The day the music died

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
in a library

I know where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news that Philip Larkin had died. I was driving to work through Durham and was on that section of road right after Duke University Rd. becomes W. Chapel Hill St. I was listening to Morning Edition on WUNC 91.5 FM. And since Larkin had died the day before, on December 2, I know from the 1985 calendar that I heard the news on a Tuesday.
    Larkin was a librarian and a poet. He was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), just as Kingsley's son Martin was a contemporary of Christopher Hitchens (both born 1949). They all knew, liked, and wrote about one another.
    Hitchens introduced Larkin's main poetic theme, death, in the prologue of his memoir, Hitch-22, in the course of talking about having been prematurely "killed off" by a London magazine that contained the sentence, "Martin [Amis] was literary editor of the New Statesman, working with the late Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes...." [p. 12]
    Julian Barnes had titled his own meditation on death Nothing to Be Frightened Of¹. To Larkin, as with Woody Allen, it certainly was something to be frightened of. But whereas Allen didn't (and presumably still doesn't) want to be there when it happens, Larkin didn't want to be dead, and he wasn't consoled by the thought that when he was dead, he wouldn't be dead, because he wouldn't be:

Philip Larkin...observes in his imperishable "Aubade" that [not knowing that you are dead] is exactly the thing about the postmortem condition that actually does and must make one afraid:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true....
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear....[p. 14, Hitch-22]

But given that I blog daily, whether I have anything to say or not, it was because of another bit about Larkin that I'm writing this article today. (Let's not dwell on death for now.)
    As I indicated recently, I've been reading Kingsley Amis's Memoirs. It has a chapter on Philip Larkin:

[Larkin] always knew where he stood, never fooled himself or said anything he did not mean. When he told you he felt something, you could be quite sure he did feel it, a priceless asset to a poet, and a poet of feeling and mood at that.
    The same quality ensured that when he had nothing to say he said nothing, a turn of mind that helped him not to write any bad poems. [emphasis mine; at about 2 hours, 25 minutes in the digital recording I'm listening to]

    That is, I wanted to take this occasion to say something that I do have to say: I apologize for the times I've had nothing to say, and said it.
_______________

1. A couple of quotes from Barnes's book can be found at http://moristotle.blogspot.com/2008/12/it-is-difficult-for-us-to-contemplate.html and http://moristotle.blogspot.com/2008/12/other-possibilities-beyond-brute.html.

"Have some gin instead"

Kingsley Amis taught at
Vanderbilt University
in the late 1960s

Martin Amis is a major figure in Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. Martin's father, the English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), is also a presence in Hitchens's memoir.
    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]

Word games

Robert Conquest
(b. 1917)

So far, I've had three suggestions for the final line of Wednesday's limerick,

There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
    So this elderly menace
    Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________

all from my old college friend Jon:

We did it in a bed and said "Oh, yes."
And all that was required was togas.
Straight sex, rats, does not rhyme with Stoke Poges.

I like these, but I'm disapponted by Oh, yes's and togas's failing to include a rhyme for "Stoke" and "poke," and, of course, the clever third line repeats the given first line.
    Jon's first two suggestions are easy to adjust:

Where he did it in bed and said [choke] "Oh, yes!"
Where they managed the deed in bloke togas.

(I think togas came in men's and women's styles!)
    I don't expect to find "the solution" later in Hitchens's book, but in reading on I found something even better, more about word games, of which, we have to admit, writing limericks is one:

I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead....[p. 130]
    I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, they can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin [Amis, son of Kingsley] was—is—a genius at this sort of thing. It arose—arises—from his willingness to devote real time to the pitiless search for the apt resonance....[p. 164]
    Something of the same was true of the "Friday lunch" that has now become the potential stuff of a new "Bloomsbury" legend...There was never the intention or design that it become a "set" or a "circle," and of course if there had been any such intention, the thing would have been abortive. The Friday lunch began to simply "occur" in the mid-1970s, and persisted into the early 1980s, and is now cemented in place in several memoirs and biographies. Let me try and tell you something of how it was.
    It began, largely at Martin's initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot's successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer's literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Time's op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell's masterwork [A Dance to the Music of Time] and among Mark's aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: "It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less [sic] than three times."...The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn't otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae....[pp. 168-169]
    ...but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick [emphasis mine]...always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well....
    Simple "versified filth"—Amis senior's crushing condemnation of most popular limericks—was not allowed.
    Indeed insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the "Seven Ages of Man" shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
    Then fucks, and then fights
    Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

This is not the only example of Conquest's genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik "experiment" in five lines? Barely a problem:

There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
    That's a lot to have done in
    But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in. [pp. 173-174]

There's probably another blog entry to come of this. I see that on p. 435, the index entry for "word games" also gives reference to pp. 264-266.

