The Letters of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader

Author:Zachary Leader [Leader, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007441129
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+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]

TO MICHAEL RUBINSTEIN – 22 SEPTEMBER 1960

53 Glanmor Road, Uplands, Swansea, Glamorgan.

Dear Mr. Rubinstein,

Thank you for your letter, which I should have answered sooner had I not been unreachably away on holiday when it arrived here.1

I do indeed favour the publication of LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, and am quite willing to give evidence in the proceedings, if required. I enclose a short statement setting out my views on the matter.

It strikes me, as one who knows nothing whatever about these matters, that there are some potential difficulties about a defence based on the “This is a great work of literature” line, and that there may be some value in my own “Let us have the whole truth on someone who has had such a profound influence” approach.2 But no doubt, if there is anything to be gained along these lines, it will already have occurred to you.

Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Yours sincerely,

Kingsley Amis

I strongly support the publication of the unexpurgated edition of LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER as being for the public good. Opinion may vary on the question of the work’s artistic merits, as on the merits of its author’s writings as a whole. But it seems to me of the utmost importance that the entirety of these writings, including, that is

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