The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship Between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin by Richard Bradford

Author:Richard Bradford [Bradford, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Collections, Letters, Literary Criticism, Poetry
ISBN: 9781849544719
Google: dvetAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00AWN0UHS
Publisher: The Robson Press
Published: 2012-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Then there will be a shift to an acceptance of others as part of his world.

I went to the local library and strolled very slowly back up the main street, pausing to buy two teaspoons and a root of celery, feeling contented with the content that comes from feeling that the world is all right, even if I am all wrong. The pavement outside the Union Hall (over the Cooperative Stores) was scattered with confetti, and inside they were dancing and drinking and singing Let the rest of the world go by.

He feels a sense of unaffiliated tenderness, not denying himself the ‘contented’ observation of moments of commitment, happiness, experienced by others. Next he turns to a more recondite contemplative mood: ‘as you know, or have guessed, I am always, emotionally, “on the hop”! by feeling bound to “explain” why, if you mean so much to me, I don’t “prewve it”. I always feel so defensive about this’ (L to Monica, 9 October 1955). It sounds like a prose version of one of his poems.

When he wrote to her of Amis, that ‘I’ve grown tired of all my friends except you … I’m through with this. Basically. You have shown me better things!’ (3 May 1955), his declaration was prophetic but not quite in the way that it seemed at the time. As far as Amis knew they would remain friends, but Monica had enabled Larkin to sideline his creative preoccupation with him.

In 1957 Amis had applied for the post of Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University in the United States, was accepted and arranged with Swansea to give up his lectureship for the forthcoming academic year.

By the end of the 1950s Swansea had become the fulcrum of Amis’s personal, professional and creative life. It had provided him with his first full-time job, his and Hilly’s first permanent home, their children had grown up there, Lucky Jim had been born there and without it Lewis and Bowen would not have existed. It enfolded and bespoke the tensions of his marriage, which had on several occasions almost ended there but had survived, precariously. Leaving it would not, he knew, miraculously transform his personality, habits and inclinations, but at the same time he suspected that a complete change of place and environment, a detachment from ever-present memories, would be at least a gesture towards optimism, alteration. He began to think seriously about leaving Wales for good during his academic year in the United States in 1958–9. Princeton had offered him a two-year extension of his contract, and he was tempted.

One Fat Englishman would be based on many of his experiences in the United States, but perversely. A more economical and honest account of the visit was written, to Larkin, shortly after his return to Swansea (30 July 1959). He had met and listened to a number of jazz players who had featured in his letters to Larkin over the previous fifteen years; the imagined presences behind the records had become real.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.