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| Kingsley Amis taught at Vanderbilt University in the late 1960s |
Over the past two months I've sampled as many of Martin's and Kingsley's books (about a dozen) as I could download in digitally recorded format, both fiction and not. None of them appealed to me and proved as readable as Kingsley's 1991 Memoirs. It's unputdownable, more fun than Hitchens's own memoir, which is a lot longer and weightier, discoursing seriously as it does on international politics and such matters.
I've been tempted several times in the first two hours of listening to Memoirs to quote something here for your delectation. Here's perhaps the best so far:
John Wain [minor English poet, novelist, and critic] slotted in his three years of undergraduate residence while I had been away at the war. He had been found unfit for military service (lungs), like Philip [Larkin] (eyes), like others who, when counted in with those who had craftily evaded service elsewhere, like Dylan Thomas, made up quite a total and suggests, as part of an answer to the old question, Why were the Great War poets better than the Second War lot? Because a good half of the Second War lot managed to stay out of it.
I digress, however....
I found [John Wain] most attractive, lightly caustic with a voice and manner to match, knowledgeable, worldly wise, a budding academic without crap....
...He was full of stories, like the one about the sherry bottle that held something other than sherry. The inconvenience of his rooms in Redding had led him to pee habitually into a bottle last thing at night, emptying it first thing in the morning. Once, about to hand some guests glasses of what was meant to be Tio Pepe, he had noticed at the last moment that this was not so and deduced in the nick of time that what had gone down the pan that morning was the Tio Pepe.
"Hold it," he had blurted, "this isn't good enough for you. It's piss, in fact. Have some gin instead".... [at about 1:45 into a 12:52 reading]
Funny story.
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