Showing posts with label T. S. Eliot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label T. S. Eliot. Show all posts

Monday, September 08, 2025

The Ghost in Hamlet


William Blake: Hamlet and his Father's Ghost (1806)


I remember that when we marked exams in the Auckland University English Department, we tutors were always instructed not to leave any comments - especially nasty ones - on the papers. Instead, we circulated a few stapled sheets for any thoughts we had beyond the bare grade.

The reason for this (I was told) was because there'd been a big fuss a few years before when a student made a formal request to see their script and found it covered with sarcastic marginalia.

Human nature being what it is, these comment-bundles tended to become the academic equivalent of a gag reel. They were carefully collected and burned at the end of each examination season.

Among the quotable quotes one of my colleagues recorded from our Stage 1 Shakespeare exam one year was the following remark about Hamlet: "The question is: is it a Protestant ghost or a Catholic ghost?"

He apparently thought it very risible to have to ascertain the spectre's doctrinal preferences before you decided whether or not you should pay any attention to its advice. It did sound rather funny - as stated - but I suspected at once that this phrase must have come from one of my tutorial students. It was I who had been stressing the differing views on the afterlife held by various Christian sects.



Put simply, is Hamlet's deceased father now located in Purgatory, or in Hell? If the former, his intentions must presumably be good; if the latter, the question is far more equivocal.

When the ghost speaks of the "sulf’rous and tormenting flames" to which he is condemned by day, that sounds very much like hellfire.

However, the rest of his statement would imply otherwise:
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

Ludovico Carracci: Purgatory (1610)


It's hard to read that line about his "foul crimes" being "burnt and purged away" as anything other than a reference to Purgatory. That is, after all, the place where such cleansing occurs. And Purgatory:
is a belief in Catholic theology. It is a passing intermediate state after physical death for purifying or purging a soul. A common analogy is dross being removed from gold in a furnace.
But how old is this doctrine? The idea of praying for the dead appears to have been part of Judeo-Christian practice for a very long time indeed. However:
At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, when the Catholic Church defined, for the first time, its teaching on purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church did not adopt the doctrine. The council made no mention of purgatory as a third place or as containing fire ...
Subsequent papal pronouncements have clarified that "the term does not indicate a place, but a condition of existence."

As for the various Protestant churches, opinions vary according to denomination:
The Church of England, mother church of the Anglican Communion, officially denounces what it calls "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory", but the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and elements of the Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist traditions hold that for some there is cleansing after death and pray for the dead, knowing it to be efficacious. The Reformed Churches teach that the departed are delivered from their sins through the process of glorification.
In other words, you pays your money and you makes your choice.



Returning to Hamlet, though: despite its generally gloomy demeanour, the prince seems convinced by the end of this first encounter that it is "an honest ghost." That was not his initial reaction, though:
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.
There is indeed something very "questionable" about this apparition. It certainly claims to come from Purgatory, but ought we to believe it?



It's thought that Hamlet was written sometime between 1599 and 1601, in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was first published in 1603. The date of composition can be ascertained (to some extent) by some references in the text to the newly-formed company of boy players at Blackfriars theatre, as well as verbal echoes of some of Shakespeare's earlier plays.

This was definitely a time of great political uncertainty. Shakespeare himself only narrowly avoided trouble when his acting company put on a special performance of the play Richard II - which depicts the deposition of a monarch - for the supporters of the Earl of Essex, who mounted an abortive coup against the Queen in early 1601.

It seems a little unlikely, then, that Shakespeare would have been actively promulgating the "Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory" in such troublous times, even if he was (as some suspect) a secret Catholic.


Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum (1514)


Denmark has, of course, been staunchly Protestant since the 1520s, when the Reformation first reached Scandinavia. But that doesn't really help us either way, since Shakespeare's knowledge of the country was probably hazy, and since the actual "events" on which the play is based (as reported in the 13th-century "Life of Amleth" by Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, at any rate) took place in the legendary past of the country.

So we're left with that question: Was this ghost more likely to be regarded as a "spirit of health" or as a "goblin damned" by contemporary playgoers?

The question was definitively resolved - in his own judgement, at any rate - by Professor Ken Larsen of Auckland University. Or so he informed us in the first year tutorials I attended as a callow undergraduate.

Larsen told us that he'd read a book on thaumaturgy from the 1590s which gave a series of clear indications whether or not you could trust a spirit to tell you the truth or not (I'm sorry to say that I don't recall its title).

I was argumentative even in those days, and suggested that even if that was so, it didn't necessarily follow that Shakespeare himself was of the same opinion as the author of the self-help guide to necromancy Larsen was citing as evidence.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean that nowadays lots of people write lots of books about spirits and the supernatural, but just because they're contemporary with us doesn't mean that we agree with them, or that we're even aware of their conclusions. Even in a smaller cultural circle, 1590s London, there could be room for a number of views on the subject."

"What do you mean?" he repeated.

"I mean even though this book gives one clear opinion, Shakespeare may have been unaware of it, or even actively disagreed with it."

"I don't know what you're saying. Are you saying that it's a waste of time to try to gauge contemporary opinion on the subject?"

"No, not at all. I'm just saying that this book can be cited as valuable evidence, but it doesn't necessarily prove that that was what Shakespeare had in mind."

"I don't see what else I can do except what I'm doing. I've told you what the book said. You seem to be disputing that. I don't see what else I can say to make it clearer."

It was all rather frightening. The other students were glaring at me. My point seemed to me so obvious that it was hard to believe he couldn't understand it. Naturally he didn't expect any mere freshman to dispute his learned views - "What, I say? My foot my tutor?", as Prospero puts it when Miranda dares to question him similarly in The Tempest. But it was more than that. He didn't seem willing to concede the simple axiom that evidence (however interesting and relevant) isn't ipso facto conclusive proof.

I got a B+ from him on my essay - the only mark below the A's I received in my whole undergraduate career, I think.

But, as you can tell from my - no doubt somewhat biassed - account of our conversation, I still agree with myself. Larsen was a devotee of theological hairsplitting. He was always pointing out arcane doctrinal points in sixteenth and seventeenth century texts (as I discovered a few years later when I benefitted from his instruction on Spenser and other esoterically inclined poets). But he did seem, nevertheless, to lack what Keats called "negative capability": the ability to remain in doubt on a variety of thorny issues.


Jack Thorne: The Motive and the Cue (2023)


Recently, watching a cinematically projected version of Jack Thorne's stage-play The Motive and the Cue, which records:
the history behind the 1964 Broadway modern-dress production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Richard Burton in a production directed by Sir John Gielgud.
I came across yet another interpretation of Hamlet's father's ghost. Could it be, as Gielgud suggests to his turbulent star, that Hamlet simply didn't like his father? That the real reason for his apparent dilatoriness and indecision throughout the play is because he'd been bullied and belittled by him all his life, and is therefore reluctant - however subliminally - to continue this state of subordination even after the old man's death?

