This piece was written for The New Statesman and later included in the booklet for the memorial service at St Martin in the Field’s in London. The church was full and the speakers were Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Tina Brown, Bill Nighy, Martin’s wife, Isabel, and his children …
The second time I went to interview Martin Amis was again at his Londonhouse in Primrose Hill. He had no real reason to be kind to me that day and yet his spontaneous willingness to give me his time and encouragement was indicative of a lesser-documented quality in his character and, I think, his writing: the quality of generosity. And that’s what I want to illuminate a little here. Now that he has gone. Or, rather, as he would say: now that he has migrated permanently and exclusively to the shelf.
I buzzed the security gate that he felt it necessary to maintain. He opened the front door himself – a one-man essay in how bad posture and a nicotine-squint might perversely signal great courtesy and clarity of vision. (Like his generosity, this oddly paradoxical relation has its counterpart on the page.) Come on in. Come on in. His life, he said, was pretty full and also pretty full of shit – by which he meant…
