MARTIN AMIS--A BAD BRIT MAKES GOOD : MARTIN AMIS

Martin Amis began his literary life being identified as the son of Kingsley Amis, whose wickedly comic novels of postwar England include “Lucky Jim” and “I Want It Now.” But these days, Kingsley Amis is being identified as the father of Martin Amis, who has become one of England’s hottest literary properties.

A half-dozen years ago one of the weekly literary competitions here, seeking foolish book titles, gave the prize to “My Struggle” by Martin Amis, with its sarcastic suggestion that entry into the world of letters is a cinch if you are the son of a famous novelist. But even in 1981, it was obvious that if the son had help, it was in the genes and chromosomes; he had otherwise done things his way.

Amis the Younger’s first novel, “The Rachel Papers,” had won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. His “Dead Babies” in 1975 and “Success” in 1978 had further identified him as an angry young man for the ‘70s, a writer with what can only be called a furious command of words, a social commentator of lethal invention and savage wit.

Auberon Waugh, another celebrated son of a celebrated literary father, Evelyn, has called Martin Amis “the only interesting writer of his generation.”

This year Amis will have had three books published in the United States. “Einstein’s Monsters” is a set of five stories all inspired by the specter of nuclear holocaust. The stories are impressive but, at that, not so forceful and moving as Amis’s introduction to the stories. “Failing to get the point about nuclear weapons is like failing to get the point about human life,” Amis wrote. “Human beings are unanimous about nuclear weapons; human institutions are not. . . . We must find the language of unanimity.”

Also coming out in America this year is his 1978 novel “Success,” rejected at the time by his then-U. S. publisher, Knopf. The reason Knopf didn’t take it, Amis is sure, was that a four-letter word occured 50 times on the same page. Harmony House is publishing it now.

“Success” is a withering assault on the values of the trendy, materialist ‘70s. It presents in alternating chapters, two brothers by adoption. The natural son of landed gentry parents is a swinger whose speech is a litany of brand names; the adoptive son is a cloddy failure who can’t get girls or interesting work. But everything changes, to blacken the comedy still further. It is bold, raucous, as far removed from the polite and civilized as British letters generally get, yet never unfeeling.

Amis is a novelist and critic and also a journalist on continuing assignment for the Observer. A collection of his journalism pieces, many on American authors and American themes (a piece on the Claus von Bulow murder trials among them), and called “The Moronic Inferno,” is also due out.

At 38, Amis no longer quite qualifies as an enfant terrible, but he continues to be angry, observant and original. Slight, pale, dark-haired, handsome and intense, he works in the upstairs flat, Spartan but cluttered, in a house that smells faintly of another tenant’s cats, in the Notting Hill section of London. He lives in a house about a mile away, with his American-born wife and their two sons, one 15 months, the other turning 3 in November.

“They grab your time with both hands,” Amis says of the children. “As a result, the day is 10 minutes long.” He gets to the flat at 9:30 a.m. and tries to write from 10 until 2. It’s the longest you can do good work, he thinks, “unless you’re in some sort of overdrive toward the end of a novel and you’ve got the Adrenalin going.”

He reads and lulls--his word--the rest of the afternoon. “Reading to fortify the writer. I think everyone’s finding it more difficult all the time to sit down and read a serious book seriously. The distractions are getting to even the most dedicated of us.”

Amis wears white T-shirts and chinos and rolls his own cigarettes, expertly. It all seems very American and you have the feeling the windows should look on Provincetown or Venice beach instead of an ancient London Street. Amis, in fact, feels a remarkable closeness to the United States and to American writers. As a child, he lived in Princeton for a year while his father was lecturing there, and the impression was evidently indelible.

“I try to get there at least twice a year. This year it’s been three times. Once to the ABA (American Booksellers Assn. convention) in Washington, once on a journalistic trip, once on a family vacation to Cape Cod (where his wife’s family has a home).”

He had been to the Frankfort Book Fair as a journalist and remembers the search for the dullest book title. “As I remember, my year it was ‘Industrial Adhesives and Sealants.’ ” He found the booksellers association “a giant schmooze. When they weren’t working, they weren’t socializing, they were doing that thing in between that seems to occupy such a large area of American life--networking, touching base, making contacts.”