This is, admittedly, meant more as a guide to Burton's brilliantly moody (by all accounts) performance as the melancholy Dane than as a serious theory about the play. But even taken out of context it does help to explain the Oedipal struggle so many have sensed at the root of the drama.


John Gilbert: The Ghost, Gertrude & Hamlet (1867)


The ghost does, after all, reappear. In Act 3, scene 4, just when Hamlet seems to be making progress in explaining and even justifying his odd behaviour to his mother, Queen Gertrude, the ghost suddenly walks in and starts to chide his son for tardiness in exacting revenge:
Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
This is, at that particular moment, distinctly unhelpful advice. Gertrude can neither hear nor see the spirit, and her son's reaction to it persuades her - once and for all - that he's as crazy as a bedbug: "Alas, he’s mad."

So, once again, is this simply an act of tactlessness on the part of the impatient ghost - or is it deliberate sabotage? Is he a malign spirit, stirring up trouble for purposes of personal vengeance - or is he a genuine messenger from beyond, sent to purge all that's "rotten" in the state of Denmark.

Does he come from Purgatory, as a blessed (albeit somewhat erring) spirit - or from Hell, as a damned soul? To a strict Protestant, only the second alternative is really theologically possible. A Catholic could more easily entertain the first theory, though further proof would be necessary to confirm it.

An Anglo-Catholic, in the 1590s, could well be in doubt on such a matter. It's important to stress that Anglicanism is not, strictly speaking, a Protestant denomination. It's always existed in a complex and uneasy negotiation between the two extremes of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. That's still the case now, and it was certainly the case then.

Hamlet is not generally listed among the Shakespearean Problem Plays. As conceived by critic F. S. Boas in 1896, these are:
All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. Some critics include other plays that were not enumerated by Boas, most commonly The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice.
However, Boas did adds that Hamlet links Shakespeare's problem-plays to his unambiguous tragedies.

The term itself (borrowed from Ibsen) was meant to denote plays "uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic." That's not really the case with Hamlet, which has all the hallmarks of Shakespearean tragedy (a fatally flawed hero, a tragic dilemma, and the curtain coming down on a stage full of corpses). But the play is profoundly problematic, all the same.


Laurence Olivier, dir.: Hamlet (1948)


The other great tragedies all exemplify a clear flaw in their protagonists: jealousy in Othello; ambition in Macbeth; pride in King Lear. But what's the moral deficiency in Hamlet? Laurence Olivier's film referred to it as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."


T. S. Eliot: The Sacred Wood (1920)


T. S. Eliot's notorious 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problems" called the play an "artistic failure" because the character's emotion does not accord with the external machinery of the play. It fails (he claims) to find an adequate "objective correlative" — a set of external objects or situations which could evoke that specific emotion in the audience.


C. S. Lewis: Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem? (1942)


C. S. Lewis, in his riposte "Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?" creates an amusing thought experiment to explain his own reactions to the play:
Let us suppose that a picture which you have not seen is being talked about. The first thing you gather from the vast majority of the speakers ... is that this picture is undoubtedly a very great work. The next thing you discover is that hardly any two people in the room agree as to what it is a picture of. Most of them find something curious about the pose, and perhaps even the anatomy, of the central figure. One explains it by saying that it is a picture of the raising of Lazarus, and that the painter has cleverly managed to represent the uncertain gait of a body just recovering from the stiffness of death. Another, taking the central figure to be Bacchus returning from the conquest of India, says that it reels because it is drunk. A third, to whom it is self-evident that he has seen a picture of the death of Nelson, asks with some temper whether you expect a man to look quite normal just after he has been mortally wounded. A fourth maintains that such crudely representational canons of criticism will never penetrate so profound a work, and that the peculiarities of the central figure really reflect the content of the painter’s subconsciousness. Hardly have you had time to digest these opinions when you run into another group of critics who denounce as a pseudo-problem what the first group has been discussing. According to this second group there is nothing odd about the central figure. A more natural and self-explanatory pose they never saw and they cannot imagine what all the pother is about. At long last you discover — isolated in a corner of the room, somewhat frowned upon by the rest of the company, and including few reputable connoisseurs in its ranks — a little knot of men who are whispering that the picture is a villainous daub and that the mystery of the central figure merely results from the fact that it is out of drawing.
It's not unreasonable to suppose, Lewis goes on, that "our first reaction would be to accept, at least provisionally," the last of these views. However:
‘Most certainly,’ says Mr. Eliot, ‘an artistic failure.’ But is it ‘most certain’? Let me return for a moment to my analogy of the picture. In that dream there was one experiment we did not make. We didn’t walk into the next room and look at it for ourselves. Supposing we had done so. Suppose that at the first glance all the cogent arguments of the unfavourable critics had died on our lips, or echoed in our ears as idle babble. Suppose that looking on the picture we had found ourselves caught up into an unforgettable intensity of life and had come back from the room where it hung haunted for ever with the sense of vast dignities and strange sorrows and teased ‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’ — would not this have reversed our judgement and compelled us, in the teeth of a priori probability, to maintain that on one point at least the orthodox critics were in the right? ‘Most certainly an artistic failure.’ All argument is for that conclusion — until you read or see Hamlet again. And when you do, you are left saying that if this is failure, then failure is better than success. We want more of these ‘bad’ plays. From our first childish reading of the ghost scenes down to those golden minutes which we stole from marking examination papers on Hamlet to read a few pages of Hamlet itself, have we ever known the day or the hour when its enchantment failed? That castle is part of our own world. The affection we feel for the Prince, and, through him, for Horatio, is like a friendship in real life ... When we want that taste, no other book will do instead. It may turn out in the end that the thing is not a complete success. This compelling quality in it may coexist with some radical defect. But I doubt if we shall ever be able to say ... that it is ‘most certainly’ a failure. Even if the proposition that it has failed were at last admitted for true, I can think of few critical truths which most of us would utter with less certainty, and with a more divided mind.
Lewis is, I hope you'll agree, quite right. Hamlet is a magnificent play - almost the magnificent play. It's the mountain peak all others aspire to. "If this is failure, then failure is better than success," as he so eloquently puts it.

I don't have a solution to the problem of the ghost in Hamlet. But I don't think that this is because I haven't looked hard enough - or am just too dumb to find it. I'm fairly sure that the point of the ghost in Hamlet is that we're being forced to remain in doubt about it.

