Martin Amis

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a writer. The famous son of a famous father, he left Oxford with a first and wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers, at the age of twenty four, promptly winning the Somerset Maugham Award for his efforts. He seems to attract envy and admiration in equal measure. His books, which include Money, London Fields, and Time's Arrow, have been highly acclaimed, and he's been called the cleverest and most entertaining writer of his generation.

Presenter0:56

Personally, however, he's attracted criticism. As a result, he's dismissed the way the press have treated this aspect of his life as immoral, corrupt, and arrogant.

Presenter1:05

Cool, witty, and forty seven, writing is of overwhelming importance to him. Life alone does not offer enough, he says. It can only be redeemed by being reprocessed into prose. He is Martin Amis. Is writing, then, Martin, a a compensation? Does your fiction make up for shortcomings in your reality?

Martin Amis1:25

Um I don't think so, because when I started writing it was not out of any conflict, it was more out of a sense of play and

Martin Amis1:33

wanting to join the dance. What is being redeemed is the the formlessness of life.

Martin Amis1:39

It would be intolerable to me to just be a you know, a passive

Martin Amis1:43

liver of my life. It's only when you write that you can you can impose form and pattern and humour, comedy. Otherwise the stuff itself would strike me as unendurably thin.

Presenter1:54

But does it matter then whether your life is going well or going badly? Does the one or the other have an effect on how much you want to write?

Martin Amis2:02

No, it's it's a it's a fairly constant daily urge.

Presenter2:06

So do you you walk with the spring in your step to your study every morning? Do you really want to get in there?

Martin Amis2:11

I really want to get in there and uh will snarl with loathing sometimes when the telephone rings and really you're very intensely concentrated and

Presenter2:19

Which is apparently not how it was for your father, Kingsley Amos.

Martin Amis2:23

Well, dad had had uh daily anxiety about writing. I only have anxiety as I'm finishing a novel, where where all the anxiety that's I've been

Martin Amis2:33

Sublimating um comes and seeks me out.

Presenter2:35

Why is that? Be because because people are then going to see it, you've got to let it go, as it were.

Martin Amis2:40

Yeah, well it's it's no, it's all doubt. Doubt is what you're dealing with. Um and that's what my father dealt with every morning. He he would be trembling over his boiled egg'cause he thought he you know he'd lost it. He'd lost the magic, the n the knack. Um and then when I lived at home I'd hear him go into his study and fifteen minutes later I could hear him laughing.

Presenter3:02

But when you saw all that going on as a boy, you saw your father going through all of that did did you think then, you know, that's what I want to do? Or did it look so awful you thought that's what I don't want to do?

Martin Amis3:12

What it looks like is um it looks dull. Nothing is duller than what your father does for a living, whatever it is.

Presenter3:19

So it was essentially unglamorous.

Martin Amis3:21

Unglamorous, but glamorous too, I mean, no question about it.

Presenter3:24

Because he had status. You must have spotted that as you heard.

Martin Amis3:26

He had stated things were happening. It was

Martin Amis3:31

I mean, what it what it meant for me was that my father sort of d disappeared a lot of the time.

Martin Amis3:36

and was alone, and then every couple of years he would be in the papers, and when his marriage broke up

Martin Amis3:42

It was in the papers, and I think I got a sense then.

Martin Amis3:47

Luckily, that that was part of the job too, and so that.

Presenter3:51

Mm.

Martin Amis3:52

One had to grow another layer of skin to deal with that.

Presenter3:56

Tell me about your first record.

Martin Amis3:58

This is Night Train, Oscar Peterson.

Martin Amis4:01

And part of the reason

Martin Amis4:02

I'm so fond of it is that my next book, a short novel, is also called Night Dream, and it was a kind of a rhythm in the back of my head as I was writing this short novel.

Presenter5:12

Night Train played by the Oscar Peterson trio, Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums.

Presenter5:19

Martin Amis, you use a lot of your own experiences as material for your novels.

Presenter5:24

If you went under a bus tomorrow, if your children then read your work.

Presenter5:30

To find out more about you, they might say to themselves, I wonder why Dad was so often preoccupied with low life.

