me he is a place to visit because my friend Christopher Hitchens one of your brightest sons because he did adopt Washington and I was very sad on the train coming down with the gloom and in you all the times I came down when he was sick and anyway ears to the hitch wherever he may be I write up I write about things that were already interests me and sometimes I write about things just to fortify myself for writing about them in fiction the two examples in that book the long piece on the Queen the chalice I viewed as research for a novel that does have a royal family in it British royal family and the piece on pornography was for the same novel a section on the Californian pornography industry and writing about writing about it as a journalist it's it's interesting in that that's up the front bit of your brain but if you research something for a novel then it takes a couple of years for it to sink in and what happens with a novel the neat example is Norman Mailer who said he wanted to write a novel about September the 11th beginning it on September the 12th but he was very wise about the process of fiction and he said it would take three or four years before it had gone into your brain gone down your spine into your viscera and up again and then you are ready to do it repeat in subconscious and and that takes a while and sure enough in 2004 2005 three or four novels on to 2011 came out Jay McInerney Candice sue Don DeLillo I mean I thought leg right that's how long it takes so I wouldn't I wouldn't attempt to write about a literary essay on something I didn't know pretty well you prescribed novel writing as a spooky process that's Norman Mailer's yes you were with Lawrence is a description of novel writing is there any way to prime the pump to get at that process or it's this system systematize it a little bit and it is it isn't spooky there's no doubt about it and I used to talk to my father and stepmother on both of you novelist about this and sometimes he didn't want to talk about it because it's so mysterious to you it's why I would never have I would never go to psychiatrist no matter how what psychological distress I found myself because I feel they lived in a mess with this process but to give an example of how you humor the subconscious I when I was younger I used to and I came across a difficulty in something I was writing I would just keep at it here stubbornly bloody-minded me just bang my head against it that would I wouldn't it wouldn't occur to me to do that anymore if I come across a difficulty I walk away from my peers it's even more physical than that in that it's my legs that take me away and not you for a few hours you do something else you may need to sleep on it maybe sleep on it twice but then suddenly your legs take you back to the desk and you realize you you have solved it or subconscious assault it's it is it is very weird I don't know no I know no critics who understand it and I know no writers relax many of the essays and reviews in this book feature a postscript where you kind of talk about how your subject your thinking on a subject has evolved or how the subject itself has evolved at the time we generally happy with these essays anyone taxi he has agreeably surprised that impressed by many of them because I don't I don't really enjoy writing s notorious s and that it's the hardest thing I do know you've got a no Stern she's got a right ears and and above all and you've got to organize so I'm always amazed I'm amazed at the time when it's published in a magazine or paper and and I think this is if I see if I just had to be dead it looks like gibberish to me but if there's been a decent engine or a week or two I'm always impressed by how convincing it looks because you've gone through such labor and unhappy labor to produce it and when you save in a book it looks even more convincing but it's it is a bit of your mind that you don't use except for that purpose reportage and shall assure you knows is easy because you're describing an event describing a trump rally is very straightforward you do have to organise it a bit it usually presents itself to you but getting an acid whipping an essay into shape I think I I every time I do it I think who done it again condemned yourself to three weeks unhappiness and I think it's just sort of the work ethic Protestant work ethic there was no Protestantism in my house when I was growing up I mean the concept of God just never came up and I had and once when I was filling in a form the school I get back from the forum as it said religion what's your religion you know I ran out into the hall and shouted up the stepmom Wow I said what religion are me and then there was a really long silence and then she said Church of England and I felt such relief I mean Church of England is pretty good anyway because nothing was expected of you although when I when I stayed with friends I used to if it was a sleepover on a Saturday night I used to go to church with the family the day asleep and it always gave me the creeps and I thought are they doing is grown men and women down on their lousy knees - what but the work ethic has lingered the oddest people have habit and it and I all of them say they they're glad they've got there's a touching aside in one of your essays where you're talking to your late friend Christopher Hitchens you try to convince him to be agnostic as opposed to an atheist I was really why were you why did you include that but well