The differences between American writers and British writers interest him. Writers in America “are turned into oracular figures. If you don’t watch out, you’re going to get semi-deified there. In England, I’ve always thought writers are taken slightly less seriously than the average citizen. In America, they’re rung up by newspapers and invited to give their views on things.

“They’re much more famous, and that brings with it all sorts of risks. One tends to find that the novelists who last are the ones who tuck themselves away somewhere, be it Boston or Chicago. I could agree with Saul Bellow when he said there were no writers to talk to in New York, there were only celebrities on exhibit. And that brings with it a lot more competitiveness.

“English writers tend to get on well together. In America . . . it’s probably the size of America. They come from such distances, from Alabama, from California, so when they do run into each other, they look a bit odd to each other and they don’t get on. They sue each other and beat each other up at parties.”

Amis had a ricocheting education at 13 schools in Britain, Spain and the United States and two cram schools in London to prepare him for Exeter College, Oxford, where he settled in and earned a First in English. He worked at the Times Literary Supplement, then spent two years as literary editor at the New Statesman. But he had written a first novel at 21 and found that being an editor left him no energy at night for his own work, and at 30 he became a writer full-time.

There have been rumors that the Amises pere et fils are fiercely competitive. Their arguments over the nuclear issue--Kingsley is a devout conservative--are reported in Martin’s introduction to “Einstein’s Monsters.” But it all seems fond enough.

“We do talk,” Martin Amis says. “We tend to talk about details rather than our respective viewpoints. More like how to render certain sorts of speech accurately. Little do’s and don’ts. And we’ve sometimes had copyright disputes over certain jokes. One of us will say, ‘I’m having that’ or ‘Can I have that?’ ”

For seven years now, the elder Amis, separated from his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, has been sharing a house with his first wife (Martin’s mother) and her third husband.

“My father’s a very phobic man,” Amis says. “Doesn’t like flying, driving, being alone at night. And my mother and stepfather didn’t have any money but wanted to live in London. So they sort of housekeep for him, and it works beautifully, a curious set-up for curious people. My brother and I helped to set it all up. Everyone said: ‘You’re crazy; it won’t last 10 minutes. But it has.” And the son thinks the father is writing better all the time. “He’s getting really strong and his last novel, ‘The Old Devils,’ was quite wonderful.”

Amis is a great admirer of John Updike, on whom he did a recent profile in the Observer. They discovered a common alarm about being interviewed. Being interviewed “rots a writer’s brain,” Updike told Amis. “It cretinizes you. You say the same thing again and again and when you do that happily, you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.”

“The literary interview,” Amis said in the profile, ‘won’t tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.”

Amis to interview is thoughtful, polite, increasingly relaxed but he nevertheless suggests a man who knows the clock is ticking and the work isn’t getting done. Amis gets a lot done: five novels and two collections of journalism, book reviews for the Atlantic Monthly.

“I think one has a duty to review books if you’re a writer. I’ve got no time for writers who are too grand to do book reviews. You want to keep standards up. You have a stake in the whole thing. My father still reviews books and I’m pleased that he does. He’s an asset to the whole debate.”

On writers he likes, Amis says: “The truth is, you don’t get around to the younger writers until they’re older writers. If someone’s been around for 30 years and a lot of people have found him interesting, it’s a much safer bet to crack open one of his books. When I do read the younger writers, I’m greatly impressed.” He likes Philip Roth and Saul Bellow among the seniors, and Don DeLillo among the younger writers.

“In the 19th Century, England was the center of the world and the fiction it produced reflected that--the thousand-page novels, the imperial novel. Now America is the center of the world and its fiction has risen to that.

“And I think that actually now that England is a backwater, the novelists here, with all sorts of splendid exceptions, go along with that too and become preoccupied with the middle-class angst that can be dealt with in 225 pages.

“I think what appeals to me is the arrogance of American fiction. England is now in a very peculiar stage in its evolution; it’s in a prideful decline.”

Amis is emerging as a kind of bridge figure, reflecting the American urgency and something of the arrogance and confidence he finds in its fiction, plus the sensitivity and the concerns for a changing society that he finds in the best English fiction.

Churchill used to say he was half-American (as he was) and wholly English. Amis is unquestionably wholly English, but he does respond, as he says, to “that North American tug.”