Martin Amis Discusses His New Novel "Night Train."

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JANUARY 29, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 012901np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Independent Counsels
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:06

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, sitting in for Terry Gross.

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's initial assignment was to investigate the Whitewater real estate deal in Arkansas. Now, it's led him to an inquiry into allegations about the president's sex life and his possible involvement in an obstruction of justice.

The path of Kenneth Starr's investigation raises the question of what the job of the independent counsel is, and what limits the law imposes on the counsel's authority. My guests are the Wall Street Journal's national political correspondent, John Harwood, and the paper's Supreme Court correspondent Edward Felsenthal.

Their story in today's Wall Street Journal focuses on the unfolding of Kenneth Starr's inquiry and on the history of the office, originally known as the special prosecutor. The name was changed to independent counsel in an effort to avoid the appearance that the people targeted were criminals.

I asked John Harwood to remind us why the office of special prosecutor was first created in the wake of Watergate, 20 years ago.

JOHN HARWOOD, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Well, after the Watergate scandal had occurred, and during that time you will recall there was the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department whom Richard Nixon fired when the going got very rough in the investigation, Democrats in Congress, in particular, pushed the idea that there needed to be a mechanism created to investigate top executive branch officials that would be more insulated from politics.

And the independent counsel law -- it had a different name then -- was enacted as part of a broad-ranging Ethics in Government Act and it was designed to remedy that problem.

BOGAEV: Let's talk about how the law actually works. The attorney general decides whether there's cause for the appointment of an independent counsel. But as we've seen in the last few months, in which Janet Reno has declined to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the president's and the vice president's fundraising practices, there's a huge gray area in which the attorney general can move.

Is the law so unclear about the appointment of an independent counsel that there's room for such an array of interpretation?

HARWOOD: Well, the -- the gray area is not that huge, but the attorney general's discretion is huge. In other words, once the attorney general makes a decision, it can't be reviewed by anybody. It can't be reviewed by a court. It can't be reviewed by the president or Congress. So it is the attorney general's call, but the language in the statute is pretty specific, and that's of course what generated so much controversy over her decision not to appoint an independent counsel.

The threshold is pretty low. Anytime that she's got specific and credible evidence that something's gone wrong, she has to investigate it. And if, at the end of her investigation -- her initial investigation -- it looks like she needs to know more, she really is obligated by law to turn it over to an independent counsel.

So, people can debate how specific, how credible some information is. People can debate how big the need is for further investigation. But the threshold is pretty low and there's actually not that much gray area.

EDWARD FELSENTHAL, SUPREME COURT CORRESPONDENT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: And I'd add, Barbara, that before the campaign finance issue arose, Janet Reno had the reputation, to the chagrin of other -- others in the White House and the administration of appointing independent counsels at the drop of a hat, in cases involving, say, Mike Espy, the Agriculture Secretary or Henry Cisneros, then the HUD Secretary.

And so this was -- this was an exception to that pattern.

BOGAEV: The attorney general decides at his or her discretion whether to appoint an independent counsel. But, who actually appoints the person?

HARWOOD: Janet Reno, in this case; or the attorney general asks a panel of three appeals court judges from Washington to appoint an independent counsel, and they basically pick somebody.

BOGAEV: Is the authority of the office of independent counsel outlined in the actual law? Or, is the authority at the discretion of the appeals court that appoints him or her?

HARWOOD: The law doesn't say much about what the independent counsel is supposed to do once he takes over. It gives the independent counsel the authority to have -- conduct grand jury proceedings, to subpoena witnesses, to challenge claims of executive privilege and so forth. But it doesn't really lay out what the prosecutor -- what the counsel is supposed to do. It says you're supposed to follow the ordinary Justice Department rules for prosecution and for prosecutors.

But that -- that of course has turned into one of the great debates. Critics of this process claim that the independent counsel don't have to act like ordinary Justice Department prosecutors because they've got unlimited budgets and only one case and they don't make the same kinds of decisions that ordinary prosecutors do. But that's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to, under the law, follow the guidelines for Justice Department prosecutors.

BOGAEV: This issue of the unlimited budget of the independent counsel's office is -- is a sore subject, a huge one I think you could say, with the American public, not only in this investigation but in others. I'm thinking of Iran-Contra. Is there really no limit in the law to what can be spent?

