POETS Day! Kingsley Amis with a Touch of Philip Larkin
I’m writing this on a Thursday and I just checked my son out of school early. In the office there’s a sign in/out sheet by an extremely oversized digital clock and I filled in the names. The time was two after two. You couldn’t miss it. I put it down. Above our line were six sign outs all listing two o’clock. There were only eight kids out all day. Six at the same time seems like a lot. Different last names and handwriting.
It’s POETS Day, so do all the regular stuff. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and bars, ballgames, swimming, and parks. Enjoy the weekend a few hours ahead of schedule. All that. But is there something I should know about Thursday? You wouldn’t call it POETF Day, but is there something like that? It’s just a lot of kids leaving at once. Is it a secret?
Read some verse. I’m going to look into this. If anyone wants to clue me in I can keep everything confidential.
***
I was planning on writing about Kingsley Amis without mentioning Philip Larkin. The two met at St. John’s College, Oxford, became roommates and formed a bond still strong when Amis said things at Larkin’s funeral. The little bits of their correspondence that I’ve read cracked me up. They shared a love of jazz, a distrust of posturing, and a wicked sense of humor. Often, when one is mentioned, the other pops up like a mischievous penny.
A few hours ago I was reading “The Amis country: On the poetry of Kingsley Amis” by David Yezzi (The New Criterion, March, 2007). Larkin shows up in the second paragraph, but before we come across his name, Yezzi generally describes Amis’s poetry:
“He produced only a few slim volumes and wrote the sort of poems that have long fallen out of fashion: bare-knuckled, witty, light but never ‘lite,’ outward-looking instead of inward-gazing—a kind of red-blooded vers de société…”
And right there I knew I’d be sharing one of my favorite Larkin poems.
Vers de Société
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I’m afraid—Funny how hard it is to be alone.
I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted,
Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted
Over to catch the drivel of some bitch
Who’s read nothing but Which;
Just think of all the spare time that has flownStraight into nothingness by being filled
With forks and faces, rather than repaid
Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind,
And looking out to see the moon thinned
To an air-sharpened blade.
A life, and yet how sternly it’s instilledAll solitude is selfish. No one now
Believes the hermit with his gown and dish
Talking to God (who’s gone too); the big wish
Is to have people nice to you, which means
Doing it back somehow.
Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines
Playing at goodness, like going to church?Something that bores us, something we don’t do well
(Asking that ass about his fool research)
But try to feel, because, however crudely,
It shows us what should be?
Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure and remorse
Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course—
Larkin’s recognized as the better poet; offered, but turned down the Poet Laureate position. Amis was better known, at least in their lifetimes, though not so much for verse. Mark Steyn writes in “the old devil,” also from a 2007 issue of The New Criterion, though April this time:
“Amis was not just the most celebrated comic novelist to emerge in Britain after the Second World War but also a constant presence—a public personality on TV, on radio, in gossip-column squibs as either an agreeable clubman or a fat boozy lout, and in upscale glossy advertising for Sanderson Fabrics: ‘Very Kingsley Amis, Very Sanderson.’”
An aside: Steyn is fantastic at collecting and deploying interesting and surprising facts about people. If you get the chance, pick up a copy of Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade. It’s a collection of obituaries he’s written over the years. Bob Hope, Evel Knieval, Princess Diana, William Mitchell (the scientist behind Cool Whip and more), and Eugene McCarthy all get a look. “Yes We Have No Banana,” written after the passing of Zimbabwe’s Reverend Canaan Banana stands out. Right after the above quote, Steyn writes of one of Britain’s other great comedic writers:
“P. G. Wodehouse wrote funny stories, and his many biographers will point out that this or that episode derives from his experiences on Broadway or schooldays in Dulwich, but the fact is he spent his time sitting at home on Long Island reading thrillers and watching the daytime soaps, decade in, decade out: his life is very unWodehousian.”
I didn’t know anything about Wodehouse beyond the Jeeves and Bertie books and one or two others. It didn’t cross my mind that he’d plunk down in front of General Hospital. It makes a sort of sense, unexpected twists being the coin of both comedy and soap opera. Michael Malone, author of the hilarious books Foolscap and Handling Sin, held a day job as head writer for One Life to Live. I thought that was interesting.
Back to Larkin and Amis: They were congenially competitive. In “A Letter to a Friend About Girls,” Larkin laments coming up short in one aspect.
