What Will Survive of Him

On an equatorial summer day eleven years ago, I spent a few hours with Martin Amis in his home on Strong Place in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood. Assigned to interview him about his latest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, I began at once by asking him about all his other novels instead. What did it feel like to write Money? Is it true that Marmaduke in London Fields was based on Christopher Hitchens’s firstborn? On page 234 of The Information… and so on. Amis was very patient. He spoke movingly of Hitchens, who’d passed away just six months earlier, performed a memorable impression of a manic Robert Lowell, and recalled once running into his friend Clive James at a bus stop in London. “He was reading Tacitus… in Latin.” When the interview was over, Amis and I smoked a cigarette in his backyard.