The Letters of Kingsley Amis - Hardcover

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80 ratings by Goodreads

9780002570954: The Letters of Kingsley Amis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002570955 ISBN 13: 9780002570954

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2000

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The most eagerly awaited, and scandalously entertaining, collection of correspondence since The Larkin Letters (1992).

Throughout his life, Sir Kingsley Amis was a prolific, brilliant and outrageous correspondent. In his letters to friends such as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he was able to unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than seven hundred letters contained in this volume – the vast majority of them never seen in print before – contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings.

The letters reveal Amis’s youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his spectacularly successful first novel, Lucky Jim; his passionate love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about the vicissitudes of family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his relationship with his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; and his development into one of the country’s most revered – yet also uniquely controversial – literary figures.

Seldom can any writer have provided such a lively and coruscating self-portrait as is revealed by these letters. Above all, they comprise a definitive, and devastating, riposte to the simplistic but widely-held view of Amis’s life as a progression from ‘Angry Young Man’ to curmudgeonly establishment figure.

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Review:

As well as being a prolific novelist, Kingsley Amis loved to write letters. And whether one views him as a comic genius or misanthropic bar-fly, his literary output alone justifies the publication of this comprehensive collection. Here are fulminations to the press, laddish porn-swapping with best friend Philip Larkin, along with numerous communications, charming and vitriolic, to editors and agents.

Those seeking revelations might be disappointed but browsers will find a treasury of poignant detail. As an undergraduate, Amis advises Larkin on girls; he's still doing so 30 years later. As a father, he cloaks pride with irony ("Scoundrelly Mart has sold his novel to the Yanks", he fumes, a propos of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers). An avowed enemy of sentiment, he pens touching notes to his second wife, replete with pet names and illustrations. Later, he is vulnerable--terrified by alcoholism, widening waistbands and false teeth. This collection does not pretend to provide a key to his complex personality, but amply fulfils Amis's own prophecy: "What a feast is awaiting chaps ... when our ... letters come out". Not even appetites of Amis's proportions could digest this feast at one sitting--The Letters of Kingsley Amis is a book to be savoured over a lifetime. --Matthew Baylis

Review:

‘You can put this book in front of people and watch them crack up’
David Sexton, Evening Standard

‘A bracing delight’
Julie Burchill, Guardian

‘Better than Evelyn Waugh’
Economist

‘A wonderful, wickedly enjoyable collection’
Andrew Vine, Yorkshire Post

‘Hugely entertaining’
Katharine Whitehorn, Observer

‘A feast’
Blake Morrison, Independent on Sunday

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