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Polly Marshall earwigs for New
Insight as old mates and giants of contemporary letters rap on
cool, coke, knickers and the joys of working class pastimes
ON CRITICISM…
Will Self: I felt the critical reaction to Time's Arrow
was monstrously unfair.
Martin Amis: Among my writer friends I'm known as a
tyrant of cool. That I don't mind reviews. Some of my friends
assume the foetal position for eight hours after a lukewarm
review. I always josh them about this. I am thick-skinned simply
because I'm the son of a writer. Being a writer is being someone
whose solitary thoughts turn out to have some general interest.
Which is an extraordinary thing, but it's never struck me that
way because my dad did it. So I'm not as fragile as people who
got there by themselves.
WS: I feel that the novelist puts himself on the line to
a far greater degree than any other artist. It's a risky
business.
MA: In an age of growing literalism there's vulgar
interest in the writer himself - or herself. Because
personalities are more accessible than a corpus of work.
Everyone can understand a person, you can see them on Terry
Wogan.
In TV age terms, it's pretty onerous to have to wade through a
body of work, when all you're interested in is personalities.
WS: The question asked most frequently by non-writers is
"Where do your ideas come from?" To them, imagination
seems to be this separate faculty in the mind that just spews
out ideas.
MA: The real mystery is talent. All writers have those
days when it feels like you're clearing away stuff to get at
what's there. Auden described writing as scraping away on a
dusty stone to see what the inscription is.
WS: At root you are a satirist. Satire depends on comic
exaggeration, and on stereotyping.
MA: Do you feel you are a satirist?
WS: Unquestionably. One critic said: "I don't think
Self is interested in character, he's interested in
conceits." I took this on the chin. I don't believe in the
whole idea of character, psychological realism. I see it as
dying with the nineteenth-century novel.
ON DRUGS…
WS: Do you have ideas on the relationship between drugs
and inspiration?
MA: I'm a habitual, but timorous, user of drugs. It's
good for making notes, but not for the executive side of it.
Good for ideas, but not for getting on with it. If you're
seriously into drugs, then drugs are going to become your
subject. You have to look around for a way of writing about
drugs, that has to do with drugs as well.
WS: I suppose that's true of me. I am a
drug-addict-writer in that way. What I think is remarkable about
marijuana is that it does produce this kind of conceptual
synaesthesia: you 'hear smells'. I've written on dope and off
it, and I think there's a certain x factor.
MA: Is the whole operation different? When I'm writing a
finished paragraph, I want to be straight. Even drink is no
good...
WS: No, liquor isn't a working drug. I wrote Cock &
Bull entirely on hash. Smoking all day, every day, in Morocco.
That's a very different ambience. In England I wouldn't finish a
paragraph on dope. But in Dead Babies your evocation of the
drug-saturated consciousness is exact.
MA: Yes, that reflected the terror engendered by four
encounters with LSD during my last year at Oxford. Two of the
trips were nice and two were not.
WS: There's an element of self-pity. I grew up on drugs.
By the time I was 15 I was a daily user.
MA: Which drugs?
WS: Speed and dope. Then heroin when I was 17. So, I feel
sort of protective of my younger self. I thought that if you
were a hard drug addict, you were an underground writer.
MA: Norman Mailer said that drugs were a form of
spiritual gambling. That when you take a drug, you are making a
raid on the future. You have the intense experience - which
lasts however long it lasts - but then you have depleted your
future. It's a measurable deal. The time you've spent high, you
have to spend at least that much time straight, to repay the
debt.
ON SEX…
WS: You're ambivalent about sex in your work, aren't you?
MA: No. The invented world I write about presents very
few opportunities for healthy Lawrentian sex.
WS: But in Money, there's the unfettered delights of
Selena's knicker drawer.
MA: I've got into terrible trouble over underwear.
WS: But underwear just is sexy, isn't it?
MA: Hugh Hefner sorted this out many years ago. For men,
there's a visual stimulus to do with the female shape,
particularly when emphasised by the standard underwear, that
goes straight into the eye, down the central nervous system to
the penis. And that's the end of it: bingo.
WS: Yes. I wrote Cock & Bull out of rage at the
involuntary character of my own sexual arousal.
MA: The only aggressive feeling I have towards women is
to do with their power over me. I've spent a big chunk of the
last thirty years thinking about them, following them around,
wanting to get off with them, absolutely enthralled. That's
bound to produce a slave's whinny for mercy every now and then.
In Time's Arrow the narrator says, "Women are great."
I pretty much go along with him there.
ON CLASS…
MA: The middle classes are under-represented in my books.
WS: You don't like their language.
MA: There's nothing going on there. I like talking to
working class people, I like what they say. There's often
something very beautiful about it.
WS: That's your other life, isn't it - games?
MA: I did get very deeply into darts culture.
WS: I'm intrigued. I don't have any interest in games. I
can't stand to lose. You can't stand to lose either, but you're
still prepared to play.
MA: I obviously can bear to lose, because I do a lot of
it. I even set myself up to lose by playing people who are far
better than me. I hate it every time, as if it's a fresh
experience…
ON EXPERIENCE…
MA: I increasingly wonder whether writers experience
anything.
WS: Is this what's coming up in the new book?
MA: Yeah. The Wordsworth phrase, "emotion
recollected in tranquillity" I think more of as,
"emotion invented in tranquillity." You're always on
duty, always looking for the writerly angle.
WS: On this new book, it's being put about that it's
concerned with literary rivalry. That's a telling phrase,
"put about"...
MA: It's a way of answering all the curiosity I feel
directed at me. You get these questions when you do interviews,
or readings, or signings. My book is a joke in that I say: you
want to know about me, about writers? Well here it is. But, of
course, nothing would happen in the book, if it were about a
writer. He would just get up and go to work.
WS: Your generation of writers has been accused of
attaching themselves to other countries. Barnes to France,
yourself to America. Is this true? Are you English?
MA: Oh yes, inescapably. But I need the North Atlantic,
for air as much as anything else.
WS: Is what attracts you to America the English view of
it as raunchy, emotionally immediate, lacking class?
MA: The greatest American export has been one notion, and
that is 'the cool'. That's an American idea - it's certainly not
an English one. All Americans are capable of it - the English
aren't.
On Sat May 20 Will Self reads
from How the Dead Live, his third novel concerning an American
woman dying in a London hospital.
On Sun May 21, Martin Amis
comes armed with the benefit of Experience, his eagerly-awaited
memoir. Box Office: 01273 709709.
copyright New Insight 2000 |
