Interesting Times: i.m. Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)

Mario Vargas Llosa: Tiempos recios (2019)

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa
(28 March 1936 – 13 April 2025)

I have books that deserve to outlive me, yes. Conversation in the Cathedral and The War of the End of the World. I worked very hard on those two books. But I don’t think about death.

- Mario Vargas Llosa (20/2/2023)

Of course, the title of the penultimate novel published by Mario Vargas Llosa in his lifetime, Tiempos recios, doesn't really mean "interesting times." The translator of the English version, Adrian Nathan West, called it Harsh Times - and he might have chosen "rough", tough", or even "hard" times if he'd wanted to.

Charles Dickens: Tiempos difíciles. Trans. José Luis López Muñoz (2010)

Charles Dickens's 1854 novel Hard Times is generally rendered in Spanish as Tiempos difíciles, so it's not clear whether or not Vargas Llosa was actually intending any allusion to it.

What I had in mind in choosing a title for my post was that ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times" - though unfortunately Wikipedia, with its usual thoroughness, has informed us that there's no known local source for this piece of nineteenth-century Chinoiserie:

The nearest related Chinese expression translates as "Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos" ... The expression originates from ... the 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong, Stories to Awaken the World.

Certainly Mario Vargas Llosa, the immensely distinguished, Nobel prize-winning Peruvian writer who died earlier this year, had no choice about living in interesting times.

I saw him once in person. He was billed to give the 1986 Neil Gunn International Fellowship lecture at Edinburgh University, where I was studying at the time. My plan was to write a Doctoral thesis on European versions of "South American-ness" along the lines of Edward Said's then newly minted text Orientalism (1978), so you can imagine that the chance to see one of the greatest living Latin American writers in action was far too important to miss.

It was - as always - a brilliant performance. His English, albeit a little accented, was fluent, and he had little difficulty in holding the attention of the far-from-polyglot audience. The talk itself appeared shortly afterwards, in slightly truncated form, in an issue of the Times Literary Supplement, and subsequently, in full, in John King's 1987 book Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey. Then I found it again as chapter two of his 1990 book A Writer's Reality, based on a series of lectures given in 1988 at Syracuse University, New York.

Mario Vargas Llosa: A Writer's Reality (1990)

I mention these details to emphasise just how adept he was in making the most of each piece of work he completed. What had seemed like a spontaneous response to the question of the Chronicles of Peru and their influence on subsequent fiction in Latin America was clearly a well-worn theme for Vargas Llosa, and he was keen to make the most of it by recycling it again and again.

At the time he was considered somewhat suspect in Britain for his open support of Margaret Thatcher. He adapted a good deal of her social attitudes and political rhetoric to local conditions in his campaign for President of Peru in 1990. Defeated by Alberto Fujimori, Vargas Llosa claimed that he'd only run in the first place because his country's "fragile democracy was on the point of collapse."

Subsequent events could be said to have proved him right, though, since Fujimori "carried out a self-coup against the Peruvian legislature and judiciary" early in his Presidential term:

Fujimori dissolved the Peruvian congress and supreme court, effectively making him a de facto dictator of Peru.

Fujimori went on to draw up a new constitution, and was re-elected twice under its provisions in 1995 and 2000. However, his time in office:

was marked by severe authoritarian measures, excessive use of propaganda, entrenched political corruption, multiple cases of extrajudicial killings, and human rights violations ... Fujimori targeted members of Peru's indigenous community and subjected them to forced sterilizations.

Interesting times, as I mentioned above.

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El Pais: Mario Vargas Llosa at his home in Madrid (2023)

An internationally celebrated writer such as Vargas Llosa could have been forgiven for retreating from the world of action and confining himself to his books after such a set-back as being trounced in the election. And he did live mainly in Madrid after 1990, though he "spent roughly three months of the year in Peru with his extended family."

The Latin-American idea of the writer as "tribuno" - tribune of the people - was strong in him, though. He'd already explored the world of mass media in a South Bank Show-style talk show called The Tower of Babel, produced for Peruvian TV in the early 1980s. Theatre, public lectures, visiting professorships, were all important parts of his life, as well as his complex engagement with the tragic history of his native land.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La guerra del fin del mundo (1981)

My own first attempt at an assessment of Vargas Llosa's work came in chapter 3 of the thesis I mentioned above, which eventually ended up with the imposing title "An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day." I focussed on his sixth novel La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World], comparing it to two previous accounts of the Canudos Campaign, a bizarre late nineteenth-century conflict between "civilisation" (in the form of the Brazilian government) and "backwardness" (in the form of an obscure millenarian religious sect) in the sertão, the primitive north-eastern backlands of Brazil.