After comparing lives with you for years
I see how I’ve been losing: all the while
I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.
And ends,
There should be equal chances, I’d’ve thought.
Must finish now. One day perhaps I’ll know
What makes you be so lucky in your ratio.
Yezzi shares this from a letter Amis wrote on receiving from Larkin a copy of his poetry collection The Less Received:
“Tks VM, OM, for TLD. When it came I turned over the pages saying “Better than me … Better than me … I could do that … Better than me … Better than me … I could—no I couldn’t … Better than me … I wouldn’t want to do that—well … Better than me … Better than me …” You sod.”
They were both better for the other, this literary almost odd couple who did great things. Before reading Yezzi’s “vers de société” line, I fixed on Amis independent of Larkin, though not alone. He alludes to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Songs of Innocence was first published as a twenty-three poem collection in 1789 and Songs of Experience, with twenty-six, in 1794. Later that year he’d combine them into a single volume and a couple of poems appeared under Experience at one point only to be moved to Innocence by Blake later. For the most part, Songs of Innocence were about the joys of a world presented idyllically and Songs of Experience expressed guilt, misfortune, and defaulted to baser instincts. Think The Mommas and The Pappas playing as pretty midriffs hand out flowers on a litter free Haight Street in a nostalgia ad on one side and the “I’m in acid kindergarten” kids Joan Didion depicted in Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the other. Different takes.
In my favorite from the Experience side, Blake presents the rosy and the jaundiced view.
The Clod and the Pebble
William Blake (1757-1827)‘Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:‘Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.’
I’m not sure in what collection these next two poems were originally published – they may have appeared in magazines, newspapers or not at all – but in the introduction to Collected Poems, Clive James writes that contained in the book are “all of his verse that [Amis] wishes to preserve,” and that “the arrangement of poems is chronological.” I’ve seen them presented individually, which seems silly. It’s apparent that they’re complimentary, but I’d wondered if one was written and years later the other as a revisiting. They sit facing each other on page 108 and 109. I suppose I should hold open the possibility that there exists a surprising amount of poetry that Amis didn’t wish to preserve that would have found a sequential home between the two.
I am playing with possibilities here. These appear to be influenced by Blake. The first line of “Lovely” belongs to Walter de la Mare’s “Fare Well,” and both poems jadedly play with the themes found in that earlier work. He could have written these without a thought about clams and pebbles, but the stanzas made me wonder first and there are other connections. Where Blake presents something lovely and casts in an unlovely light, in “Shitty” Amis presents something crappy and then shows that soon it will seem lovely in comparison as crappier is imminent. In “Lovely,” he acknowledges beauty, but it’s a beauty circumstances take away. There are parallels. This. Now worse than this.
Shitty
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)Look thy last on all things shitty
While thou’rt at it: soccer stars,
Soccer crowds, bedezined bushheads
Jerking over their guitars.German tourists, plastic roses,
Face of Mao and face of Ché,
Women wearing curtains, blankets,
Beckett at the ICA.High-rise blocks and action paintings,
Sculptures made from wire and lead:
Each of them a sight more lovely
Than the screens around your bed.Lovely
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)Look thy last on all things lovely
Every hour, an old shag said,
Meaning they turn lovelier if thou
Thinkst about soon being dead.Do they? When that “soon” means business
They might lose their eye-appeal,
Go a bit like things unlovely,
Get upstaged by how you feel.The best time to see things lovely
Is in youth’s primordial bliss,
Which is also when you rather
Go for old shags talking piss.
The reason I thought of Blake in the first place is because Amis evoked him in an earlier (as evidenced by its page 58 position on the layout timeline) poem, “A Song of Experience.”
Among the things shared by Amis and Larkin appears to be a less than salutary view of women. I’m not saying that either was incapable of loving or respecting a woman individually. It seemed that they both cared deeply about the women they cheated on, but did those women have obstacles to overcome before endearments? There are arguments to the contrary, but Larkin may not have liked women; not as people with personalities and things to say. He certainly desired them sexually, but they’re objects until they aren’t. Amis was a conqueror.
More from Steyn:
“Amis is the great character in all his books, not in the reductive sense that he once went to Portugal and I Like It Here (1958) is set in Portugal, or that a businessman called Harold Soref once took him to lunch at the Reform Club and endeavored to restrict Amis to the set menu and was a bit “shy on the booze” and a similar character of similar parsimonious bent presides over a similar lunch in Girl, 20 (1971). Rather, Amis is a more elemental presence: his personality animates his best work, not with anything so fey and limpid as “lyrical freshness” but with a great fizzing energy.”
