The Time I Wrote Martin Amis a Letter

It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re young. You write about your heroes, and then you actually write to them. In my case the hero was Martin Amis, a writer I read in my early 20s in a trance of admiration. This was the mid-to-late ’90s, before we had smartphones, but a paperback of Money performed the same trick of attention. I’d hold it in my hand, head bent as I moved along sidewalks, experiencing Amis’s sentences as small explosions of pleasure, nearly stepping into traffic, buses blaring me back to myself.

I was a graduate student at Oxford, reading literature but longing to write fiction. I bought all of Amis’s paperbacks at Blackwell’s on Broad Street, one after the other, and they convinced me that I had to try. Novels were where the action was, where the world got larger and darker and wilder. London Fields was this lunatic landscape of darts, apocalypse, and murder. Money was a headlong ride through the hedonism of writing and Hollywood. The Rachel Papers was sex, lust, cruelty, and coming of age. Dead Babies was a house party so unhinged and violent and nasty I read it twice. 

I was hardly the only young aspiring writer dazzled and seduced by Amis. He was a superstar by this time—later I’d discover the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square held his books behind the register to deter shoplifters. You could read about him on gossip pages, and his latest novel Night Train was being viciously reviewed (always a sign). And yet for me, the experience of devouring his books was so pure and startling that none of that mattered. Amis may have been world-famous, but he was also completely mine. 

So I wrote about him. This was after I’d left Oxford and was eking out a salary in San Francisco as a writer and junior editor. Amis did this in London at the New Statesman in the 1970s. My far less illustrious perch was at a shoestring wine magazine, in publishing’s outermost ring. But I had caught the attention of an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the city’s popular alt-news weekly that was widely known for its annual nude beach guide. The editor in question was a little in love with me—he took me to dinner on his expense account and politely invited me into the showers at his gym after squash—but he also published me in the paper’s literary supplement. It was in those pages that I wrote an essay about Amis. I can’t bear to re-read this essay—and you won’t find it online—but in it I took seriously something I knew Amis took seriously, what you might say was his central preoccupation, his faith. He believed, as I believed, that style carries with it truth, morality, character. That the arrangement of words in a sentence is inseparable from meaning. 

That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Amis was chided for pyrotechnics, as if his sentences were ornamented, as if the way he wrote was a choice he made to dazzle and show off. From Money: “I drove myself home—from Pimlico to Portobello in my purple Fiasco.” From The Rachel Papers: “I fidgeted with matchsticks to grime up my fingernails; I consigned my feet to cheesy death; I nourished ray-gun halitosis.” Every sound, every syllable, mattered to him. From London Fields: “Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as a cobweb.” From Dead Babies: “Keith Whitehead lay on sandpaper blankets farting like a wizard.”

In Amis, what word followed what was a holy question. It was the reason Nabokov and Bellow and Austen were his touchstones. Why Lolita and The Adventures of Augie March were books he wrote about again and again. I didn’t know Amis, but I knew the sentences that came out of him were rigorously worked to capture the hilarious monstrosities that filled his imagination. I knew he loved obscenity and had found a language to express that love. His sentences were precise, mimetic, sacred.

I argued all this in my essay, writing that style mattered above all else, and that not enough new writers wrote the way Amis did, or the way Lorrie Moore did, or the way John Updike did (my trio of literary heroes right there). Like I said, I’m not rereading this piece of fan mail, but I do know that I boiled my entire 25-year-old literary sensibility into it and the editor told me it was great and he put it on the cover of the supplement and paid me something like $200.

Before social media, you published a piece and you walked around free of it. My readership—a few hundred San Franciscans? At most? They were immaterial to me, and thank God. I probably sounded grandiose, overly sure of myself. The truth was I was testing my faith every time I wrote, faith in my own writing, in myself. I dreamed of trying a novel, but I was fearful and tentative and not getting ahead of myself. My Bay Guardian editor took me to dinner and told me I would write books and I didn’t believe him. Amis had already published two at my age. 

And yet I did something a little cocksure next, a little headlong, a bit Amis-y perhaps. I took my essay, composed a short note introducing myself, and folded both into an envelope. I wrote down the only address I could think of that might reach him: Martin Amis c/o Talk Miramax Books, New York, NY. Stuff a message into a bottle and toss it into the ocean. Why not? The stunt cost me a few dollars in stamps and not much else. I put it in a mailbox and forgot about it. There was no way it would reach him.

I still marvel at the publishing assistants and editors who somehow received my letter and didn’t throw it out, but took the trouble to mail it along to Amis—and I marvel that he read it and I stagger to think, even now, what he must have thought and what inspired him to write me back. An airmail envelope arrived weeks later, return address London. Inside was a tri-folded page of A4. “Dear Taylor,” Amis had written. “I very much enjoyed your piece. Here is someone, I thought, who understands.” 

His death on Saturday hit me with a wave of grief, for surely at 73 he had more than a decade of writing in him. His last novel-as-autobiography, Inside Story, gave me that sense that Amis’s writing always did, that the world was larger, more gloriously lurid and sexy and death-struck and savage and hilarious than any of us could imagine. It brought that world into focus. A place I wanted to live in. A place I understood.