It seems that the murder the ghost is so anxious Hamlet should revenge did indeed take place as described: Hamlet's uncle's actions at various points in the drama reveal as much. It also seems that the posthumous fate it describes for itself: "Doomed for a certain term to walk the night / And for the day confined to fast in fires" does indeed closely resemble the contemporary understanding of Purgatory. So it may well have been intended to be regarded by Shakespeare's immediate audience as "a spirit of health" rather than as "a goblin damned."


William Salter Herrick: Hamlet in the Queen’s Chamber (1857)


But it's impossible to be sure. Its second appearance is so unhelpful that it inevitably gives rise to doubts. Which leads us to go back and think again. Doesn't it make sense for Hamlet to question its bona fides, given the stark doctrine of pagan revenge this ghost is preaching?

It would indeed be nice if we could solve just this one little vexed point in the play, as Ken Larsen thought he had done. But to claim that is to miss the point. The reason Hamlet remains alive for us is because it defies easy analysis. It may be a "failure" if you measure it against the inexorable certainties of Oedipus Rex - but not if you see it as the root of all things modern in literature: uneasy, equivocal characters; unresolvable dilemmas; action as the root of harm as well as good.

The problems with Hamlet, then, are like so many of the other problems that beset us. As Dr. Johnson said, when asked to resolve the question of the existence of ghosts: "all argument is against it; but all belief is for it". There's definitely a ghost in Hamlet, and we're told that it's a role Shakespeare liked to reserve for himself, but who or what that ghost is, and whether or not it's seeking relief from damnation or purgation is beyond final construing. Perhaps that's the real significance of Hamlet's famous remark:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.



King James I: Dæmonologie (1597)



Saturday, May 04, 2024

Idle Days


Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau: Idle Days (2018)
Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau. Idle Days. Art by Simon Leclerc. First Second. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2018.

A long time ago now - has it really been fifteen years? - I wrote a post called "Unpacking my Comics Library". I see that, to date, it's received 11,671 views, and attracted 15 comments. That's pretty good going - for my blog, at any rate.

I don't propose to write another survey post like that one, but a number of graphic novels have found their way into my collection since then. One of the strangest I've run into would have to be Thomas Desaulniers-Brousseau's Idle Days, a family saga set in the Canadian woods, where a deserter is living with his grandfather during the last days of the Second World War.


Simon Leclerc: Art for Idle Days (2018)


Simon Leclerc's art for the comic is almost equally obsessive and internalised. As he himself puts it in a joint interview with Paste Magazine (February 2, 2016):
Jerome, being a deserter, finds himself forced to live in his grandfather’s house, isolated in the woods nearby. The story then unfolds around that house; the forced reclusiveness gets Jerome interested in the previous generations of the house owners and their mysterious and tragic fates that weirdly relate to his. Along the way, the forest unveils its haunting characters: a dead woman, alcohol smugglers, a witch, a black cat, all while Jerome has to deal with his grumpy grandfather!
The interview as a whole confirms the strongly personal nature of the story's background. Author Desaulniers-Brousseau explains:
My father’s father, whom I never knew, deserted just before his regiment was deployed in Vancouver, worried that he would eventually be sent to fight in Europe. He apparently regretted it because the regiment never left British Columbia, and his friends otherwise “enjoyed a nice trip.” I hope I’m not being insensitive towards our veterans right now, that’s not my intention. But anyway, he hid with his uncle, a doctor in the village, and his experience has inspired the character of Jerome and some of the events of the story. Maybe it was a desire to know more about his life that led me to write this story. But Jerome is also me in a lot of ways, and the relationship that develops between him and his grandfather is a sort of imaginary dialogue with pretty much all the male authority figures in my life, of which Maurice is the melting pot.

Simon Leclerc: Art for Idle Days (2018)


Leclerc seems more focussed on the technical challenges of the comics medium:
A book like Idle Days (and graphic novels in general) is great because it gives me the opportunity to art-direct my project entirely.
Personal projects demand that you raise your level of creativity, that you level up your inventiveness, because the thing you are making is your own. In my opinion, comics is one of the last mediums where the editors as well as the audience expect the authors to push and play with its boundaries as much as they do.
I choose the level of stylization I want to inject, the amount of time I decide to put drawing these tiny leaves on that weirdly shaped tree, or whether I want to leave that scribbly line that doesn’t really make sense on the nose of my character, but that I find oddly beautiful and satisfying.
In the end, whereas Desaulniers-Brousseau admits that 'it certainly has a meaning and a message for me.'
it’s basically a ghost story. I hope people have an enjoyable time reading it, and if they can find echoes in their own lives, well that’s just tops.
Leclerc, by contrast, just wants people to 'look at it and go: “Cool! That drawing of a tree looks gnarly!”'

I guess I have a soft spot for this oddly formless, intensely atmospheric graphic novel for a number of reasons. I found it lurking in a pile of other comics in a Hospice shop, and it always gives me a warm feeling to rescue interesting books which have been abandoned there.

More than that, though, it was probably the title that attracted me most. I do have a taste for intense, autobiographical Canadian comics - I used to read all I could find in the days when they were constantly on display on the ground floor racks in the Auckland Central Library.

But Idle Days ... what an evocative concept!




W. H. Hudson: Idle Days in Patagonia (1893)


Far away and long ago I lived in an east-windy, West-Endy city called Edinburgh, which prided itself on being the 'Athens of the North' (though Tom Stoppard referred to it 'the Reykjavik of the South'). One of the things I did there was collect and read the works of W. H. Hudson, an Anglo-Argentinian naturalist, who specialised in dreamy books about birds and the romance of the plains and jungles of South America.

Idle Days in Patagonia is one of his most celebrated works, perhaps the first in which he achieves fusion between the scientific classification of bird species and the belletristic fine writing about nature for which he became famous. Years later it would inspire Bruce Chatwin to make his own visit to Argentina, the subject of his first travel book, In Patagonia.


Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia (1977)


Bruce Chatwin was a born liar. When his book became famous, many of the people he'd interviewed (or claimed to interview) came forward to denounce him for putting words in their mouths. This is a not uncommon dilemma for travel writers, who inhabit a curious no-man's-land between truth and fiction, and who therefore tend to regard themselves as entitled to distort chronologies, ginger up otherwise flat narratives into something more exciting, and generally confuse things in the hopes of confounding any subsequent attempts to check up on them.

Chatwin did take this trait further than most, however, and it's therefore best to regard all of his books as either directly or indirectly fictional, whether or not he (or his publishers) described them as "novels" or "travel books". Perhaps it's true that the devil finds work for idle hands ...


