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Pretty used to being with Gwyneth

Regrets that her mother did not smoke

Frank in all directions

Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais

Simply cannot go back to them

Roll your eyes at Samuel Beckett

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion

Metaphors with eyes

Life of Mary MacLane

Circle what it is you want

Not really talking about women, just Diane

Felicity's disguise

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Entries in kingsley amis (2)

Monday
Jan272014

In Which We Find Something Lacking In Kingsley Amis

A Memoir of My Father

by KINGSLEY AMIS

My father stood five foot eight or nine: average height or a little over for one born at the end of the 1880s, rather short compared with his grandchildren's generation. With a stocky frame and some breadth of shoulder, he had a good build for games-playing.

This was a passion of his life, and he kept it up longer than most men, playing vigorous tennis well into middle age and actively skippering the local cricket side in his sixties. His eye outlasted his wind, to the end he remained a stylish batsman, with a late cut I have rarely seen surpassed. His glance was direct, appraising, humorous and warm, yet also, at times, troubled and petulant. He had a decent big nose that caused him, so he said, to be occasionally mistaken for a Jew by Jews; our name, with its closeness to Amos, may have contributed to this. He would tell anecdotes about it embroideries, I imagine now, on a couple of ambiguous interchanges with a typical mixture of amusement and unemphatic irritation.

kingsley with second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard

In fact he was Nonconformist English from, ultimately, East Anglia, and if, much more ultimately, the Amises had come from France, there was no trace whatever of any of that by the time they produced my father, the most English human being I have ever known. This was one of the things I had against him in my teens. Nobody in the novels I was reading then was without his Russian grandmother, Italian aunt, Austrian step-sister, and even my school friends all seemed to have their bits of Scotch and Irish. The best I could do was a couple of American cousins, my father's sister's children hopelessly unexotic.

Not only were my environment and upbringing insular almost to a fault I went abroad for the first time, and then not voluntarily, in 1944 it was also fiercely non-crazy: another let-down after the novels. My father's father had done a lot to set the tone. It is true that, beyond admitting to Norfolk origins, he would never say where or what he had come from, but I realized quite early that this reticence must spring from nothing more romantic than snobbery. He was a glass merchant in a fair way of business until Woolworth's came along and undersold him. There was one good story about the time, demonstrating to a potential customer, he broke an unbreakable tumbler, but, again, that was an accident: Habitual glass-smashing is not typical of chapel people.

It was, I believe, literally at chapel that my father first met my mother. Like his, her parents were Baptists of the Denmark Hill community. Her father, a self-taught musician, played the organ on Sundays. A lot of the rest of the time, when he was not serving in a local outfitter's, he played the piano or, according to my mother, had his nose in a book. The book was likely to be one of the standard English poets that filled his shelves. I should have liked to know what he thought about these, but he died when I was a child.

Chapel, as such, was a thing of the past by the time I was old enough to care about such matters. Reacting against his upbringing boldly as it might have seemed then, mildly enough by present standards my father had turned his back on any form of worship and, I suspect, on the Christian faith as well. I only suspect this, because he was not one for that sort of discussion, but I doubt if he would have needed to add much to the stray remark he let fall once or twice about there having to be some meaning to life, or a similar post-Protestant shred of belief.

Anyway, he never put the slightest pressure on me to have anything to do with religion, explaining that he knew far too well what it felt like to be forced to attend chapel. The most he would do was to rebuke me for using the name of Christ as a swear word, and even this, superstition rather than piety, he dropped when I was grown up.

At the same time, of course, it was totally characteristic that, when plunged into unusually deep despair about my shortcomings, he was likely to put them down to my complete lack of religion. And I should not be truly his son if I had never felt that he had something there. But that was as far as doctrine went, no distance at all compared with the tremendous inroads of the morality associated with that doctrine. Matthew Arnold would have worried less about the survival of Christian ethics in an age without literal faith if he could have had a couple of chats with my father.

For parts of the training I received I can only be heartily grateful. I cannot claim to be more honest and responsible and thrifty and industrious than most people, but I am pretty sure I would be less distinguished in these fields if I had been brought up quite outside the shadow of the chapel. On the other hand, as I came to sense the image in which my father was trying to mould my character and future I began to resist him, and we quarrelled violently at least every week or two for years.