this is agnosticism the atheism and he always proudly said he was an atheist and I said you know that reminds me of the enterprising termit termite who claims to be an individualist in that he's not seeing the bigger picture what we know about the universe is pathetically partial and a huge questions that have been that a dead end at 3040 years and then they keep finding things out that make them think you know Christ we've got it that wrong when it was discovered that the work that the universe was not only flying apart but flying apart an accelerating rate I was in the California Institute of learning and there was the famous cosmologists Kip Thorne in the cafeteria and I went up to him said what does this mean for you and this is what does it need it means that I just come out of the house I've got my car keys I throw them out in the air and they just keep going we don't understand galaxy formation the the contents the universe 80% of it is either called dark matter or dark energy and then they reduced to referring leaders from the Tyrael dot material because they know nothing about it so the idea that you can say there is no higher intelligence seems to me a contradiction since the universes are higher intelligence than we are with eight or nine Einsteins away from understanding some very basic things and to then say I mean a theist seems a bit presumptuous and and premature you just don't know enough I'm if you imagine agnosticism as a sort of high wire you should be just about to fall off into a tizzy that need a bit more evidence yeah particularly resonant comment especially in light of Stephen Hawking's past when twin ones Stephen Hawking's passing indeed yeah last night I just said it's a resident indeed well then he I mean he's known as the the greatest cosmologist at his generation of the property years that his contributions to absolute knowledge margining that black holes give off radiation that's it it's called Hawking radiation but that's it's hardly e equals mc-squared and is that's not foundational is it you write a great deal about Jewish American literature in particular bellow and rah and I was surprised by your and I don't know why but your argument that Jewish American literature is actually quite new I mean you say that it starts with Saul Bellow in 1950 so it's still kind of emerging as a corpus of work I was wondering if he had a sense of what the 21st century literature will be do you have a sense of of who's writing that literature what it's about um well this is making the bold assumption that the skill will be robust and I know many people who say would be lucky to still be around Zadie Smith who's 14 B Thorntons said said to me years ago she said she said it lasts your time but identity the last mine this means a coherent literary culture and with a certain feeling for its place in civilization and its centrality incident and and I can well imagine that becoming woolly er I don't think it's to do with the the literary novel which which really became what it is now quite recently in 1980 roughly by which time I was I'd already written three novels and suddenly it all changed when I published my fourth all the superstructure stuff was there in place and when I started there were no no interviews no festivals no radio no TV no profiles no photo ops all that came around 1980 and the reason for I don't think there was a spontaneous flowering of interest in the psychological insight and kerlick you'd sentence it was a it was a it was informed by the media in that the papers have been getting fatter and fatter Sundays and exactly is they known all the days in between and they and what bulked out the medians was true in other forms radio television is that they they ran out you know alcoholic actors and depressive comedians and Ned the world Royals and furious fashion models and adulterous golfers and white beating footballers and raped his boxes and to their horror in England at least they found themselves reduced to writing about writers a class that they the journalistic class in in England really hates literary writers because it's a it's a it's a funny accident that novelists deal in prose narrative and so does journalism and and I I'm unwilling to believe that the average journalist and in England journalism is really first grade and there's a lot of it but I don't think they when they started out they wanted just for the journalists they all had a sort of secret yearning to the serious writing more more serious writers so there's a this of a sneering subtext not and also because whereas in America I don't I don't sense that and Jonas at all and for historical reasons perhaps in that when America was performing and what them and it was wondering what it was what is America was it just a collection of Brits Italians Jews Germans or was it a nation with a soul and a meaning and Americans sensed subconsciously probably that writers would play a part in in helping to define what America was and and in Britain Nathan one India that I mean they they they know who they are they their literature began in the 12th century America is a young country so they they're more forgiving and welcoming and tolerant in that Japan yeah sounds like you're for me that sounds like an argument for the continuation and perhaps even a perpetuation of literary culture because what you're describing in many ways writers writing the national narrative the Great American Novel perhaps one permutation of