QUILLBLOG

Anna Ford calls on Martin Amis to stop “whingeing”: UPDATED

Martin Amis has been in the news quite a bit recently. He’s got a new book out, The Pregnant Widow, which is getting widely reviewed in the U.K.; some reviews are positive, others less so.

Amis being Amis, he is not content to let his fiction do his talking for him. He’s also been in the news recently saying that in the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, “women went Napoleonic” in their hunger for power, and suggesting that street-corner euthanasia booths should be set up in Britain to deal with the incipient “silver tsunami” of an aging population.

But Amis now says the more outrageous statements that have been attributed to him recently are the result of media spin. From the Telegraph:

Recent headlines such as “Martin Amis: ‘Women have too much power for their own good’” and “Amis calls for euthanasia booths on street corners” were, he said, essentially down to the media’s own “chaotic perceptions,” based in at least one instance on “a mishmash of half-quotes.”

All of this has prompted one prominent public figure, ex-BBC news reader Anna Ford, to write a public “For Heaven’s Sakes” letter calling for Amis to stop “whingeing.” Ford is quoted in the Telegraph:

Martin seems to think that having highly controversial views on a number of subjects – nuclear warfare, Iraq, Muslims – is not going to attract criticism.

It seems to me that if you’re going to be a controversial writer, then you have to expect people to have an opinion about you, and you have to take the rough with the smooth. It’s this unattractive, immature whingeing that really gets me. He just ought to stop.

Ford, who has known Amis for three decades, rails against the author’s “narcissism” and says that Amis might be better served by “a closer and more honest look at himself in relation to others” than by “complaining about reckless distortions and chaotic perceptions.”

Amis, who has also had very public spats with figures such as Julian Barnes and Christopher Hitchens, refused to reply to Ford’s letter, telling the Telegraph (in a rare display of rectitude) that he’d rather speak with Ford in private.

UPDATE: The rectitude was short-lived. Amis has responded publicly to Ford, in a letter dated February 22 and posted on the Guardian‘s website.