Novelist says Elizabeth Jane Howard 'got him going on literature' while father Kingsley Amis was mixed blessing in his career
• Read the full interview
The novelist Martin Amis has given credit for his career in literature: it's not due to his novelist father, Kingsley, but all down to his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard – and Jane Austen.
Howard, who died last month aged 90, was herself an award-winning novelist.
In an interview with the Guardian at the Perth festival, Amis recalls that he was an adolescent disaster area after the disintegration of his parents' marriage. He said: "My mother's household had collapsed. She was living on the Fulham Road in a place that was never locked – a case study in boho laxity – and basically she was very unhappy and had a crack-up.
"I was averaging an O-level a year. I was a real mess – not druggy or anything like that – just adrift, alienated in a non-combative way. And then Jane got me going on literature. She gave me a reading list and began leerily with Pride and Prejudice and, after an hour, I went and knocked on her study door and said: 'I've got to know: does Elizabeth marry Darcy?' I expected her to say: 'Well, you'll have to finish it to find out' but she said, perfectly imitating an aristocratic swoon: 'Yes!'"
His famous father was a mixed blessing in his career, he said. "I think there's a certain peculiarity in my case – being the son of – which if anything was a slight boost when I started out. Then the culture changed: it became a curse. I was tainted by heredity – by inherited elitism. And so it became accepted that you could say whatever you fucking well liked about me because, so to speak, I didn't earn it."
A review more than a decade old by Tibor Fischer, who compared Amis's novel Yellow Dog to "your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating", still hurts. "It poisoned the whole thing – it took food off my table. And that, by a fellow novelist … "
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