There's a long and interesting article about the famous literary father and son, Kingsley and Martin Amis, in the NY Times Magazine this week:
Kingsley Amis, an indelible figure in British letters, is the subject of an immense and sympathetic new biography by Zachary Leader (published this month in the United States) that has already caused a stir in England both by reminding readers of how funny Kingsley could be and because of its frankness about his personal life. (Leader is a friend of Martin’s, who encouraged him to write the book and put no restrictions on him.) Martin, meanwhile, who published his first novel when he was just 24, has recently brought out his 10th, “House of Meetings,” and at 57 is arguably writing better than Kingsley was at the same age. He is a more daring and inventive novelist than his father — unafraid in “London Fields,” for example, to wheel out the whole tool chest of postmodern tricks — and in books like “Money,” about a would-be filmmaker spiraling out of control on both sides of the Atlantic, nearly as funny but on a much bigger canvas.Martin likes to say that he is of an age now when looking at himself in the mirror in the morning is like watching a low-budget horror movie with particularly lurid special effects. In fact, he has maintained most of the brooding good looks that were his trademark as a young man, though the “rug,” as Amis characters tend to call not a toupee but their own head of hair, is going a little thin on top. He wears black a lot and goes in for that dandified Brit touch of French cuffs without cufflinks. “I really do think I was blessed by Kingsley in that I really don’t get worked up or upset the way many of my contemporaries do,” he said over lunch a couple of months ago in New York, speaking in a slow, mid-Atlantic drawl in which the vowels are sometimes elongated for emphasis. “I never thought it was anything out of the way being a writer, but for them it’s been a struggle for legitimacy. It doesn’t astound me that I’m a writer, because what your dad does is banal by definition. It never seemed a big deal.”
Incidently, there's also a long piece reviewing the new biography about Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader in The New Yorker this week as well:
Zachary Leader’s “The Life of Kingsley Amis” (Pantheon; $39.95) is a better biography than many bigger writers have had: detailed, sympathetic, unsparing without being unkind. Amis, Leader makes clear, had to work earnestly to become as bilious as he became. Born in 1922, Amis came from a tight, suburban lower-middle-class family, the accoutrements—small house, small money, paper-thin walls—closer to what Americans think of as poor, but the attitudes firmly respectable-professional; his father, whom he called “the most English human being I have ever known,” was a clerk in the office of Colman’s, the mustard-makers. This was probably, at least from a literary point of view, among the most oppressed classes in human history, or at least had the worst inferiority complex: never self-lionized, like the working classes, permanently snubbed and mocked by the uppers and even the upper-middles.***
Every country’s difficult literary guys are different, and you know from experience how to handle the kind you’ve grown up with. Reading Geoffrey Wolff’s excellent biography of the truly ornery American writer John O’Hara, you sense that you could have managed him, for one night with a mixture of office-adulter gossip and writerly mumbling about advances and sales. But when you come to the super-ornery English novelist Kingsley Amis you realize that you have no idea what you could possibly have said to get through an evening. Office gossip would be bound to hit a clunker, publishing talk would seem vulgar this is a writer who devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs to the minor American Jewish humorist Leo Rosten in order to tear him apart, because, on the one evening Amis spent with him, Rosten (a) didn’t give him enough to drink and (b) misused the English expression “local” to mean a nearby restaurant instead of a neighborhood pub. With someone like that, you just hide under the sofa, or hope you never run into him at all.
I have been a big Martin Amis fan since college, despite some miststeps in his writing in the last 15 years (Night Train, Korba The Dread, etc...), however, I am enough of a fan that I did read his memoir Experience. I've also read Kingsley Amis' most famous novel, Lucky Jim. And I suppose I ought to at least read his Booker Prize winner Old Devils as well. Martin mentioned some others in his memoir that made me want to read those too, but, I can't call to mind the titles at the moment.
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