FELSENTHAL: Well, they've tried to tighten this over the years, and I think -- Edward, correct me if I'm wrong -- that they have tried to set some guidelines in the statute that place some common-sensical bounds on what the independent counsel spends. But I don't think there's -- there's no statutory cap or ceiling on what he can spend.

And I think that -- you mention it's a sore spot with the American people -- not sore enough for the people who have been the targets of these investigations, because if it's a Republican president, as it was with Ronald Reagan and George Bush during the Iran-Contra investigation, the partisan defenders of those presidents always raised the amount of money spent on the case as a way of trying to bring pressure to end the investigation.

Democrats are now talking about how much money Ken Starr has spent. But that really hasn't -- hasn't had a great effect on the course of the investigations and is more sort of rhetoric thrown out there that doesn't seem to have a lot of impact.

HARWOOD: The controls that were put in when the law was reauthorized three, four years ago are pretty wimpy. Basically, you've gotta submit more reports. You've gotta have more auditing done of your expenses. You now have to work out of a government office, as opposed to a private office. Lawrence Walsh had -- had some space in the Watergate that cost millions of dollars in rent.

So there -- there are a few provisions, but as John says, the -- the -- if you've got more to do, the Justice Department really doesn't have much choice other than to approve continuing costs and continuing expenditures. And I might add that not only are we, as taxpayers, covering the cost of these investigations, but when they prove to be -- when they prove to turn up nothing, the law provides that we give the targets of the investigations back some of their legal expenses.

So, we've paid out millions of dollars in legal fees to people who have been unsuccessfully pursued by special counsel.

FELSENTHAL: One thing we can be sure of: we will never reach the point where Ken Starr says "hey, I'm out of money. Gotta stop there. Here's my report." He'll keep going until he's done.

BOGAEV: What's the tally now? What are the costs of this investigation?

HARWOOD: Ken Starr, according to the General Accounting Office, as of last March had spent about $26 million. That's not including the $6 million that was spent by his predecessor on the Madison Guaranty investigation, Robert Fiske. So, I guess we're at $32 million.

BOGAEV: How would the independent counsel's investigation be ended? Who -- who has the authority to say "let's end this now. This is over"?

FELSENTHAL: Ken Starr. At some point when he decides that he's done, he will issue a report. That report will go to the Congress. He also has the option of, as he has done in some cases already, filing criminal cases against targets of his inquiry. But ultimately, it's to the independent counsel to put a stop to the thing.

BOGAEV: One focus of the debate about the case at hand is whether the current investigation into the -- into the president constitutes an expansion of Kenneth Starr's jurisdiction. Now, the broader question, of course, is how did this jurisdiction expand from Whitewater to the White House travel office firings to the White House alleged mishandlings of FBI files to the Paul Jones civil suit to today? Did all of those expansions follow legal pathways? Do they constitute expansions?

FELSENTHAL: There's probably a political answer and a legal answer to that. The legal answer, and I'll leave the political one to John, is that -- that the initial grant of -- of authority to Ken Starr by the appeals court panel that appointed him was extremely broad.

And that he has along the way also gotten a very important court ruling from the federal appeals court in St. Louis that basically says: under the law, anything you're doing is pretty much related to anything else. There's no real standard. And if you think you've got something that follows along an earlier lead -- that seems similar to a pattern of behavior you're been investigating, you can go for it.

HARWOOD: The -- Starr has gotten from the court at least four publicly disclosed expansions of his authority, some of which I should say have occurred at the request of the Justice Department, which I think wasn't anxious to have other independent counsels appointed for these.

You had the travel office fiasco, where the incoming White House fired the old employees of the White House travel office and accused them of various things which turned out not to be true. And, that was thrown in. So was the "filegate" -- so called "filegate" issue where it was discovered that some officials in the White House had possession of old FBI files of people who had worked for previous administrations. There are also some expansions of Starr's authority which we do not know the nature of, because they remain under the seal of the court.

So, it's both things that have flowed out of other scandals at the White House, and I think generally they -- the expansions have been justified under the broad rubric of obstruction of justice, which is something that Starr has been probing from the beginning, as well as some other things that we can't really explain right now, 'cause we don't know.

FELSENTHAL: You've also got a logistical problem here. OK, so this situation with Monica Lewinsky comes up really late in the game. What are you going to do? Appoint a new independent prosecutor? A new independent counsel whose gotta hire new people and set up a new office? I mean, it may not look like what Ken Starr was originally supposed to do, but practically speaking, he's the only guy who can pursue it.