So I came down through the wood to the bank of Yann and found, as had been prophesied, the ship Bird of the River about to loose her cable.
There doesn't seem much doubt that Lord Dunsany's long fantasy story "Idle Days on the Yann" (from A Dreamer's Tales, 1910) was inspired by W. H. Hudson's Idle Days in Patagonia - or at any rate by its title.
The captain sate cross-legged upon the white deck with his scimitar lying beside him in its jewelled scabbard, and the sailors toiled to spread the nimble sails to bring the ship into the central stream of Yann, and all the while sang ancient soothing songs. And the wind of the evening descending cool from the snowfields of some mountainous abode of distant gods came suddenly, like glad tidings to an anxious city, into the wing-like sails.
This story had a deep influence on H. P. Lovecraft, particularly on his early novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926-27). According to Wikipedia, Dunsany's story was written "in anticipation for a trip down the Nile."
And so we came into the central stream, whereat the sailors lowered the greater sails. But I had gone to bow before the captain, and to inquire concerning the miracles, and appearances among men, of the most holy gods of whatever land he had come from. And the captain answered that he came from fair Belzoond, and worshipped gods that were the least and humblest, who seldom sent the famine or the thunder, and were easily appeased with little battles. And I told how I came from Ireland, which is of Europe, whereat the captain and all the sailors laughed, for they said, 'There are no such places in all the land of dreams.' When they had ceased to mock me, I explained that my fancy mostly dwelt in the desert of Cuppar-Nombo, about a beautiful blue city called Golthoth the Damned, which was sentinelled all round by wolves and their shadows, and had been utterly desolate for years and years because of a curse which the gods once spoke in anger and could never since recall. And sometimes my dreams took me as far as Pungar Vees, the red-walled city where the fountains are, which trades with the Isles and Thul. When I said this they complimented me upon the abode of my fancy, saying that, though they had never seen these cities, such places might well be imagined. For the rest of that evening I bargained with the captain over the sum that I should pay him for my fare if God and the tide of Yann should bring us safely as far as the cliffs by the sea, which are named Bar-Wul-Yann, the Gate of Yann.
The story itself bears a certain resemblance to C. P. Cavafy's most famous poem, "Ithaka" (1911), which gives a similarly meandering account of a journey whose true purpose is not its destination so much as the incidents along the way.
And now the sun had set, and all the colours of the world and heaven had held a festival with him, and slipped one by one away before the imminent approach of night. The parrots had all flown home to the jungle on either bank, the monkeys in rows in safety on high branches of the trees were silent and asleep, the fireflies in the deeps of the forest were going up and down, and the great stars came gleaming out to look on the face of Yann. Then the sailors lighted lanterns and hung them round the ship, and the light flashed out on a sudden and dazzled Yann, and the ducks that fed along his marshy banks all suddenly arose, and made wide circles in the upper air, and saw the distant reaches of the Yann and the white mist that softly cloaked the jungle, before they returned again into their marshes.
I wrote a version of Cavafy's poem once - not a direct translation, since I speak no Greek, but a beefed-up version of a literal, word-for-word version I located somewhere. You can find it here.
And then the sailors knelt on the decks and prayed, not all together, but five or six at a time. Side by side there kneeled down together five or six, for there only prayed at the same time men of different faiths, so that no god should hear two men praying to him at once. As soon as any one had finished his prayer, another of the same faith took his place. Thus knelt the row of five or six with bended heads under the fluttering sail, while the central stream of the River Yann took them on towards the sea, and their prayers rose up from among the lanterns and went towards the stars. And behind them in the after end of the ship the helmsman prayed aloud the helmsman's prayer, which is prayed by all who follow his trade upon the River Yann, of whatever faith they be. And the captain prayed to his little lesser gods, to the gods that bless Belzoond.
There is something irresistibly attractive in the idea of long river cruises, drifting past temples and villages, with fishermen plying their trade, and pilgrims coming down to the shore to wash away their sins. I've only experienced it once or twice, and then only for a brief time, but it's an agreeable thing to think about.
And I too felt that I would pray. Yet I liked not to pray to a jealous God there where the frail affectionate gods whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, whom the men of the jungle have long since deserted, who is now unworshipped and alone; and to him I prayed.
Dunsany was once a writer who was spoken of in the same breath as Yeats: a playwright, a poet, a fantasist whose works are now only read for their "influence" on such colossi as Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. And perhaps that's appropriate. But there's no denying the charm of such stories as "Idle Days on the Yann."
And upon us praying the night came suddenly down, as it comes upon all men who pray at evening and upon all men who do not; yet our prayers comforted our own souls when we thought of the Great Night to come.
The story is not entirely episodic, mind you - like so many of Dunsany's works, it hinges on a central terrifying fact which his dreamer protagonist is unwilling to accept, lest it destroy the whole fabric of the world as he knows it. In this case the unassimilable truth is a cyclopean city gate carved out of a single tusk. And his fear is that the owner of the tusk may still be looking for it, up in the hills that look down on the town of Perdóndaris.
And so Yann bore us magnificently onwards, for he was elate with molten snow that the Poltiades had brought him from the Hills of Hap, and the Marn and Migris were swollen full with floods; and he bore us in his might past Kyph and Pir, and we saw the lights of Goolunza.
Perhaps the clearest analogue to all this is Italo Calvino's classic novel Invisible Cities, where the peripatetic Marco Polo describes the cities of his empire to the invincibly static Kublai Khan, who will never otherwise be able to experience them at all.
Soon we all slept except the helmsman, who kept the ship in the mid-stream of Yann.
The truth of Marco Polo's account has (of course) been under question since it was first written - and the same has to be said of Calvino's fictional Marco's tales told to his master. Do any of these cities actually exist? They sound allegorical rather than real, but then the same might be said of any traveller's tale.
... And the time was come when the captain and I must part, he to go back again to his fair Belzoond in sight of the distant peaks of the Hian Min, and I to find my way by strange means back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the Lands of Dream.
I used to teach a course on Travel Writing, where we explored such questions. In particular, we spent a good deal of time discussing the distinction between Marco Polo's true experiences of the East, and their transmission through the medium of a manuscript written by Rustichello of Pisa, who shared a cell with him in Genoa, and beguiled his leisure by taking notes on his garrulous fellow-prisoner's travel stories. Rustichello had previously made his living as a composer of chivalrous romances.
Long we regarded one another, knowing that we should meet no more, for my fancy is weakening as the years slip by, and I go ever more seldom into the Lands of Dream. Then we clasped hands, uncouthly on his part, for it is not the method of greeting in his country, and he commended my soul to the care of his own gods, to his little lesser gods, the humble ones, to the gods that bless Belzoond.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities (1972)





Saul Bellow: Dangling Man (1944)


It isn't actually called "Idle Days", but Saul Bellow's debut novel certainly unpacks the concept with mordant precision. Published in 1944, the same year that Desaulniers-Brousseau's graphic novel is set in, Dangling Man is the diary of a young draftee, waiting to be called up for the army, and thus unable to settle to any other task.

