POETS Day! A Few Poems by Kingsley Amis as Pretense to Discuss One of His Novels
Illustration by Rene Sears
I don’t like poinsettias and take comfort in the fact that they usually do the honorable thing and die shortly after Christmas time. They’re fine in season I suppose, but so are ugly sweaters and bells on adult shoes.
They’re poisonous flowers, I think. I read that people who don’t like cats but somehow ended up with one buy poinsettias intending to plead ignorance later and get on with their lives. Ours is still in the kitchen thriving in its pot so I daydream about adopting some sort of reverse cat that’s poisonous to poinsettias.
I’m supposed to be encouraging you to take a POETS Day, but I’m distracted by this velveteen-flop looking plant with one petal beginning to wilt and a couple of dozen more that won’t follow its example. I’m distracted like you might be on a Friday afternoon, so preoccupied with weekend thoughts that you can’t get any poinsettia work done, sitting performatively, wasting your time. You should Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
Read a poem first.
***
I’ve written about Kingsley Amis in this space numerous times (see here, here, here, and here). I’m an unabashed fan so an unapologetic writer though I don’t claim any “Best” titles for him. There are better novelists, better poets, better editors, and your average park bench made for a better husband. He simply seems to be the writer I like most most of the time.
He was a very good poet who seems very very serious about not coming off as one involved in seriously working at the craft. I think he tries to make it look easy, sometimes flippant. More often than not, he succeeds.
It’s almost impossible to mention Amis without bringing up his friend, Philip Larkin. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Larkin was the better poet among the two. He was savage and funny and dark. “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.” He could also write with terrible sadness. Amis was a national personality, star of the BBC radio and television. Amis could be sad and savage too, but so often he comes off as a good natured roguish guy with a wry wit who’s baffled that you can’t tie a better Windsor knot; at ease in the company of both pirates and royalty.
from Letter to a Friend About Girls
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)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.
Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well:
My mortification at your pushovers,
Your mystification at my fecklessness—
Everything proves we play in separate leagues.
Before, I couldn’t credit your intrigues
Because I thought all girls the same, but yes,
You bag real birds, though they’re from alien covers.
Larkin wrote novels too. I’m taking it on the word of others, as I haven’t read any, that they’re good if not all that successful. Amis, on the other hand, was a superb novelist. He made a tremendous smash with his debut, Lucky Jim. Such a smash that his next couple of mere successes were a source of frustration.
This is a POETS Day post. That is not to be ignored. I’m including a couple of very good Amis poems I suspect you’ll enjoy, but as a Trojan Horse for some thoughts on The Old Devils, my favorite of those of his novels I’ve read so far. There will be spoilers – I’m giving away the end – so consider yourself warned.
The Old Devils is set in Wales and concerns itself greatly with Welshness. Amis was raised in Norbury near London but spent twelve years as a professor at University College of Swansea, so he had an outsider’s view of the idiosyncrasies of the country with time and residence enough for them to endear themselves to him.
Swansea Bay
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)Maps look impressive; to be anywhere
In villages rich with conventional signs,
Knowing that things ten miles away are there,
Seems happiness; roads fenced by dotted lines
Must run between pictorial solitudes;
Waters deserve their blue of remote, still,
And best at evening; and enamelled green
Becomes a phrase again, furnishing woods
With billiard-table moss, baize-apron leaves.
All must run for once to our own will,
Be and enact our need, and none believes
That any sour notes hide in a scored scene.The far side of this bay is like a map:
Something small denotes a tower, a steeple,
Shading points out the contoured slopes, a scrap
Of smoke is houses, and movement of people.
They are the chance effect, the frontal mess
Against the background’s paper authority;
However trite, some kind of recognition
– immodesties of love or weariness –
Has got to make their presence relevance,
To see in a blank field an absent city;
People must enter the eye’s lonely dance,
Or leave it reeling at its blind vision.
It’s a comic novel about a group of lifelong friends in their retirement, which consists mainly of drinking and teasing or otherwise driving each other nuts. The men meet the back room of a pub adorned with trophies and plaques brought over from the racquet club of their earlier days. The women meet at a rotation of each other’s house for Bible Study, by which they mean Riesling, or coffee, by which they mean Riesling. The disruption that makes their retirement novel worthy comes with the return of Alun and Rhiannon from London.