BOGAEV: You write that Kenneth Starr probably does have partisan leanings. He might not, perhaps, like the Clintons personally. But he's still making decisions based on what the law allows or compels him to do, and you make that distinction. John Harwood, your -- your venue is politics. What exactly is his political record? How partisan is Kenneth Starr, really?

HARWOOD: He's a very conservative Republican who had been active for years in -- in conservative legal causes and political causes. He served in both the Reagan and Bush administrations. He was solicitor general under Bush. He served in the Reagan Justice Department. He talked at one time of running for the United States Senate as a Republican in Virginia. He was an adviser to the Competitiveness Council that Vice President Quayle ran during the Bush administration.

And he also, we have learned, had some interaction with the attorneys for Paula Jones before he was appointed independent counsel, which is one of the things that Democrats have seized upon in suggesting that essentially he is working hand in hand with the Jones attorneys right now as they pursue their civil lawsuit.

Now, I don't think there's a lot of evidence that that's taking place, but certainly that's become some smoke the Democrats are pointing to.

BOGAEV: My guests are Wall Street Journal reporters Edward Felsenthal and John Harwood. We're talking about the history of the independent counsel law and what the powers and the limits of that office are.

Edward Felsenthal is a Supreme Court correspondent. John Harwood is the national political correspondent. And their story on the independent counsel law appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Let's take a short break and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

If you're just joining us, my guests are Wall Street Journal reporters Edward Felsenthal and John Harwood. We're talking about the history and the authority of the office of independent counsel.

I thought it was interesting that you quoted a former Watergate prosecutor, Mr. Haman (ph), who raises the question of whether the office of independent counsel has become more about getting to the truth with a capital "T" about a scandal in the executive branch, as opposed to investigating an actual crime that can be prosecuted in a court of law.

It's really a vital distinction.

FELSENTHAL: It is a vital distinction, and I think it gets at a lot of what people think has gone wrong here, that prosecutors aren't making the kinds of judgments -- that independent counsels aren't making the kinds of judgments that ordinary prosecutors would, in part because they feel charged with telling our scandal-obsessed culture what -- what really happened in the West Wing of the White House or anywhere else. And it's propelling a lot of these investigations and the expenses and the length of time that we've been -- that we've been talking about that goes into these investigations.

HARWOOD: The -- I think of an analogy in our business to what the -- the sort of situation independent counsels find themselves in. Reporters are also paid to investigate things and look into them and find scandal if -- if you can and put it in the newspaper.

If you told a reporter -- a top investigative reporter "all I want you to do is investigate the mayor of 'X' town and spend all your time doing that and see what you can come up with," it becomes difficult for that reporter to, after some limited period of time, to say, if this is what he finds: "well, you know, I've looked at this mayor and I don't really have anything. So we're not going to write a story." The impulse for that reporter is to keep looking and keep looking and keep looking until he can find something that would make a good story.

On the other hand, if you're a reporter and you've got 10 things to cover, and this mayor is one of them and you find after some initial investment of resources that there's not anything particularly interesting or embarrassing to write about, you drop it and go on to something else. And that's sort of -- the independent counsels are in the former position.

BOGAEV: Well one frustration that the public has is whether this can ever come to court. What is the special prosecutor's -- I should say, what is the independent counsel's path to an indictment of a sitting president? And does it lead through impeachment? It seems like a chicken and an egg question.

FELSENTHAL: Well I think there's big disagreement still among legal scholars as to whether a prosecutor can indict a sitting president. Arguments have been made on both sides. But some people believe that a president would need to first be impeached before he could be tried on criminal charges.

This was what -- I think that attitude governed the special counsel in the Watergate administration. It was anticipated that if Richard Nixon was going to be tried, he would be tried after he left office. Then, of course, President Ford, who succeeded him, issued a pardon and that became beside the point.

But I don't think we have an answer to that question.

BOGAEV: This law comes up for reissue every -- what? -- five years?

FELSENTHAL: Mm-hmm.

BOGAEV: Has there ever been any change in it?

FELSENTHAL: Yes, the law has been adjusted, actually, in each time it's been reauthorized, in an effort to cure defects that legislators thought arose in practice. And principally, those have been to try to tighten spending guidelines and those who could be targeted by independent counsels.

When it comes up in 1999, some Democrats are now saying that it needs to be tightened further because in particular in the last couple of years during a Democratic administration, they are more acutely sensitive to the looseness of the law and the low trigger for establishing independent counsels.