In the novel One Fat Englishman, Roger Micheldene his-first-names his way through a series of women in America as a visiting lecturer at Budweiser College. Amis did that at Princeton. Sorta reductive. In “A Dream of Fair Women,” he writes “’Me first Kingsley; I’m cleverest’ each declares” of the titular ladies. Unlikely to be reductive, but the spirit is there. He’s not afraid to express that spirit in his work or to be identified as one possessed.
This is from a 1975 interview of Amis in Paris Review by Michael Barber. He asks about the character Jim Dixon from Amis’s name making debut novel Lucky Jim.
INTERVIEWER: I think it’s difficult for anyone under thirty today to see Jim as a true rebel, despite what he may have appeared then.
AMIS: Yes, well, rebellion escalates doesn’t it?… But then I think the degree to which he was intended to be seen by the author as a rebel has been exaggerated. He didn’t want to change the System. He certainly didn’t want to destroy the System.
INTERVIEWER: He wanted to be his own man?
AMIS: Yes. He didn’t like the bits of the System that were immediately in his neighborhood, that was all.
The interview ends with Barber asking what motivates Amis as a novelists. He answers genuinely about a duty to his readers, that he feels he’s doing “what I’ve been designed to do.” Barber writes that as he’s packing up to leave, Amis asks to add a postscript to the last answer.
“And then of course there’s always vanity. You remember that Orwell said, when he was answering his own question, why I write, that his leading motive was the desire to be thought clever, to be talked about by people he had never met. I don’t think he was being arrogant. I think he was being very honest.”
When Amis wrote about sex and sexuality, I don’t get the sense that he was trying to usher in a new libertine era or even challenge mores. I think he was trying to be his own man. “Here I am. You don’t have to like it. There’s room for us both.” He was being honest.
In “A Song of Experience,” a man tells tales in a bar. He’s overplayed and goes on about women. The next day he’s spotted going about an average day. Suddenly boring. It was braggadocio. He’s playing at something he thinks is impressive.
A lot of us learned Blake’s famous line about a lamb “Did he who made the tiger make thee?” in grade school. It’s possible that Amis is working along such lines. The braggart and an unremarkable salesman by day? Opposites in one man.
I think he’s also showing us something shitty and then showing us something he thinks is shittier. He’s making a point. Amis doesn’t shy from risqué, but that’s because he’s writing honestly. He’s not sensationalizing to attract readers. He’s no daytime salesman in disguise. This isn’t a pretention and he’d rather be thought vulgar than quotidian.
A Song of Experience
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)A quiet start: the tavern, our small party,
A dark-eyed traveller drinking on his own;
We ask him over when the talk turned hearty,
And let him tell of women he had known.He tried all colours, white and black and coffee;
Though quite a few were chary, more were bold;
Some took it like the Host, some like a toffee;
The two or three who wept were soon consoled.For seven long years his fancies were tormented
By one he often wheedled, but in vain;
At last, oh Christ in heaven, she consented,
And the next day he journeyed on again.The inaccessible he laid a hand on,
The heated he refreshed, the cold he warmed.
What Blake presaged, what Lawrence took a stand on,
What Yeats locked up in fable, he performed.And so he knew, where we can only fumble,
Wildly in daydreams, vulgarly in art;
Miles past the point where all illusions crumble
He found the female and the human heart.Then love was velvet on a hand of iron
That wrenched the panting lover from his aim;
Lion rose up as lamb and lamb as lion,
Nausicaa and Circe were the same.What counter-images, what cold abstraction
Could start to quench that living element,
The flash of prophecy, the glare of action?
– He drained his liquor, paid his score and went.I saw him, brisk in May, in Juliet’s weather,
Hitch up the trousers of his long-tailed suit,
Polish his windscreen with a chamois-leather,
And stow his case of samples in the boot.
He reads the poem aloud, along with “Nocturne,” here if you’re interested.
Yesterday my copy of Philip Larkin: Poems Selected by Martin Amis arrived. I’m looking forward to Kingsley’s son’s introduction almost as much as the poetry. Maybe I’ll do a Larkin post soon with a touch of Amis (Kingsley… both) in it.