Presenter5:37

with things violent or vile or humiliating.

Martin Amis5:42

Yes, I think they might think that. Um, I also think that

Martin Amis5:46

They'd think that I was there in search of curious kinds of humour and even strange poetic effects as well.

Martin Amis5:55

What I hope that eventually conclude is that um

Martin Amis5:58

looking around, reading around, they'd see that in fact all the other genres have disappeared and all we've really got left now is comedy.

Martin Amis6:06

you know, tragedy and epic and romance.

Martin Amis6:09

don't seem to fit the world we're in at the moment.

Presenter6:12

But why really the question is why have you chosen as your genre, why has your genre become unpleasant low-life characters?

Martin Amis6:21

Well, yes, but they're charming, too.

Martin Amis6:23

And the the lower they are, the you know, it seems in my work, the more popular they are with my readers.

Presenter6:29

But that's not the reason you write about them, surely?

Martin Amis6:32

Not quite as sin

Presenter6:32

It's not quite as cynical as that, is it?

Martin Amis6:34

No. There's nothing cynical about it at all. In fact, it's not even a choice. It's a recognition.

Presenter6:39

Of what?

Martin Amis6:40

You recognize what your subject is, what you were sent down here to write about.

Presenter6:45

You said something like that. You said, Let me quote you to yourself, if I may. I don't come at these people, they come at me like information formed in the night. Why does uh such people as

Presenter6:56

Keith Tallant in London Fields is the obvious example, you know, who's pretty amoral. Why does he come to you in the night and say write about me?

Martin Amis7:04

It's very mysterious. I think everyone who isn't a writer has a kind of utilitarian view of how novels get written.

Martin Amis7:12

In fact, they come from nowhere and they they feel like a little gulp in your digestive system, and it's a you just recognize that that's your next novel. What you're you're given in these little pangs of conception can sometimes appall you. You think I'm going to spend four years on someone like that.

Presenter7:31

But what you have said, I think, on occasions is that, you know, you're not necessarily approving of these people, obviously. In fact, you're you're laughing at them quite often.

Martin Amis7:39

That's right.

Presenter7:40

There is a comedy there. That's very difficult, I think, reading as a subjective business, but it it it's very difficult to accept that. You can come out of the end of some of your novels, like money.

Presenter7:50

Just feeling disturbed, dejected, a bit dirty actually.

Martin Amis7:55

Oh, well I'm s I'm sorry to hear you say that. I think that good stuff, good literature, uh is incapable of depressing anyone. Otherwise there will just be a blood bath in the theatre at the end of King Lear or Hamlet, and that doesn't happen. You come out exhilarated, catharsis has taken place. Anything anything that's any good is going to cheer you up no matter what it's about.

Presenter8:17

Tell me about record number two.

Martin Amis8:19

Um this is takes me back to my days on high heels and flares and um flower shirts as Jimi Hendrix, the live version of Voodoo Cha.

Speaker 48:35

Lord, I'm a good little child.

Presenter8:59

Jimi Hendrix and the live version of Voodoo Child.

Presenter9:03

Going back to your early life, Martin, you apparently went to more than a dozen schools. Why so many?

Martin Amis9:07

Because my parents moved around and also, um, broke up. So

Martin Amis9:12

Starting a new school became an almost annual event. And I think it m t made me

Martin Amis9:18

Rather

Martin Amis9:20

obsequious and ingratiating child. Uh I was in any case a middle child.

Martin Amis9:25

With very um expressive brother and sister. So I was always picking up the pieces and being a diplomat and

Martin Amis9:33

And actually avoiding attention. I was n I

Martin Amis9:36

It always

Martin Amis9:38

puzzles me when I hear about children needing attention because I was

Martin Amis9:42

quite liked escaping from attention.

Martin Amis9:44

Then that perhaps is the the seed of

Martin Amis9:46

wanting to be a writer is that

Martin Amis9:48

You get all this time alone.

Presenter9:50

But you weren't into reading much, as they say. Apparently all you read was Harold Robbins and comics.

Martin Amis9:56

Uh yes, I read a lot of comics and then I reread those comics.

