Martin Amis Memories of Martin by his long-standing friend and publisher Dan Frankln

From almost the moment I was first aware that there were different publishers, with lists of different character, and therefore started looking at the colophons on the books on the library shelf, I recognized that Jonathan Cape was the best. It was the one whose taste I trusted even if I hadn’t heard of the author.

I went into publishing in 1970. Thereafter, every time a job at Cape came up, I wrote to Tom Maschler, the managing director, and three times I was interviewed in his huge room in Bedford Square.

By now, Maschler had created what was probably the most exciting literary list in the world: Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Wolfe, Bruce Chatwin, Salman Rushdie and … Martin Amis.

Amis, who was a few months younger than me, had written his first novel when he was 23. By 1984 and his fifth novel, Money, he had left everyone else behind. He was the one – the coolest, funniest writer in Britain.

In 1993, I was offered the job of publishing director at Jonathan Cape. It had taken me 23 years, but I’d made it at last.

I had only been at Cape for a few months when Pat Kavanagh, Amis’s agent, rang to say that she was sending me his new novel.

Called The Information, it was the story of two friends, both writers, one spectacularly successful, the other, after a promising start, a failure. It was classic Amis, but not his best. My task was to acquire it from Pat, the most terrifying agent in London, for a sum that wouldn’t break the bank.

I can’t remember what I offered, but it seemed to have gone down okay. Pat would talk to Martin. A day went by, then another. Something was clearly wrong. Then Pat rang. Her voice sounded different. Martin had asked her to ask Cape for an advance of £500,000. When she demurred, he sacked her and he was in future going to be represented by the New York agent Andrew Wylie.

Wylie had already lured Salman Rushdie from his agent Deborah Rogers and he was causing consternation at British publishers for the high advances he was demanding.

So I didn’t get to meet Martin Amis. Wylie sold the book to Harper Collins. Did they pay half a million? I don’t know, but within days the gossip columns were full of the news that Julian Barnes, Pat Kavanagh’s husband and one of Martin’s oldest friends, had sent him a fierce letter ending their friendship.

Then came the next story: Martin had told someone that he needed all that money to pay for dental work in New York. What Amis later described as an ‘eisteddford of hostility’ broke over him. From then on, every move that Martin made was picked over by the British press, almost aways to his detriment.

It felt as though every male writer in Britain wanted to be Martin Amis, and when they came up short, they took it out on him.

Harper Collins’s publication of The Information was a disaster. As a marketing ploy – and counting on the book’s notoriety – they decided to leave the author’s name off the jacket.

He was back at Cape for his next novel, Night Train. Two years later came Experience, a memoir he had started writing after the death of his father Kingsley. It was moving, funny, brilliant about his childhood – he and his brother Philip hanging out in the King’s Road – and heartbreaking about the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West. Experience was nothing less than a masterpiece.

Amis never needed editing –those famous sentences were very carefully planned – and that was the case here. I just had a few queries.

He tells how Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brother Colin, after being thrashed at backgammon by Martin, was so depressed that he went to bed at 6pm ‘after putting a lightbulb down the wastemaster’.

As Martin describes in a footnote, I asked, ‘Is putting a lightbulb down the wastemaster’ slang for ‘having a stiff drink’. The answer was no. It was an everyday event in the Amis/ Howard household, Colin’s ‘most dependable pick-me-up’.

My third memory is from 2001. September 11 2001. I was working on quotes for the paperback of The War Against Cliché. I rang Martin in New York and asked, ‘Are you happy with the quotes? I wanted the LRB on the front, but they…’ He wasn’t listening. ‘Dan,’ he said, ‘two passenger jets have just crashed into the World Trade Centre…’