But we'll see whether the thing does get reauthorized. You know, Republicans have -- have substantially been opposed to this over the past. And it's possible, of course, that since you still will have a Democrat in the White House that, you know, maybe that both parties could come together on this, although it would be politically hard to junk.

HARWOOD: The great political trick in this law is that it has to be reauthorized and not repealed. So if you oppose the law, you don't have to stand up and say, you know, "I oppose this provision in the Ethics in Government Act" -- which looks awfully unpopular. All you have to do is sort of keep your mouth shut and it will lapse.

And if both parties make a tacit agreement to do that, then, you know, we've got to start over from scratch or some of this stuff goes back to the Justice Department. There actually were two years at the beginning of the Clinton administration where this law had lapsed because nobody was pushing it hard enough or fast enough.

FELSENTHAL: Well, and during the 1992 campaign, when the Iran-Contra special counsel was still grating on Republicans and George Bush, you remember he reissued an indictment and some information about former Defense Secretary Weinberger just before the election. Republicans on Capitol Hill blocked the reauthorization of the law -- said they'd filibuster the law. And that's why it lapsed.

Then, had the Clinton administration and Democrats on the Hill not made it a priority in 1993 and 1994, it probably wouldn't have been reauthorized.

BOGAEV: Do you really, in your opinion, think that the law works as it stands now?

FELSENTHAL: Well, I would say that the law -- that there have been results under the law that a lot of people think are not reasonable. You know, there is still a -- an independent -- an active independent counsel investigating President Reagan's HUD Secretary Sam Pierce. And I was talking to Carl Levin, the Democratic -- lead Democratic supporter of the law, and he said: "yeah, there's still an independent counsel from the Reagan administration. I can't remember his name right now."

I don't think anybody envisioned that these sort of things would take that long. But I -- I think ultimately we're talking about political problems and a political culture that has elevated scandal to a very high priority for members of both parties. Personal dirt and scandal have become a weapon of political dialogue, debate, conflict.

And I don't think that's a function or a result of the law per se, but the law has probably exacerbated the problem.

HARWOOD: I don't know if you talked to anybody who felt differently, but I didn't talk to a single person in the course of my reporting who thought this law was working. I talked to people who think we're stuck with it, who think it's part of the permanent political culture. I talked to some people who have some hopes that it can be fixed. But I didn't talk to a single person who was singing its praises. Did you?

FELSENTHAL: I didn't.

HARWOOD: No.

BOGAEV: I want to thank both of you very much for taking time to talk today on FRESH AIR.

FELSENTHAL: Well thanks for having us.

HARWOOD: Thank you.

BOGAEV: John Harwood is a national political correspondent, and Edward Felsenthal a Supreme Court correspondent, for the Wall Street Journal. Their article on the independent counsel law appears in today's issue.

I'm Barbara Bogaev and this is FRESH AIR.

Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest: Edward Felsenthal; John Harwood
High: From the Wall Street Journal: Supreme Court Correspondent Edward Felsenthal and National Political Correspondent John Harwood discuss their article on the independent counsel which appears in today's Wall Street Journal. Clinton, ironically, signed into law in 1994 the Independent Counsel Reauthorization Act. Soon after, Kenneth Starr began his Whitewater investigation. Now after two decades, the independent counsel is being criticized by many for its nearly unrestricted use of "time, money, and prosecutorial authority."
Spec: Politics; Government; Independent Counsels; Monica Lewinsky; Whitewater; Kenneth Starr
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Independent Counsels
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JANUARY 29, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 012902NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Sex and Soul
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:30

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, sitting in for Terry Gross.

Styles of music almost never end. They just step out of the spotlight for a while. Sometimes very fine examples of a particular style are produced in these afterglow periods. One such example is the music of soul singer Roy C.

Music critic Milo Miles has a review of a recent Roy C reissue called "Sex and Soul."

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "SEX AND SOUL")

ROY C, SINGER, SINGING: Last night I dreamed I held you in my arms
Yes I did, honey
We made love, ooh eee
It lasted so long
Yeah
Oh, I could never get enough
Yeah
(unintelligible) but I could never get enough
No, no I could never get enough

MILO MILES, FRESH AIR COMMENTATOR: It was the middle '70s and soul was supposed to be dead, muscled aside by disco and funk. But nobody told Roy Charles Hammond, who sang under the name Roy C. He'd been loving soul music for too long to stop now, and his work was hitting its peak just as his style was supposed to be finished.

