Martin Amis: video interview

[Applause] did you do any explicit Fiel research for this um apart from having been a a sun reader for 30 years reading several volumes of Jordan's autobiography um just for for incidental details what did you make of that I was rather impressed by it um you know Danube in this book she never she never appears but but um because the she the girl we do look at is is a danu wannabe but I was impressed by Jordan in the end she's uh celebrity mom of the year and for good reason you know her her oldest boy Dwight York's son Harvey has had serious problems and and um accidentally hurts himself you know in in ways that are painful to read about and she's very good and tough about that and do her books have literary merit um that would be pushing it um but they have they have the merits of of cander and and a certain sort of honesty if you notice uh the the one absentee social absentee from my novels all of them is the middle class uh I've never written about them I always write about uh the criminal class lowlife class and perhaps the very privileged in the novel yellow dog it was the King of England versus a tabloid gist um that was the contrast I'm only interested in extremes and I I and I know that world I all my life I've had uh connections with that world and when I was a kid I was farmed out to a workingclass family in in Wales for months on end and uh and loved that's a long way from pitbulls called was it Joe and Jack well there's six pitbulls in all in the whole thing um of course it is but um but I've never not had that part of my life and uh even even among people who should know better I mean my oldest friend who died at the age of 50 sometime ago was in and out of prison and there's not a single prison in London tonight haven't visited him in um and I have friends who who uh who I have a particular friend whom I won't name but he he fixes me up with situations where he said some people are coming to this restaurant you might be interested to come along and they are you know villains um so I you take your notebook no no no that would be that would be bang out of order um so you have friends in low places yeah and um and I've read about it a lot about it too uh but I doesn't feel like it it feels for me to write about them is not crossing a Chasm it's a rut that any frog could straddle it's um one of the voices in my head is is that kind of voice do you think that a Mormon president is anything to be worried about well Mormonism is uh is the most uh contemptible uh fraudulent and above all recent religion in America it's only barely 100 years old and it its Origins are all in Huer ISM and uh uh hogwash uh and I I thought that he was he was just sort of inh inherited uh hereditary Mormon um and that it was just something he had in his background but no people say that a Mormon is mid you know he he is above all a Mormon and uh some of the you should read Crystal hin on this and God is not great but the way they claim conversions from the dead including the Six Million of the Holocaust uh you know how dare you do um you know about Temple Underpants uh uh and but does any of this matter is it just it's a personal matter do you think it it matters to anyone else uh I can't see him legislating from a Mormon point of view but it it's it matters to one's opinion of his IQ you just mentioned uh Christopher hijin uh has there been anything about the process of grieving that surprised you yeah a a great deal um with when it's someone you know a little one can go through the conventional motions of uh like Marie kovin whom I knew a little bit you know where you feel rotten for a few days and you go to the funeral and and actually do get something out of that and then shed some tears and and then then it sort of moves past you because I didn't know her very well I liked her and admired her um but when it's a your best friend of 40 years I I I don't expect to to get to the other side anything like the other side of it in my lifetime uh uh but what I there have been surprises too um James fanton at the memorial service read out his poem for Andrew Wood and it's he says in that you know what would what would dead friends want of us would they want us to to grieve for them and what concentrate on what we have lost in their in their going and what about what they have lost that's what we should be thinking about so and uh the horrible realization that um that when you die it's it's as if uh everyone else has died in other words that that your family wife your children all the people you love and care about and everything you love and care about it's as if they they were on a charter flight and have gone down in flames and uh it's a it's a multiple bereavement to die and that's what he's lost um on the other side and and surprisingly um he he was someone with exceptional love of life and I always envied it and and acknowledged that it was greater than mine but since he's died I found my love of life has he's Beed his love of life to me in that I feel the obligation to to Value every moment uh because he's not there to value that moment there's a lovely phrase you had in um in the pregnant Widow about the house becoming increasingly dilapidated but the Garden getting bigger in the Garden Of Memories yes and it just made me think of that yeah um the past with a capital P doesn't really enter your life until your 50s and then suddenly it's this great undiscovered continent where you can go and uh Wander um and that that that increases as you get older as the future shrinks the past expands not just in temporal terms but in sort of geographical terms in your own head and um you begin to to for instance you you know you meet some old friends and you have dinner and it's extremely enjoyable when I was younger I would say it was good fun last night but now I I really do think about what it was like and remember moments and and you're just you know you in a way you're you're becoming I hope this is this is second childhood in its benign form but your Wonder at life increases towards the end because it's tinged with this leaking feeling that it's not going to be there for very much longer and uh makes you prize it more

Channel: The Guardian

Views: 27,543

Keywords: Culture, Books, Martin Amis, the guardian, london fields, guardian

Id: 1SgrJ8-6yqQ

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 13 2012