– In Conversation With Martin Amis – Philip Adams – ABC Australia Late Night Live – October 8, 2020 – ABC Australia –
We had other plans today. It was going to be a reasonably uneventful, somewhat relaxing Saturday with our typical smorgasbord of Pop Culture and Music posts. But earlier this morning, I got the sad news that the novelist, essayist and screenwriter Martin Amis had died at the age of 73, after losing a battle with esophageal Cancer.
I am afraid we’re reaching that age when a lot of us will be going in a steady stream; one a month, then one a week, then one a day, then two a day.
Martin Amis may not have the broad Pop Culture recognition some of his contemporaries may have. But that’s not to say Martin Amis is by any means obscure. Martin Amis was a hugely influential author, among the celebrated group of novelists including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose works defined the British literary scene in the 1980s.
Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, and educated at schools in Britain, Spain and the US, before going to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in English.
He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with waking him up to literature when he was a drifting adolescent “averaging an O-level a year”: “She gave me a reading list and after an hour, I went and knocked on her study door and said: ‘I’ve got to know: does Elizabeth marry Darcy?’”
His first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published in 1973 while he was working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1974, and another book, the blackly comic Dead Babies, was published the following year. He worked as the literary editor of the New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, during which time he published his third novel, Success.
Amis was often compared with his father, Kingsley Amis, who won the Booker prize in 1986 for his novel The Old Devils. Though the younger Amis never won the Booker himself, he was shortlisted for his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, a portrait of a Nazi war criminal told in reverse chronological order, and long-listed in 2003 for his novel Yellow Dog.
Martin Amis and his close friend Christopher Hitchens were part of a cohort of novelists and thinkers with a public profile that extended well beyond the page. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a nonfiction work about Stalin’s Great Terror. The book sparked a literary controversy, partly because of its attack on Hitchens, whom Amis accused of having sympathy for Stalin and communism.
Hitchens retaliated via an article in the Atlantic, but the friendship was apparently unaffected. “We never needed to make up,” Amis told the Independent in 2007. “We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless.” When Hitchens died, in December 2011, Amis delivered his eulogy.
This interview, done by Philip Adams for the ABC Australia Radio program Late Night Live, Martin Amis talks about Hitchens and how his death had a profound affect on him.
Now it’s Martin Amis’s turn.
(Special thanks to The Guardian for last minute biographical information). And FYI, check out Late Night Live online. Great show.