this idea um and for me it doesn't that mean that perhaps were waiting or or maybe there are few writers who can continue to do that essential work at least in America well I'd like to think so but it used to be a minority interest sphere and may well retreat back into being there I mean we we don't know the effects of and I think the the invention of the internet the half the planet is now got internet access I was it struck me at the time that this was an evolutionary moment comparable in mythic terms to Eve biting on that Apple it was a so little for from Eden and remember that the fruit chief baton was from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and we all have benefited hugely from the internet but I'm very suspicious in it and I think the stupid that the stupefying effects of the Internet and under the nastiness it seems to release in human beings is is has got a long way to go to express itself I mean I claim the Advent at all Trump I think says something about the intelligence of the average voter in America and I've been told by many Americans rather clothing ly that I can no longer sneer at American America's credulity because of Britain and Britain and it says it's a pretty good point but the difference between brexit and Trump is that Britain had no idea what grexit would look like it was it was a burn your boats and leap in the dark moment for Britain but if we had known in England that brexit had orange skin and yellow hair and couldn't complete his six word sentence without a repetition or a tautology I don't think we would have benefited for it but Americans had seen nothing else but Trump for a year and a half and instead of wanting less they wanted more on this topic I really enjoyed reading your piece about Mitt Romney and Republican contenders in 2012 you actually wrote who will perpetually submit to being lied to with a sneer the effects of dishonesty are accumulative undetectable by focus groups or robocalls they build in the unconscious mind creating just the kind of unease that will sway the undecided in November I couldn't help to think about 2016 when you know somebody divided with a year throughout his I was right about 2012 yeah I will exactly I was wrong about 2016 what happened in the interim what happened in the national character it's kinda that's a that's a pressing question and in 20 2012 already I talk to strategist and I said isn't it a problem for you guys that Paul Ryan speech last night turns out to be a pack of lies because it was exposed in the New York Times item by item and I listened to the speech live and it was quite convincing you know in a sort of sinister way but but I said I was very relieved to see he was lying his head off throughout and I said it's not gonna be give you a bit of PR work to do and they said we don't anticipate that and their slogan was already in 2012 there is no downside to lying and if if you don't feel a personal downside to lying then god help you I mean if you can lie as Trump does when there's a documentary about his golf course in Scotland and there he is on television saying ecologists agrees love Mike plan and this the greens turn out to be one guy in a basement with a mobile phone completely unrecognized by any other group and various other really Rhenish in telling a lot you know parents used to save certain children you know he or she would rather tell a lie until the truth then one of my daughters has been like that for a while the truth too but he really can't you would it makes no difference to him whether it's a liar and his his common touch is populist touch maybe based on the fact that that a diminishing number of people mind lying as a sort of moral thing and that wants the truth goes or what I think it's all nonsense about your reality out Santa you know what a novelists gonna do with no problem about that novelists will find a way but if the truth no longer matters then almost everything is is in danger I've been nursing a pet theory for some time that there's something and I perhaps you know I shouldn't say this in this setting but there's something about that tells me that that Donald Trump is something of an artist right like an artist is concerned with world and marshaling facts and lives and all kinds of things to create the world they would want to live in or they want the readers to live in and this is essentially what Trump has done I mean he said to a group of people yes your way of life is will no longer be acceptable in the 21st century but with me it will be with me I will not only it will not only be acceptable I will perpetuate it the kind of life and like the code it was well precisely the goal or or even this idea of this deeply embedded kind of white supremacy right like from a numerical perspective that's passing away that's the worst thing he's done yeah Jenny since in the last couple of months that I really come to feel that I think what he is saying he's not only saying your way of life is safe with me he's saying you know and this gets to part of the core that that what he's saying in his rallies is saying and it's all in a whisper it's not what he's actually saying but what he's suggesting is that you know the the media and the eggheads and and certified no walls say that you're stupid and you don't know anything saying to his crowd well look at me I'm stupid I don't know anything either and I'm I the media will tell you that you have to educate yourself throughout your life