Letters of Kingsley Amis, review Pat Boran

'The Letters of Kingsley Amis. Edited by Zachary Leader. Harper Collins.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Business Post)

'By letters or by scyence,' wrote William Caxton in 1483, 'is the man made semblable or lyke to god,' a predictable enough take on the already common notion of the 'man of letters' (though that exact phrase wouldn't find currency for another two centuries). What is interesting about this notion of the man or, grudgingly it would seem, woman of letters is that the phrase fails to distinguish between letters (ie correspondence), letters (ie qualifications after a name) and letters (the alphabet, ie simple literacy). In it all three become things that confer power on the user and, if we are to believe Caxton, sometimes super-human power.

Almost invariably, though, while the collected letters of the great and respected throw light into mysterious corners in which such overlappings and connections are formed, they also illuminate murky depths and embarrassing secrets. In truth, however editors may protest, it is often this very darkness that draws public interest to what are scraps and off-cuts of the real thing. 'Though much of what he writes about women will be deplored...' begins one sentence in Zachary Leader's short and relatively straightforward introduction, while the following one commences, 'Though often malicious about friends...' But despite the anticipated turn-arounds (Amis' love letters are 'warm, open, tender, even abject in their expression of feeling,' we are told), it is hard to stomach the early smugness or later misogyny.

A major reason for this is that readers will feel that the letters (or a writer in particular) are the truth while the fiction, and the poems, are the construction, the mask. But is this necessarily so? Or is it possible that the 'man of letters' is at all times, if to varying degrees, in disguise?

In the case of Kingsley Amis, the answer is a hesitant yes. One mask replaces another. That even private correspondence is a performance which will in time sit alongside the prose and poems in public view is pointed out by him again and again in these pages, particularly when he addresses the poet Philip Larkin to whom he wrote some 531 letters (along with literature, they shared a passion for jazz), almost half of which make up the earlier and most interesting part of this daunting 1,200-page volume. It is as if Amis and Larkin are reminding each other they are being watched even in their most private moments, which fact in turn leads to a kind of code and shorthand inside which they retreat to rant and carp and simply be unkind about the world.

Dylan Thomas, for instance, was a favourite target. But one can almost forgive nastiness between writers and artists as they struggle to maintain their own voices and obsessions, at least when it's clear that the nastiness is really aimed at the work rather than the individual producing it. Amis however not only frequently oversteps the mark, but as he ages he betrays his own earlier convictions in doing so, all in the guise of intending to shock. So, the young man who joined the Communist Party at Oxford in 1941 knocks Charlie Chaplin in 1983, not just because he can't understand how people imagine the star of The Great Dictator to be funny, but because 'He's a Jeeeew, you see. Like the Marx Brothers. Like Danny Kaye.' It might, of course, be argued that this comment is at least half in jest, but it is the anti-Semitic half that occurs once too often in similar remarks over the half century or so covered here. And, when it comes to jest, a comparison between Groucho Marx's devastatingly funny and erudite correspondence with people like TS Eliot, and Amis' various attempts here, show the author of Lucky Jim to little advantage.

'What a feast is awaiting chaps when we're both dead and our complete letters come out,' Amis writes to Larkin in September 1956, but there is a sense, even then, that the boys' club smugness of the sentiment is due to more than the inclusion of that colloquial 'chaps'. There is even a temptation to see, in this and other details, clues to the misogyny and 'compulsive philandering' (Leader's phrase) that erupted following Amis' divorce from his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1983.

But just as the published work is not the complete story, neither are the letters. In fact, even the two together fall short of a definitive account. As Leader himself points out, there is little here of Amis' drink problem, or the visits to sex therapists that troubled that second marriage or, more mundanely perhaps -- but more tellingly -- of the relationship between himself and his children, of which the novelist Martin is the best known.

Not only did Kingsley Amis not preserve any of that inter-familial correspondence, but even Martin was able to produce 'only a single birthday postcard' from his father, though he could recall one other, what appears to be an undated correction of spelling: 'Note/ whiskey - US and Irish. /whiskey - others / Jolly good luck / Dad.'

Affectionate though it is, the silence that surrounds that little note might as a reminder of the dangers as well as the attractions of the literary life.