January 12, 2007

The Mortification of Martin Amis

On this day in 1995, British writer Julian Barnes sat down and wrote a letter to Martin Amis about his longtime friend's decision to change agents. He congratulated his pool-shooting buddy on his decision to go with Andrew Wylie and that he hopes that "Mart" will be just as successful as Wylie's other clients, such as Salmon Rushdie (then under a death sentence by Iran) and Bruce Chatwin (dead of AIDS). He signed off his cheery note with two words, Amis wrote, "The words consist of seven letters. Three of them are f's."

In the ordinary course of an author's career, changing agents is not known as a catastrophic event. It's even accepted as a normal part of doing business. After all, an agent is a business partner, and if an author feels that said partner is not pulling its share of the load, then it's time for a parting of the ways. But in the case of Martin Amis, the English writer and son of Kingsley Amis, it was more than the sundering of a partnership. His agent of 22 years, was not only his father's agent, but Julian Barnes' wife. The sundering, and Barnes' response, was just nuts to the small London literary world, which monitors and writes about literary feuds with the enthusiasm and taste of Howard Stern talking about lesbians. Jealousy, envy and spite are not just characteristics of the British journalist, they're job requirements, and Amis found himself in the middle of a firestorm of controversy that lasted for months.

It wasn't just the change in career direction by Amis fils that set off an explosion of vituperation in the tabloids unrivaled since Chuck and Di's separation. In addition to dropping his best friend's wife as agent, Amis didn't have the good grace to shop locally for a new one, but tapped Wylie, an American agent who went by the made-for-tabloid moniker of "The Jackal." Then, Amis had the temerity to seek a huge advance (reportedly as high as $500,000) for the rights to his next novel "The Information." The reason, it was written, was so Amis could have his teeth fixed, proof positive that he was leaving behind all the values of the British Empire (striving for money instead of art, employing a Brit and bad teeth) and Going Hollywood — or at least Going New York, which was just as bad.

Lost in all the back-biting headlines ("Martin Amis in Greed Storm") was that Amis wasn't just getting his teeth whitened or straightened, he was getting them ripped out. Heredity ("My mother had okay teeth and bad gums. My father had okay gums and bad teeth. I've got bad teeth and bad gums") combined with neglect had caused serious damage, necessitating a complete rebuild of his choppers. The experience, described in stomach-clenching detail in his memoirs, makes the torture Dustin Hoffman's character underwent in "The Boys From Brazil" look like a fluoride rinse.

In Shakespeare's phrase, la affaire Amis was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Papers were sold, Amis' book was published, and presumably he's been eating better ever since 1995. But no one could blame him if he's still a bit dazed about the absurdity of it all. When a journalist suggested, "You won, but it wasn't a clear victory, was it?" all Amis could say was, "over what?"