Martin Amis9:59

and read Harold Robbins and things that were meant to be sexy, like John Brain, Room at the Top. That was under my bed for a year or two when I was twelve or thirteen.

Martin Amis10:10

My education r really became a mess. In my late teens I was

Martin Amis10:16

averaging about an O level a year and spending a lot of time in betting shops and that kind of thing.

Martin Amis10:23

So you were

Presenter10:24

So you were you you were quite street wise then, were you? Yes, I think that's where it all began.

Martin Amis10:26

Yes, I think it's a good idea. And it was my stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Hard, in fact, who saw that this couldn't go on and decided to.

Martin Amis10:35

systematize my education and I was then sent off to a boarding crammer.

Martin Amis10:40

in Brighton.

Presenter10:41

But how did they persuade you to do that? Apparently they took you out, she and your father, to to a Wheeler's restaurant and said, Now, this is what we're going to do with you.

Martin Amis10:50

Uh they read the right act, and but I was ready. Um if you're tall, bright, and you're l you're l living a kind of worthless life, then you're you're ready for a change and and you know this can't go on and and you're more and more frightened of the world you're going to have to enter.

Presenter11:06

How old would you have been then when they did this?

Martin Amis11:08

Oh, quite, you know, getting on. I mean, eighteen.

Martin Amis11:12

Almost a lost cause.

Presenter11:14

And yet within a matter of what, eighteen months, two years, you'd got into Oxford to read English.

Martin Amis11:19

In a in a year, in fact, because I found uh you know, I liked it and

Martin Amis11:24

Was good at it.

Presenter11:25

Record number three.

Martin Amis11:27

As you'll see by the end of this programme, I'm really a a very sentimental soul. Uh beneath this exterior as a as Kat Vonnegut said, I'm as soft as a sneaker full of slime. There's a terrible sentimentality.

Martin Amis11:41

trying to get out and

Martin Amis11:43

The books in a sense are just sort of tough talk to keep that sentiment sentimentality at bay.

Presenter11:48

And this music mirrors exactly that.

Martin Amis11:51

Yes, if if the carapace cracks, this is what you get.

Presenter12:55

Part of the last movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. Six in B minor the Patitik with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Umstislav Rostropovich.

Presenter13:04

So you um you got a first, Martin Amos, from Exeter College, um but you were so laid back about it apparently that you didn't bother to open the envelope that told you.

Martin Amis13:13

Now this is this is a story my father told where he accused me of being a monster of cool.

Martin Amis13:18

It's true that when the notification came.

Martin Amis13:21

I left the

Martin Amis13:23

the card on the kitchen table with a coffee stain on the corner of it.

Martin Amis13:27

But but that's not it's not an accurate story, because I already knew because I'd been to Oxford and and had the interview. And this was no mere ordinary first, this was a what they used to call a congratulatory first, so I knew that I'd got that, um because instead of grilling you they just chat to you for five minutes.

Presenter13:44

Right.

Presenter13:44

But he quite liked your cool, your father, didn't he? He rather admired your your street cred, didn't he?

Martin Amis13:50

Uh

Martin Amis13:51

Well, I think he did and he didn't. I think

Martin Amis13:54

One of the reasons he didn't like my fiction much was the milieu. I mean, he didn't like these uh Burks and Louts uh and promiscuous young people. So that's really as far as it goes.

Presenter14:06

It's quite a good line though he came out with when he said that he he he longed when he read your books for an ordinary sentence like they they finished their drinks and left.

Martin Amis14:13

Well, to which I say I want fewer of those sen sentences in his books, um although I I mean I never made any secret of my admiration for his work.

Presenter14:24

Anyway, you went into journalism at first. You you went to the Times Literary Supplement, then you went on to the New Statesman, where you were literary editor, but by twenty four you'd published this first novel, the The Rachel Papers, which was very successful. Was it then only a matter of time before you were going to become a full time writer? Was that always the plot?

Martin Amis14:41

The the the plot was that I would

Martin Amis14:43

Come I came down from Oxford and I was going to have a year in London and see how it went.

Martin Amis14:48

If I didn't fancy it, I was going to go back and do another degree, and I think I would have become an academic.