Euclides da Cunha: Os Sertões (1902)

The first account, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands], is a kind of sociologically infused history of the confused mentality of the Conselheiristas - as the followers of the home-grown prophet Antonio Conselheiro had come to be called. It's a Brazilian classic, and a major work of world literature.

R. B. Cunninghame Graham: A Brazilian Mystic (1920)

The second, R. B. Cunninghame Graham's A Brazilian Mystic: Being the Life and Miracles of Antonio Conselheiro, is a more conventional history of the event, interesting mainly for the personality of its author, a Scottish writer and traveller - mainly in Latin America - who was also among the founders of both the Scottish Labour Party (1888) and the Scottish Nationalist Party (1928).

John Lavery: Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936)

The Canudos campaign meant very different things to these three writers: the Brazilian journalist, the Scottish historian and travel writer, and the Peruvian novelist. But it meant different things in their three separate eras, too. Da Cunha, in the late nineteenth century, felt despair at the seemingly bottomless ignorance and backwardness of his provincial countrymen; Cunninghame Graham, in the 1920s, saw it as yet another example of colonial oppression and indiscriminate violence; and as for Vargas Llosa in the early 1980s ... what exactly did he think about it?

None of his previous novels had strayed far from Peru - not only that, but the Peru of the 1950s, of his early manhood, as perfect a mirror for his larger thoughts about men and the world they inhabit (or so it seemed at the time) as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County had been for the elegist of the American South.

It's interesting to revisit the rather convoluted way in which I tried to approach this question in my own thesis in the late 1980s:

Mario Vargas Llosa's book La guerra del fin del mundo ... has many endings – to match its many narrative streams – and these are perhaps better dealt with in summary than in quotation. The actual ending comes as the culmination of an argument between a local Bahían Colonel and the gaucho lieutenant Maranhão who has been acting as unofficial executioner (by decapitation) of the prisoners. After the Colonel has humiliated the lieutenant by slapping his face and urinating on him, one of the woman prisoners (who has observed this act of revenge) catches hold of him and gives him the answer to the question he has been asking: where is João Abade, the military commander of the rebels?

"He got away, then?"
The little old woman shakes her head again. encircled by the eyes of the women prisoners.
"Archangels took him up to heaven," she says, clacking her tongue. "I saw them."

One could see this as Vargas Llosa's determination not to end in despair, but rather with a sense of victory of some sort – however equivocal. The main characters of the novel have already been dealt with, in the fashion of a nineteenth-century novel: the 'nearsighted journalist' (who one feels is some kind of analogue ... to Euclides da Cunha, one of the dedicatees of Vargas Llosa's book) has found happiness with Jurema, whom he met in Canudos; 'Galileo Gall', the Scottish revolutionary and phrenologist (... perhaps ... suggested in part by R. B, Cunninghame Graham) has died precisely because of his abuse of love, with the 'fateful femininity’ Jurema; and, finally, the Baron de Canabrava, the éminence grise of Bahían politics, has succeeded in making love again, thus restoring his wife and himself to the spiritual harmony they had lost in the siege. It sounds a wild farrago, but it all builds up to the single unified (avowedly authorial) conclusion to be drawn from the tale. As he himself has said, this is something new in his work:

Because of the type of problem faced by the various characters. I have had to think in terms of generalized concepts – something which I have never done before while writing a novel, because it is a kind of thinking which tends to create obstacles, a novel being (for me, at any rate) a fundamentally concrete world of experience.

What this conclusion is defies simple expression – but it seems, essentially, to set against the 'world-historical' cataclysm of Canudos the human values and human scale of the lives and mutual affections of the various characters. In essence, then, it is an attempt to draw from the particularities of the Canudos campaign 'ciertas ideas generales' [certain general ideas].

Or, as he puts it elsewhere:

"Don't you see?" the nearsighted journalist said, breathing as though he were exhausted from some tremendous physical effort. "Canudos isn't a story: it's a tree of stories."