It was not, I think, that I was unusually intractable by nature, nor that he took less kindly than most men to having his deeply felt wishes flouted, or at least contested, by somebody he had power over. Certainly, he had embarked on parenthood comparatively late, so that by the time I started noticing that he could be wrong about things he was already in his middle forties and, perhaps, less resilient than earlier. He had not, moreover, re-embarked on parenthood, and this had the common effect of sharply personalizing our conflict.

with his son martin

An only child is short not so much of allies, of supporters, as of means of dilution and diversion, another body to share the weight of parental care. This isolation may make him over-ready to defend his interests. For my own part, I had acquired from somewhere a very liberal helping of adolescent intellectual's arrogance, while inheriting in full measure my father's obstinacy. The last factor alone was enough to launch us regularly on one or another conversational collision course, immediately recognized as such by both, indeed by all, parties, but not to be deviated from at any price.

We were divided on the issue of sex to fully the expected degree, my father a card-carrying anti-self-abuser-cum-anti-fornicationist, myself opposed to neither. There was once a very big scene over the first of these, full of warnings about thinning of the blood and eventual hopeless insanity. I had the remarkable good sense not to believe this.

Thereafter I went my own sexual way under a pact of silence and dissimulation. This suited my father, who was normally as reticent about this as about other basics. Apart from the fact of my own existence, no sort of detail of his sexual life ever reached me. I have often been tempted to think it was never a very active one, but experience teaches that nothing is likely to fall more wildly astray than this sort of judgment, even as regards contemporaries whom one knows intimately.

What might roughly be called art was much more productive of overt friction between us. Art, not a word of a concept my father had much truck with, consisted for him of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Edwardian ballads (almost none of which ever came my way again) he and my mother and their friends sand at the piano, West End stage success in which music comedies of the Leslie Henson/ Fred Emney type came to predominate, and detective stories by such as R. Austin Freeman, Francis Grierson and John Rhode. This list, admittedly not exhaustive, seemed and seems to me woefully short, especially for somebody by nature neither stupid nor incurious. Anyway, I had my own ideas of what art consisted of.

The art that most reliable provided a domestic casus belli was music. This was because it was the one for which my father, in his way, a way I had no time for at all at that stage, really cared. He wanted me to like Gilbert and Sullivan and took me to the The Pirates of Penzance and The Yeoman of the Guard; I meanly exaggerated my boredom.

He tried to get me interested in the ballads; I disparaged their lyrics and wanted to know why there was no Schubert or Wolf under the lid of the piano stool. I would go on to accused him of not really liking music, to which he would retort, with annoying relevance, that that would come better from someone who, like him, could play some of the stuff. But a more important irritant was the nature of music itself. If I chose to waste a fine afternoon in an art gallery or to ruin my eyes over a book when I could have been out in the fresh air, then that at any rate in my father's more tolerant moods was up to me. Music kicked up a roe, and I really could not expect to have the damned wireless or gramophone blaring through the house all the hours there were and upsetting mother. Especially that sort of music...

Actually it was most sorts. My father's catholic distaste ranged from Dvorak to Troise and his Mandoliers, from Benny Goodman to Haydn. He was not content with just registering objection in each case: he would deliver a critical verdict, often in the form of an analogy. There was a piece of Duke Ellington's, for instance, (I think from the Black, Brown and Beige suite anyway, something about as far from primitivism as jazz had then got) which put my father in mind, or so he said, of a lot of savages dancing round a pot of human remains. 'The Swan of Tuonela', on the other hand, called up successive images of a small animal in pain and a large animal in pain. Perhaps it was the element of horrible truth in this which prevented me from seeing how funny it was and made me come up, as I surely must have done, with one of my blanket charges of dislike of all music.

These and related problems could have been easily solved in a different kind of household and house. We lived until 1940 in a short series of suburban villas in which a kitchen, bathroom and box-room were added to the two-up-two-down formula. The partition walls were not specially thick, and most sounds went through them. And the room where one was in the evenings was naturally the one with the wireless in it.

