{ 2008 04 25 }

Hatchet Jobs

What is it about Martin Amis that inspires people to write nasty things about him? I should confess my bias straight out — I love his novels.  He has created his own London.  Yet even if you are not a fan of his work, you have to feel a sense of injustice, anger even, at the pure venom some people write about him.  Curiously, all of it seems to be coming from his own countrymen. Martin Amis has been the victim of quite a few hatchet jobs since — oh, when did they start?  – since I started reading about him in the mid-nineties. There was the thing about his teeth.  He spent a lot of money having work done on them.  Then there was the thing about his dropping his former agent for his present agent so he could get substantially bigger advances. There were even snide remarks about his second wife, a lovely young woman. Obviously, a trophy, the press huffed. Except that she turned out to be smart and accomplished in her own right, which kind of blew up that argument into a million tiny pieces, not that anyone took any of it back in print.  And not that they have stopped either.

They are still at it.

Take a look at this piece that appeared in The Telegraph recently. There’s all the old stuff. And there’s new stuff. Amis is being paid GBP 80,000 a year to be Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. As that is not an outlandish amount of money, the writer of the article divided it by the number of hours that Amis was contracted to teach. The result — Martin Amis gets £3,000 an hour as a lecturer – reads the headline. And while you’re mulling over that, why not mull over the writer’s innuendo that the the University had to fire a number of staff in order to pay Amis.

First, the article writer fails to demonstrate how one event — hiring Amis– had anything to do with the other — reducing the number of staff.

Second, let’s look closely at the amount of Amis’s salary. What the Telegraph writer did was take the salary and divide it by the number of hours he is required to teach.  This assumes no preparation time and no office hours.  It also assumes that Amis’s contract calls for him to teach and teach alone — no speeches, no writing while on campus, nothing.  Also, let’s face it — GBP 80,000 is not that much money. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic says a word about the truly outlandish salaries paid to athletes, figures that are in another league altogether. Lastly, and most divorced from reality, the article writer assumes that Amis brings to the classroom his experience and his abilities as a lecturer, nothing more.

You know what?  I could take anyone’s salary, even the author of the article, and detail the number of vaccines it could buy for children in sub-Saharan Africa or how many gallons of water you can purify and deliver to people who do not have potable water?  That’s a pretty cheap trick, don’t you think?

I do.

Amis was hired by Manchester for many reasons, including the fact that he is a big enough name that his inclusion in the roster of lecturers will help enrollment. In an unattributed something-or-other (because it’s not a quote) in this loosely reasoned article, we read –

The university insisted on Friday that it was getting good value for money because Amis’s appointment had seen applications to the Centre for New Writing rise from 100 last year to 150 next year.

There you have it — the University itself is on the record insisting that it got its money’s worth.

Look, seriously, this is how it works:  If you are Martin Amis, a successful and popular author who has consistently produced great fiction and well-respected essays, and as a result of your hiring you increase the number of students enrolled in the program where you teach by fifty percent, you get the big bucks.  If you aren’t, you don’t.

End of story.

Sources: Nigel Reynolds, “Martin Amis gets GBP £3,000 and hour as lecturer,” The Telegraph (January 28, 2008), The University of Manchester Centre for New Writing, Martin Amis web page

Posted by Gonzalo Barr on Friday, April 25th, 2008, at 9:10 am, and filed under Writers.

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