The Letters of Kingsley Amis Review

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(More customer reviews)Amis's letters are a lot of fun, as you might expect. Amis is often as outraged and funny as in his best fiction (especially in the letters to Larkin). Often in literary appraisals he is acute, and he always seems true to something in himself, so that even when one disagrees--i. e., T. S. Eliot is not simply a pretentious bore--one goes along.
Good as this correspondence is, it isn't up to Larkin's letters because Amis doesn't believe or feel as deeply as Larkin does, nor does he have as focussed a perspective as Larkin, so the humor isn't set set off in such sharp contradistinction to a fundamental seriousness. Yet you keep reading because the book clears away cant and intellectual fustian so vigorously. Moreover, it gives just enough glimpse of Amis's biography: a sad, messy counterpoint spreads out in the background: the meanderings of a brilliant man with a zillion reactions and nothing firm to attach them to.
Larkin's parody of his own poem "Days" on page 1040 is not to be missed; it's in one of Leader's helpful footnotes.
This book weighs a couple of pounds, so is hard to hold--to be read at table rather than in bed. Couldn't the publisher have used lighter weight paper and given us smaller type and less margin?

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In 1954, Kingsley Amis grabbed the attention of the literary world as one of the Angry Young Men with his first novel Lucky Jim. He maintained a public image of blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion until his death in 1995. In his letters, he confirms the legendary aspects of his reputation, and much more. This collection contains more than eight hundred letters that divulge the secrets of the artist and the man, with an honesty and immediacy rare in any biography or memoir.Amis, so assured in his pronouncements on fellow writers, grapples privately with fears, self-doubts, ambitions, and personal disasters. He is wildly funny, indulging in mordant gossip and astonishing frankness with his intimate friends and lovers. Some letters are dashed off with signature frustration; others are written with painstaking and painful circumspection. They make vivid the triumphs and tumult of his life and his times, from post-war Britain through the Thatcher era, as well as his attractions to women, jazz, drink, and the comic possibilities of the English language. As an intellectual pugilist who took no prisoners, Kingsley Amis had few peers. These letters, at times scandalous, at times tragic, reinforce his historical relevance and literary stature.

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