A selection of his tunes from Mercury Records was released as an album called Sex and Soul, and it became the ultimate soul die-hard's prize. Roy C presented rugged, stripped down songs that told it like it still was, about striving in society and cheating on your lover.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "SEX AND SOUL")

ROY C SINGING: I need somebody, yeah, yeah
Somebody to love me
Love me, yeah

Came home from work one day
Found a man in my bed
Oh no, this can't be true
Those are the words I said

I work hard every day
Trying to take care of my home
Those men out there
Won't leave my wife alone

I need somebody
Love, love
Well I need somebody

MILES: Roy C had paid his dues. At the end of the 1950s, he was the lead tenor for a rather minor do-wop group from Long Island called "The Genies." The group faded, but Roy C kept plugging away, picking up new ideas about musical arrangements and vocal harmonies, and releasing singles whenever he could.

He made some noise on the rhythm and blues charts, but never crossed over. He did find a whole new audience of soul enthusiasts in 1974 with Sex and Soul. You see, it was really a concept album about infidelity. As one title put it: "I'm gonna love somebody else's woman. Somebody's lovin' mine."

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "SEX AND SOUL")

ROY C, SINGING: The Bible says
Thou shall not commit adultery
But very few people
Are living by the Bible these days
I was a strong believer
But from now on you're gonna hear me say

I'm gonna love somebody else's woman
Somebody's lovin' mine
Ooh, ooh, Lord
I said I'm gonna love
Somebody else's woman
Somebody's loving mine
Yeah, yeah, oh, Lord

I'm going downtown
Around some of the nightclubs
And I'm gonna find me somebody
Yeah, someone that I can really love
The next time you see me
You bet your life I won't be walking

'Cause I'm gonna drive
Somebody else's car
Somebody driving mine
Oh, Lord
I said I'm gonna drive
Somebody else's car...

MILES: Roy C's vocals and sturdy melodies put across his suffering vividly, and he could tell an off-hand heartbreak story like nobody's business.

Still, on the rare occasions when he wasn't out looking for it or feeling bad that his had gotten away, Roy C could drive home political points in songs like "I Wasn't There, But I Can Feel The Pain."

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "I WASN'T THERE, BUT I CAN FEEL THE PAIN")

ROY C, SINGING: Yeah, yeah, I can feel it
I can feel it
I can feel the pain
Yes I can

I can still hear the slaves moaning
As they slowly walk down the gang plank from the ship
And all I can do Lord, all I can do
Is stand there and cry

Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, oh Lord
Good God almighty
Oh, I can feel the pain
Yes I can

I said I can feel the pain
Lord, Lord, oh I can feel it
I can feel it
I can feel the pain

Yes, I can

MILES: A consumer advisory here: Roy C has another album called "More Sex and More Soul," but actually it's less -- a very secondary followup to the original. And finally, Roy C is not totally single-minded on sex and soul.

There are songs of outright love and affection, none better than his closer "I'll Never Leave You Lonely." When you get caught up in that popping rhythm guitar and those slow swaying horn parts, you know you're in the grip of a true soul believer.

So come slip away with Roy C. It'll feel so good.

BOGAEV: Milo Miles is features editor of Soundstone.com. Sex and Soul is on the Collectibles label.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "I'LL NEVER LEAVE YOU LONELY")

ROY C, SINGING: Oh baby, I'll never -- never, never leave you lonely
Oh, honey, I said I'd never, never, never, never leave you lonely
Oh, no, no more lonely nights sleeping in your bed alone
All you got to do is to say so
And I'll be right there in your arms
Oh, to make love to you
Kiss your lips, honey
Do all the things
Oh, that I can do
Oh-ee I'll never, yeah, never, never leave you lonely
Oh no, honey, I'll never...

BOGAEV: Coming up, British novelist Martin Amis on writing and suicide.

This is FRESH AIR.

Dateline: Milo Miles; Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest:
High: Critic Milo Miles reviews the reissue of "More Sex and More Soul," an album first released in 1974 on Mercury by Roy C, otherwise known as Roy Charles Hammond. Roy C said it was his concept album about infidelity.
Spec: Music Industry; Roy C
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Sex and Soul
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JANUARY 29, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 012903NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Night Train
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:35

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: Martin Amis' new novel "Night Train" starts off sounding like a classic noir thriller. A hard-boiled female detective by the name of Mike Houlihan (ph), who narrates the book, is asked by her former boss to investigate the death of his beautiful daughter, Jennifer Rockwell.

