Martin Amis came to the table wih a clear psychological edge, which he reinforced with a surly glance across the lush green felt. In trans-Atlantic snooker circles, he has carved a ferocious reputation, though not without a great deal of exaggeration and militant self-promotion. “Earthquake Amis” he called himself in one magazine story, an ungentlemanly attempt to disarm adversaries and solidify his image as the Hulk Hogan of the British pool hall.
Despite Amis’ frowns and malign looks as he flexed his cuestick, this was meant to be a friendly game, an hour or so of relaxation and good fellowship at Stix, a pool parlor on Sheffield Avenue near Clark Street. From all signs, Amis urgently needed a snooker break, to help him decompress not just from the ordeal of an American book tour but also from the tempest that had trailed him across the waves from his native Britannia.
“I was counting the days before I left,” Amis said of his impatience to get on the road. In those days, weeks and months before his departure on a working holiday in the U.S., Amis found himself publicly pilloried for a series of infamous acts, which brought him almost as much scorn and notoriety as Jack the Ripper, John Christie, Kim Philby, Prince Charles and other classic British malefactors.
But the U.S. was no safe haven, Amis instantly learned. The shock waves were felt in Manhattan’s highest and innermost media circles, whereupon all the sordid details of his misbehavior were recycled and re-recycled in the pages of such hard-copy journals as The New Yorker, New York and Vanity Fair. “Someone who read that piece in Vanity Fair was waiting for the part where they dug up my garden and found I’d been killing children,” said Amis.
Infanticide was not one of Amis’ offenses, nor had he been accused of fratricide, parricide or homicide of any form. To make many long stories short, Amis was hoisted to the media yardarm for leaving his wife, his children and his longtime literary agent (the wife of his best friend); for his greed in demanding (and getting) $800,000 for the British rights to his latest novel, “The Information”; and–vanity of vanities–for spending $30,000 of the booty to have his teeth repaired, allegedly at the urging of his mistress.
Waiting for a snooker table at Stix, Amis had obligingly, if dispiritedly, provided a ritual blow-by-blow of the more painful and embarrassing moments, some of which surpassed those in his own manically imaginative and mordantly funny novels, including not only “The Information” but also “Dead Babies” and “Time’s Arrow.” “There were people in vans outside my flat, outside my wife’s house, outside my girlfriend’s flat,” he reported.
More Top Picks Best Digital Measuring Tools
Most flabbergasting, Amis said, was the attention focused on his dental makeover, which threatened to turn the situation into a restoration tragicomedy.
“If I’d known that my teeth were going to make headlines in Time magazine and every paper in England, I’d have killed myself without hesitation,” he said, apparently quite seriously. “It was an intrusion into the most neurotic, screwed-up part of myself.”
For those who might have missed the news, Amis would like them to know that his new teeth are not simply vanity plates. The oral surgery became necessary to correct a “lifetime of serious problems,” he said, and afterward he “staggered out of the dentist’s office spitting blood into the gutter, like some old bum who keeps getting into fights.”
Even though dental implants have significantly improved his smile, Amis was in no mood to display it, not at least while he was recapping the misery and woe inflicted on him by the British and American press. He was in only marginally better spirits when it came time to play snooker. He approached the table somberly, looking as if he were out for blood, which only further demoralized his opponent (namely me).
A pool hall wizard
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Amis was to the pool hall born. By his own admission, he misspent much of his youth in British pool halls, beginning at age 15. These were not exclusive private clubs, he insisted, even if he is the son of the clubby, patrician British novelist Kingsley Amis (“Lucky Jim”).
“I started playing in places rougher than this,” he said, dubiously sizing up the ambiance of Stix. “That was when they were still proletarian hangouts, before they became such yuppie places. It really used to be tough to get in and out alive.”
Despite the posters of W.C. Fields and Jackie Gleason (as Minnesota Fats in “The Hustler”), Stix is not a stereotypical yuppie playground, with bright, polished surfaces, antiseptic decor and uniforms by Polo. In spirit and atmosphere, the storefront pool hall more nearly resembles the wicked places that Professor Harold Hill warned parents about in “The Music Man” (“You got trouble right here in River City/With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool”). As the balls bump, carom and hiss across the cushioned green felt, they set off decadent echoes in the deep and cavernous afternoon shadows.
Like Amis, I had practically come of age in a pool hall, playing snooker when I was supposed to have been in a high school classroom, learning the principles of geometry and the English language. But I hadn’t been near a snooker table in several decades, whereas Amis continues to play twice a week, usually for money, and (by most accounts) with the same diehard vengeance he devotes to tennis and chess.