Mario Vargas Llosa: The War of the End of the World (1981 / 1984)

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Mario Vargas Llosa (1988)

Fictions

One of the mnemonic devices I've evolved over the years for turning off the tap of the monologue in my head when I'm trying to get to sleep is to recite lists of tricky - but memorisable - phenomena. It started off with the reigns of the kings and queens of England, then moved on to the chronology of the American presidents. When I got bored with those, I switched to the dates of Charles Dicken's novels - then ditto for Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and ... Mario Vargas Llosa.

Vargas Llosa's 21 works of fiction seem to fall naturally into threes - or at any rate that's the easiest way for me to remember them when I'm lying awake at night.

Books I own are marked in bold:

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Mario Vargas Llosa: La ciudad y los perros (1962)



1. La ciudad y los perros [The City and the Dogs] (1962)
   • La ciudad y los perros. 1962. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1988.
   • The Time of the Hero. 1962. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1966. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La Casa Verde (1965)



2. La casa verde [The Green House] (1965)
   • La casa verde. 1965. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1983.
   • The Green House. 1965. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1968. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Conversación en La Catedral (1969)



3. Conversación en la Catedral [Conversation in the Cathedral] (1969)
   • Conversación en La Catedral. 1969. Nueva Narrativa Hispánica. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1979.
   • Conversation in the Cathedral. 1969. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1975. London: Faber, 1993.

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These first three novels definitely form a group. In a previous post on the "Boom" generation of Latin American novelists, I said of them:

Vargas Llosa's first three novels are fantastically dense, almost Faulknerian studies of the lifestyles - and moral compromises - of Peruvian society and politics in the 1950s. They're linguistically inventive, stylistically innovative, and powerfully structured. La ciudad y los perros makes a kind of parable out of the author's own schooldays in Lima. La casa verde - probably the most enduring of the three - centres on the doings in a certain brothel in Amazonia; whereas Conversación en la Catedral records a single conversation in a bar, with an almost infinite set of ramifications branching out from each line of dialogue.

Together, they probably form his major claim on posterity.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973)



4. Pantaleón y las visitadoras [Pantaleón and the Special Service] (1973)
   • Pantaleón y las visitadoras. 1973. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1989.
   • Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. 1973. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1978. London: Faber, 1987.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977)



5. La tía Julia y el escribidor [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter] (1977)
   • La tía Julia y el escribidor. 1977. Biblioteca de Bolsillo. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1986.
   • Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. 1977. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.

Mario Vargas Llosa: La guerra del fin del mundo (1981)



6. La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World] (1981)
   • La guerra del fin del mundo. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1981.
   • The War of the End of the World. 1981. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1984. London: Faber, 1986.

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In his 1990 Paris Review interview, Vargas Llosa said:

I used to be “allergic” to humor because I thought, very naively, that serious literature never smiled; that humor could be very dangerous if I wanted to broach serious social, political, or cultural problems in my novels. I thought it would make my stories seem superficial and give my reader the impression that they were nothing more than light entertainment ... But one day, I discovered that in order to effect a certain experience of life in literature, humor could be a very precious tool. That happened with Pantaleon and the Special Service. From then on, I was very conscious of humor as a great treasure, a basic element of life and therefore of literature.

It wasn't just humour that he discovered at the beginning of the 1970s, though, it was the whole burgeoning world of postmodern intertextuality. His next three novels are still among his most beloved and widely read. As I said of them in an earlier post:

No more ponderous studies of colonial corruption and violence - instead, he decided to approach these themes through humour and linguistic absurdity. Pantaleón y las visitadoras, the first of these novels, tells the story of a "special service" of prostitutes provided to servicemen in Amazonia, poorly concealed under a cloak of bureaucratic verbiage and officialese. It's a very funny novel, which reprises the themes of La casa verde in a completely different way.
He followed it up with an even bolder leap into the unknown: La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977) retold the events of his own early life, with the admixture of an imaginary hack serial-writer, whose multiple stories were all starting to fold in on each other in an increasingly chaotic blizzard of clichés. This remains his most famous and successful novel, having even survived a dreadfully cack-handed Hollywood adaptation with Barbara Hershey and Peter Falk. It revisits not only the world of his first novel The Time of the Hero, but also that of the early stories collected in Los jefes & los cachorros [The Cubs] (1959 / 1967).