otherwise you're bound to fall behind he said that I don't do any of that and look at me I'm the multi billionaire commander-in-chief it's a it's a sort of idiots of the world unite and and we're the really smart ones and some where he hasn't explained and anti elitism which I must admit I don't really understand except as a kind of reflex I mean who's an anti elitist when they go to the doctor there was 90 elitist when they get on an airplane it's a way of suggesting that the subject under discussion isn't very important if you scorn expertise and they like to say that about literature these are so elitist to kind of rightly meaning respect grammar and the meaning of words and but that's a way another way of saying that it doesn't matter because anything that matters on your health or your survival we're natural images the politics is serious I mean that does affect your life when your freedom at least I don't give him I don't give Trump credit for any that having two consecutive thoughts in his head for the last 20 years and I think he's just sort of blundering through it I can't think he has a strategy and he thinks he's so marvelously because that are winging and they love him anyway and when he said that I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing a single vote he actually blundered into the into quite near the truth and that they don't think he's a real he's real they think he belongs to reality TV and and this sort mythologized world of money in planes and beauty pageants and all the rest of it but they don't they don't see he's a reality in quite the way Democrats do I think partly because of Trump we have at this moment in which more people are speaking their own they're talking about things that have happened to them over the course of many years things that perhaps were swept under the rug for various reasons and I know that the Philip Larkin is one of the people you most admire and in response to some of your own misgivings about his beliefs you wrote but I bore in mind the simple truth that writers private lives don't matter only the work matters and this is something I've been struggling a great deal with myself because I since discovered that many of the people I deeply admire are not that people I thought they were one example that comes to mind is Bill Cosby for me he was somebody who I admired greatly when I was growing up my parents are from Nigeria and so when I was quite young my father watched I spy when he was a child so he made us watch it in the Bill Cosby character that show was the road Scholar and I think Bill Cosby won an Emmy for that and he was the first black actors would an Emmy and of course he went on to have his fabulous career that inspired many people so much so that this show was banned The Cosby Show is done in South Africa during the apartheid regime because many people the National Party government in South Africa thought that I guess black people were sort of getting inspired by what they were seeing on television so I've had to kind of jettison Bill Cosby for my pantheon of heroes I was wondering for you is that is that something that you think about it all the kind of I have you because in the essay of course you say that that the work is separate from the individual is that something that you still believe or have you over the course in the past year to thought about that yes I was I was defending Saul Bellow I on the radio and said our Sunday's confronted with this chapter and verse from the woman interviewer and I was with the biographer so all better who said you know this clear misogyny in in heads of faces and after I thought do I have to wait raise my we refuse to defend him from the fulness and actually there is plenty of misogyny but I had the actresses and what follows from that you know so what now what and she didn't look as though she had where he thought of that and I said do we what do we do about so better now if even if we establish beyond doubt that he has he suddenly writes about misogyny and you know what about misogyny in Shakespeare King Lear but to the girdle did the gods inherit he's talking about a woman see that simpering maid but to the girdle to the gods inherent beneath his all the feed their stench there's corruption five-five give me an ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten my imagination I mean do you what what you do it's it's not a literary consideration misogyny exists and it is actually a good subject for an office but it's it's a social cultural judgment not a literary and if that you know this will be one of the things that undermines it if if these social cultural considerations really come to predominate and then you've lost something is there the blamelessness in literature and novel asserts nothing only when it is taken to assert something do we know that something's really gone wrong in reception is not like the Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie the Ayatollah Khomeini detected all all kinds of blasphemy and hatred of Islam in that knob soon is that a literary judgement knowing things that but a novel a service not and one great critic said that it was J's mill you first put this idea about the novelist isn't heard novelist is overheard it's not it's as if he's talking in the dark and we're listening but it's not as if he's addressing us and the idea that that our minds are poisoned by these very regrettable things like the soldier rather than dramatizing them and