It's the perfect situation for a prototypical existentialist novel of self-doubt. And, like Camus's Meursault, Bellow's Joseph duly proceeds to get up to didoes, interfering in his neighbours' lives, and generally making a bit of a mess of his last days of freedom. The war intervenes to save him from himself, though, just as execution for murder does for Camus's unfortunate protagonist.

Dangling Man bears little resemblance to the later, more sprawling American sagas we associate with Saul Bellow, and seems, still, to have a quite separate audience.

I suppose that the general message that an idle man is a menace in the making rings through all of these diverse narratives. Bellow's book has been compared to the superfluous man tradition in Russian literature: anti-heroes such as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's Pechorin, and Turgenev's Tchulkaturin fritter away their inane lives with pointless love affairs and other self-destructive acts.

Perhaps the most famous of them all is Goncharov's Oblomov, whose slothful and indecisive nature makes him incapable even of getting out of bed in the morning.






The model for all these angsty idlers is not hard to find. Byron's first book of poems, Hours of Idleness, set the tone for his future work, though it made little impression at the time it first appeared.

The Byronic hero, glamorous, heroic, misanthropic, and (dare I say it?) intensely romantic was, however, to dominate European literature for decades after the appearance of Byron's breakthrough work Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Doing a lot while seeming to do nothing seems to be the essence of the character. In this he resembles Hamlet, but there was something new there, too.

What T. S. Eliot once described in Burnt Norton as being:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
is implied by these exemplars - Byron, Marco Polo, W. H. Hudson, Lord Dunsany - to be the ideal state for poets and creative artists generally.

If Art is what takes place when you're looking elsewhere, then perhaps - like thought - it can only happen if you've allowed yourself (or been permitted by fate) to explore the perilous pleasures of idleness:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
- Ash-Wednesday

Lord Byron: Hours of Idleness (1807)





Sunday, May 14, 2023

Amis & Son


Sunday, 21st May, 2023 - I'm updating this post to record the news of the death from cancer of Martin Amis on Friday the 19th of May, at his Florida home. It seems strange to have been writing about his work just a week before that - strange, too, that it should have coincided with the Cannes debut of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, based on Amis's 2014 novel. It was received with a six-minute standing ovation. Requiescat in Pace.

Amis fils & Amis père


The other day I was in a bookshop where they were having a "five for five dollars" sale. Even at that price, I found few items to tempt me. An old copy of Spycatcher - yes, I missed reading that at the time, back in the paranoid '80s, but my friend John Fenton assures me it's a valuable piece of social history - that went in the bag. What else? An anthology of writings about the Battle of Britain, edited by some flying ace or other; a companion volume about pioneer aviators; Andrew Motion's Selected Poems; and - Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations ...

You'd think the latter would have been a shoo-in, given my longstanding obsession with the life and works of Kingsley Amis and (to a somewhat lesser extent) his son and literary rival Martin. Not so. I already own no fewer than three full-length biographies of "Kingers", as his friends used to call him, and - to be honest - I felt a bit reluctant to add to their number.

Still: five for five dollars - not to mention the fact that there isn't, so far as I'm aware, much biographical writing as yet about Martin - or 'Amis fils', as he's sometimes called. So I duly bought it and stowed it away on the shelf devoted to just such Amisiana. Until, the other day, feeling in dire need of a bit of a laugh - and I do find both Amises irresistibly amusing at times - I picked it up and started to read it.


London Remembers: Sir Kingsley Amis


It begins, sensibly enough, with a visit to "Kingsley Amis's earliest childhood home - 16 Buckingham Gardens, Norbury, SW16." The author is quick to refute "the green plaque stating that Sir Kingsley Amis was born here" placed there by the local council. Apparently he wasn't. As for the house itself, and its immediate ambience:
Even if Buckingham Gardens hasn't gone down in the world much since the Amises lived here, it hasn't come up; only one of the houses shows the slightest hint of ownerly gentrification, and it looks out of place.
So far so good. Class insecurity is a major theme of Neil Powell's book as a whole, so this seems a good place to start. But then:
The air carries a stong and unmistakable whiff of curry, which Kingsley mightn't in one sense have minded (it was among the few foods he actually enjoyed), though in another he'd have minded quite a bit: he was no racist, but he strongly disliked the quality of English life being mucked about. [p.1]
I had to read this sentence a couple of times before its implications really began to sink in. I mean, I have lived in the UK. I do know the terrain - to some extent, at least. What Powell appeared to me to be saying was that the area has been taken over by foreigners - the kind who eat a good deal of curry. Not only that, there is - is there not? - an implication that their very presence here constitutes some kind of affront to the "quality of English life."


Carcanet Press: Neil Powell


Perhaps I'm overreading it, I thought, resisting my first impulse to throw the book across the room. Surely he can't mean that. In any case, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and persevere.

Certainly Neil Powell knows a good story when he hears one. I'm not sure that I came across many in his pages which I hadn't already encountered in Amis's Memoirs or one of the other biographies, but they were certainly just as amusing when retold here. He also quotes lengthy passages from Amis's Letters, which reminded me of just how rib-ticklingly funny that book can be - one of the few such volumes that it actually is dangerous to be caught reading in a public place. People are liable to think that you're throwing a fit.

But is this enough? Is this really a necessary book? As D. J. Taylor puts it in his own notice of Amis and Son in the Literary Review:
On the shelf beside me as I write this are, in chronological order, Kingsley’s Memoirs (1991), Eric Jacobs’s Kingsley Amis: A Biography (1995), Martin’s Experience (2000), Zachary Leader’s edition of The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000), Richard Bradford’s Lucky Him (2001), advertised as a ‘biography’ but in fact an exceptionally astute critical survey, and Leader’s jumbo-sized The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006). They are all interesting books, up to a point, but there are an awful lot of them and the message emerging from their three or four thousand collective pages is generally the same.
I too own all of these books, and am forced - somewhat reluctantly - to concur with Taylor's opinion that "one can think of novelists twice as good who have attracted half the volume of scholarly, or not so scholarly, exegesis."


Martin Amis: Inside Story (2020)


Where there's already so much competition, justifying the appearance of yet another tome on much the same subject surely requires a bit of special pleading. So, unless Powell has an exceptionally compelling new reading of Amis père to offer (and I'm not sure that he does), his book really stands or falls on the value of any new material he can provide on Amis fils.