I used to think that my limerick, "No End in Sight" (November 26, 2006):

Religious war burns on and beleaguers
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
    But it brings no relief
    From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.

was pretty darn good, and maybe it isn't bad, but it compresses far less into itself than either of the examples from Conquest.

Shopkeeper's fantasy

In Kingsley Amis's comic novel The Folks That Live on the Hill, the Asian brothers who run the shop where Harry Caldecot ran into Popsy a while back now await opening time:

It was a bright clear sunny morning in the few minutes before the off, before the double doors from the street were thrown back and over the spotless composition floor and among the impeccably squared-off shelves, the videos sorted and spaced, every journal the precise distance from its neighbour so that the identifying signs of all were clearly visible, the greetings cards set out in their categories for every relation and relationship and contingency, including not a few wishing people well in tackling their new responsibilities or congratulating them on having passed their exams—before over that floor and among those shelves and the rest the British (or English) children came with their soiled clothing and snotty fingers, their seniors dropping sweet-wrappers, knocking piles of envelopes off shelves, holding the corner of a magazine back for a couple of seconds only but long enough to render it unsaleable at full price, dislodging and instantly treading on markers or tubes of paint or glue, putting everything they took out to look at back in the wrong place—oh, and fumbling with purses, mislaying lists, thinking about looking for credit card or pen and cheque-book and cheque-card on being told a second or third time the sum required. Howard had more than once said he would like to get everything set up one morning and then simply bloody not open the doors and let them gawp and go on gawping at what lay just out of their reach. Charles could see that was just Howard's fun (he was far too greedy to mean it for one thing) but every other five minutes he also saw what he meant.... [pp. 185-186]

Desire

My alter ego Harry Caldecot, in Kingsley Amis's comic novel The Folks That Live on the Hill, has a brother Freddie, a poet, on whose behalf Harry has concocted a writing regimen to gain Freddie some respite from his oppressive wife Désirée. Freddie and Désirée have come to dinner with Harry and Clare, their sister, who lives with Harry:

He became conscious that Désirée was sort of staring at him. He smiled encouragingly, instead of asking her what she bloody wanted.

To the believers go the spoils

"As far as I am aware," writes Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great,

there is no country in the world today where slavery is still practiced where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran. This returns us to the retort delivered, in the very early days of the Republic, to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. These two slaveholders had called on the ambassador of Tripoli in London to ask him by what right he and his fellow Barbary potentates presumed to capture and sell American crews and passengers from ships using the Strait of Gibralter. (It is now estimated that between 1530 and 1780 more than one and a quarter million Europeans were carried off in this way.) As Jefferson reported to Congress:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be found and to make slaves of all they could take prisoners.

      Ambassador Abdrahaman went on to mention the requisite price of ransom, the price of protection from kidnapping, and last but not least his own personal commission in these proceedings. (Religion once again betrays its man-made conveniences.) As it happens, he was quite right in what he said about the Koran. The eighth sura, revealed at Medina, deals at some length with the justified spoils of war and dwells continually on the further postmortem "torments of fire" that await those who are defeated by the believers. It was this very sura that was to be used only two centuries later by Saddam Hussein to justify his mass murder and dispossession of the people of Kurdistan. [p. 181]

"Spoils of War"

If I were going to post some comments on this, I thought I'd better have read the eighth sura myself, so I got out my copy of Thomas Cleary's English translation of The Qur'an and three times read the sura titled "Spoils of War." It opens as I think all of the suras do with the invocation, "In the name of God, the Benevolent, the Merciful." Then:

