The Letters of Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis

The Letters of Kingsley Amis by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780007441129
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2000-02-14T23:00:00+00:00


TO J.H. McCALLUM – 24 AUGUST 1960

53 Glanmor Road, Uplands, Swansea, Glam., G.B.

Dear John,

I am really delighted to hear that TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU has drawn one or two cheers from you and colleagues. Authors pretend not to care what their publishers think, but it’s usually a pretty hollow act.

I’m afraid your list of suggestions arrived too late for me to do anything with them: Gollancz were really insistent that my proof went back to them with the minimum delay. So that relieves me from the necessity of having to answer your points. Out of interest, though, I will try to deal with the more major points, those in the main body of your letter.1 Taking them in order:

Patrick’s succumbing is depressing, and is meant to be. I wanted some pretty dark places in the comedy, and this is one.

Ormerod-Edgerstoune. You are right, but to correct things would have meant a major revision (and the weakness itself is, I think, only minor).

No, it is really enormously important that Jenny be confronted with evidence of apparent moral failure at that moment. It is what makes her return to Patrick, whom she had just rejected. And the remoteness of Miss Sinclair and John Whittaker is supposed to illustrate how unexpectedly and deviously these things can happen: you can err through pure inadvertence.

See point 1. The drunkenness is a dramatisation of the ‘unfairness’ Jenny complains about in sexual relations.

That’s about it. Thank you for all the good care you are taking of me; for all the NEW MAPS OF HELL reviews you kindly sent; and above all for saying you liked TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU. It really was a relief and a reviver.

Yours ever,

Kingsley

[TLS: Harcourt]



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