Martin Amis forces cancellation of unflattering biography

    * Richard Brooks
    * From: The Australian
    * July 06, 2010

Publisher withdraws book after letter from celebrated novelist.

Martin Amis (pic right - NYT) has bared his teeth and chewed up a book that threatened to intrude on certain aspects of his private life.
Small independent publisher Peter Owen has decided unilaterally to withdraw the book after receiving a warning letter from Amis's agent, Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie.

Amis and Wylie were angry that the biography by Richard Bradford, a Northern Ireland-based professor of literary history, was being described as an authorised biography of the celebrated novelist. A stickler for precise use of language, Amis argued that he had not actually authorised the book, even though he agreed to give five face-to-face interviews to Bradford in return for having an "editorial say" over the contents of the biography.


Amis, who has read half the book, told the biographer that he was unhappy about some of what he had written about his "nearest and dearest".

Amis also demanded that Bradford should not talk to his mother (who has since died), his brother or former wife.

The row has led Peter Owen to scrap publication and hand back the rights to Bradford. He is seeking a new publisher and trying to assuage other concerns Amis has over material in the book.

"We will have to sort this out between us," Bradford says.

Amis, feted for his early novels The Rachel Papers and Money, and more recently derided for Yellow Dog, has generated strong passions among those whom Bradford wanted to interview for his biography. Amis was happy for Bradford to talk to friends and fellow writers Christopher Hitchens, now fighting cancer, and Clive James, and to Alexandra Wells, a former lover known as Gully, and his wife Isabel Fonseca.

However, there were tensions over others, including the novelist Julian Barnes, the poet James Fenton, and Claire Tomalin, with whom Amis had an affair in the late 1970s.

"He [Amis] told me he and Barnes were friends again," Bradford says.

Not according to Barnes. The two fell out in 1994 when Amis left his agent, Pat Kavanagh, for the more aggressive Wylie. Kavanagh, who died last year, was Barnes's wife. Contrary to Amis's claim, Barnes has not really forgotten or forgiven.

The full story at The Australian.