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Kavanagh recalls Amis the lothario
Julie Kavanagh, a former girlfriend of Martin Amis, has published an account of their tempestuous relationship and his string of affairs
A "consensual kiss-and-tell" by the former girlfriend of novelist Martin Amis, the biographer Julie Kavanagh, offers a tantalising glimpse into the bedhopping antics of the Seventies London literary set.
Kavanagh's account, which appears in the Economist's quarterly style magazine Intelligent Life, recalls the years she spent with Amis from the mid-1970s and reveals the string of affairs the London Fields novelist had during the course of their relationship.
The revelations pre-empt Amis's forthcoming novel, The Pregnant Widow, which the 59-year-old has called "blindingly autobiographical", based on previous romantic conquests.
The 21-year-old Kavanagh was introduced to Amis in 1974 by her half-sister, the late literary agent Pat Kavanagh and the couple subsequently moved in together.
‘Amis’s feeling of short-arsed inadequacy gave way to Byronic magnetism’
In her article, entitled 'The Martin Papers: My Life with Martin Amis', she reveals how Amis had affairs with "bohemian beauty" Lamorna Seale, with whom he had a daughter, Delilah; with the critic Lorna Sage and with the New Statesman's then literary editor Claire Tomalin. Kavanagh's relationship with Amis ended when he had an affair with her best friend Emma Soames, the journalist granddaughter of Winston Churchill.
She also reveals how the publication of his first novel The Rachel Papers in 1973 transformed the 5ft 4in Amis from an insecure "short-arsed" man into a ladykiller.
"The feeling of profound unattractiveness from which he claims to have suffered a couple of years before we met - feelings of short-arsed, physical inadequacy which he novelises time and again - had given way to Byronic magnetism."
Kavanagh visited her former lover, who is now married for the second time to the American writer and heiress Isabel Fonseca, in April to discuss her article. Amis, Kavanagh says gratefully, "agreed without hesitation".
No doubt Amis, whose new novel comes out this autumn, was keen to sustain his Byronic reputation. As Daily Telegraph columnist Rowan Pelling notes, "Amis comes out of it looking like a red-hot, irresistible Lothario". ·