talking about them if they're to be banished then then that's a huge wound the novel and for literature there are multiple sort of pieces reviews essays in this book about fellow others obviously you've engaged these writers or much of your literary life did you intend to do that or is it just your love to them that brings about you'd follow your inclination I mean the writers you like and I have doubts about Updike and Roth that I don't have about that Oh God all better but just listen and I wonder if you feel this I think more writers do to an extent you write the sort of novels you want to read and and that that's why you read the sort of novels you'd like to write although you would never admit that that would be a disgrace but that it's really the case I'm intrigued that in much of your political analysis in this book you will cite an artist oftentimes a novelist sometimes a poet and I couldn't help but wonder the extent to which your life as an artist though they do feel very distinct means satires is the instrument for expressing hostile views about politics politicians and politics in general perhaps and satire is seems to me well past its its vigorous period and another limitation of Saturday's you can't write it about an ongoing evil something is too much of a hostage to fortune I mean satire is militant ironing it wants to change the world but it does so through through caustic laughter and how funny will Trump be if things got out of hand with North Korea and a American city disappeared and and Trump responded as he sucking wood with the Arsenal clearing obliteration of North Korea and with all the contamination that would it wouldn't be funny anymore you know Swift wrote about famine in Ireland when that famine was over or that particular that Dickens saccharides imprisonment for deckhand Little Dorrit decades after that practice was abolished and that's the time for Santa when it's gone otherwise it's it's make zoos that are very nervous to take liberties with a reality that is still unfolding humor comes up a lot in this collection or the lack of it one of your critiques of Donald Trump is that he seems the last humor in your piece about the corn industry her talk one of your contains of many of the characters you've met it was that they were they lack humor as well do you perceive humorousness as a kind of character flaw as a as a character flaw well it's I I regarded as a disability I'm serious and then it said it said it said quite fondly jeremy corbyn by anyone who's interviewed bit short on the sense of humor as if this is just the sort of thing that old lefties tend to be but I very much enjoy the quotation from Clive James he said so many great things where he said that the sense of humor is is the same thing as common senses it's common sense working at a different speed and computes a sense of humor is just common sense dancing and those who lack humor you trusted with anything and because they've got no common sense either so never give a humorless person their letter deposed and make sure you always help them across the road because they're they completely help us themselves and then they don't know what's going on because they don't care of this the common sense that has enough freedom to love the humorless man is a joke and a joke you will never get as humor an essential component of pretty piece of writing navikev said that any writer in any verb is is more or less bound to be funny or capable of being funny and I think that that stares you in the face the the bloomie the tragic kind of novelist he used to be when I was coming of age in the 70s it used to be said admiring me of knowledge I really respect that writers pain but actually it goes against the great majority of our writers who won't end to be you know capable of being wildly was the the the idea and still present in in some countries like Germany for instance that that either you're being serious or you'll be in comic and never the two shall meet is I think completely primitive that actually it's when that the humor is a great instrument for emphasizing tragedy tragedy is not just po-faced full of irony tragic irony is always there's always a sort of slight laughter going on in the waves because tragic heroes famously always do have some some control that that is seen from certain viewpoints is ridiculous one of my favorite essays in the collection was about John Travolta and I hadn't spent a great deal of time thinking about this but I guess the point one of the points you make in the essay is that and I think this is pointed Quentin Tarantino's only is that he was actually a great actor that he had a lot of potential that a number of people fellow actors critics alike thought that he could have been one the great actors of his generation but he just made series of bad choices it's it's sort of too many bad choices yes for it to be an action yeah obviously you've had a successful and flourishing literary career but are you on the whole happy with the choices made in terms of being in dollars the novelist and then going off and doing and the very choice you've made are you happy with your your trajectory yes agreeably impressed but it's it's anything it's you can't have a plan for your career and just to see part of a plan for a normal I mean you better get a plan when you started it but you don't plan people written two novels about the Holocaust and both times I was asked many repetitively what made