“The Richard Dawkins in Colin Firth’s jockstrap” and other stories

On Monday, 11th October, Martin Amis and BAFTA-winning screenwriter Andrew Davies took to the stage for another MLF warm-up event, presented by The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester, to discuss the impact of Literature on Film. Guest blogger Jennie Shorley was there to witness this very special event. Here's what she made of it:

The University of Manchester’s wonderfully named Cosmo Rodenwald concert hall is large enough to stage a symphony orchestra. But tonight it hosts just two literary luminaries; the infamous Martin Amis and Andrew Davies, screenwriter and adaptor of THE Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones, and more importantly to this audience member, 80s kids TV series Marmalade Atkins.

Martin Amis is professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. He is a critically acclaimed novelist and thinker, and named in The Times’ 2008 list of the 50 Greatest Writers since 1945. He is famed for acerbity and dyspeptic criticism, so we are expecting some fireworks.

Through the audience’s anticipatory hubbub, there is division of opinion as to what tonight will hold – academic fight, intellectual love-in, or deep praise of Clueless?

Both men are introduced with great praise; Andrew Davies as the “most renowned practitioner of adaptation in our times” followed by a list of his Emmys, Baftas and British Academy Fellowship. Amis is similarly acclaimed, for his university colleague “one of the best things about being around this university is bumping into him”.

Amis sets out his anecdotal stall from the beginning; we will not hear discussion and argument, but rather Ronnie Corbett-esque tales from the writer’s chair. He is obviously the home-team and the opener for Davies as the visiting act; although his literary prowess and reputation are no less impressive for that, and his drawling insights soon draw laughs from the audience.

He has, we learn, interviewed Steven Spielberg, Sydney Lumiere and Brian de Palma; the latter did not go down well, and received an acidic review. Amis has also written science fiction for film, including Saturn 3, starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel. Jokes run through this narrative, peppered by warning against the lack of literary freedom, both commercial and collaborative, when writing for film.

Running through Amis’ memories is the distinction between his creative Englishness and the brash commercial interests of Hollywood. Movie stars appear to hold a general obsession with nakedness; we hear of Kirk Douglas’ demands for nude and sex scenes, and Harvey Keitel being uncomfortably comfortable with his top off in meetings. There is a real sense of delicate art being crushed, but also a palpable sense of excitement and awe at meeting the stellar personalities of Hollywood film; we hear that Travolta has a limousine to travel 10 yards to lunch.

Andrew Davies agrees with the lack of importance of the author in Hollywood, and follows in the same vein, with stories of evil agents and fawning producers claiming, “we haven’t read anything he’s written, but we love it”. His nationality dictates that he is plied with wine (apparently we all drink a lot of it…), until he sends the first script through, and they want to dump him.

Davies briefly discusses possibly his biggest movie hit, Bridget Jones, and rather neatly proves his own point about the writer’s unimportance by forgetting the name of its author. He then moves on to what seems to be the much more comfortable and enjoyable ground of TV adaptations, and in particular, 1995’s Pride and Prejudice. The contrast is dramatic; here as an adaptor, he has “not total autonomy, but (is) the lead person.” He was motivated to undertake the project by outrage at others’ bad adaptations of the novel, and strongly believed in bringing out the sexual attraction between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth, including the wet shirt scene; the defining image of the series.

And sex is once again a theme of the anecdotes; Davies describes P&P as a “pre Darwinian novel”, Darcy’s rationality failing under the evolutionary weight of sexual desire for the vibrant Elizabeth. Davies terms it “the Richard Dawkins in his jockstrap”.

Both men clearly love Austen; their dialogue about readings of Emma and Pride and Prejudice inspire me to re-read the whole corpus; personally, it is the most engaging part of the show.

As the lights come up for questions, the intimate fireside story element is lost. It is clear that many audience members are amateur writers, eager for sound advice from industry professionals.

Overall, the event is not at all what I expected; the exchange is one of friendly, funny anecdotes, and not what I had anticipated from Amis. His anecdotes are peppered with lament for the role of the writer in film and television, and a simple love of literature and its creative art.

As Amis terms it, the “god-like freedom” of the writer may be trampled by crazy demands from Hollywood stars, but as both men have proved with the laughter rippling the audience from their anecdotes, sex sells.

Jennie Shorley studied Classics and Ancient World Studies at The University of Manchester and works for Manchester Metropolitan University Business School.

Frolicing like Sheba: A surreal history of sex (with many gaps) from Martin Amis, Carol Mavor & Will Self

And so here we are in the lofty environs of the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama (a large lecture theatre that appears to have stray pieces of decking glued to the walls at random intervals) to hear Prof Martin Amis, Prof Carol Mavor (author, most recently, of the book Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott) and author Will Self discuss Literature and sex.

