Read the interview with Martin Amis (MA.), one of the most successful writers in Britain today. He talks to a BBC English reporter (R) about his work
R: As the son of a famous writer, how did your own writing style develop?
MA: People say, you know, "How do you go about getting: your style?" and it's almost as if people imagine you kick off by writing a completely ordinary paragraph of straightforward, declarative sentences, then you reach for your style pen — your style highlighting pen — and jazz[27] it all up. But in fact it comes in that form and I like to think that it's your talent doing that.
R: In your life and in your fiction you move between Britain and America and you have imported American English into your writing. Why? What does it help you do?
M.A.: I suppose what I'm looking for are new rhythms of thought. You know, I'm as responsive as many people are to street words and nicknames and new words. And when I use street language, I never put it down as it is, because it will look like a three-month-old newspaper when it comes out. Phrases like "No way, Jose" and "Free lunch" and things like that, they're dead in a few months. So what you've got to do is come up with an equivalent which isn't going to have its street life exhausted. I'm never going to duplicate these rhythms because I read and I studied English literature and that's all there too. But perhaps where the two things meet something original can be created. That's where originality, if it's there, would be, in my view.
R: You have said that it's no longer possible to write in a wide range of forms — that nowadays we can't really write tragedy, we can't write satire, we can't write romance, and that comedy the only form left.
M.A.: I think satire's still alive. Tragedy is about failed heroes and epic is, on the whole, about triumphant or redeemed
heroes. So comedy, it seems to me, is the only thing left. As illusion after illusion has been cast aside, we no longer believe in these big figures — Macbeth, Hamlet, Tamburlaine — these big, struggling, tortured heroes. Where are they in the modern world? So comedy's having to do it all. And what you get, certainly in my case, is an odd kind of comedy, full of things that shouldn't be in comedy.
R: What is it that creates the comedy in your novels?
M.A.: Well, I think the body, for instance, is screamingly funny as a subject. I mean, if you live in your mind, as everyone does but writers do particularly, the body is a sort of disgraceful joke. You can get everything sort of nice and crisp and clear in your mind, but the body is a chaotic slobber of disobedience and decrepitude. And think that is hysterically funny myself because it undercuts us. It undercuts our pomposities and our ambitions.
R: Your latest book The Information is about two very different writers, one of whom, Gywn, has become enormously successful and the other one, Richard, who has had a tiny bit of success but is no longer popular. One of the theories which emerges is that it's very difficult to say precisely that someone's writing is better by so much than someone else's. It's not like running a race when somebody comes first and somebody comes second.
MA: No, human beings have not evolved a way of separating the good from the bad when it comes to literature or art in general. All we have is history of taste. No one knows if they're any good — no worldly prize or advance or sales sheet is ever going to tell you whether you're any good. That's all going to be sorted out when you're gone.
R: Is this an increasing preoccupation of yours?
M.A.: No, because there's nothing I can do about it. My father said. "That's no bloody use to me, is it, if I'm good, because I won't be around."
R: Have you thought about where you might go from here?
M.A: I've got a wait-and-see feeling about where I go next. One day a sentence or a situation appears in your head and you just recognise it as your next novel and you have no control over it. There's nothing you can do about it. That is your next novel and I'm waiting for that feeling.
(BBC English, August 1995)
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