Those who have grown up with the BBC Third Programme and Music Programme might find it difficult to imagine how little music was broadcast in the thirties. One would go months without a chance to hear individual works in even the standard repertoire. So I would very much want to listen to Brahms's Second Symphony any time it was available, and my father, after a day at the office and and getting on for an hour's journey home, would very much not. And there we were.

with his first wife

The smallness of the flat and of its successors was made mildly claustrophobic at times by my father's constant concern to prevent my getting away from him, in several senses of the phrase. He and my mother could not have restricted my choice of friends, and my chances of seeing them, more assiduously if there had been a long family history of male prostitution or juvenile dipsomania.

When I was at home, as when not at school I usually was, I kept finding that reading in public was deemed rude, while reading in private was anti-social. There was a thing called joining in the family circle that has left me with a life-long non-enjoyment of sitting over the remains of a meal. This pattern persisted. Whenever, after my marriage, my family and I visited my parents or they came to stay, everything had to be done with everybody present: no recipe for getting the best out of people.

As if we had not had enough on our plates already, my father and I came to differ about politics. But I need spend no time on that: he was an ex-Liberal of the Lloyd George denomination who went Tory after the first war and for years was active in his constituency and in the local Ratepayers' Association. After what I have said about other disagreements, my reaction here is rather depressingly easy to imagine. In this field as in others, my father inevitably failed to turn me into the sort of person he wanted me to be.

That sort of person was, of course, a version of himself; a more successful version, for he got no further than a senior clerk's responsibilities and pay in the mustard firm he worked for, and considered himself a failure. He was never bitter about this, but meant to see to it that I had a better chance than he. Here he succeeded at considerable financial cost: scholarships notwithstanding, he had to go on supporting me and being deprived of a youth's earning capacity. Although he never had much idea of what I was about, he was delighted when I began to make my way as a writer while not forgetting to deliver the expected warning that I must not make the mistake of thinking I could actually support myself m this fashion. All the time, I think, he would really rather I had gone into commerce, a word I can still not hear without starting to feel drowsy.

Boredom, I am sorry to say, came to be my chief reaction to my father's company, though I did not want to feel like this and grew better at hiding it I hope. As ageing people (among others) will, he would recount and reminisce without relevance: cricket, the City, friends he had made since I left home, a chap in the pub, a chap in the tram. I am sure he on his side was not much entertained when, on request, I would tell him of my doings in a world as alien to him as commerce was to me. There was not a lot to be done about this, given the burning sincerity of all boredom. It is depressing to think how persistently dull and egotistical we can be to those we most value, and how restless and peevish we get when they do it back to us.

But this would be the wrong note to end on. The era of the quarrels was also, not surprisingly, the time of greatest intimacy. In those years my father would exploit a talent for physical clowning and mimicry that made him, on his day, one of the funniest men I have known. Every story called for the full deployment of facial, vocal and bodily resources, was conscientiously acted out. My mother used the same techniques, so that at one stage I thought they were standard in anecdote-telling, and to this day find something lacking when they are not used. It is in mid-story that I see my father most clearly, quite a dapper figure in one of his grey or light-brown business suits (though he never could tie a tie properly), hobbling across the room in the style of some decrepit director of the firm, or forcing his face into lines of disquietingly silly uncouthness as he became the man next door.

1967

"Her Shining Eyes" - Mindset (mp3)

"Her Shining Eyes (Jallen remix)" - Mindset (mp3)

Wednesday
May262010

In Which We Fell One Of The Greats

at his wedding

The Poet and the Dreamer

by KINGSLEY AMIS

Acquaintance with school examination scripts and with the tastes (or professed tastes) of young people entering the university will suggest that Keats is still the teacher's favourite poet. After all, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and the rest of the train require interpretation, textual or ideological: Keats can be read without a glossary and he believed simply in Beauty.