It had been so long since I’d hung up my cue that Amis had to refresh me on the rules of the game, explaining that “You pot a red ball, then you pot a number ball.” As soon as play got started and it became obvious that he was going to pot many more balls, both reds and numbers, than his badly rusted opponent, Amis relaxed and frequently smiled what he facetiously called “my Hollywood chicklet smile.”
Typically British
By the testimony of his friends and casual acquaintances alike, the 46-year-old Amis is not the scourge his media persona and his sabertooth prose might suggest. Away from the battlefield pressures of literature and sports, he’s capable of great charm and patience, qualities that began to emerge once the score reached 24-2.
By then, Amis had cheered up considerably, chatting amiably, if regretfully, between shots about his tabloid humiliation, a triple whammy that resulted from the breakup of his marriage, his quest for a higher paycheck from his British publisher, and his split with his agent.
“It’s impossible to explain to an American what it was all about,” said Amis, whose financial demands certainly seemed modest enough by American standards, hardly limo fare for such ranking members of the multimillion-dollar club as John Grisham, Stephen King and Judith Krantz. “I’m as baffled by it as you are, mate. Comparable things happen to other writers without exciting any comment at all. It must have something to do with me. I must rub people the wrong way.”
But where’s the rub? Amis wondered aloud and at length. “Envy must play a part in all this,” he decided. “Envy of the crudest financial kind. But envy never says, `I’m envious.’ It says, `I hate materialistic people.’ “
Beyond materialism, Amis said, there’s the sin-and-sex factor. “England is a very prurient place now,” He asserted, recalling the “journalistic hypocrisy” when his father abandoned his mother for novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, when Martin was 12. “These paragons from Fleet Street were talking about him as `this adulterous novelist.’ “
By the time he’d repeated his father’s performance, leaving his own wife and children in the throes of a midlife crisis, more than three decades later, the journalistic climate in England had changed, Amis said, and not for the better.
“There was no need for hypocrisy because nobody’s pretending to be good anymore. They’re all proud of being bastards. Now the mood is just this giggling scurrility. Nothing’s out of bounds.”
Whatever the root cause of his troubles, Amis reflected, it was a scandal that could only happen in England, because it’s such an uptight little island, with the literary/publishing/gossip industry even more mercenary and incestuous than it is on Manhattan Island. “That’s absolutely it,” he said. “The only way I can look at it without going crazy is to see it as a story about England, not about me.”
Friendly Fire
According to reports filtering over from his homeland, Amis is solidly entrenched in a middle-age “Boys Club” of writers, along with Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Redmond O’Hanlon. Novelist Julian Barnes (“Flaubert’s Parrot”) used to be a member, as well as Amis’ close chum on pub, tennis and snooker circuits. But Barnes dropped out in a monumental snit, after Amis dropped Barnes’ wife as his literary agent and imported a notoriously predatory American agent to squeeze $800,000 from a new publisher.
Up to this point, the affair might have remained a family squabble, a semi-private dustup, if novelist A.S. Byatt hadn’t rudely and publicly intervened, turning it into a literary battle royal. The Booker Prize-winning author of “Possession,” Byatt complained to a London newspaper that Amis’ exorbitant contract would indirectly divert money from her own and other authors’ pocketbooks. “I don’t see why I should subsidize his greed, simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone,” she wrote the paper.
According to Amis, Byatt has since repented. “She wrote me a letter apologizing, and that’s all been ironed out.” But, the author noted unhappily, his friendship with Julian Barnes, his former snooker-tennis buddy, remains in a state of grave and perhaps permanent disrepair.
After an even dozen books in 22 years, Amis’ professional reputation is considerably more secure than his personal relationships and his media image, which cast him as a “rock star” novelist, a Mick Jagger-naut in literary precincts. Speaking for the critical majority, A.N. Wilson described Amis as the “cleverest and most entertaining writer of his age,” while Saul Bellow has detected in his fiction the “inventive genius” of a Joyce or a Flaubert.
But Amis’ prose style could scarcely be less Joycean or Flaubertian. For him, “words are weapons of deadly force,” to be used “like the fists of a martial artist” (quoting from his latest novel). As a result, his tae-kwan-do style has won him almost as many enemies as friends, not only for his fiction but also for his books of two-fisted criticism, such as “The Moronic Inferno” (a title he borrowed from Bellow, his mutual admirer).
“My last couple of novels all caused minor scandals,” Amis said. “I was accused of misogyny in `London Fields’ and, much more seriously, of anti-Semitism in `Time’s Arrow.’ “
Such criticism tends to arouse his darkest suspicions, not to say his paranoia. “If anyone else had written `Time’s Arrow,’ no one would have called it anti-Semitic,” Amis said. “It was because I wrote it. This strikes me as trivial and vulgar rubbish.”