Martin Amis14:54

But it did go well. Um I loved working at the TLS. I wrote

Martin Amis14:59

my first novel in the evenings. I had a tremendous amount of energy.

Martin Amis15:03

Uh because I'd worked so hard for my degree at Oxford. I mean, I wasn't I wasn't cool about that. I'd have looked like an idiot if I hadn't got a first. I worked so hard. And working hard gives you muscles for working hard.

Presenter15:15

But then it was, you know, round about then that this whole press thing started, really. You started being called a a super brat, didn't you?

Martin Amis15:23

Yeah.

Presenter15:23

Because you were being so successful. Smarty Marty, they called himself.

Martin Amis15:27

But yes, except except all that I mean, in in the culture generally that it wasn't there. I mean, you delivered your novel, it got published, it got reviewed, and that was that. There was none of this secondary

Martin Amis15:41

you know, continuous rumble of personality stuff.

Presenter15:44

Well, why then it's now happened to you. Why have you called it you know, you've come on very strong about it, why have you called it immoral and corrupt?

Martin Amis15:51

I think I was talking about

Martin Amis15:53

The way journalism is going. I think it is.

Martin Amis15:57

It's getting more powerful, therefore more corrupt.

Martin Amis16:00

And more arrogant and more scurrilous. But you spartan.

Presenter16:03

But you've smarted from it personally. I mean, you can you can tell that. You've

Martin Amis16:06

I've I was small

Presenter16:07

smarted from it personally.

Martin Amis16:08

Not that much. I mean, I think when people say, doesn't it bother you? What I take to mean being bothered by this kind of thing is that.

Martin Amis16:16

Your mind is not at rest. You're constantly turning over a sense of injustice in your mind. You're waking up in the middle of the night.

Martin Amis16:25

Murdering people in your thoughts. And honestly, that that hasn't happened. Every now and then someone says something that does get under your skin. But it's not.

Martin Amis16:35

It's not the volume of the stuff that does it. I've had I hadn't really felt cowed by that.

Presenter16:41

Record number four.

Martin Amis16:43

This is a song that's true and beautiful for the two minutes of its duration. James Brown, It's a Man's World.

Speaker 416:51

Made me the car!

Speaker 416:55

Take us more than roll!

Speaker 416:59

MAAAAAAAA

Speaker 417:00

Train!

Speaker 417:04

To carry the heavy load

Speaker 417:09

Man beat the electrolyte!

Speaker 417:12

To take us out of the dark.

Presenter17:17

Man be

Speaker 417:18

In the boat, mama!

Presenter17:21

James Brown, and it's a man's world. And now, Martinemus, you have two daughters.

Martin Amis17:27

That's right. Separated by two decades. Um the elder, Delilah, Seale, I've only come to know in the last couple of years, and the younger

Martin Amis17:37

Fernanda, who has just recently joined us.

Presenter17:39

I said earlier that you used your your life as material for your fiction.

Presenter17:45

Was your daughter Delilah?

Presenter17:47

Always there in it then. Delilah, we should explain. You you fathered during a brief affair in the seventies and have recently been

Presenter17:56

reunited as it were. She's twenty years old.

Presenter17:58

I noticed in in Money you've got the here are there, John Self, saying at one point, Should you ever find yourself in a paternity or maternity mix-up, tell the kid. How can you live seriously if you don't know who you are? I mean, is that

Presenter18:09

Was that your thoughts about Delilah there?

Martin Amis18:12

Well, the writer Maureen Freeley wrote an interesting piece where she said that this had become a theme in my work around about the time that

Martin Amis18:21

Delilah was being born and raised, you know, outside my ken. I knew of her, but I didn't

Martin Amis18:28

And I had fantasies of following the pram around. But she was in another life, and there was.

Martin Amis18:34

Which ought to have remained close to me.

Martin Amis18:37

And it's true, if you look at my books, there are these missing children. Also my cousin, first cousin.

Martin Amis18:43

Lucy Partington disappeared at at that time Elizabeth.

Martin Amis18:47

We later discovered was one of Fred West's victims, but for twenty years.

Martin Amis18:52

Um she was just someone who had disappeared.