It's true that Powell evinces a number of opinions which are (to put it mildly) not in line with my own. He seems to take it for granted that any time spent reading Science Fiction is time wasted, and that Kingsley Amis's pioneering efforts as a critic and anthologist of the field ought therefore to be written off as simple self-indulgence. Powell even claims that Kingsley (he refers to him by his first name throughout, so I don't see why I shouldn't) would have been much better off expanding his (failed) BLitt thesis on the popular audience for Victorian poetry into a monograph than dignifying such disposable 'genre fiction' with his attention. And yet, to me, that's one of the strongest arguments in favour of Kingsley's critical acumen.

But just because I happen to disagree with many of Powell's views is no reason to dismiss them out of hand. At this point I thought it might be a good idea to see what some other readers thought of his book. There are a couple of puffs on the cover: "A delight: witty, clever and astute" - Observer, plus a blurb description of it as a "witty, opinionated and thoroughly readable critical biography"; D. J. Taylor, too, refers to it "a thoughtfully written study," in the passage from his review quoted above.


The Wheeler Centre: Peter Craven


There was at least one writer who felt much as I did about it, however. You can, if you wish, read it for yourself on the website of the Melbourne Age for July 22, 2008, but here are a couple of quotes from Australian critic Peter Craven's review:
Amis and Son, Neil Powell's would-be critical biography of Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You, and Martin Amis, his son, author of The Rachel Papers and London Fields, is ... a silly and sickening book that is liable to be taken more seriously than it deserves.
That's going straight for the jugular! But why exactly does he think so?
It is essentially a critical book, buttressed by biographical summary that tends to be used as an increasingly impertinent crutch for the evaluative judgements that keep jumping about between the lives and the works of Amis father and son.

It is less obviously debilitating in the case of Kingsley because the burden of Powell's book is that Smarty isn't half the writer that his Dad was. Smarty Anus, you'll recall, is Private Eye's empathic nickname for Martin Amis, a homage of an epithet if ever there was one.
Certainly this is a problem if, as I've argued above, the book's raison d'être really has to be providing a substantive reading of Martin's work, rather than rehashing the far more readily available material on Kingsley. But Powell, according to Peter Craven, is:
the kind of narrow and overweeningly snooty critic who is constantly confusing the limitations of human beings with the faults of their work. It is not a vice confined to the British, but one they exhibit with a peculiar intensity and obnoxiousness.

At its worst this kind of writing is constantly sliding into what sounds like social condescension. It is especially dominant where criticism and biography meet, as in the truly appalling studies of Anthony Burgess and Laurence Olivier by Roger Lewis.


I, too, have read Roger Lewis's rambling and vituperative 'critical biography' of Anthony Burgess, so I do see the point Craven is making here. I haven't read Lewis on the subject of Olivier, but I have a copy of his apparently equally venomous Life and Death of Peter Sellers lying around somewhere. Is Powell's book really as bad as that?

Certainly he says some odd things at times. While describing a seduction scene in Martin's The Rachel Papers (1973), which takes place to the accompaniment of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, regarded by the hero as "a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life", Powell calls 'When I'm Sixty-Four' and 'Lovely Rita':
the two songs which despite their jaunty surfaces most clearly reveal the Beatles' underlying callousness and contempt for other people. [pp.297-98]
Really? Do they? Maybe I've been getting them wrong all these years ... It does seem a rather extreme view, though it certainly matches up with an earlier diatribe by Powell about "a truly shocking moment in Experience", where Martin mentions:


J. S. Bach: Complete Cello Suites (1-6)
Bach's 'Concerto for Cello', in four words conveying ignorance of musical history, the composer's oeuvre and the difference between a concerto and a sonata ... His father had been able to take a scurrilously disrespectful view of received culture precisely because he knew a good bit about it from quite early on. Martin didn't have that luxury; hence, despite his plumage, he had to become a successfully diligent gnome. [pp.288-89]
Yes, Martin (or his editor) should have picked up on that one. But then, Powell's own book is not exactly error-free. In any case, isn't all this a bit of an overreaction? Does it really justify describing him a "successfully diligent gnome"? Perhaps it's an English thing. As my Birmingham-born friend Martin Frost once remarked to me, "It's not that you're outside the class system, Jack, it's that you're beneath it."

The nuances of class are clearly something that fascinates Powell, though one can't help feeling that he's not talking solely about the two Amises when he mounts his own "unfashionable defence" of these curious caste divides:
at least since the mid-eighteenth century, class in England has been extraordinarily fluid, enabling immense social leaps to be made within individual lifetimes ... [and] this fluidity coincides with the rise of the English novel, which has made class - in its nuances, misunderstandings and unexpected transitions - one of its major themes. [p.315]
"For the novelist it remains an indispensable resource". Powell's defence of class seems to boil down to two not easily reconcilable statements: 1/ that it doesn't really work; 2/ that it's great to write about. Sometimes it's nice to be a New Zealander and not feel that you have to worry about that kind of thing.

I'm not myself a great fan of Martin Amis, whose works I stopped collecting some years back, but I have read a number of them, including Money and London Fields, and would certainly agree with Peter Craven's praise of his attempts to reclaim:
the vast underworld of London street talk and the way contemporary Britain actually talked in his mature fiction. Powell's culpable stupidity about this goes most of the way towards disqualifying him from saying anything of critical interest about Martin.
In short, then:
Amis and Son is a book by a critic of some intelligence who nonetheless constantly dissipates his insights because his swaggering irritation at one of his two subjects makes him blindingly daft.
Craven concedes that "it's easy enough to be irritated by Martin Amis."
You can even go halfway with Tibor Fischer's assessment, quoted by Powell, of Martin Amis as "an atrocity-chaser ... constantly on the prowl for gravitas enlargement offers (the Holocaust, serial killers, 9/11, the Gulag, the Beslan siege) as if writing about really bad things will make him a really great novelist", and still acknowledge that, on a good day, he is one of the most significant writers in Britain to have produced fiction in the past 30 years.

Martin Amis: Koba the Dread (2002)


That seems like a pretty judicious distinction to me. One of the books I have read by Martin Amis is his account of Stalin, Koba the Dread. It inspired me to verse, in fact:
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Stalin’s a bad man I know
Martin Amis told me so
It's not exactly a revelation
but thank you for the Information

[26/9/2002]
There was definitely a smug, de haut en bas tone about Amis's book which I found irksome. But then, I almost died laughing at the antics of the two warring novelists in his 1995 novel The Information - you'll have noticed the clever way I've inserted a reference to it in the clerihew above - not to mention the appalling works they're respectively responsible for:
'What's your novel called?'
'Untitled'
'Don't you have a title for it yet?'
'No, it's called "Untitled" ...'
That's the book by thwarted novelist Richard Tull which causes anyone who tries to read it to start bleeding from the eyes, a condition rapidly escalating into a brain hemorrhage if they're foolish enough to persist. His rival Gwyn Barry's successful utopia Amelior sounds equally emetic, though fortunately far less lethal.

