Literary corner

This article on the Guardian website reminded me about one of my favourite books - The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis.  Well worth a read.  The article deals with the plot and so on but suffice to say it's a weird combination of brilliantly funny and horribly sad.

I tend to apply a famine or feast approach to authors, so I haven't read much Kingsley in recent years following a period of a major obsession.  This madness peaked with the purchase of his collected letters, all 1212 pages of them. They sit on my bookcase as the literary equivalent of ordering an enormous cake when you're not even hungry. Selected randomly, I give you the following indispensible classic from 27 May 1964:

Dear Miss Barber

I hereby resign from the Society of Authors.  I was just about prepared to go on paying £2-12-6 a year to an organisation that does nothing for me, but when the price goes up to £5-5-0 I jib.

Yours sincerely etc

I would put it in the bog but I'm not sure how much the missus wants to sprain her wrists wrestling with a gigantic brick just to read racist letters to Philip Larkin.

The recent publicity around Martin son-of-Kingsley's latest pile of pretentious wank-fodder has also made me nostalgic.  One of the happiest days of my life was when I realised that no one was making me read London Fields and its endless turgid sentences, and that I could just stop and read something else instead.  The only Martin Amis worth reading is his autobiography Experience, and that's because it's mainly about Kingsley and Fred West (one of whose victims was Martin's cousin).  Just skip any reference to his teeth or Saul Bellow.

That's also where I got my favourite Fred West fact - that he used to munch onions like anyone else would eat an apple.