Martin Amis18:55

Um

Presenter18:55

And she's there, it's said in in your novel. She's well, there's Mary Lamb, isn't there? Yes, there are these. And other people and.

Martin Amis19:00

Yes, there are different people and my novels about.

Martin Amis19:06

Children disappearing.

Martin Amis19:08

I wasn't consciously writing about Lucy or Delilah, but but of course fiction is where your unconscious asserts itself, and of course I had been worrying about them. They'd been in the back of my mind.

Martin Amis19:22

And the novel is is exactly the place where that kind of

Martin Amis19:26

hidden preoccupation is going to surface.

Presenter19:28

So art imitates life in that sense. Does does life ever imitate art? It was said that when you began writing the information.

Martin Amis19:30

Can that

Presenter19:37

Which is a a about a midlife crisis. You weren't having one, but by the time you finished it you were.

Martin Amis19:41

That's true. But the novel was in that limbo between being finished and being published when the the great fuss happened. So, um

Martin Amis19:51

It it it didn't affect the book. The book evolved into into a kind of midlife crisis, although that was always going to be its subject.

Presenter19:59

Okay, well we'll we'll talk about the great fuss in a minute, but just let's pause and have some more music.

Martin Amis20:04

Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins are what I spend ninety ti ninety percent of my music listening time with. And it's always been my theory that

Martin Amis20:12

All sex sex music is seduction. This would be the the brisk way of trying to seduce a woman.

Presenter21:20

Ben Webster Quintet and Late Date with Ben Webster on sax, Oscar Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass, Herb Ellis on guitar and Stan Levy on drums. That was recorded in nineteen fifty seven and I was just saying it's a it's a very jaunty seduction there.

Martin Amis21:33

Yes, you're trying to jolly them along before they have a chance to think about it.

Presenter21:39

So this very public midlife crisis. Um we all knew about it. Your marriage broke up. There was a row about your wanting too much money for your book. You lost your agent of long standing and you spent twenty thousand pounds on your teeth.

Presenter21:52

How it was incredibly public, all played out in the newspapers. How painful was it?

Martin Amis21:57

Uh well it was nothing compared to what was actually going on. Um

Martin Amis22:02

What happened in the papers was just a pinprick compared to the actual events.

Presenter22:06

Tell me a bit about the money thing, because ap apparently you'd never bothered about money before. You'd always, I read, put your bank statements in a shoe box unopened.

Martin Amis22:14

Mm, I've gone back to that now.

Martin Amis22:16

Um

Martin Amis22:18

I suppose it was just curiosity about, you know, wanting to you reached a certain stage in your life and you wanted to know where you stood.

Presenter22:24

what you were worth or what you could get, do you mean?

Martin Amis22:26

Well, what?

Martin Amis22:29

No, what what a publisher was prepared to pay.

Presenter22:31

Had you not bothered that much before that? You'd just take them vaguely what the agent negotiated.

Martin Amis22:36

Yes, yes. I hadn't bothered much. I'm I'm not, you know, interested in money, uh, not excited by it. But there was this

Martin Amis22:46

This it was part of the sort of convulsion in my life that I wanted to

Martin Amis22:51

You know, I've get seeing that I was

Martin Amis22:54

Supposed to be the most influential etcetera, writer of my generation, so I thought.

Martin Amis22:59

Well, let's test the waters. And it wasn't, I mean it was exaggerated, so as a.

Martin Amis23:07

not exaggerated, but seized on as a way of having another reason to attack me, because um there were other advances paid that were within a stone's throw of that, that caused not even a business paragraph.

Presenter23:19

But this caused you to to lose your agent Pat Kavanagh and thereby her her husband, your friend Julian Barnes. So, you know, it all got sort of terribly personal and and

Presenter23:29

Painful, presumably.

Martin Amis23:31

Hmm.

Martin Amis23:32

Yes, it did.

Presenter23:33

And why did you let that happen is really what I'm asking?

Martin Amis23:36

Well, I don't I don't know if I mean, perhaps the press.

Martin Amis23:39

Does here become a kind of an actor in the drama because.

Martin Amis23:44

By the time that happened, I felt I'd long lost control of events. And it's um I mean the press

Martin Amis23:52

The press really created a lot of the pressure that made that happen.