When the group was younger, Wales was enraptured by a poet of stature named Bryden. He was a national symbol of sorts. I think it’s fair to say Amis modelled him on Dylan Thomas. Alun was loosely affiliated with Bryden and when the great poet died, he managed to parlay that connection into a career on television, waxing on about things Welsh, and otherwise being the go-to panel guy for the BBC when a Welsh cultural perspective was needed. He was a bit of a weasel.
Rhiannon was the great beauty who all the boys loved. One of the group, Peter, was seriously involved with her, but got her in trouble in her late teens. She went to a doctor, who “took care of it” and Peter didn’t know how to speak to her anymore. She ended up with Alun, and off to London. No one forgot her.
What follows is some worrying about the yuppyish couple coming back and causing problems and digging up memories. The dynamics make the comedy.
There are ten chapters of around thirty pages each, each told from a the point of view of a character or characters. Peter gets two, Rhiannon and Alun get one, Rhiannon gets her own, then Alun, etc. Charlie’s the funniest character and the most like biographies lead me to believe Amis to have been. Charlie’s as foolishly drunk as the rest, but you get the sense that his observations and his biases align most to what the author considers reasonable. The author is omniscient and omni powerful so he’s speaking through all his characters, but Charlie seems the vessel for Amis to speak through plainly.
Around two-thirds into the book, Alun finds a moment alone with Charlie. I’m going to quote at length.
‘I want you to do something special for me if you would.’
‘I’ll have you know I’m a respectable girl and never touch the kinky stuff.’
“No, it’s…” Alun had rehearsed this part but he still had to squeeze it out. ‘The thing is, I’ve started a sort of novel, it’s supposed to be a serious novel, a proper one, you know, with no ham or balls or flannel about it, look you to goodness boy bach, but it’s hard for me to tell. So if you could just sort of take a glance through the first pages of the thing, not bothering about merit or the plenteous lack of it, but just seeing if…’
‘If I can give it a free-from-bullshit certificate.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well…’ Charlie’s glance was uneasy. His familiar battered look seemed intensified without actual bruising or laceration, as though he had been perseveringly beaten with padded cudgels. ‘Unless I give you my honest -’
‘I’m not asking for a bloody bunch of roses – of course you must speak as you find. Please, Charlie. Go on, you old bugger, you’re the only one.’
A page later, and I’m going to quote at greater length.
‘Well, fire away,’ said Alun briskly when they were settled with their drinks. ‘Let’s have it.’
‘You did ask for my honest opinion…’
Alun’s glance fell. ‘Which you have now made clear enough. How much did you manage to struggle through?’
‘I read twenty pages carefully, then skipped to the end.’ Charlie spoke with a hesitancy unusual in him. ‘I must emphasise that this is just my personal –‘
‘Spare me that if you will.’
‘Sorry. Well now. I can see here and there what you’re trying to do, and I think it’s worth doing, and… you’ve probably made the best attempt at it you can, but… I’m not sure if it can be done at all, very likely it can’t in the 1980s I don’t know. But you haven’t done it, that’s to say you weren’t doing it in what I read.’
‘What about the bullshit?’
‘The whole tone of voice, the whole attitude is one that compels bullshit. If I say it’s too much like Brydan I mean not just Brydan himself but a whole way of writing, and I suppose thinking, that concentrates on the writer and draws attention to the chap, towards him and away from the subject. Which I suppose needn’t be Wales in a way except that it always is, and somehow or other it’s impossible to be honest in it. Now I’m sure you’ve tried your hardest not to put in anything you didn’t mean or you thought was playing to the gallery, but it all gets swallowed up and turns into the same thing.’
Alun was still looking down. ‘Nothing to be salvaged?’
‘Nothing I saw. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re saying I’ve gotten to the stage where I can’t tell what’s bullshit from what isn’t bullshit and longer.’
‘No. I don’t think I am. I’m saying if you want to talk seriously about that place of yours and the people in it you’ll have to approach the thing in a completely different way, as if you’ve never read a book in your life – well, no, not that exactly, but…’
I’m about to give away big things, so SPOILER! It won’t keep you from enjoying the the book knowing all this, but you’ll know all this, so skip down to the poem and come back later if you want to read it unaware.
