Martin Amis, we are assured by Clive James's irresistible new website, welcomestranger.com, finds television "intolerably superficial". Although Amis is "celebrated among his friends as one of the great talkers around the lunch table", we, the public, have never been exposed to his dazzling conversation. Until now. Just as digital cameras have allowed sports fans to view matches in ways they never imagined, James is now using digital cameras to lull his friends into seemingly friendly chats in his library. The programmes are broadcast exclusively on the internet, so the production values of a glossy TV studio aren't needed. The interviews are shot on cameras so unobtrusive, and with a host so genial, that at times his guests genuinely seem to reveal their true selves. And what a true self Amis reveals. With the novelist shorn of his flock of adoring sycophants and of the careful reworking possible with the written word, James - seemingly unwittingly - shows us, definitively and at last, that this emperor is wearing nothing but his own enormous ego.
All of Amis's faults are almost cruelly apparent. His snobbery manifests itself when the guests refer in passing to James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow. Atlas describes how a good friend of Bellow's was upset when Bellow obviously based a character on him in his novel Humboldt's Gift. Amis retorts: "It doesn't matter what this man who works in tiling minds." He utters the word "tiling" with a contempt that most of us reserve for paedophiles. Amis has created within his own mind a notion of "talent", which he deifies and worships. He says, with the certainty of a man who has never doubted his own ability, that "your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent". Literary talent is his sole criterion for success, and anybody outside that world - a tiler, for example - is worthless. He emerges as obsessed with his own place in literature, and notes with sadness: "Usually writers never find out how good they are because that starts with the obituaries."
However, it is when James moves Amis on to a discussion of his philosophy that the viewer really recoils. Amis has always insisted that aesthetics are the sole standard for judging the worth of literature. He tries to argue that "morality is contained within aesthetics . . . they can't be separated . . . it's convenient for analysis but [they are] the same thing". But, James puts it to him, "there surely must be such a thing as a great stylist who . . . doesn't make an adequate approach morally to life", an argument to which Amis can reply only by shifting the subject. When they return to it and wonder if they "allow the possibility of a great Nazi writer", Amis finds himself with no answer. James warns of "the danger of an aestheticised world" without ever realising that this is the world his friend has always lived in, from his Oxford college to his current mansion in Primrose Hill.
Indeed, we could read this invaluable half-hour interview as a metaphor for Amis's whole life. Sitting in a hermetically sealed library, chatting with a friend who is similarly immersed in the world of literature, Amis has no reference points other than literature itself. He sits in a world of books, and can only write about them.
None the less, James emerges from this interview, and the others on this marvellous site (with as eclectic a mix of figures as Ruby Wax, the poet Peter Porter and the prima ballerina Deborah Bull), as one of the great interviewers of our time. Earlier this year, James confessed to feelings of self-hatred. If anything, his neuroticism is even more pronounced now than it was then. He argues, for example, that under Stalinism he would have been like Ilya Ehrenburg, "a very bad man" who "did some good things because of his position, and he achieved his position by being a slavish writer for the regime".
This unashamedly highbrow site is funded by the fortune James amassed from his lightweight work in television. It is hard to resist concluding that he considers his mass-entertainment work as his own slavish concession to the system, and that welcomestranger.com is his way of trying to achieve something good to make amends.
If so, this enthralling expose of Amis compensates us ten times over for introducing Japanese game shows to an international audience, and even for bringing Margarita Pracatan to the world. And that's really saying something.