More Top Picks Best Time Timers For Classrooms
Even more than Amis’ previous seven novels, his latest, “The Information” (just published in the U.S. by Harmony), seems shrewdly calculated to shake, rattle and possibly alienate critics on both sides of the Atlantic. “Because it’s all about a book reviewer,” he said, “They may feel that I need to be put in my place.”
The central character in Amis’ corrosive satire is Richard Tull, a talented but obscure, destitute and monumentally unpleasant novelist, as well as a critic, specializing in biographies of mummified poets. A “virtuoso of rejection . . . humiliation,” Tull so envies his good friend and fellow novelist, the untalented but obscenely popular Gwyn Barry, that he schemes to have him beaten within an inch of his life, perhaps beyond.
Toward the end of “The Information,” Tull and Barry set forth on a joint promotional tour of American cities, much like the one that has brought Amis to Chicago. In the novel, Amis has Tull describe Chicago as “the only city that really frightened him.”
After five trips to Chicago, Amis said that his fictional character’s apprehensions still reflect his own. On the way to the pool hall, he called the city “beautiful but severe and intimidating. It’s the look of all this naked steel. . . . it’s a tough city.”
As he surely suspected before the shooting started, Amis had nothing to fear at the snooker table. Despite the lopsided final score, he generously assured me that I hadn’t disgraced myself or wasted his time, time that might better have been spent hustling books, not erstwhile snooker punks. Instead, he seemed positively ebullient and invigorated, grateful for the break. “It’s nice to breathe the fresh air of a pool hall,” he said.
On the sidewalk outside Stix, Amis rolled a cigarette, pausing to contemplate the windup of his American tour and his return to England, less than two weeks off. By then, he said hopefully, all this “sourness” over his fractured marriage, his remodeled teeth, his romantic entanglements would be forgotten and he could retreat into the “quiet center” of his life: “my writing. . . . I’m not going to let a handful of journalists distort my life. I’ll go back and life will go on. It will get quieter.”
AN EXCERPT FROM AMIS’ `THE INFORMATION’
Chicago was the only city that really frightened him.
It frightened him because it was there, in Chicago, that he would–or would not–be the subject of the Dub Traynor Interview. Radio: hour-long, one-on-one. This was now in doubt. But it frightened him for other reasons too. The severity of its naked steel frightened him. Chicago, he knew, was the cradle, or the ancient assembly point, of the American political machine. What goes around comes around. I’m okay: you’re okay. We don’t take nobody nobody sent. Chicago, he knew, was the eighth biggest city on earth. Cities are machines. No other city he had ever been to said to you, as Chicago said to you, This is a machine. I am a machine.
There was a traffic jam all the way in from the airport, and dark rain. The mist was as thick as clouds and the clouds were as thick as smoke and the smoke was as thick as chalk. Chilling Chicago awaited them in its vapors and gray medium, deeply massed and square-shouldered on the vague horizon. They heaved on, five yards per heave, along Kennedy Expressway. The five lanes coming into the city were all blocked and the five lanes going out of the city were all blocked; between these two great metal Mississippis of steam and suffering, of spiritual durance, there lay a railtrack on which brightly lit and entirely empty trains sped past in both directions. No one ever used the trains. They had to be in the cars. Americans were martyrs to the motors; autos were their autos-da-fe. Never mind what cars have in store for us globally, biospherically; cars–our cars–hate us and humiliate us, at every turn, they humiliate us. Types of car drivers (timid, pushy) are also types of sufferers: the silent, the permanently enraged, the apparently equable, those who persuade themselves that they are running the show (known as “motorists”), the snarl-prone, the oath-casting, the sullen, the erased … They drove on. Their driver–a woman, affiliated with Gwyn’s publishers–who was seated beside the plump-necked publicity boy, pointed out where the first, third, and fifth tallest buildings on earth might be seen, on a clear day. They drove on: the shell of Shell, yellow on red like a hand raised against the sun. LEE’S LUMBER and WAYNE’S WINDOWS. Zero Willpower Meets Zero Fat, a billboard slogan in praise of a product that at least tasted fattening, struck a brief chord in Richard, who wasn’t particularly fat, yet. A sodden flag. And then at last they were in the city or under the city, with its halls and chutes and stanchions of steel, and you were a lab-rat in the rat-trap of steel Chicago. Richard suddenly felt that American cities were the half-mouths of lower jawbones and held a monstrous acreage of wedged dentition; with those big teeth they have, no wonder their gums whine with permanent maintenance and repair, all the deep scaling and root-canal work, the cappings, bridgings, excruciating extractions. Now they were engulfed by the sounds of this desperate periodonture, and for a moment Richard’s teeth felt like claws, seized in his gums.