1. They ask you about the spoils of war.
      Say, "The spoils are for God and the messenger
            [i.e., the Prophet Muhammad].
      So be conscious of God,
      and reconcile dissension among you.
      And obey God and God's messenger,
      if you are believers."...
II...
12. Then your Lord inspired the angels,
      "I am with you, so steady those who believe.
      I will cast fear into the hearts
      of those who scoff,
      so strike above their necks,
      and strike off their fingertips."
13. That is because they contended
      with God and the messenger of God;
      and for anyone who contends
      with God and the messenger of God,
      God is severe in punishment:
14. "There you are, so taste it—
      for the atheists there's the torment of the fire."
15. Oh believers, when you meet
      the atheists on the march,
      never turn your backs to them.
16. Whoever turns his back on that day,
      except when turning to fight
      or withdrawing to regroup
      has brought down wrath from God;
      and his abode is hell,
      and what a miserable destination!...
V.
38. Say to those who scoff,
      "If you desist, what is past
      will be forgiven you;
      but if you resume,
      the example of the ancients
      has already occurred."...
41. And know that a fifth
      of anything you gain as spoils
      is for God and his messenger,
      and for relatives, and orphans,
      and the poor, and the traveler,
      if you do believe in God
      and what We sent down to Our servant
      on the day of distinction,
      the day of the meeting of the two armies;
      for God has power over everything...
VII.
57. So if you prevail over them in war,
      then disperse their followers with them,
      that they may take a lesson.
58. And if you really fear
      treachery from a people,
      default on them equally;
      for God does not like the treacherous.
IX.
65. O Prophet, rouse the believers to battle:
      if there are twenty of you
      who persevere patiently,
      they will defeat two hundred;
      and if there are a hundred of you,
      they will overcome a thousand
      of those who scoff,
      because these are the people
      who do not understand....
X.
70. O Prophet, say to the captives in your hands, "If
      God recognizes good in your hearts,
      God will give you better than what was taken
      from you, and God will forgive you.
      And God is very forgiving, most merciful."
71. But if they intend to betray you,
      they have already betrayed God;
      so God has given power over them.
      And God is all-knowing, most wise....[pp. 84-88]

      What a fluttering thrill this must give the believer. To be led by an all-powerful (but benevolent and merciful) father protector. And to be assured of victory on the battlefield. But what a shudder for the freethinker to read even the invocation:

In the name of God, the Benevolent (but not to me!), the Merciful (but not to me!)

I am, against these warriors of God, destined to become spoils, a slave. Or have my head lopped off, or my fingertips, or both!
      "Of course," I'm thinking, the belief that this twaddle came from God is a fantasy. It's just men, with no more human resources than nonbelievers have, whipping themselves up into the delusion that they are not only irresistible and indestructible, but also morally superior into the bargain. But people so whipped up are not to be messed with lightly. Our own cops are often sorely challenged to take down a crack-head.

Kill Alle

Less than an hour after preparing the material above for posting, I was startled out of impending sleep while listening to Kingsley Amis's The Folks That Live on the Hill:

While [Fiona, Harry's stepdaughter by a previous marriage] waited for the minicab she sang a little—a hundred years ago she and her parents too had thought she might make a singer, which was a laugh if ever there was one.

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln
Und mit Fünfzig Kanonen
Wird leigen am Kai...

She had known some German too at the same sort of stage, which was another laugh, even bigger when you thought about it, but she had long forgotten what it was exactly that the ship with eight sails and fifty guns got up to after reaching the quay, though she did remember that at the end the crew asked the girl Jenny who was supposed to be singing the song how many of the people in the town she wanted killed and, speaking not singing the word, she answered, "Alle!" [pp. 128-129]

      For I had heard not the German word "alle" but the Arabic word "Allah," as though the girl Jenny were voicing the secret desire, Death to Allah! Be done with Islam once and for all! My creative hearing struck me as uncannily appropriate in the context of Barbary pirates and sailing ships with cannon. The magical thinking part of myself of course wanted this to be a divine signal of some sort, hopefully telling me:

Right on, Islam is a crock of thuggery and brutishness, too many of its Arab adherents caught up in a death cult stemming from some no doubt interesting psychological complex, if not, as Thomas L. Friedman and others have suggested, from their ambivalently feeling at the same time both superior in their status with God and inferior on social, cultural, and scientific scales.