I've already commented above on the equally multi-layered War of the End of the World.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Historia de Mayta (1984)



7. Historia de Mayta [The Story of Mayta] (1984)
   • The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. 1984. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1986. London: Faber, 1987.

Mario Vargas Llosa: ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986)



8. ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? [Who Killed Palomino Molero?] (1986)
   • ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? 1986. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1988.
   • Who Killed Palomino Molero? 1986. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1987. London: Faber, 1989.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El hablador (1987)



9. El hablador [The Storyteller] (1987)
   • El hablador. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1987.
   • The Storyteller. 1987. Trans. Helen Lane. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.

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The next period of Vargas Llosa's writing life is rather more difficult to characterise:

There were political satires, such as Historia de Mayta [The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta] (1984) and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto [The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto] (1997). There were detective novels, such as ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? [Who Killed Palomino Molero?] (1986) and its sequel Lituma en los Andes [Death in the Andes] (1993). There were risqué sex comedies, such as Elogio de la madrastra [In Praise of the Stepmother] (1988), and Travesuras de la niña mala [The Bad Girl] (2006).

Of the three novels listed directly above, my own pick would definitely be El hablador, though I described it as "more of a great idea for a novel than a great novel" in my earlier post.

Interestingly enough, much the same approach, interspersing Indian folktales with the contemporary story of despoliation of the Amazon, was taken by British playwright Christopher Hampton in his at-least-equally-accomplished 1970s play Savages.

¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? is a good roman policier, but not really much more than that. The Historia de Mayta suffers from too much topical satire at the expense of hopeless left-wing ideologues. The events it was based on were real enough, but somehow Vargas Llosa hasn't added anything very substantial to them. Perhaps he was just stretched too thin at this point in his life to concentrate fully on his vocation as a novelist.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Elogio de la madrastra (1988)



10. Elogio de la madrastra [In Praise of the Stepmother] (1988)
    • Elogio de la madrastra. La sonrisa vertical: Colección de Erotica dirigada por Luis G. Berlanga. Barcelona: Tusquet Editores, S. A., 1988.
    • In Praise of the Stepmother. 1988. Trans. Helen Lane. 1990. London: Faber, 1992.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Lituma en los Andes (1993)



11. Lituma en los Andes [Lituma in the Andes] (1993)
    • Death in the Andes. 1993. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1996. London: Faber, 1997.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (1997)



12. Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto [The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto] (1997)
    • The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. 1997. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1998. London: Faber, 1999.

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I described the two novels In Praise of the Stepmother and its sequel The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto as "quasi-soft porn" in an earlier post on Vargas Llosa's later work.

Certainly it was a surprising development in the work of one of the most senior writers in the Latin American canon. Opinions differ on the effectiveness of the result. What might have seen as par for the course in a comparably eminent French writer somehow seemed to shock people more when it came from so "serious" an author.

Lituma en los Andes is a grim detective novel, a sequel to ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, but with far more heft and atmosphere. It provides another fascinating window into the strange world of Vargas Llosa's Peru.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: La Fiesta del Chivo (2000)



13. La fiesta del chivo [The Feast of the Goat] (2000)
    • The Feast of the Goat. 2000. Trans. Edith Grossman. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003)



14. El paraíso en la otra esquina [Paradise in the other corner] (2003)
    • The Way to Paradise. 2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber, 2004.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Travesuras de la niña mala (2006)



15. Travesuras de la niña mala [Doings of the Bad Girl] (2006)
    • The Bad Girl: A Novel. 2006. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

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"The Feast of the Goat came after such a long dry spell that most critics had already written him off," is how I put it in a previous post called "Novelists in their 80s."

The Way to Paradise (like its successor The Dream of the Celt) is an interesting enough ficto-biography. Travesuras de la niña mala is - we're told - Vargas Llosa's attempt to transpose his most-admired novel, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, to the world of contemporary Peru. Neither of the last two is much more than a footnote to his earlier triumphs, however.

But The Feast of the Goat! I couldn't really believe it when I first read it. I described it then as:

a terrifyingly visceral piece of work, fully comparable to such early works as La casa verde or Conversación en la Catedral. More to the point, it's a major contribution to that strange literary subgenre called the Latin American dictator novel.