I'm still not sure what The Information is actually about, but it's hard to care when the incidental details are as good as that. Martin Amis is certainly not a jolly or a likeable writer, but the sheer power and variety of his prose makes up for an awful lot.

One of the oddest passages in Powell's book is the one where he unpacks "one of the riddling paradoxes of fiction":
an unambitious form is one crucial respect more ambitious than an ambitious one: it is, in this sense, easier to write Ulysses than a novel by, say, Barbara Pym or C. P. Snow. Ulysses competes only with itself, with its own ambition; a novel by Pym or Snow competes with thousand others about middle-class women, strange clergymen and mendacious academics. [pp.311-12]
Carried to an extreme, wouldn't this doctrine militate against Powell's earlier dismissal of Ian Fleming, one of Kingsley's favourite writers, as "a bad and pernicious author" [p.148]? I mean, isn't it harder to compete with a thousand other thrillers replete with "pornographic sadism" than to write, say, Tom Jones or Tristram Shandy? Fielding and Sterne were only competing with themselves, after all, whereas Fleming has Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane all barking at his heels ...

As one progresses through his book and encounters more and more opinions of this nature, it becomes increasingly difficult to take Powell seriously as a critic. There's an ad hominem tone to his judgements which seems driven by personal animus rather than disinterested analysis. Peter Craven, too, has difficulties with this aspect of his writing:
You're free to think that none of Martin Amis has as sure a place in the canon as Lucky Jim, but that's not the point. Powell is an interesting guide to the ins and outs of Kingsley's fiction, and some of his tips about particular books may be worth following. On the other hand he is an admirer of Martin's Time's Arrow - the Holocaust novel that runs backward - so you have to wonder.
Yes, I'm with him there. For me, Time's Arrow is a one-page idea dragged out to the length of an entire novel. On the other hand, I was intrigued to see that (unlike Richard Bradford in Lucky Him), Powell likes Kingsley's late novel The Folks Who Live on the Hill as much as I do. And, while I remain unconvinced by his defence of the quasi-psychotic excesses of Stanley and the Women, it is interesting to hear his views on the matter.

Craven concludes his review as follows:
The word about this book is that it's the bollocking Martin Amis always had coming to him. It isn't, it's a spiteful and thoughtless book by a vain and shallow critic who is defeated by everything in his hugely talented contemporary that shows up his own narrowness and pettiness and lack of feeling for the rough and ready words and grand ambitions that might encompass a world or transform it in fiction.
In short: "What defeats him is human beings and the way the details of a life might illuminate a writer's work." Strong words here from Craven; it's hard to dissent, though, if you've actually made your way to the end of Powell's book. It's a pity, above all, that he makes such great play with the (alleged) carelessness and ignorance of the two Amises when you consider his own vulnerability on this score.

To take one example. He concludes, on p.371, a long denunciation of Martin's use of Americanisms in his prose by saying that a writer's job is "To purify the dialect of the tribe" - a dictum he attributes to T. S. Eliot. While it's true that this phrase does indeed appear in Part II of "Little Gidding" (1942), the last of Eliot's Four Quartets, it is actually (of course), an Englishing of Mallarmé's famous line "Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu" from the sonnet "Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe".

There's a double irony in this. Powell's view of Amis's prose style as "veering away as far as possible from an English conversational voice towards a demotic statelessness" would surely apply far better to the work of the deracinated American T. S. Eliot than to unrepentant Londoner Martin Amis? And, given that Mallarmé attributed this purification of the "tribal" dialect to another American, Edgar Allan Poe, its use as a guarantor of "Englishness" here seems particularly off the mark.


Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)


But if Powell's book is so bad, why waste so much time and energy on it? It's a fair question. I suppose that the answer might be because I wanted it to be better than it is. For my all my reading and rereading of their works, I still find even the elder Amis - let alone the younger - something of a mystery.

Since I know so much less about Martin than Kingsley, it was really this aspect of Powell's book that I hoped to learn most from. I've read almost all of the novels he analyses - the early to mid-career ones - and was surprised to find how little validity I found in his assessments of them. The two - to me - most doctrinaire and mechanical, Success and Time's Arrow, he rates most highly, whereas the verbal pyrotechnics of Money, London Fields, and The Information seem to leave him cold.

Mind you, there's no accounting for tastes, and there's no moral obligation on him to like these books. I'm not sure that I exactly like them myself. But I do agree with Peter Craven about the immense gravitas of the task Martin Amis set himself in attempting to reclaim "the vast underworld of London street talk and the way contemporary Britain actually talked in his mature fiction."

Like Dickens, Martin Amis has trouble with plots: there's always either too much or too little of it in all of his novels. But that's not really why I read them. Not purely for pleasure, but for "news that stays news" (to employ another Americanism) - in this case, news about the language.

In any case, Powell's book is clearly not the one I need. Maybe, in fact, I don't need any more critical books or biographical accounts of either author, but simply to reimmerse myself in their works. If so, I should probably tender some thanks to Neil Powell for reminding me of that.







Kingsley Amis (1989)

Sir Kingsley William Amis
(1922-1995)

Books I own are marked in bold:

    Poetry:

  1. Bright November (1947)
    • [Bright November: Poems. London: the Fortune Press, n.d. (1947?)]
  2. A Frame of Mind (1953)
  3. Poems. Fantasy Portraits (1954)
  4. A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956 (1956)
  5. The Evans County (1962)
  6. A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967 (1968)
  7. Collected Poems 1944–78 (1979)
    • Collected Poems 1944-1979. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1979.