But such a reaction on my part could be but the mirror image of the predictable response of "good Muslims" (following another of their seeming moral imperatives) to condemn Hitchens for not really knowing anything about Islam, by which they really only mean that he doesn't know it sympathetically and apologetically—the way they do—so how dare him tell them about Islam. He, they jeer, emphasizes the wrong things, they emphasize the right things (the same way that Christians play down Leviticus and play up God's loving mankind so much that He gave his only begotten Son, etc.).
      So I'll not claim that hearing "Allah" was any sort of divine inspiration or sign, but will only assume that it was an unconscious mental act helping me deal with cognitive dissonance, as if I'd decided at the last minute to buy a Ford instead of a Chevy and proceeded to see a lot of bad Chevies on the road, so wasn't I lucky I switched to a Ford.

At my time of life

The character Harry Caldecot in Kingsley Amis's comic novel The People That Live on the Hill is the one that, for "demographic reasons," I suppose I have to identify with the most. In this passage he visits a friend:

"Cheers, darling," said Maureen.
      "It's lovely to see you."
      "Listen, why didn't you telephone before you came? I might not have been here. I'm quite often not at this time, or I might have been having Bernie round."
      "Oh, Bernie, of course."
      "You know Bernie," she said impatiently. She smoked with her cigarette pointed at him and her elbow against her chest, like a beauty of a bygone era.
      "No, but I'm sure I can imagine him."
      "He's an actor who happens to play the guitar rather well."
      "Yes, I thought I could imagine him."
      "Anyway, why didn't you telephone, because I might easily have been having him round."
      "Well, you weren't, were you, and I don't know, I suppose I didn't think, and what of it, it's only a step from Shepherd's Hill Road."
      "You weren't by any chance hoping I'd be out or otherwise engaged?"
      Harry moved away from the chair he had taken and went and sat next to her on the Leonard-period sofa [Leonard had been her husband], and she instinctively shifted up to make room for him. "Would that be like me, do you think, as you've known me?"
      "No, you sod. No, of course it wouldn't be like you. That's true enough."
      "There you are, then."
      "Made it more of a bit of excitement, though, perhaps, not knowing?"
      "Well, now you mention it, I suppose there might be a bit of that in it, I really don't know."
      "Yeah." She did a great scowling caricature of a wink. "So the old bad penny's turned up again, eh?"
      "Bad pennies are supposed to be things people don't like to see turning up."
      "I beg your pardon, Professor."
      "No, I just meant I hoped you weren't saying you were sorry I'd come."
      "Do me a favour."
      He leaned forward and picked up in his fingers two deliquescent lumps of ice from the bowl. They seemed to become measurably smaller as soon as they hit the surface of his gin and tonic, but it was the general idea that counted. Settling back again, he snuggled a little closer to Maureen on the sofa. "This is jolly cosy," he said.
      When they were in their second drink she went and lowered the venetian blind over the window that looked out on the front of the house, working the twiddler at the side to turn the slats vertical or someway in that direction...
      ..."If you really want to be an angel there's some more ice in the kitchen. No rush."
      When he brought the ice, everything was as it had been when he arrived except that she was playing an Ella Fitzgerald record on her small distortion-rich machine (c. 1968) and joining in with some of the words...
      ..."Come on, just a small one before you go. Or not?"
      "Or not? Whence the sudden urgency? And what the importance? People say or not these days as if the sands had started running out. Yes, thanks, I'd love one...This is jolly nice," he said parking himself on the sofa and snuggling up to Maureen again. "Getting away from everything. Really nice." In fact it struck him as so nice that at one stage there seemed a fair chance that she would have had to let the blind down again, but he remembered how late it was getting and the moment passed. Not long after that he said he would walk back to Fitzherbert Avenue and pick up a cab on its way down to Buckland Village. She went along to the front door with him.
      "It's been lovely," he said, and kissed her affectionately. "See you soon."
      "Well, that's up to you, isn't it, a bit?"
      "What? How do you mean?"
      "Do you realize how long it's been since the last time?"
      "No? Why, has it been a specially long time?"
      "Not really. Well, I was going to ask you." Her face and voice went into a sort of Dickensian-cockney travesty. "I mean it wouldn't be, now would it, that you've found yourself some other little fancy piece of work in Muswell Hill or likewise, what is more appealing than your poor little Maureen what you have known these many years."
      "What? Good God, no." He was genuinely astonished, if only because she knew so well how lazy he was. "What a, what a ridiculous bloody idea. At my time of life?...." [pp. 76-79]

Ah, that time of life. I'm coming to know it well.

