Martin Amis remembered by John Banville

At the end of the 1980s, when I was appointed books editor at the Irish Times, my predecessor in the job urged me to pop over to London for a couple of days, stay at a nice hotel, have a couple of good dinners, pay my respects to some of my counterparts over there, and call in on a few publishers to find out what they had coming up in the way of masterpieces. The jaunt turned out more of an embarrassment than anything else, since half the people I spoke to were baffled as to why I was there, while the other half were trying not to laugh.

To salvage something from the debacle I decided I should meet at least one writer, since writers after all were the ones producing the goods. So I phoned Martin Amis –how did I have his number? – and suggested lunch. He agreed, and we met at an unpretentious little place in Notting Hill. It was our first encounter, though I knew, admired and envied his novels and his superb essay collections.

We ordered wine, and passed 10 minutes in the usual small talk – how parsimonious our publishers were, how useless our agents, and how could the latest Nobel prize have gone to that talentless mediocrity. Gradually we lapsed into silence and creeping desperation. This would not do. I hit on a bold démarche.

“Look, Martin,” I said, “let’s agree on something. When you publish a bestseller or win a prize, I hate you for it, and I’m sure the same holds for you in regards to me. Right?”

He considered this for some moments, gingerly sucking his teeth – they were causing him much pain and trouble at the time – then reached out a hand.

“Right,” he said.

We shook hands. We were friends for life.

Over the course of lunch we found that our literary tastes were remarkably similar. There were differences, of course. He thought Beckett a fraud, while I held that Saul Bellow’s novels were formless messes. Tentatively I mentioned his father, and he told me with amusement how he had found Kingsley’s copy of Money with a slip of paper marking the point at which Martin Amis enters the novel as a character – “Obviously that was the point at which he gave up in disgust.”

He was proud of Kingsley as a novelist, and loved him unreservedly as a father. Years later, on the day of Kingsley’s death, he phoned me in a state of shock. He had not expected, he said, to be so bereft. He asked if my father was alive. No, I told him, he had died when I was in my early 30s. And how did I feel, then? Gently I reminded him of Kingsley’s grim but wholly characteristic observation that the greatest gift a father can give his son is to die young.

“Ah, yes,” Martin said. “Too late for me, then.”

We did not meet often, over the years, but when we did it was always memorable. He did a stint teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, and to mark the venture we were asked to do a joint interview with Paxo on Newsnight. I felt odd being there, and sure enough, just as we were entering the studio I was asked if I would mind stepping aside; no one said so, but obviously I was deemed superfluous. I did not mind at all, but Martin did. “If he” – jerking a thumb at me – “isn’t in the interview, I won’t be, either.” He had that kind of loyalty, that kind of integrity.

I was sad when he moved to America, but I knew it was the right thing for him to do. The British media, who had doted on him for so long, were turning against him, in the way that they do when an enfant terrible reaches middle age and stops supplying colourful copy. He came over to Ireland on a few occasions. He and his wife, Isabel Fonseca, and I spent an enjoyable hour together in a Dublin hotel one gusty winter twilight. As I was leaving, Martin was ordering his third martini; it was 6.15pm.

I encountered him again late on a summer afternoon in Borris, County Carlow, at Viv Guinness’s festival of writing and ideas. It was plain to me that his health was failing, but he was in a mellow mood. We sat, a group of us, around a table on the lawn outside Borris House, sipping wine and talking of this and that. Martin was considered one of the hard men of contemporary writing – and it’s true, he didn’t suffer fools gladly; indeed, he didn’t suffer fools at all – but to those of us fortunate enough to know him not only on the page but also away from it, he was delightful, courteous, funny and, yes, lovable. He was also an artist who in his way defined the age he lived in.

That day in Borris the sunlight was soft on the grass, the birds were trilling in the trees, and Martin was trying to convince himself that vaping was every bit as good as smoking. Is it only hindsight that lends to the occasion a sweetly melancholy sense of something coming to an end? We embraced when he was leaving.

“Come visit us in Brooklyn,” he said.

“I will,” I answered.

But I knew I wouldn’t. That was the last time I saw him.