you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust and two things are wrong with the phrasing of that one is decide that sounds to me like a description of writer's block sort of sitting there thinking what kinda I'm you know the hanukkah I mean the novel's don't come to you that way they come navikev coded a throb uptight called it a shiver it's a it's a sort of sudden apprehension that here is a normal you can write and as Joseph Heller said nothing about it appeals to you except that you can write a novel about it and the other thing that's wrong with it why did you decide to write about this is about Julian Barnes has said around is a better a better preposition write a novel around or Holocaust as mill says you you're going to confront it but only in a way that other people couldn't overhear what decide about it it gets too much like lawmaking or prescription if you're trying to persuade the reader what to think about something or what view to take about it all you gonna do is sort of throw out the sort of stimulating situations and thoughts that that you hope they'll respond to that you don't take it on head-on believe I'm running out of time and I also want to hear your wonderful questions so I'll just ask one more question can you talk about a piece of art that you read or watched or engaged with written out because I mean it's the only I really respond to I've had to admit to myself well I I reread king air the other day that seemed to do the trick thank you as has your attitude changed about your father since you've become a parent yourself and a grandfather and the second question is do poop still serve as a moral compass or center for an audience you talk about a multi-city tour as their function on the author and notwithstanding your comments is that why you do this question first question is now your attitude to your parents changes instantly within a couple of minutes here is your first child's class cry and and then after day you know exactly what it is you think Jesus you mean my parents did all this for me when I was tiny and you can instantly forgive them everything in my case is very little all their supposed sins and I mean it's a great price to blame your parents certainly beyond the age of 60 but you they get an absolute full pardon from you almost at once and the other question was about the book to earn well em I was looking again at something Hitchens wrote to me he said I truly enjoy meeting this shadowy creature the reader and it closes the circle in some way and since the m95 versed in my time spent alone to feel a community there is is very heartening particularly because I think more and more convinces the right that normal is a social form why is social realism easily the most dominant genre in in all literature's that's because the normal is sociable that you're then the writer is a is a host and the reader is a guest and I felt that relationship from both both ends and I I want to be a good host and a thoughtful host and that then that's quite a resonant decision when you consider that all of all the experimental quote unquote that all that the difficult novels that Lionel trilling set we was the ones we really like ever they're all dead the stream of consciousness is dead the deductive novel where you have to set a second-guess the novice that's dead the baggy monster which is very type of novel which is very discursive and digressive and won't stick to the point that's dead and you know what is emerging very strongly is that this this social relationship with the reader just to giver as a remand example when you open an avakov novel you feel at ease peace asked you into his house oh into his private thoughts and he's given you the best chair in the room and a delicious drink and some snacks to keep you going till dinner and almost sort of caressingly comfortable he makes you at once now if we go to look in on Joyce you have given an address as a building that no longer exists then you find it sort of hot round the back and knock on it and he's not there that eventually does show up and addresses you cheerfully in a language you've never heard before and serves you lunch consisting of two slabs of feet around a conga really I mean he makes no allowances for the reader and when you look at Navajo success rate as a novelist it's it's I think really almost uniquely high it's at fifteen fourteen masterpieces out of eighty and you look at choice and there's Dubliners and there's about a quarter of Ulysses and the rest is is sort of brazenly unreadable what is it Finnegan's wait well commuted as never cop said it's a snore in the other world to be obscure to mystify is a tremendous assertion of arrogance and it's saying you know I'm I don't really care about you but I'm gonna perform and if you concentrate you will get the beauty of my genius I think that that that that's completely the wrong kind of tone it's the wrong subconscious attitude you have to love the reader and how do you do that how do you make someone love you by by applying yourself at your very best that you're most irresistible and certain writers and I include Henry Keynes in this Michael quite like the reader to begin with Dublin is is very accessible and charming and addy James middle James is is him it is most welcoming but by the end of James and Joyce I think throughout it's like watching a marriage go bad in that they no longer share a bed they separate beds then separate rooms then separate apartments