"A hoot sounded in the street..."

On June 10 I reported having read a review of a new biography of Kingsley Amis and subsequently adding his name to my list of authors to read. I've been continually in a state of delight as I read his 1990 novel The People That Live on the Hill. (And it's not even one of the especially funny novels mentioned in the review.) Here's an excerpt:

In the post office [Harry Caldecote] picked up more or less at random a small packet of airmail envelopes and made for the counter. Here he found he was standing next to a kind of elderly small boy dressed like a conscript in some half-starved oriental army. When an unsmiling glance of recognition had come his way he identified this person as the dreaded Popsy, girl-fiend of Bunty, his niece by marriage. She seemed to be daring him to speak.
      "Hallo, Popsy, how are you, haven't seen you for a long time. How's old Bunty?"
      This was obviously so devoid of insight and style as not to be worth answering. She was buying some packets of coloured sticky labels of the sort that might be used (it occurred to him later) to distinguish one person's belongings from another's. Harry watched her intently while she had her purchase put in a bag, paid for it and was given change, not because he wanted to in the least but through having somehow entered a state of light hypnosis. It lasted until she had moved to near the door and he had followed her.
      "Did you say something to me about Bunty?"
      "Yes." He wanted to say something else to her now, on the subject of her going and fucking herself, but stuck to his original point. "I wondered how she was."
      "Oh. Well I'm afraid I'm not really up to date on how Bunty is at the moment. I haven't spoken to her for over a week it must be. She was all right then."
      "I...what...I..."
      "That flat she's in, I'm not living there any more, I'm in South Kensington now." To save him from looking a bit of a twit by objecting that actually as anybody could see she was in Shepherd's Hill now, Popsy added, "I'm just over here to see some of my stuff being picked up."
      "You're moving out for good, then," he said without much sense of breaking new ground.
      "Life had simply become impossible."
      "Really?"
      "I don't know whether you think you have any influence over her, over Bunty."
      "Oh well, perhaps I do, I mean perhaps I have."
      "After all you got her into that flat, didn't you?"
      "I thought I'd made it clear I merely happened to have heard it was vacant at the right time."
      "She needs someone to tell her other people don't belong to her as if they were her private property, they have their own lives to lead."
      "I don't think I've ever met anybody in my life who needs someone to tell her that less than Bunty does."
      "In any case it isn't just Bunty. That Piers [Harry's 35-year-old son, who lives in the same flat] needs to pull himself together as well, in a big way."
      "I couldn't agree more, I've often tried to put the point to him myself."
      "Young lord and master. Do you know what he does for a living?"
      "Do tell me, I've given up trying to find out."
      "I don't know, I just thought you ought to, in your position."
      "Well there are an awful lot of things I ought to know which I don't suppose—"
      "There certainly are." Popsy's bottom teeth were visible between her thin lips. Her eyes moved as if in rapid thought. "Here's another. There was a fellow round the other day making inquiries about that Piers."
      "What sort of man?"
      "I don't know, I wasn't there." She gave a grim laugh out of a thriller. "The sort of man who makes inquiries, I shouldn't wonder."
      "What sort of inquiries?"
      "As I said, I wasn't there. But evidently they boded no good at all to Master bloody Piers."
      Harry glared back. "Well, Miss Popsy-Poops, all I can say is that if for your own good reasons you want to make me feel fed up or concerned or frightened about Piers, who's been in more kinds of trouble than I guess you have so far, then you'll have to do a bloody sight better than that. Your trouble is you've plenty of ill-will but not the imagination or the practical knowledge or I dare say nasty enough associates to carry it through. Good afternoon to you."
      At that point the two moved apart...
      She had managed to convey greater hostility...than anything in her words. In addition she had made him feel he was responsible for everything she had alluded to, and for much else besides, things he could never even have known about, but he was used to getting such teleaesthetic messages even from the sort of women that were supposed to like men. Something in his manner had told her, quite likely without her knowledge, that he was feeling pleased with life, and she had instinctively moved in to see about that. Well, he was not going to let himself be got down by a bloody dyke at his time of life....
      [One of the two Asian brothers who ran the shop] handed him a small leaflet of stiff pink paper. Shepherd Hill Neighbours Help, it said.
      "You've got a dog, haven't you, Mr Caldecote? This lot'll exercise it for you. Also come to visit you if you feel lonely....Mind you, I doubt whether any of those services are really intended for you. I mean you're not from a black or ethnic minority or gay or disabled like it says, are you?"
      "No. No."
      "No. And you're not regardless of age, creed or religion either, are you?"
      "I should say not."
      "You know what I think, I think that lady you were talking to just now, she's more the kind of person these people are anxious to involve, as they call it. Or am I completely wrong?"
      "Your powers of observation are extraordinary."
      "I'm just interested in human nature, Mr Caldecote." A hoot sounded in the street.... [p. 71-74]