Alun dies shortly after that. It’s pretty spectacular in that it’s mundane though entirely unexpected. Mid conversation, his heart gives out and he collapses. Shocked me. I don’t think his book is ever mentioned again. It doesn’t bear on what transpires if it is mentioned. It seemed a big deal as reader, like it was setting up a triumph or a downfall. Maybe a break in friendship. None of that happened.
It wasn’t until I finished, thinking about what I read as you do when you finish a book, that I got it. All the references to Welsh habit, Welsh ways, all the references to Wales and Welshness.
I remember a very funny rant-let by BBC personality – presenter in metric – James May. He was on about how he loves the Irish, but hates the Oirish!. The Irish are wonderful people with a rich cultural heritage who enjoy conversation and a good laugh. The Oirish! form drunken office outings on St. Patrick’s Day, wear neon green leprechaun blazers with cheap plastic top hats, bless the world with shouts of “I’m f—ing Oirish!” – between retches and sips – if even one of their great-grandparents had a fondness for potatoes. The Oirish! are an Irish themed, bar hopping minstrel show probably getting ready to brag that Notre Dame lost this most recent national championship game by less than they lost the last time they catfished their way in.
Too many expressions of love for Ireland fall prey to Oirish! cartooning. That goes for all manner of things people truly have feelings for. We exaggerate and sentimentalize.
‘Which I suppose needn’t be Wales in a way except that it always is, and somehow or other it’s impossible to be honest in it.’
I think Amis wanted to write a love story but he didn’t want the dressing. Peter and Rhiannon end up together. After Alun died, his and Rhiannon’s daughter married Peter and Muriel’s son. In all that, Peter and Muriel separated and he and Rhiannon started talking. They end in an uncertain commitment. There were no grand expressions, no As You Like It/Three’s Company misunderstandings. Peter’s considerably overweight, and though Rhiannon’s still beautiful in her sixties, the “still” is needed; there’s no sex appeal. No stars are crossed. They simply find themselves in a moment with a person they love and they’re happy. Their relationship doesn’t take center stage until the end, a part of life rather than a great drama, but no less amazing and important when stripped of questing knights and boxes of chocolates.
My wife works in publishing. Among her focuses are the science fiction and fantasy genres. A company ago, back when Twilight was topping sales charts with a trail of imitators not far behind, her boss called and said, “I’ve held out as long as I can. They sell too well. Find me a vampire book that doesn’t make me want to puke.” I think Amis wanted to write a love story that didn’t want to make him puke and I don’t believe he thought was possible at the get go. I think he set himself a challenge.
‘I’m saying if you want to talk seriously about that place of yours and the people in it you’ll have to approach the thing in a completely different way, as if you’ve never read a book in your life – well, no, not that exactly, but…’
Peter wasn’t the only one pining for Rhiannon all those years. The book ends with these lines from the character Malcolm’s point of view. Amis gives us a last celebration of love for love’s sake, unrequited, but embraced. Malcom sat down to write.
If she had found love with Peter he was glad, because he had nothing to give her himself. But she had given him something. The poem, his poem, was going to be the best tribute he could pay to the only woman who had ever cried for him.
It’s no less hilarious a book for being about kissy stuff in a subdued kissy way that you could call “on the down low” but probably shouldn’t because of confusion. I recommend it highly.
As promised, another Amis poem.
Wrong Words
Half-shut, our eye dawdles down the page
Seeing the word love, the word death, the word life,
Rhyme-words of poets in a silver age:
Silver of the bauble, not of the knife.Too fluent, drenching with confectionery
One image, one event’s hard outline,
The words of failure’s voluptuary
Descant around love – love of a routine.There follow high words from a thwarted child
Rightly denied what it would foul, threatening
Grown-ups with its death, eager to gild
The pose of writhing with the pose of resigning.But loneliness, the word never said,
Pleads to be recognized through their conceits;
Behind their frantic distortion lies the dread,
Unforced, unblurred, of real defeats:Their real ladies would not follow the book,
Wrong ladies, happy with wrong words, wrong lives
Careening now, they blazed, while none would look,
The distress signals of their superlatives.