If you'd like to see more examples of these novels, I've already tried to list most of the major titles - from Asturias' El Señor Presidente to Roa Bastos' I the Supreme and García Márquez' Autumn of the Patriarch - in a previous post.

There's not a lot of point in writing more about La fiesta del chivo: it demands to be read. I don't think anyone had anticipated that the old man still had it in him.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: El sueño del celta (2010)



16. El sueño del celta [The Dream of the Celt] (2010)
    • El sueño del celta. 2010. Alfaguara. México: Santillana Ediciones Generales, S. A., 2010.
    • The Dream of the Celt. 2010. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El héroe discreto (2013)



17. El héroe discreto [The Discreet Hero] (2013)
    • The Discreet Hero. 2013. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2015.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Cinco esquinas (2016)



18. Cinco esquinas [Five Corners] (2016)
    • The Neighbourhood. 2016. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2018.

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In an earlier post, quoted above, I tried to sum up the effect of one of Vargas Llosa's later novels:

The Discreet Hero is not among his masterworks ... but it's still a fascinating read for the fans.
Those of you who've read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter will recall how the latter's scripts start to fold in on themselves, with characters appearing in the wrong contexts and contaminating the plotlines with unexpected interventions. So many of Vargas Llosa's own old characters - Lituma, Don Rigoberto, the 'Stepmother' herself - turn up in this novel that one has, at times, the odd feeling that the whole thing is set in Vargas-Llosa-land rather than any kind of recognisable Peru.
His obsession with the provincial Peru of the 1950s, its constant recurrence in its work, is supplanted here by an rather more 'contemporary' Lima and Piura. The characters all seem to live in the past, however: his past, Vargas Llosa's, rather more than their own.
The novel is neatly plotted and full of unexpected treats - though perhaps more for readers familiar with his work than any newcomers. The playfulness may seem a little forced at times, the virtuosity a bit tired, but there's no doubt that Vargas Llosa at his worst ... is still superior to most other novelists at their best.

The Dream of the Celt, as I mentioned above, is a ficto-biography of the Irish social activist and revolutionary Roger Casement. It makes a rather unhappy attempt to write off Casement's notorious "Black Diaries", detailing his homosexual activities, as a series of fantasies rather than a factual record, but is otherwise quite persuasive in its reconstruction of his world: particularly his investigations of the appallingly brutal turn-of-the-century rubber plantations of the Amazon.

Cinco esquinas, too, met with a rather mixed press. Reviewers' opinions ranged from: "a colorful but confusing and ultimately disappointing work by a great writer" to an "audacious and skillful" novel which "pulses along with a zest and cunning not commonly found among octogenarian Nobel laureates."

The translation, too, has received brickbats as well as bouquets, being described on the one hand as "punchily translated by the ever-excellent Edith Grossman", and on the other blamed for "tripping up" the reading experience.

As the saying goes: You pays your money and you takes your choice.



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Mario Vargas Llosa: Tiempos recios (2019)



19. Tiempos recios [Harsh Times] (2019)
    • Harsh Times. 2019. Trans. Adrian Nathan West. London: Faber, 2021.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Le dedico mi silencio (2023)



20. Le dedico mi silencio [I dedicate my silence to you] (2023)
    • Le dedico mi silencio. Alfaguara. USA: penguinlibros, 2023.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Los jefes / Los cachorros (1959 / 1967)



21. Los jefes (1959) / Los cachorros [The bosses / The cubs] (1967)
    • Los jefes / Los cachorros. 1959 & 1967. Biblioteca Breve. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, S. A., 1988.
    • The Cubs and Other Stories. 1965 & 1967. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1979. London: Faber, 1991.

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I've added Vargas Llosa's two early collections of short stories to the end of this list as a kind of coda to his 65 years of publishing fiction. Los jefes - winner of his first literary award, the Leopoldo Alas Prize - and the novella Los cachorros both inhabit the world of Peru's feral street kids. He may have ended up as one of the grand old men of world letters, but he began as a young punk, and he was anxious not to let anyone forget it.

Peru in that decade, the 1950s, when he was in his teens, remained his spiritual centre for the rest of his life. Some of his greatest novels - The War of the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat - were set elsewhere in Latin America, but an overwhelming number of them were situated right there at home, in the narrow streets and broad mountains he'd known since childhood.