And from this reader, too, a hoot—of laughter. I hope that my excerpt provided enough for you to appreciate the wickedly observant satire of the "novelist of manners" that Kingsley Amis seems to have been (he died in 1995). If not enough for that, then enough, I hope, to encourage you to pick up this novel and join me in reading it from the beginning for its mordant humor, its marvelous precision of observation of people's foiblous ways^*....
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* Right, I made "foiblous" up, but it should be in the dictionary, don't you agree?

Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I don't have the right to publish long excerpts from copyrighted work (such as the novels of Kingsley Amis). I console myself with the thought that I have so few readers—a few friends—I can hardly be said to be "publishing" anything. And some of those who read this excerpt might be led to explore Amis's work....

A Poke in the Ribs

Midway through David Lodge's industrially dark Nice Work, I'm finding it as solidly enjoyable as its prequels, Changing Places and Small World, and I'm glad that I'm only about half-way through his fictional oeuvre. And this morning, reading last week's New York Times Book Review's review of a new biography, I may have identified the next English writer for my list. From A. O. Scott's review of The Life of Kingsley Amis, by Zachary Leader:

Amis did leave behind a credo of sorts, in the form of the following set of rhymed and numbered propositions, the fourth and last in a series of "Poems about Oxford," composed in 1950:

Here is a list of things I have understood.

i. There are only two sorts of things, bad and good.
ii. When he gets the good, a man ought to be glad.
iii. When he gets the bad, a man ought to be sad.
iv. Some of the good are joking, smoking, soaking,
And (if you will permit the expression) poking.
v. In a bad place these are absent, or even banned.
vi. In a good place they are frequent, or ready to hand.
vii. And I want as much of them as I can stand.

Anyway, on pp. 148-149 of Lodge's Nice Work, Vic Wilcox's secretary continues to lobby her boss to use nude photographs of her daughter for a company advertising calendar:

"I believe Brian mentioned to you his idea for a Pringle's calendar," she said, hovering at his shoulder.
    "Yes," said Vic, "he did."
    "He said you weren't keen."
    "That's putting it mildly."
    "It would be a great chance for Tracey," said Shirley wistfully.
    "A great chance to degrade herself," said Vic, handing her the letter.
    "What d'you mean?" said Shirley indignantly.
    "You really want pictures of your daughter in the altogether stuck up on walls for anybody to look at?"
    "I don't see the harm...What about art galleries?"
    "Art galleries?"
    "They're full of nudes. Old masters."
    "That's different."
    "I don't see why."
    "You don't get blokes going into an art gallery and staring at a picture of Venus or whatever and nudging each other in the ribs saying, 'I wouldn't mind going through her on a Saturday night.'"
    "Ooh!" gasped Shirley, adverting her face.
    "Or taking the picture home to wank off with," Vic continued remorselessly.
    "I'm not listening," Shirley said, retreating rapidly to her office. "I don't know what's got into you."
    No more do I, Vic Wilcox thought to himself, feeling slightly ashamed of his outburst, as the door closed behind her. It was in fact several weeks before he realised that he was in love with Robyn Penrose.

Vic's social awareness has been aroused by his few weeks' association with his "shadow" from Rummidge University....