  8. Novels:

  9. The Legacy (1948) [unpublished]
  10. Lucky Jim (1954)
    • Lucky Jim: A Novel. 1953. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1954.
  11. That Uncertain Feeling (1955)
    • That Uncertain Feeling. 1955. Four Square Books Ltd. London: New English Library Ltd. / Sydney. Horwitz Publications Inc. Pty. Ltd., 1962.
  12. I Like It Here (1958)
    • I Like it Here. 1958. Penguin Book 2884. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
  13. Take a Girl Like You (1960)
    • Take A Girl Like You. 1960. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
  14. One Fat Englishman (1963)
    • One Fat Englishman. 1963. Penguin Book 2417. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
  15. [with Robert Conquest] The Egyptologists (1965)
    • [with Robert Conquest. The Egyptologists. 1965. Panther Books Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1975.
  16. The Anti-Death League (1966)
    • The Anti-Death League. 1966. Penguin Book 2803. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
  17. [as Robert Markham] Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (1968)
    • [as ‘Robert Markham’]. Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure. 1968. London: Pan Books Ltd., n.d.
  18. I Want It Now (1968)
    • I Want It Now. 1968. London: Panther Books, 1969.
  19. The Green Man (1969)
    • The Green Man. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1969.
  20. Girl, 20 (1971)
    • Girl, 20. 1971. London: The Book Club, by arrangement with Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1972.
  21. The Riverside Villas Murder (1973)
    • The Riverside Villas Murder. 1973. London: Book Club Associates / Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1974.
  22. Ending Up (1974)
    • Ending Up. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1974.
  23. The Crime of the Century (1975)
    • The Crime Of The Century. 1975. Introduction by the Author. Everyman Paperbacks: Mastercrime. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1987.
  24. The Alteration (1976)
    • The Alteration. 1976. Triad / Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Triad Paperbacks Ltd, 1978.
  25. Jake's Thing (1978)
    • Jake's Thing. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
  26. Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980)
    • Russian Hide-and-Seek: A Melodrama. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
  27. Stanley and the Women (1984)
    • Stanley and the Women. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1984.
  28. The Old Devils (1986)
    • The Old Devils. 1986. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1986.
  29. Difficulties with Girls (1988)
    • Difficulties With Girls. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
  30. The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990)
    • The Folks That Live on the Hill. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd, 1990.
  31. We Are All Guilty (1991)
    • We Are All Guilty. London: Reinhardt Books / Viking, 1991.
  32. The Russian Girl (1992)
    • The Russian Girl. 1992. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
  33. You Can't Do Both (1994)
    • You Can't Do Both. Hutchinson. London: Random House (UK) Ltd., 1994.
  34. The Biographer's Moustache (1995)
    • The Biographer's Moustache. 1995. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
  35. Black and White (c.1995) [unfinished]

  36. Short Stories:

  37. My Enemy's Enemy (1962)
    • My Enemy's Enemy. 1962. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
  38. Collected Short Stories (1980)
    • Collected Short Stories. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
  39. Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories (1991)
    • Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories. 1993. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
  40. Complete Stories (1980)
    • Complete Stories. Foreword by Rachel Cusk. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2011.

  41. Non-fiction:

  42. Socialism and the Intellectuals. Fabian Society pamphlet (1957)
  43. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960)
    • New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. 1960. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1961.
    • New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. 1960. A Four Square Book. London: New English Library Limited., 1963.
  44. The James Bond Dossier (1965)
    • The James Bond Dossier. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
  45. [as Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner] 1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965)
  46. What Became of Jane Austen?, and Other Questions (1970)
    • What Became of Jane Austen?, and Other Questions. 1970. Panther Books Limited. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1972.
  47. On Drink (1972)
    • On Drink. Pictures by Nicolas Bentley. 1972. Panther Books Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
  48. Rudyard Kipling and His World (1974)
  49. Everyday Drinking (1983)
    • Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.
  50. How's Your Glass? (1984)
  51. The Amis Collection (1990)
    • The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction, 1954-1990. Introduction by John McDermott. 1990. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
  52. Memoirs (1991)
    • Memoirs. Hutchinson. London: Random Century Group Ltd., 1991.
  53. The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997)
    • The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.
  54. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. ['On Drink' (1972); 'Everyday Drinking' (1983); 'How's Your Glass?' (1984)]. Introduction by Christopher Hitchens (2008)

  55. Edited:

  56. [with Robert Conquest] Spectrum anthology series. 5 vols (1961-66)
    • Spectrum I: A Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.
    • Spectrum II: A Second Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1962. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
    • Spectrum III: A Third Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1963.
    • Spectrum IV: A Fourth Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1965. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
    • Spectrum V: A Fifth Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1966. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1969.
  57. G. K. Chesterton. Selected Stories (1972)
    • G. K. Chesterton. Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis. London: Faber, 1972.
  58. The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978)
    • The New Oxford Book of Light Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  59. The Golden Age of Science Fiction (1981)
    • The Golden Age of Science Fiction. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1981.
  60. The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988)

  61. Letters:

  62. The Letters of Kingsley Amis. Ed. Zachary Leader (2000)
    • Leader, Zachary, ed. The Letters of Kingsley Amis. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
    • Leader, Zachary, ed. The Letters of Kingsley Amis. 2000. Rev. ed. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.

  63. Secondary:

  64. Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis: A Biography. Hodder & Stoughton. London: Hodder Headline PLC, 1995.
  65. Bradford, Richard. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2001.
  66. Leader, Zachary. The Life of Kingsley Amis. 2006. Vintage Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2007.





Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis
(1949-2023)

    Novels:

  1. The Rachel Papers (1973)
    • The Rachel Papers. 1973. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1976.
  2. Dead Babies (1975)
    • Dead Babies. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
  3. Success (1978)
    • Success. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
  4. Other People (1981)
    • Other People: A Mystery Story. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
  5. Money (1984)
    • Money: A Suicide Note. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
  6. London Fields (1989)
    • London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1989.
  7. Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence (1991)
    • Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence. 1991. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
  8. The Information (1995)
    • The Information. 1995. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
  9. Night Train (1997)
  10. Yellow Dog (2003)
    • Yellow Dog. Hyperion. New York: Miramax Books, 2003.
  11. House of Meetings (2006)
  12. The Pregnant Widow (2010)
  13. Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012)
  14. The Zone of Interest (2014)
    • The Zone of Interest. Jonathan Cape. London: Random House, 2014.
  15. Inside Story (2020)
    • Inside Story: How to Write. A Novel. Jonathan Cape. London: Vintage, 2020.

  16. Short stories:

  17. Einstein's Monsters (1987)
  18. Two Stories (1994)
  19. God's Dice (1995)
  20. Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998)
    • Heavy Water and Other Stories. 1998. Vintage. London: Random House UK Limited, 1999.
  21. Amis Omnibus (1999)
  22. The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
  23. Vintage Amis (2004)

  24. Screenplays:

  25. Saturn 3 (1980)
  26. London Fields (2018)

  27. Non-fiction:

  28. Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
  29. The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
    • The Moronic Inferno, and Other Visits to America. 1986. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
  30. Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
  31. Experience (2000)
    • Experience. 2000. Vintage. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2001.
  32. The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (2001)
  33. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002)
    • Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. 2002. Vintage. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2003.
  34. The Second Plane (2008)
  35. The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016 (2017)
    • The Rub of Time: Bellow, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1994-2016. 2017. Vintage. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018.

  36. Secondary:

  37. Powell, Neil. Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations. Macmillan. London: Pan Macmillan Ltd., 2008.