Martin Amis says Anna Ford was "misremembering" in minute to the Guardian. Photograph: Xavier Bertral/EPA
Rarely one to spin the alternative cheek, the writer Martin Amis – who was the theme of an open minute from Anna Ford in Saturday"s Guardian accusing him of narcissism, slight of his godfatherly duties and smoking over her late husband"s deathbed – has opposite attacked, job the former newsreader"s coming out "ungenerous and self-defeating".
Amis retaliates opposite Ford, who is the widow of Mark Boxer, a close crony of Amis until his genocide in 1988. "I was astonished. I was majority appropriate man at her wedding. [The attack] creates me consternation how prolonged all this has been brewing," he told the Guardian today.
Calling Ford"s minute "eagerly ungenerous and self-defeating", he said: "She"ll bewail all this. She is undermining the mental recall of Mark, whose friends unequivocally did venerate him." He added, addressing Ford: "You usually have to ask yourself dual questions: if Mark were alive, what would he think and how would he feel?"
Amis rejects Ford"s comment of his revisit to Boxer"s sickbed, in which, she wrote: "You stayed far as well long. You smoked over his bed." According to Amis: "I never smoked a cigarette in Mark"s bedroom." And to Ford"s explain that "you wrote a square about your feelings and tears as you left. I saw no justification of these," he responds: "I pronounced my last difference to him and he pronounced his last difference to me, and I recollect really obviously what they were. Then I left, and managed to reach my car prior to I was overwhelmed."
He rejects Ford"s assign he was "filling in time prior to you held a craft at Heathrow" (the Ford-Boxer family home was in Brentford, nearby the London airport). That is misremembering, claims Amis; the moody in theme was the subsequent morning. He writes: "You are conflating dual apart visits (and I done multiform such, not usually to your house, but additionally to that Tudorbethan sanatorium in Maida Vale)."
However, to one square of Ford"s complaint Amis pleads guilty. "It is loyal that I am a invalid godfather," he writes.
Ford and Boxer"s daughter, Claire, is Amis"s godchild. When she review English at university, according to Ford, "she pronounced she was study Martin Amis and did I know anything about him? Oddly enough, I told her, he"s your godfather. We invited you to lunch. You paid meagre courtesy to Claire […] and she hasn"t listened from you since."
On this, Amis is penitent: "When I met her as a immature adult, on the arise you describe, she expressively and warmingly reminded me of Mark (and I told her so). I will be essay to her to indicate my apologies and regrets." He right away recognises a "lost opportunity" for impasse in the hold up of a kid who was "abruptly fatherless".
If Ford dealt out a little flattering serious criticisms, accusing Amis of "narcissism and incapacity to empathise" and propelling him to take "a closer and some-more honest see at yourself", Amis repays her in kind. "When you embrace an unprovoked conflict similar to this you are left wondering about the personal troubles of the aggressor," he pronounced today.
He writes: "I consternation how it serves Mark"s memory, or warms his ghost, to indicate that his dual clinging friends (I and Christopher [Hitchens, the journalist]) behaved with such improbable callousness. What lucid chairman "fills in time" at a deathbed? We both desired him, and still weep him. Many did, and majority do. He was a strenuously pleasant man."
Ford, who has been a intrepid articulator of her feminist principles, was between the initial womanlike newsreaders on ITN. Famously, she threw a potion of booze over former Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken in annoy at his square in her sacking from TV-am. She has pronounced of Amis"s writing: "As a feminist, I don"t suffer celebration of the mass him; he might be one of the majority renowned writers, but I think his perspective to women is rarely questionable."
Her minute to Amis was annoyed by a square he wrote for the Guardian, on the theme of reactions to him in the press. In Ford"s estimation, he seemed "bemused, harm and outraged". Amis, whose ultimate novel, The Pregnant Widow, was published this month, said: "I wasn"t whingeing, in fact. I was cheerfully retaliating."
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