and yeah we get that separate cities and then you can see the distance between them widening and as updates edged to describe something is an active life and son description is in itself praise and it says erotic loving feelings that I feel more and more the basis of the we don't read a writer related question for you regarding the e equals mc-squared of your works instead of identifying the one which is you know perhaps not foundational the Hawking radiation yeah I think you're holding the mic a bit like I can't hear it oh you couldn't hear when you were identifying the difference between Einstein and Hawking which is very interesting suggesting that Einstein contributed equals mc-squared something that's more foundational is there something of all of the works that you've written that you feel represents your foundation there are great contribution to literature Oh books I've read yeah well I I wouldn't like to single any of them out that your books are like your children you don't have favorites and actually badges been ripped off like orange and many other interesting things said when asked what his favorite book am here's one he would always say the next one and I with novels I I wouldn't point to any years as being the end of the story you know you're you're still I mean this is it brings up a huge subject and one unknown to literary history it's a 20th century phenomena which is medical science has given us writers with longer lives I mean Shakespeare died at 57 Dickens 56 or 58 Jane Austen you know 41 and Bronte 29 Pete's 25 the idea of the Daughtery novelist which is what medical science has given us is is it hasn't really been considered very deeply because it's so new but most novelists tend to go off at roundabouts my age at the end of the biblical span something happens 70s you can it either gets diluted and watering your time talent and originality are the same thing it's been argued they're not elements in each other they're the same thing and it's very difficult to go on being original [Music] original to yourself you know where you think oh that's original outline said sentences you right now bump into one zero 20 years ago you know it's and often with writers it you just feel they're fine they're still good but they're not moving forward in any way they're doing the stuff we already know they can do it's it's hard to go on being exciting to yourself so and it's that your technique gets better by which I mean pacing and modulation than knowing what goes where and all that that your there's a Wilder stuff that used to enjoy as a writer can only retrieve until until there's a loss of faith within the right and I suddenly haven't come to that yeah when you know do not put it right you can just retire it's unthinkable to me but I mean when people start looking at me in a funny way and saying I wouldn't bother with another novel no it's happening someone said I think it might have been gore Vidal that novels teach us how to live because any truth in I not novels teach us how to live and when philosophy teaches us how to die as as many philosophers said that's what it's for I don't I wouldn't say they teach you how to live what they do is make living more enjoyable and more stimulating you I always used to say where people ask me what's a novel for I'd say it's education you know we're in the education business and that education is not giving you knowledge so much as giving you perceptions or stimulating your own perception so that when you go outside the world looks has a more interesting color than it did before there's a layer of literary responsiveness is laid down and I think that's I still think that's a lot of truth in that but when I read Steven Pinker's book the better angels of our nature I suddenly upgraded myself or upgraded the novel in that he gives my violence's decline is his subtitle and he gives several examples you know most obviously the the the establishment of the nation-state with a police force that makes a huge difference but things like the invention of printing and the rise of women and tribute to this disdain for violence and then he said and I really jolted when I read it he said the rise of the normal if you spent then they'll be talking about the middle of the 18th century if you spent and God knows how they ever did it reading the five volumes of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa a terrible book Rousseau's what was it drew Steve if he spent all that time inhabiting another sensibility in another mind the old Christian principle you know do want to others as you would have them do to you really does sink in because he Pinker doesn't like the word empathy ever since he heard of mother screaming at her two sons a shelter men today but I mean empathy really means the same thing as sympathy and if you spend hours communing with and sympathizing with any other person then some sort of breakthrough is made then he assigns the novel quite an important role in in the decrease invite and since violence is the thing of all human inventions violence system is the most repulsive to me I was very heartened by that so she teaches you how to live in a penis on specialized we're more responsive to the outside world more in love with life than you were previously and also less inclined to beat up and kill your fellow human being that's what it is you take these last two questions oh yeah I teach my students I use a small clip from Salman Rushdie this