The writer Julie Kavanagh has published a sweet account of her past dalliance with Martin Amis, of which only about three words in several thousand are sour (when she rumbles him for one of his numerous infidelities, he turned “nasty, facetious and belittling”). Otherwise, she writes with something of the forgiving tenderness of the obituarist. This puzzled me until I worked out what the whole deal was probably about, beyond the notching of bedposts, and then it all made sense.

Kavanagh’s account, written for the magazine Intelligent Life, was headlined “The Martin Papers” — a reference to Amis’s prizewinning first novel, The Rachel Papers, which has an unforgettable scene where Charles Highway lights on a pair of dirty pants belonging to his girlfriend Rachel. The piece was reprinted and followed up elsewhere, too, reminding us that Martin — the talented, knowing, cute son of Kingsley Amis — has always been reliably good copy, whether for his dental-health crises or his backlist of wives and girlfriends. One tabloid headlined its report of Kavanagh’s consensual kiss-and-tell thus: “What a horrid little man”.

Eh? Of course Martin Amis behaved badly in his twenties: I can’t think of a man in his place who wouldn’t. As Julie reminds us, he was the first literary rock star of the 1970s, and she was an Amis groupie before she’d even met him: “I was seriously smitten; the Jagger lips, moody monobrow and fag between two fingers exactly fitted the image I’d formed of a coldly alluring Martin Amis.” Everyone wanted him, “from Germaine Greer to Mark Boxer”. And as one of his own characters would say in a novel: “The surest guarantee of sexual success is sexual success.”

So, on the surface, this piece is about her relationship with a pretty short-arse with a deep drawl and shaggy fringe, whose first literary and then sexual success conferred on him a Byronic magnetism that made him irresistible to all. “Horrid”, then, is wrong; this is a love letter, written and sent decades after the end of the affair.

That’s not all: Julie’s is also the determined effort of a female writer to establish the group credentials of her gang — the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, the poets Craig Raine, James Fenton, Clive James, the editor Tina Brown et al — for the benefit of posterity, and preferably before the others get there ahead of her.

The first book published about the Bloomsbury group, active in the first third of the last century, didn’t come out until 1954, and it did nothing to dispel the myth that the Stracheys and Woolfs et al were a charmed circle who lived in squares and loved in triangles. Julie’s piece strives to achieve much the same effect, only faster and in fewer words.

“I didn’t know then that this was a golden era; that each player would become a star in his own right, and eventually an elder statesman,” she writes, before getting down to the serious business of bed-hopping.

It’s true: Clive James has already published several volumes of memoirs. Amis’s memoir, Experience, came out in 2000. Over the next couple of years, however, the trickle threatens to become a flood as the nicotine-stained, whisky-soaked writers codify their status as a group.

Hitchens declined to contribute a piece on Martin Amis to this paper (so did Tina Brown, claiming her former squeeze’s “legend needs no further embossing”). Easy to see why: they are keeping their powder dry, with Hitchens saving Martin up for his memoirs. Meanwhile, Amis is publishing a novel in February to be followed by a work he merely describes as “blindingly autobiographical”. See where we’re going with this?

All hail the successor cult to the Bloomsbury group: it is here in all but name, another collection of varsity mates, self-mythologising and back-scratching in search of their own place in literary history, and, it seems, just as prepared to see their postgrad love lives and grimy bedclothes exposed for endless public consumption.

Which is great (juicy for readers, endlessly entertaining, and a veritable article-creation scheme for journalists) but not so great, arguably, for their — dread word — legacy as writers.

The Bloomsberries, remember, have frequently been accused of being too cut off from reality and caught up with their inbred love affairs to produce anything of true originality or lasting value. So if our group (shall we call it the Barnet Set, after Amis père’s seat in north London?) turns en masse to memoir-writing and diarising, then this is an acknowledgment, surely, of a creative full stop. It is a recognition that what keeps them in the papers (if not the bestseller lists) is our fascination with their affairs and infidelities, and not their work.

Now surely, this is not what any of the Barnet Set, let alone its shining star Martin Amis, would want to be remembered for. But here is Julie Kavanagh, ripping back the bedclothes with his blessing to reveal their “sweaty delirium”, as if all we really care about is not what he writes, or what any of them writes, but who bedded whom. This sort of thing may be gripping to read and it may set the record straight about who dumped whom. But this focus on confession, on memoir, however consensual, surely threatens to obscure their achievement in the long run.

As Amis has himself acknowledged, fame is a necessary by-product of acquiring a readership. However, his novels should still be the most interesting thing about him, not the private lives of his friends or lovers.

Beware the jeggings

My husband often murmurs that if he were prime minister, one of his first acts would be to forbid women from wearing trousers. So in our house the big news of last week was my colleague Shane Watson’s edict in The Sunday Times Style magazine that all women must wear shorts. So I obediently bought a pair. And it felt good: I dared to bare, but observed the no-thigh zone for my age group.

No way, though, am I going anywhere near this season’s alternative — a dread item called “jeggings”, a hideous hybrid of leggings and jeans. They make even the very young and very thin look awful, and simply confirm Shane is, as ever, right. This season, grannies in hotpants, mums in denim cut-offs, office workers in city shorts, are absolutely fine. No self-respecting woman should be sans culottes in the summer of 2009. The alternative — thou shalt wear jeggings — is simply too horrible to contemplate.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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