His last, Le dedico mi silencio [I gift you my silence], not yet translated into English, is no exception: it is, by all accounts, a "love letter to Peruvian popular music." As the TLS reviewer said at the time:

If this novel proves to be Vargas Llosa’s swan song, then it is hard to imagine a better one. It deploys a subtle, self-deprecating humour, as though nothing about it were really serious, when much clearly is. Toño is especially dedicated to the Peruvian vals, or waltz, a dance that bears little resemblance to its Viennese namesake and which (he tells us) emerged spontaneously from Lima’s sordid alleyways. Nobody invented the vals, everybody loves it, and it has the potential, or so Toño believes, to bring Peruvians together at a time when the country is being torn apart by Shining Path guerrillas.

Well, Mario Vargas Llosa is dead now, and with him dies the last link to that miraculous "Boom" generation. Their achievements are part of literary history now; their complex, at times contradictory, political stands have not resulted in the liberation from foreign domination they sought. They did, however, succeed in reverse-colonising the literature of the nations who had most oppressed them: surely a worthy enough feat for any set of writers?

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Jorge Luis Borges with Mario Vargas Llosa

When Vargas Llosa was asked, in the 1990 Paris Review interview I quoted from above, whom he most admired among his contemporaries, the answer was simple: Jorge Luis Borges.

... if I were forced to choose one name, I would have to say Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one. Spanish is a language that tends toward exuberance, proliferation, profusion. Our great writers have all been prolix ... Borges is the opposite — all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.

The admiration was not mutual, however:

The last time I saw him was at his house in Buenos Aires; I interviewed him for a television show I had in Peru and I got the impression he resented some of the questions I asked him. Strangely, he got mad because, after the interview — during which, of course, I was extremely attentive, not only because of the admiration I felt for him but also because of the great affection I had for the charming and fragile man that he was — I said I was surprised by the modesty of his house, which had peeling walls and leaks in the roof. This apparently deeply offended him. I saw him once more after that and he was extremely distant ... The only thing that might have hurt him is what I have just related, because otherwise I have never done anything but praise him. I don’t think he read my books. According to him, he never read a single living writer after he turned forty, just read and reread the same books ... But he’s a writer I very much admire.

"I don't think he read my books." It doesn't matter how great your fame and achievements may be, there's always something missing. Borges didn't read Vargas Llosa - or at least claimed not to - so he never knew just how he would have stacked up in that extraordinary blind genius's world.

Pepe Fernandez: Jorge Luis Borges (Hotel L'Hôtel, 1978)

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Municipalidad Provincial de Talara: Mario Vargas Llosa (13 April 2025)

Nos unimos al dolor de todos los peruanos y expresamos nuestro sentido pesar por el fallecimiento de Mario Vargas Llosa, Premio Nobel de Literatura.

Mario Vargas Llosa deja una huella imborrable en el mundo de la literatura, y como peruanos, nos enorgullece que sea uno de los principales referentes para los novelistas del Perú y el mundo.

Descansa en paz, Mario Vargas Llosa.

We join in the grief of all Peruvians and express our deepest condolences for the passing of Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize winner in Literature.

Mario Vargas Llosa left an indelible mark on the world of literature, and as Peruvians, we are proud that he is one of the leading examples for novelists in Peru and around the world.

Rest in peace, Mario Vargas Llosa.

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Memories of Don Smith

D. I. B. Smith (1934-2023)
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]

i. m. Emeritus Professor Donal Ian Brice Smith
(4/2/1934 - 27/9/2023)

I don't think I ever had a conversation with Don Smith which didn't end in some interesting book recommendation - or else a new insight into a long-beloved classic. He was the first Academic I ever met who seemed to be driven solely by a love for books and reading in general. "Great stuff!" he would intone, as he leafed through another shabby-looking prize from the second-hand bookshops downtown.

I was somewhat in awe of him to start with - and for quite a long time after that. I had, for some unaccountable reason, decided in the early 1980s that it was up to me to reclaim from oblivion the long-neglected novels of British Poet Laureate John Masefield by composing a Master's thesis about them.

Constance Babington Smith: John Masefield: A Life (1978)

"How many novels did he actually write?" asked one of the prospective supervisors I approached. "Twenty-three," I replied. "And how many of them have you read?" "Twenty-three." [1] Strangely enough, that particular prospect discovered he had urgent duties elsewhere and could not accept a new research student at that time ...