says if they speaks webinar phone he says a novel is way of going through to get to a human truth through non truth going through the fiction to get to things that you'll never you prefer actually experience on road and I just you know in relationship to the previous comment I think that's a really beautiful I wish I accept it I always say that to my students I wish I'd come up with this what the amp original is Washington you see it says he's got this clip of them on the internet that says you know the the brilliant thing about the novel is getting to human truth through countries so through fiction which is not true you don't have to know Anna Karenina to actually really begin to understand the feelings that go on and so I think that's a really great way that's way in any event I pitch it to my students and I think it's another way of taking a look at the novel and saying you know what can you get out of it get out of this a week you know it's a gateway to places and experiences we might not otherwise have yeah I mean Yale doctoral terrific writer said the difference between history and fiction he said history tells us what happened fiction tells us what it felt like and it and it it's the same thing as some analyst repair J which is kiddush distilling the human truth from these events as it was felt by individuals and you know if it can do that and lessen violence at the same time then we can't do without this culture so like given the uniqueness of a novel literary novel and how it stands apart from movies or TV and other ways of telling stories and like why do you still think that the literary novel will is on the decline and may go extinct sorry when Leonard yeah I mean I very much hope it's not on in decline but I read a bit trees for literary fiction every week where they say that that's gone and and I think it's evidence that the reach of poetry has much declined in the last two or three generations and I think I know why that I partly understand why that happened and I and I see a concealed threat to the novel of me even what a poem does what a literate person does above all is stop the clock it says right we're gonna take some minutes now to think about this epiphany in the poem is of nearly always a sort of Epiphany of some kind and and if you have to bear with me well things go still clock stop stop sticking and we examine this now everyone is saying from all sorts of different angles that the world is speeding up history is speeding up they can feel it is agitation acceleration now the novel already has adapted to that not as a cynically not mean as a bandwagon sense the typical novelists and modern beings too so and they live in the present and feel certain things about it and one of them being this sense of acceleration a poet poets can artificially introduced acceleration into a / it's just not the way the form works but novels can and have and do in the term I talked about this with novelist Franz Ian McEwan and others we have the feeling now that the the arrow of development and moving towards something is much sharper than it used to be that's why the bagi monster novel from tristram shandy up through the present day is has fallen by the wayside because people don't have the this endless fund of hours to commune with your novel at a stately pace it has to speed up a bit and there's a real pressure on the novelist to get things moving towards something even if it's just a little climax that takes you onto something more there has to be more immediate gratification and the novel is the novel can adapt to the this up to a point but it always does demand even a short novel demands four or five hours from Earth from the reading and then quiet hours with you in communion with this voice and I do earnestly hope that that you continue to count on that but if you look at a diagram of a in an illiterate brain and compare it to literate brain all kinds of differences in you know bits dangling off and that bit smaller than that would figure but if you compare that illiterate grain with a technically digitally savvy brain just as dramatic and so that what that means is that digitalized media are changing the physiology of our brains so it's we're speculating when we talk about the future because we're speculating about the shape of our brains nothing can nothing can be counted on certainly not indefinitely there's so Bela wrote nicely some way said the fact that talking about climate changing the fact that the world is changing and and in fact on this new pressures and stresses would no more of a CAD to 16th century provincial resident would no more of a care to him than it would to the to the dog at his feet but there's not one of us in this room that isn't aware of these new a sort of sense of crisis with the environment and and the idea that were to run out of its ability to sustain us is is utterly here on that slightly sad note thank you both so much [Applause] you you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 25,585

Rating: 4.7209301 out of 5

Keywords: Martin Amis, The Rub of Time, Politics and Prose, Tope Folarin, Knopf Publishing Group, essays, literary essays, literature, books, author, book, book talk, author talk, Washington DC, Kingsley Amis, novels, novelist, novel, writing, writers, british writer, british author, English literature, The Proximity of Distance, Nabokov

Id: kMZdSVJPZnU

Length: 71min 39sec (4299 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018