Presenter23:56

Is it over? I mean, is is the big midlife crisis over? You're hardened.

Martin Amis23:58

Midlife crisis.

Martin Amis24:01

Yeah.

Presenter24:01

Battle scarred.

Martin Amis24:02

Well, you do I mean it it a crisis is exactly what it is. Um in the information I suggest that it's an hysterical overreaction to the clear fact that you're gonna die, that all this is finite and that you're

Martin Amis24:14

As Larkin said, it's it's not only going to happen, but it's so near.

Martin Amis24:17

But a crisis is a crisis and it has a beginning and an end. And you do come up the other side of the midlife crisis and you look around, you think, well, I've still got one arm, and this I've still got this leg. And actually.

Martin Amis24:36

Your horizons are clearer to you and um you're strengthened and emboldened by

Martin Amis24:42

By having made this, you know, jump into the next bit of life that that seemed so strange to you when you entered it.

Presenter24:49

Record number six.

Martin Amis24:51

This is uh the beginning of Handel's concerto number four in A minor from his Concerti Grossi.

Martin Amis24:56

Um it's beautifully mathematical.

Presenter26:00

The opening of Handel's concerto number four in A minor from his Concerti Grossi Opus Six, played by the English concert orchestra conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

Presenter26:09

Does Martin being over your midlife crisis uh mean that you've ceased to contemplate death, or is it something that still daily invades your thoughts?

Martin Amis26:19

Um

Martin Amis26:20

As Saul Bellow said, it's like the d the dark backing behind a mirror that you need before anything can be seen.

Martin Amis26:28

You know, the mirror wouldn't work without this sheet of darkness behind it.

Presenter26:32

But how much do you think about?

Martin Amis26:34

Not much. I'm not I'm certainly not, um, like my father who and like Philip Larkin who

Martin Amis26:40

probably have something had something that there is now a name for, like early death awareness syndrome.

Martin Amis26:47

It doesn't loom.

Martin Amis26:48

for me as it did for him. And it was almost, you know, pathological with him.

Martin Amis26:55

As a child I remember sometimes my mother would wake me up and bring my father into my room.

Martin Amis27:02

And he would just chat for a few minutes and then go back. And I said, What was that about last night? And she said, Well, he'd woken up with a nightmare. And

Martin Amis27:11

He knew that if he was w with you he had to be calm.

Martin Amis27:15

And I think it, you know, it really was a terror for him, and it certainly hasn't been that way for me.

Presenter27:20

And how has his death affected you? I mean, obviously it would make any makes any child think about their own mortality, but you said something slightly odd. You said that

Presenter27:31

Opposite.

Presenter27:32

Very saddened by his death. But you said also that it's been liberating, that a great obstacle has gone. It is it well.

Martin Amis27:37

It's as if well, it's it's many things. And um, you know, as psychologists say, death isn't is not a simple thing, it's the complex symbol. Um you know, if you're honest, you'll say that as your father's death is is happening.

Martin Amis27:52

You feel very energetic.

Martin Amis27:55

The body feels important because it is about to be promoted into the front line.

Martin Amis28:01

temporal front line. So you uh Freud said that he had a huge

Martin Amis28:05

attack of energy when his father died, because you also feel you've got to get stuff done because your death is now more present to you, because h the intercessionary figure of your father has gone.

Martin Amis28:17

And and that kind of gets you through it too.

Martin Amis28:21

You know, someone said to me, it's it's the simple expressions of grief that actually are the tr the truest ones. Someone said, It's like lo losing a part of yourself and you know, you don't get over that.

Martin Amis28:32

And that's what it was like.

Presenter28:33

But it also means that you cease to be the boy and become the man, to put it sympathetically but yeah.

Martin Amis28:37

Well, I mean, yes, if if to d to deal with the sort of media 1% of the whole question, I can't surely to God be go on being the bad boy of English letters as I approach my fifties. And I think I was the bad boy for so long simply because the bad man was there. And now that the man is gone, then surely I go from boy to man, I have a thought.

Presenter29:03

Cord number seven.

Martin Amis29:05

This is Oscar Peterson again. Georgia on my mind.