Don - or 'Professor Smith', as I continued to address him till long after I had ceased to be his student - actually was far too busy to take me on. He was, after all, Head of Department at the time. But when I went to see him about it, he said that he would do it - but only if nobody else was able to.

Which left me with the somewhat invidious task of visiting each and every one of the Academics in the of the University of Auckland English Department who might conceivably be interested in such a project. It was certainly very educational to sample the variety of excuses they came up with - from the straight 'no' to the 'maybe some other time' to the 'perhaps if you changed it to ... [something quite unrelated].'

But no, I was - no doubt foolishly - quite determined, so I eventually made my way back to Don's door, and to his somewhat reluctant oversight ...

How did he approach it? He sat there and talked, while I took notes. His talk ranged over many subjects, some relevant and others perhaps not quite so relevant. At the time I recall he was reading the work of Anglo-Irish writer Shane Leslie - who was pretty obscure even by my standards - as well as working on some of the lesser known novels of Ezra Pound's early mentor (and Joseph Conrad's collaborator) Ford Madox Ford.

Was any of this relevant to Masefield? Well, in a curious way, as it turned out, yes. The interface between the 'commercial' and the 'literary' faces of Edwardian literature fitted rather nicely into studying the work of a poet, Masefield, who was publishing at the same time as Eliot and Pound, but inhabited a world almost literally invisible to their admirers. Ford was a good example of the same phenomenon, though in a rather different way.

Andrew Marvell: The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1971)

Don's original field of specialisation had been seventeenth century literature. He'd published an edition of Andrew Marvell's satirical prose work The Rehearsal Transpros'd in the Oxford English Texts series. When I asked him about this, he said, "Well, it got me this job." What he seemed to like most, though, was exploring the more offbeat byways of Anglo-Irish literature - not to mention New Zealand writers such as Robin Hyde: far less well-known then than she is now.

Robin Hyde: Passport to Hell, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1986)

The more I heard from him, the more I liked it. I'd been trained in my undergraduate career to admire such extreme Modernists as Eliot and Joyce, and this (still) makes perfect sense to me. On the other hand, there was a rich penumbra of weirdos such as Chesterton and de la Mare, whom I liked just as much, but whom I'd been encouraged to dismiss as dead ends in the grand obstacle race of literary innovation.

Don wasn't interested in any of that survival-of-the-fittest nonsense. Is it enjoyable? was his central criterion for a book. Yes, he was certainly interested in the finesse and skill behind particular pieces of writing, but he still seemed to steer instinctively towards the anecdotal and - above all - towards enthusiasm in his approach to what he read.

I resolved to do likewise, and so, much later, when I in my turn became an English Academic with my own graduate students, I tried to give them as much as possible of the same formula: Read the book, not - till much later - the secondary literature about it. If you don't like it, acknowledge the fact - but then try and work out why.

It is, I suppose, an approach designed to produce readers, not students or teachers of literature. But then, if you don't actually get a kick out of the stuff you read, you probably shouldn't be teaching the subject in the first place.

That was the first - and probably the most important - of my many, many debts to Don.

Most prominent among the others would have to be the innumerable letters of recommendation he wrote for me while I was undertaking my long and arduous quest for an actual job in the fields of Academia. Once again, I've tried to follow his good example when asked to do the same thing for my ex-students.

But then I could never have got that far in the first place if I hadn't got a scholarship to study overseas, and I doubt very much that that would have happened without his powerful advocacy.

Roger Elwood, ed.: The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974)

What else? Well, after he retired, I visited him a few times at his wonderful house in Mission Bay, and admired the cupboard where he kept his very extensive collection of Sci-fi and Fantasy literature. That was another subject on which we saw eye to eye (for the most part). He had what seemed to me an inexplicable enthusiasm for Andre Norton, whereas I was more attuned to Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany, but there was generally some new fantasy epic he'd been reading which I ended up making a mental note to get hold of as soon as I could.

He made all them sound like so much fun - though he did stray into heresy on one occasion, I recall, by claiming to prefer Tad Williams to J. R. R. Tolkien as a writer of epic fantasy. This was, as I solemnly informed him, a little like preferring some latter-day SF luminary to Arthur C. Clarke - if they're able to see further, it's because they're standing on giant shoulders ...

Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross (2004)

He knew I was passionate about the poetry of our Auckland University colleague Kendrick Smithyman, and since Don and I could both read Italian, he lent me the typescript of some versions the monolingual Smithyman had concocted of certain modern Italian poets through the medium of other people's translations.

That, too, was a precious gift. I ended up editing and publishing the entire collection, which still seems to me - like Pound's Cathay - to prove that the end result of a process of translation counts for far more than the way that a writer actually gets there. Kendrick's versions from Italian have a supple ease and charm which far better linguists than he have tried in vain to achieve - and, in the process, he found in the poet Salvatore Quasimodo a virtual alter ego.

Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni (2010)

I was also presumptuous enough to ask Don to launch my first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno, which he did with great style and panache. I remember he compared it to Mario Praz's famous critical book The Romantic Agony, which is, I'm sure, far more credit than it deserved. It was characteristic of his ready wit as well as his charity, though.

Another of my favourite memories of him is the time he hunted me down at my student lodgings in Edinburgh and took me out to dinner at a local tratteria called Pinocchio's. It was wonderful to see him en famille, with his wife Jill and daughter Caitlin, and - as I recall - a great deal of red wine was drunk and pasta eaten in the course of the evening!

As Stephen King's writer hero says of his friend in the movie Stand by Me: "I'll miss him forever." That's certainly true. I'd love to have another of those wonderful, unexpected conversations where Don Smith turned all my prejudices and presuppositions on their heads. But in another, realer sense he's not dead - he'll never be dead.

I can hear him now saying "Great stuff" and reading out another passage from his latest essay, where he juxtaposes a quote from Ford Madox Ford about his latest drivelly historical romance The Young Lovell with another precisely contemporary set of Fordian instructions on how to be absolutely modern to his errant young protégé Ezra Pound ... [2]

---

Notes:

1. You can find them all listed here, at https://madbookcollection.blogspot.com/2009/04/acquisitions-86-john-masefield.html - if you're curious.

2. Arthur Rimbaud, "Il faut être absolument moderne." Une Saison en enfer (1873). Pound said of Ford Madox Ford in his 1939 obituary:

[H]e felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere snob, ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn ... the stilted language that then passed for 'good English' ...
And that roll saved me two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue ... though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.

Don, Caitlin, & Jill Smith
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]

•

Amis & Son

Neil Powell: Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (2008)

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.

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 & Martin (1970s)

•

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.

Novels:


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

Short Stories:


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

Non-fiction:


39. Socialism and the Intellectuals. Fabian Society pamphlet (1957)
40. 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.
41. The James Bond Dossier (1965)
    • The James Bond Dossier. 1965. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1966.
42. [as Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner] 1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965)
43. 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.
44. On Drink (1972)
    • On Drink. Pictures by Nicolas Bentley. 1972. Panther Books Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
45. Rudyard Kipling and His World (1974)
46. Everyday Drinking (1983)
    • Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1983.
47. How's Your Glass? (1984)
48. The Amis Collection (1990)
    • The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction, 1954-1990. Introduction by John McDermott. 1990. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
49. Memoirs (1991)
    • Memoirs. Hutchinson. London: Random Century Group Ltd., 1991.
50. The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997)
    • The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.
51. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. ['On Drink' (1972); 'Everyday Drinking' (1983); 'How's Your Glass?' (1984)]. Introduction by Christopher Hitchens (2008)

Edited:


52. [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.
53. G. K. Chesterton. Selected Stories (1972)
    • G. K. Chesterton. Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis. London: Faber, 1972.
54. The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978)
    • The New Oxford Book of Light Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
55. The Golden Age of Science Fiction (1981)
    • The Golden Age of Science Fiction. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1981.
56. The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988)

Letters:


57. 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.

Secondary:


58. Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis: A Biography. Hodder & Stoughton. London: Hodder Headline PLC, 1995.
59. Bradford, Richard. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2001.
60. 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.

Short stories:


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

Screenplays:


23. Saturn 3 (1980)
24. London Fields (2018)

Non-fiction:


25. Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
26. The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
    • The Moronic Inferno, and Other Visits to America. 1986. King Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
27. Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
28. Experience (2000)
    • Experience. 2000. Vintage. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2001.
29. The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971–2000 (2001)
30. 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.
31. The Second Plane (2008)
32. 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.

Secondary:


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

Father and Son? (2020)