This immediacy of appeal is reinforced by the straightforwardly romantic subject-matter of the verse and by the engaging personality, tragic life and high aspirations of the poet; nobody, it seems unmistakable, was ever more of a poet than Keats. Most adolescents of any sensitivity will respond with an enthusiasm they may still recall when, bloody but unbowed after their struggles with pass degree, diploma, appointments board and head teacher, they in their turn face the task of implanting tolerance for poetry in the twelve-year old mind.

kingsley with first wife hilly
Any favourable attitude towards any verse must be better than none, and yet the results of an early inoculation with Keats may prove an obstacle to further literary development. If Keats is to be the ideal poet, ideal poetry too readily becomes a tissue of affectionate descriptions of nice things interrupted by occasional complaints that the real world is insufficiently productive of those nice things, and if any pupil should wonder what the dales of Arcardy have got to do with him, then the answer is that poetry deals with 'the world of the imagination', i.e. not with the real world.

Those who undertake to break down such a preconception are likely to suffer from conscience trouble. Is it worth the risk of removing one enjoyment and not managing to substitute a 'better'? Might it not be safer to push the chaps on with their Keats and with the poems that can, with whatever distortion, be assimilated to Keats: 'Christabel', 'Oenone', Paradise Lost (first two books only, of course), snippets from The Faerie Queene?

A rational reading of Keats, whatever the long-term result, is initially destructive. An uneasy suspicion of this is discernible even at the height of the cult in the late nineteenth century. Sidney Colvin, noting a 'dissonance' - or, more accurately, a piece of poetical fudging - in the 'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' remarks consolingly that 'it is a dissonance which the attentive reader can easily reconcile for himself: and none but an attentive reader will notice it.' The attentive reader will have little time for Colvin's book, the recent reissue of which, seventy years after its first publication, motivates some depression.

Kingsley and Hilary in the mid-1950s with, from left, Sally, Philip and Martin.
One imagines it already winging its way to the shelves of school libraries, where its adulatory portraiture and innocent assertion of its subject's greatness will inspire another legion of essays maundering about the way 'the poetry seems to throb in every line with the life of imagination and beauty' in that sugary erotic extravaganza 'The Eve of St Agnes'.

Even in his best poems Keats devotes himself too uncritically to 'the world of the imagination.' Even the 'Ode to the Nightingale', though containing passages which must delight the most jaded, is full of frigidities, of appeals to the remote and merely fanciful. What else are the references to hemlock, Lethe, the Dryad (tautologously described as 'of the trees'), Flora, the blushful Hippocrene (seen as a kind of Greek red sparkling Burgundy, and apparently sedimented at that, Bacchus and his pards (brought in to effect a translation into poetese of the unpoetical notion of getting drunk)?

Such entities are, as Jeffrey observed of the subject of 'Hyperion', 'too far removed from all the sources of human interest.' And to string together counters of this kind, to use 'Olympus' faded hierarchy' as correlatives for what are evidently the most passionate feelings, was a favourite procedure with Keats, as can be seen at a glance at the 'Ode to Psyche' or the 'Ode on Melancholy.'

Poetry was for Keats a matter of 'O Poesy', of Apollo, the Muses and inspired bards. This connects with his attitude to the actual business of writing. According Robert Graves (I cannot track this anecdote), Keats used to dress up in poetic robes and laurel crown to encourage the afflatus. And if Apollo did come through on the line with a personal call, the divine message was not to be tampered with; poetry must come as naturally as leaves to the tree. Keats was too intelligent to believe this all the time, but when he revised his verse at all the task was always scamped and he never became a conscientious craftsman. Shoddily worked sonnets would be thrown off and dispatched to friends the same day, to reappear unaltered in print; he knew Endymion needed radical rewriting, but 'I am tired of it' and 'it is not in my nature to fumble' — in other words, to take undue trouble.

martin amis, elizabeth jane howard and kingsley Endymion, as the Quarterly Review soon pointed out, was scattered with awkwardnesses forced upon, or rather suggested to, the poet by the exigencies of rhyme. Such faults reappear throughout the whole of Keats' work, partly because of his habit of selecting forms that require several rhymes to the same sound.