Speaker 429:12

Yeah.

Presenter30:08

The Oscar Peterson trio again, this time with Georgia on my mind. How much, Martin, do you care about your readers, or don't you care about them beyond the fact that they're there?

Martin Amis30:18

No, I I feel passionately about my readers. I think

Martin Amis30:21

Reading is an art, just as writing is. Every reader will take something different away from your books. Every reader will have a different view of each of your characters, will paint them in their own mind. I feel you know, I more and more that one needs the support of one's readers.

Presenter30:38

But um I mean, obviously you hope all authors hope that they will live on after their death. You have Richard Tale, the the unsuccessful one of the two novelists in The Information, worrying that the you know, the awful superficial work of his rival will live on. And he says, you know, if it did, the universe would be a joke, an awful contemptible joke.

Presenter30:57

Do you fear, then, for your readers, that that poor literature does them harm?

Martin Amis31:03

No, I think any reading is better than no reading.

Martin Amis31:06

Because what's so important about

Martin Amis31:08

Reading is is that you're c communing with another mind.

Presenter31:12

But you despise, don't you, people who attempt to to to get the reader to identify with them. That's not what you want. You think that's pretty cheap.

Martin Amis31:20

Well, n Nabokov said that um the number one on your list of what not to do as a reader is identify with the main character with

Martin Amis31:31

Yeah.

Martin Amis31:32

Anna or Vronsky.

Martin Amis31:34

What you should be doing is identifying with the author and seeing

Martin Amis31:39

what he or she is up to and how they're arranging things and and and trying to get a an overview of the novel, not being swept along helplessly by a kind of soap opera.

Presenter31:49

But the the possibility that that Geoffrey Archer's Oeuvre may outlive your own is um pretty hard to stomach, isn't it?

Martin Amis31:58

Um well, my father used to say, you know, he didn't care at all about posterity because he wouldn't be around to enjoy its good opinion and you know, no bloody use to me, he used to say. But I know he didn't he did mind a little bit.

Martin Amis32:12

It's what keeps writers honest, because um it's all that matters being read after you're dead. And by definition you're never going to know whether it's that's an absolute lock. They've got you there.

Martin Amis32:24

So it keeps you honest to know that the big question is one you won't even get a glimpse of.

Presenter32:29

Uh I'll strike over.

Martin Amis32:29

Yeah.

Martin Amis32:30

This is uh Kilman Hawkins' Yesterday's, and this is the the rather more whiny and weedly way of trying to seduce someone, but with great complexity and feeling.

Speaker 432:40

Uh

Speaker 433:12

Uh

Presenter33:40

Yesterday's recorded in nineteen fifty with Coleman Hawkins on tennis sacs, Hank Jones on piano, Ray Brown on bass, and Buddy Rich on drums. There's a a lot of seduction on this island, considering you're all alone, Martin.

Martin Amis33:52

Yes, that's true.

Presenter33:53

Are you going to survive on your own?

Martin Amis33:55

I think I w I would. I mean, I I'd miss my sons and my daughters. But I'm I want to find the writer as he or she who's most alive when alone. And there's definitely

Martin Amis34:08

some truth in there. So I wouldn't be throwing myself to the sharks.

Presenter34:13

If you could only take one of those records, which one would it be?

Martin Amis34:16

Um well, I think the last one. It has a kind of abrasive complexity and never quite answers the questions that it's posing.

Presenter34:23

Annual book?

Martin Amis34:25

My book would be The Longmans Annotated uh Milton.

Martin Amis34:30

Uh if it can't be a collected works of then it would just be Paradise Lost.

Presenter34:35

And what about your luxury?

Martin Amis34:36

Well, uh cable T V.

Martin Amis34:39

If I had to just take a f ch a few channels then they I'm afraid they would be the sports channels.

Martin Amis34:45

I know you can't say that without without everyone thinking you're laddish, whatever that means, but um

Martin Amis34:50

I'm afraid I do get an awful lot of pleasure watching tennis and football and other sports.

Martin Amis34:55

Television.

Presenter34:56

Martin Amus, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Martin Amis35:00

It's a pleasure, thank you.

Speaker 235:10

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.