Until the real thing comes along
Christopher Hawtree
KINGSLEY AMIS IN LIFE AND LETTERS edited by Dale Salwak Macmillan, £17.95, pp.203 Kingsley Amis's memoirs have been delighting a libel lawyer during recent weeks — and not simply as a result of the figures flashing up on the clock/calculator at his side. They are coruscating stuff, sufficient to quieten that bank manager to whom reference was made during the Booker-Prize speech.
In the meantime, nobody, least of all Amis himself, is likely to get rich from this volume of essays prepared by a professor at the peculiarly-named Citrus College in California. It is half the price of many such volumes and contains pieces by quite a few people who know about the art of writing, which is not always the case. Nonetheless, it leaves one all the more eager for the memoirs. These will cost much the same and be less coy, not to say repetitive. Dale Salwak has gathered a peculiar crew of friends, acquaintances and others (he him- self is in the second category), each of whom writes on Kingsley or Amis, as the case might be.
Some, of course, were not available: crucially, Larkin and Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin') — who himself de- serves a memoir — as well as such friends as Betjeman and Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he relished a gin and a gossip. Still, there are others here to testify to a ready wit, a kindness that even extended to Americans, a potatory disposition and an uncanny ability as a mimic: twice, one hears about, but never quite hears, an imitation — complete with sound-effects — of Roosevelt's broadcasting platitudes across the Atlantic. (One friend, not here, tells of his ex-wife Elizabeth Jane Howard always urging him to do the one about a jeep in a desert in the hope of inducing a seizure.) It would certainly do much to restore the reputation of Radio 3 if some producer had the initiative to lay in a few crates of good stuff and set a tape-recorder running.
A nifty way with party-turns does not prompt celebratory volumes (Professor Salwak is also doing a 'critical biography'). Amis is a writer. Several contributors address themselves to this fact, but none so pertinently as Anthony Burgess does dur- ing an aside in his forthcoming You've Had Your Time (he is discussing a television game on which they appeared, and which Connolly said should be called 'Money for
Jam'): `Amis was, is, more of a modernist than he seemed to realise: his prose style represents as important a breakthrough in the management of recit as that of Hemingway.'
Nobody has remarked upon Amis's debt to another writer who has adapted 'mod- ernism' to his own, equally diverse ends, Graham Greene, even though he wrote an as yet unpublished study of him (genially
guyed in I Like It Here, Amis himself later appearing in Travels With My Aunt). This study can surely not be as shaming as the
contribution here by a Canadian Prof., one Keith Wilson, who proudly refers not only to 'an extended image that sums up the mood of what I have called the will to
stasis' but finds it in Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age, a work which he duly quotes at length for the purposes of illuminating Jake's Thing — all the while unaware that in the publicity for The Folks that Live on the Hill Amis described it as the novel that Margaret Drabble would have written if she had it in her. (What, also, will Amis make of the verb 'to image' something or other?) This is a book in which to browse if somebody else has bought it (or not even as much as that: 20 minutes in a bookshop might be sufficient). Amis's own works are another matter, and it is with some relief that one returns to them in the form that they were meant to be read. That said, I cannot resist quoting from one little men- tioned here: Girl, 20. It is the mark of a true Mahlerian if he can relish this:
The movement turned out to be the first movement of the First Symphony: a con- siderable mercy, seeing that it might so easily have been something broad, full, ample, spacious, massive, leisurely and going on for over half an hour from the Second or the Third. Thanks to some paroxysm of curtail- ment on the composer's part, I was in for little more than 15 minutes' worth. (It was true that, in a comparable situation, Weber would have gone on half as long and used an orchestra a quarter as big, but then he would have had eight times as much to say.) As the music got into its lubberly stride, I made some attempt to separate it in itself from how it was being interpreted and played, but I had never been very good at this with works on my private never-mind list. At first against my will, I listened to Mahler's enor- mous talentlessness being rendered by Roy and the N.L.S.O. As they went on, flecks of seeming talent began to insinuate them- selves. Factitious fuss turned itself into a sort of gaiety; doodles in the horns and wood- wind were almost transformed into rustic charm; blaring and barging acquired a note of near-menace; even that terrible little cuckoo-motif reflected something more than the great man's decision to let the world know how jolly preoccupied he had been in those days with the interval of the perfect fourth.
Little did Mozart realise how lightly he got off in Lucky Jim. A question remains. Do the references in 'Dear Illusion' and Rus- sian Hide-and-Seek reveal that Amis has a secret liking for John Lennon?
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