But before the investigation is even under way, the plot veers into the dark territory of post-modern immorality -- a theme common in many of Amis' other novels. One critic describes him as a social commentator of lethal imagination and savage wit.

His books include "Dead Babies," "Money," "London Fields," "Time's Arrow," and "The Information." His father is the well-known British writer Kingsley Amis.

Here's Martin Amis reading from his new novel, Night Train.

MARTIN AMIS, AUTHOR, "NIGHT TRAIN": "In my time, I have come in on the aftermath of maybe a thousand suspicious deaths, most of which turned out to be suicides or accidentals or plain unattendeds. So, I've seen them all -- jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters. I have seen the bodies of bludgeoned 1-year-olds. I have seen the bodies of gang-raped nonagenarians. I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at the time of death is to weigh the maggots.

But of all the bodies I've ever seen, none has stayed with me in my gut like the body of Jennifer Rockwell. I say all this because I am part of the story I'm going to tell, and I feel the need to give some idea of where I'm coming from."

BOGAEV: Well Martin Amis, welcome to FRESH AIR.

AMIS: Thank you.

BOGAEV: How much do you know about where someone like detective Mike Houlihan is coming from? Did you do some research for this book?

AMIS: Yes I did, but only in my study. I didn't hang out in a police department for a year, but I read books by people who did, particularly David Simon's book "Homicide" and many others of the same kind, although his was far superior to anything else I read.

And I read a few -- a few dozen noir-ish novels to get a feel for the genre. But -- I keep meaning to do research, but I never get around to it, and I think I'm following an instinct there that -- you know, if you do the research, then it particularizes it too much. And it's better to kind of drag it through your psyche and hope for a universalizing process, and also taking it out of time a little so that, you know, you're not just recording the style of that particular year. And that way you hope it will, you know, stand up over time.

BOGAEV: So you feel if you actually did some -- some leg work, you'd be -- get too bogged down in the facts?

AMIS: Yeah. Tom Wolfe said that, you know, of his book "The Bonfire of the Vanities" that the writer should, you know, have 90 percent research, 10 percent inspiration. I very much enjoyed and admired his book, but I think it should be the other way around -- that you should get your foundation from research, and then hope that the imagination can do the rest.

BOGAEV: Why did you set it in America?

AMIS: Because the police environment in England is such a depressed and dowdy world. Whereas policing in America is -- is very expressive and even sexualized. You know, American police are proud of being that -- of being the -- these central figures in the modern landscape. In England, for various class reasons, the police, you know -- their heads are much lower-set on their shoulders. They don't, you know, thrust as much as their American equivalents.

And also, you know, there is no noir in England. And -- the genre doesn't live there.

BOGAEV: One of the mysteries of the book, I guess the first mystery, is whether the death is by murder or suicide. And Detective Houlihan goes about trying to figure that out. And you write out this -- for her, a great suicide dos and don't list: don't live where the sun doesn't shine; don't be an adolescent homosexual; don't be depressed; lighten up; don't be a man.

How -- how did the dos and don'ts advice occur to you? Did you do a little research on suicide for the passage?

AMIS: I did. I read four or five books about suicide, not at the intellectual end of it -- you know, "The Savage God," Al Alvarez's (ph) book -- not -- not that kind of thing. Just purely statistics and, you know, to establish patterns. It's a horrible and mysterious subject, suicide, and it -- that I found, you know, more disturbing than anything I read about in "True Crime."

Suicide is -- is a more appalling departure than -- even than murder, it seems to me.

BOGAEV: Why?

AMIS: Well, Chesterton put it this way, and I read this remark after I'd published the book, but I realized that -- that my book was a kind of annotation of this insight. Chesterton said that suicide is a far greater crime than murder, because whereas the murderer kills one or two or maybe a handful of people, the suicide kills everyone. It is a rejection of the planet and that is a terrible thing.

It's interesting that, you know, there were so many social penalties against the suicide in the past. You would be punished by taxation. The family would be punished. You would be buried in unsanctified ground. You would be buried perhaps at the crossroads under a pile of rubble, with a stake through your heart. And as James Joyce says in "Ulysses," remarks on that, he says "as if their hearts weren't broken enough already."

And I think that perhaps sets the modern mood for the contemplation of suicide. We feel nothing but a kind of awful pity, and we understand -- we understand that for some, they can't -- they just can't make it. You know, they can't hack it. And we feel no disapproval anymore. We just feel a kind of awe and horror.