Amis (looking smaller and older than ever before, but crackling with wit and erudition all the same) kicks off proceedings by quoting his father, Kingsley Amis, who said that sex in literature couldn't be done as it 'deuniversalises' your character (sex, Amis implying, being such a personal act that all of your characters foibles will distance them from the reader). Amis fils is in accord with his dad and claims sex is disastrous in literature - 'you can't write about good sex' - in the same way that you can't write about dreams ('or only for a line or two'). He quotes Henry James, 'Tell a dream, lose a reader'. What you can do, Amis continues, is write about bad sex. The main thrust of his talk, then - if you'll forgive the pun - centres on a surreal history of sex in anglophile literature 'with many gaps'. Amis then takes us on a tour, from Chaucer through Gawain the Green Knight (with its 'recurring scenes of sexual temptation') to Shakespeare's Sonnets (themselves 'a kind of a peak for writing about sex') before arriving at 'a disassociation of sensibility' (poets no longer able to think and feel at the same time) that the Romantics tried and failed to fix (although Byron and Keats came close, Amis posits, citing a hilarious instance of Larkin's marginalia to Keats' 'Lamia': in 'Lamia', Keats wrote 'and into her Dream he Melted' to which Larkin wrote, 'You mean he fucked her?'). The tour then dallied a little in the country of Dicken's Hard Times (in particular a visit by Louisa Gradgrind to her 'utilitarian' father, in which she attempts to discuss her marriage, drawing his attention to some huge chimneys outside the window, saying, Father, at night flames shoot out, only for her father to say I don't see the relevance - Amis says he can't help but wonder if Dickens felt as Louisa's father did), Eliot's Middlemarch & Austen's Pride & Prejudice (Amis jokily said 'if the novel has a fault it's that we don't get a 30 page sex scene'). From here we pass Smollett and Richardson (for whom girls can't have sex unless they're drugged) through Hardy to Lawrence - who obviously got in a lot of trouble as far as Lady Chatterly's Lover, The Rainbow, Women in Love & a later poetry collection called Pansies was concerned. Amis said, 'I think Lawrence is tremendously groundbreaking but never got anywhere with sex. His sexual unions were just like fights, and all became tremendously antagonistic.' Post-Lawrence, however, writing about sex suffers another blow - absolute freedom (what Self will later go on to call 'the death of affect', from JG Ballard, and which comes down to 'the naming of parts'). Stuttering past Updike (whose approach, to the audience's great amusement, Amis cited as being the equivalent of sending 'a Japanese film crew into the bedroom'), Amis arrives at Nabokov's Lolita - the book around which much of the evening's debate centres. Nabokov was 'consistently good' when it came to writing about sex and Lolita was his 'great flower', in which sex is both 'slightly comic and macabre'. Later in the evening, in response to questions, Amis unpicks Nabokov's own relation to Lolita, and how writing about sex with a young girl cast a shadow over everything else he did, a shadow that can be seen in the fragment of a novel, The Original of Laura, to be published later this year. Writing about sex, though, Amis concludes, is a 'great corrupting thing' akin to 'the brothelgoer's mad power' - choice - 'and the novelist has infinite choice', itself 'a fat corrupting thing'.

Professor Carol Mavor then provided a sort of abstract interlude in which (looking something like Crystal Tips, of Crystal Tips & Alistair fame, with the voice of an Americanised Julie Burchill) she talked about the letter O in sexual literature (which may sound like a racy episode of Sesame Street but - given the reliance on strange images flashed up on a screen - was actually closer to a race through the album covers of the Pixies), before Will Self (lounging back in his seat like a bearded Daniel Day Lewis, spoiling for a fight) sallies forth, first responding to Mavor's reference to Proust ('Proust becomes sexier when you realise Albertine is Marcel's Belgian chauffeur Albert') and then to Martin Amis, saying he can't concur with either, 'practically, because we'd have nothing to talk about, but also generally, because it is possible to write well about sex.' Self mis-quotes from Solomon's Song of Songs (referring to a beard like a pile of wheat when in fact the beard 'is as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers' and the belly 'is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies') as he rolls the words 'Biblical sex' around his mouth like a lozenge. 'The erotic is metaphoric,' he said, 'it's always about more than cocks and cunts' - but therein lies the problem: 'It's become permissible to write about anything' which has created a 'crisis about writing sex'. Later, in response to a statement on censorship from one of the audience, Self goes much further, saying that the problem isn't one of censorship, it's the fact that there are too many voices competing for attention. 'It's hard to avoid naming parts - you look recherche if you don't,' Self continues, but male and female writers these days are 'full of what Freud called 'full genitality'' (apparently, Self digresses, Freud stopped having sex at 45 - perhaps, he wonders, that is something we should all do). What is most offputting, Self says, is 'a sense of writers getting their jollies'. From here, we are treated to Self's views on Ulysses (a novel that was 'way out there in terms of top quality literary wank scenes', Leopold Bloom's wank scene being 'well worth wading through the rest of the book for') and Lolita, once more (which 'manipulates the reader's own desire'). Touching on the more controversial aspects of Lolita, Self claimed these days 'Nabokov would be damned for ludicrous sesquipedalianism', constantly bothered by journalists asking if he'd swallowed a dictionary before he wrote (much as Self himself has been bothered by this question). At this point in proceedings, Self said he would 'slide out of the encumbrance of discourse...' to great laughter, 'only to re-enter, fired up anew...'

The evening concluded with a series of questions from the audience, circling shark-like around the issue of Humbert Humbert and whether a writer should be 'allowed' to give voice to characters who have feelings that now may be reprehensible to us (Amis said, 'Writing is freedom' but that, particularly in the case of Nabokov - 'sex is a destablising, deuniversalising force'). The one image to be taken away from the evening, though, is this: early on in the evening, Self said there were a number of literary criminals given to writing bad sex; during question time, Self said that Sebastian Faulks was one such writer (Self had had to read Faulk's Bird Song - for research, you understand - and felt Faulks was all trussed up in his tweeds). What Faulks needs to do, Self said was 'frolic like Sheba'. I imagine, as the audience made their way home, frolicing like Sheba was high on the agenda...

- Peter Wild