It is a measure of the stress Martin is under that his email contains a minor grammatical error, which shook me to my core.
Now I love Martin like a brother and esteem the memory of his late father, whom I interviewed at the Savoy, but we really haven't the room in our humble shoebox, unless the two of them are willing to share a blow-up bed which we could inflate for them in the dining room, next to my shrine to the Green Tara.
But when Amis goes on in the email to inquire about the condition of my wine cellar and whether there might be space for him to store a few bottles of his "favorite plonk," I have to wonder if this email, like the previous one of his that found its way into my in-box, may have been misdirected. I wouldn't know a wine cellar from a bomb shelter, and I never touch the stuff, wine snobbery making me break out in hives. Perhaps Marty meant to reach out to Jay McInerney and got me instead, a mix-up which will someday give us all a good laugh at the nursing home.
Of course this doesn't explain the need for a quick getaway from London before he's burned in effigy or worse.
Like any ace reporter, I Google Martin's name and find that a fatwa has been declared against him over shock-horror comments he made an interview that have inflamed fine-feeling people everywhere and could easily be interpreted as an insult to the unborn, if they knew how to read.
Martin Amis: Only brain injury could make me write for children
Remarks about children's books made by Martin Amis on the BBC's new book programme Faulks on Fiction, broadcast this week, have caused anger and offence among children's writers.
"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book," Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. "I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable."
"I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write," he added.
Because of this, entire villages have risen up in wrath and occupied Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square too, demanding that he recant or face witch trial for being conceited.
Scads of Google items linking to heretical outburst carry headlines such as Done with Muslims and Children, Martin Amis Now Insults Children and similar pious spasms.
Well, now I have no choice but to stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with Martin. Writers climbing on their pogo sticks to top each other in outrage over the effrontery of another writer expressing a candid opinion is the height of humbuggery. He's talking about the art and craft of writing fiction, something he knows more than a little something about, whatever the relative merits of his novels, and ought to be allowed some leeway without everyone losing their rosary beads. I recognize that there are those for whom writing children's books is a genuine calling but celebrity authors trying their hands at a children's book, that is indeed an intellectual downshift, indeed in some cases a desperate maneuver to restart a flagging career. I do cherish Charles Bukowski's children's book, Beer and Puke and a Dog Named Duke, but that was something of a one-off. I mean, have you ever read Joyce Carol Oates' children's books? They will nothing for her Nobel Prize prospects.
So Martin, Isabel, I will do what I can to find you a safe house until all this "blows over."
But I also would repeat an earlier suggestion that you stop posing for photographs puffing on a cigarette. It's a tired provocation and sets a poor example for the kiddies.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/02/a-dismaying-development.html
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