BOGAEV: I'm speaking with Martin Amis. He is the author of a number of books, including London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Information. His new novel is Night Train.

Your father, Kingsley Amis, was a well-known English novelist. Did he warn you off writing?

AMIS: He didn't say anything about it at all, probably out of indolence. But he never encouraged me and he never discouraged me. And I think that's -- and that's certainly the line I'm going to take with my children.

I knew a couple of cases of quite well known writers who encouraged their children to write, and in both cases it ruined the relationship. To say to your 16-year-old son "you could be a writer" is really an egotistical act. You're saying that "I'm so wonderful that it's rubbed off on you." And it's also a very complicated thing you're saying to the child. You're saying: "you can be me. You can have my life."

My father didn't do that and I'm grateful that he didn't. You've got to let them find their own bent.

BOGAEV: As a kid, or later as an adult, did you read your father's novels to get to know him better?

AMIS: I -- I didn't come to his novels until my late teens, and I didn't even know what kind of novelist he was. I mean, as far as I knew, he could have been writing westerns or sex and shopping novels, although I have to admit that would have been extremely unlikely. But when I did start reading him, I thought -- I remember thinking it's just like being with him when he's absolutely -- absolutely at his best.

And I still think that's what the novel is and that's what, you know, if I die tomorrow, that's what my children will be able to see when they come to read me -- me at my best. It's the best of you.

BOGAEV: Now, how did his death influence your writing, if at all, in any way that you can talk about?

AMIS: Well, I think it will influence, you know, everything that comes after. Your father is a part of yourself and you lose a part of yourself when he dies. You also -- as Freud noted, you also feel energized by the death of the father, for mysterious reasons, but what you mainly feel is alive -- intensely alive -- because that part of you has died and fallen away into the past.

So it strengthens you and, you know, devastates you at the same time. It's -- and it's not something you're ever going to get over. It's just part of your life from then on.

BOGAEV: What are working on now?

AMIS: I've just finished a book of short stories, and I'm writing a memoir about the last few years of my life -- the most recent years -- and about my father and about my cousin who disappeared in 1973 and was exhumed from the backyard of the most prolific mass murderer in English history, Fred West (ph), in 1995.

BOGAEV: Do -- do you know exactly what happened to her?

AMIS: No. When she disappeared, there was a nationwide search. Her face was everywhere you looked: "have you seen this girl?" It was -- you know, every police force in England was galvanized into searching for her.

BOGAEV: And then the investigation led nowhere and it lapsed...

AMIS: Right.

BOGAEV: ... for decades?

AMIS: Until -- until Fred West was finally investigated thoroughly and the rumors spread by his children, funny enough, about there being bodies in the back garden was finally taken up by a female detective, funnily enough, who -- who showed the kind of persistence. You know, she backed her hunch and she thus revealed a scene that's horrified the entire country.

BOGAEV: How did it affect you? Did you go back and -- as you're writing -- did you try to recreate her -- her last moves or how she arrived in this position?

AMIS: No. Well, I mean, I tell her story and I establish the sort of person she was. She was -- you know, if he was evil, she was good with a capital "G." And it was just an unbelievable collision of innocence and experience. She was at a bus stop. She was heading for a bus stop, and that's all that's known.

I will write -- what really, you know, took me back was that I realized her presence in the novels I had written between her disappearance and her discovery, and realized that there were kind of missing girls -- missing young women in my books. And that it had been at the back of my mind, and it's the things at the back of your mind that go into your novels, not the things in the forefront. It's the things that bother you without actually seeming to preoccupy you that -- that, you know, bleed into your fiction.

BOGAEV: And now that you know -- you know what happened to her, the bare facts of it, how does that change? What's going on in the back of your mind?

AMIS: Well I -- it's -- remains to be seen. But I thought I did want to -- I wanted to memorialize her was the main -- she's the dedicatee of The Information, too. And she was a -- an interesting poet as well as being intensely religious, I mean, she'd recently converted to Roman Catholicism.

But I -- I suppose I wanted to bring her into the forefront of my mind and meditate on what happened to her. I mean, not -- not her last hours or anything of that kind, because nothing is known about that. I mean, it's -- it's known what happened to her after death and what was done to the body and so on, but I would -- I would not inquire into that. But just to absorb the meaning of this collision.

BOGAEV: Martin Amis, I want to really thank you for talking today.

AMIS: Thanks a lot.