with john lennon

These forms were chosen capriciously, without regard to their appropriateness or to his own capacities, on occasion merely because they happened to be used by poets he happened to admire. It was only an admiration for Paradise Lost  that eventually took him to blank verse, where common sense might have taken him before 1818. Even the Odes, written for once in original stanza forms, are disfigured by Endymion-like crudities: the 'deceiving elf' of the 'Nightingale', for instance, an incarnation into which 'the Fancy' is recklessly crammed to save having to fumble with the rhyming line, and the two analogous defects of the first stanza - 'emptied...to the drains' (sc. not 'poured down the drain' but 'drained, drunk off') retained to rhyme with 'pains', and 'melodious plot' (so glaringly inappropriate, with its connections with cultivation) retained to rhyme with 'happy lot.'

It is the middle stanzas of the poems — I take it as fairly representing the mature Keats — that its merit chiefly lies, in the unforgettable entrancing picture of the wood itself, and in the poet's confession, of an unwonted sobriety in style, that he finds himself 'half in love with easeful Death.' Here, by chance, there are no technical flaws, and here too, of set purpose, the classical lumber is stowed away.

That English strain which Dr. Leavis rightly notes as a characteristic of Keats at his finest comes to the fore. In addition, the poet is talking about himself, not a Delphic simulacrum of himself, and has something to say about human existence, not a wish-fulfilling caricature of it. But it is only here, and in the induction of the revised 'Hyperion', that Keats fulfilled for more than a line or two his often-made promise to treat of 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts', to become one of those 'to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest.'

To exalt into greatness one whose achievement was actually that of an often delightful, if often awkward, decorative poet may have, as was suggested above, harmful consequences. Any presumption that Keats might in time have become a major artist is cast in doubt by the fact that it is unpromising theories about poetry that derive from defects of character, quite as much as bad influences and the results of illness, which vitiate his existing work.

kingsley photographed by fay godwin
The kind of writer he might have become is indicated in his letters:

Imagine the worst dog-kennel you ever saw, placed upon two poles from a mouldy fencing. In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old woman, squat like an ape half-starved from a scarcity of biscuit in its passage from Madagascar to the Cape, with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed, skinny-lidded inanity, with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her hand: squat and lean she sat, and puffed out the smoke, while two ragged, tattered girls carried her along. What a thing would be a history of her life and sensations!

But that was not the kind of subject that 'a glorious denizen' of Poesy's wide heaven could undertake.

POSTSCRIPT 1970:

This now strikes me as a rather clever undergraduate essay (pretty good, that is to say, compared with most of the undergraduate essays I remember). I would not want to withdraw or mitigate any of the nasty remarks about Keats' technical shortcomings and their connection with a self-indulgence deeply embedded in his mind and heart, and to this day I find it genuinely curious that anybody should have written (as M.R. Ridley did) a whole volume called Keats' Craftsmanship: surely a candidate for that shortest-books series along with Canadian Wit and Humour, Great Marxist Humanitarians, and The Vein of Humility in D.H. Lawrence.

However, I neglected to celebrate, or took for granted, that tremendous originality and audaciousness which were far beyond any mere 'decorative' quality and, by making poetry personal, so to speak democratized it. When Keats opened the Nightingale ode by writing, 'My heart aches', he was writing about his own heart and nobody else's. Earlier poems in the first person had had the name of some other character invisibly prefixed to them, normally an idealized or anyway carefully trimmed version of the poet, often, indeed, the Poet, which figure does a good deal of talking in Wordsworth's anecdotal and autobiographical verse. Keats' ability to cut through all that — an ability that must have sprung from the same root as his self-indulgence — made it possible for anybody at all to identify with him in the process of reading the poem.

The results of that 'democratization', like others, may not have been altogether happy, but like them, they were inevitable. Whatever the detail of Keats' performance, this achievement is such that no one who has never thought him the greatest poet in the world, no matter for how brief a period, has any real feeling for literature.

Kingsley Amis died in 1995. He is the author of over twenty novels.

with young Martin Amis

"Summer Begs" - Sarah Jaffe (mp3)

"Pretender" - Sarah Jaffe (mp3)

"Vulnerable" - Sarah Jaffe (mp3)

"Better Than Nothing" - Sarah Jaffe (mp3)