Acclaiming Amis

In a great literary coup Martin Amis, unarguably the leading novelist of his generation, is coming to Manchester as Professor of Creative Writing

“You can’t teach talent,” said Martin Amis, “but I believe it can be coaxed along.”

Considering that he never had any special tuition, yet has become the leading novelist of his generation, Amis is genuinely enthusiastic about teaching creative writing. He did, of course, have what might be considered the huge advantage of learning at the knee of his famous novelist father, Kingsley Amis. But his dryly humorous response to that notion is that “he never gave me any tuition”.

Indeed, ‘following in father’s footsteps’ is not a suggestion he takes to kindly, even though Sir Kingsley also became a teacher in later life – at Swansea, Princeton and Cambridge – for 15 years. “By all accounts he was very good at it”, he said.

Now, at 57 and with eleven acclaimed novels, as well as collections of short stories, books of non-fiction and countless essays and critical pieces to his name, Amis is very much looking forward to his first academic job – at The University of Manchester’s newly created centre for New Writing.

“I always fancied teaching,” he said. “I am at the point of my life where I want a new milieu and I think I have something to offer. I have a vulgar curiosity about the young. I want to know how ideological they are and what effect modernity has had on them. I can’t think of a better way to learn about them, because nothing lays you more open than writing fiction.” He has five children of his own, but he said “they only give you a partial view”. So, whilst coaxing along new writers, he is clearly keen to learn himself and, as always, is on the look-out for possible material for another novel.

“When I was young I might have benefited from some guidance from a kind and helpful 57-year-old writer,” he said, with typical irony, considering that he has something of a reputation for being an acerbic writer and a fearsome critic. “I’m sure I can be helpful and gentle. I know that writing fiction leaves you totally exposed’.

The challenge of not only teaching creative writing, but also assessing students’ work, exercises him. “Nabokov said there is only one school – one of talent,” he said, underlining his original point. And he is not about teaching new writers “the tricks of the trade”. But there are what he calls benchmarks, like freshness, freedom from cliché, levels of perception and, perhaps most importantly, “economy of energy – how to make the best use of it”.

He is truly committed and strongly believes that the academic milieu has earned a valid place in fostering creative writing talent. He cites Ian McEwan, a product of the long-established writing course at East Anglia, led by Malcolm Bradbury, a notable exponent of the campus novel. The number of successful writers is certainly some measure of the effectiveness of the teaching.

Of course, few reach the heights or the celebrity status that Amis himself has achieved over 30 years, After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford, with a First in English, where his tutor was the late Jonathan Wordsworth, great-great-great-nephew of the poet, he went to work as an editorial assistant on the Times Literary Supplement.

He wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973, when he was 24. Success was immediate – it won the coveted Somerset Maugham Award for best first novel. In 1975, Dead Babies appeared, followed three years later by his third novel Success, whilst he was Literary Editor of the New Statesman.

In the 1980s, he produced what is considered to be his masterpiece, Money: A Suicide Note (1984), the first of an informal trilogy along with London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995).

In 2003 came Yellow Dog, his eleventh novel, and he is currently working on his latest, The Pregnant Widow. “It’s a very autobiographical, generally rash novel,” he said. “At a certain age, you become curious about what you’ve lived through and it is a matter of tweaking and mauling that material. Feminism has been the main issue in my lifetime, hence the title”.

Amis has always tackled big and distinctive themes, fearlessly and often controversially. And he has always explored them with a distinctive and innovative literary style.

So, he brings to his new job exceptional experience as a writer – and as a man concerned with the big issues. In a way, he is entering a new phase in a wider sense since he has recently returned to England after living for more than two years in Uruguay.

He and his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, moved back to London for the sake of their daughters’ (Fernanda, aged nine and seven-year-old Clio) education. And coming back has caused him to look afresh at Britain, Europe and what he identifies as the worrying hostility towards the United States and Israel.

“I find that people here are very masochistic” he said. “The tangle of ideologies that dominated Europe has peaked in America. The lesson of history is the desire for power – and the loss of power causes anger. Britain does not relish being no longer a world power. Islamism lost power centuries ago and is still angry about it”.