BOGAEV: Martin Amis' new novel is Night Train.

This is FRESH AIR.

Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest: Martin Amis
High: British novelist Martin Amis. He is considered one of the leading British writers of the late-twentieth century and one of the most controversial. Amis' newest book is a detective story set in America "Night Train" about a suspicious suicide.
Spec: Europe; Britain; Martin Amis; Books; Authors; Post-Modernism; Martin Amis
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Night Train
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JANUARY 29, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 012904NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Keeping It Complex
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:55

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: The current scandal at the White House has left everyone guessing not just about what actually happened, but about how to describe it if it did. According to linguist Geoff Nunberg, this is the sort of discussion that Americans have become quite comfortable with in recent years.

GEOFF NUNBERG, FRESH AIR COMMENTATOR: There's an old Jewish joke about two middle-aged women who run into each other on the street. "Oh, darling," says one. "You look fabulous -- so happy, so radiant. What's going on?" The second woman blushes and says: "well, if you must know, I'm having an affair." And the first woman says: "an affair! How wonderful! So, who's catering?"

That's the thing about the words we use to describe these unsanctioned amorous relations. They're always ambiguous or vague or circumspect. It's too delicate a matter to come at head-on. Sometimes, we wink at it with worldly knowingness, usually with words borrowed from French.

"Affair" is just the French word for business, and when it was first used in this sense, it was often italicized and spelt with a final "e." And before that, there were other French borrowings, like "liaison," "amour," "intrigue," and "dalliance." That last one goes back a long ways. Shakespeare refers in "Hamlet" to libertines who tread the primrose path of dalliance.

You'd think by now we'd be willing to acknowledge that this sort of behavior isn't wholly alien to the Anglo-Saxon mentality. But maybe it's not so much that we think that only Europeans carry on like this, as that we like to imagine that they're the only ones who know how to talk about it. And using a French word is an easy way of adding a risque note to any proceeding.

The New York Times Week in Review section last Sunday headed their coverage of the story with the word "scandale" -- with an "e" stuck at the end of it. I wondered why they hadn't been content just to put the English word "scandal," but probably they figured that in that case, readers might assume that it was about money, rather than sex.

Not surprisingly, Clinton and other members of the White House staff stayed away from words like "liaison" and "affair." You suspect they wouldn't want to give the impression that words like these even figure in their psychic lives. Instead, they referred to the allegations with vague terms like "relationship" and "encounter" -- words that mean virtually nothing by themselves unless there's something in the context to, so to speak, flesh them out.

The tone was set last week when Clinton was asked if he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he answered by saying that there was no improper relationship -- thereby opening the door to a frenzy of semantic speculations as to what exactly constitutes a "proper" relationship. And each of Clinton's subsequent attempts at clarification led to nitpicking of almost Talmudic intricacy.

Does "no sexual relations" preclude oral sex? Phone sex? Foot rubs? But then it was foreordained that we would get into this sort of discussion from the moment the word "relationship" was uttered. It's actually a very recent word in this sense. It only became popular in the 1970s, and it's charged with all the self-reflective preoccupations of the age. Relationships are things you work on, work out, work over -- in every aspect from your sex life to the way you make your eggs in the morning.

The key word here is "work." The moment people start talking about their relationship, you can suspect they're not having fun anymore. After all, people don't say things like: "we really have to work on our fling."

Now, even if Clinton and Lewinsky really did tread that primrose path, it's unlikely that what they had was a relationship. I mean, I assume that if things started to go sour for them, they wouldn't have gone to see somebody about it.

In a less reflective age, people would have referred to this sort of thing as a fling or a dalliance. And while they might have judged Clinton for it, if it was true, they wouldn't have felt the need to spend hours trying to pin it down.

But it's Clinton's misfortune to have become president in an age that insists that the unexamined relationship is not worth having, and which has organized an enormous cultural apparatus to coordinate the resulting yammer. We have daytime talk shows, self-help books, personal growth seminars, human potential groups -- all of them devoted to helping people pick over their relationships in numbing detail.

It's no wonder everybody's taken to the current scandal with such gusto. We've been training for this one for 20 years.

BOGAEV: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Dateline: Geoff Nunberg, Palo Alto; Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia
Guest:
High: Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the words we use to describe "unsanctioned amorous relations" and the difficulty of using more straight forward language.
Spec: Language; Sexuality; Deconstruction; Culture; Scandals; Politics; Government
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Keeping It Complex
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.