`Knives, Not Baubles'

The comic moralist, drunk and language cop Kingsley Amis died twenty years ago today, and that hardly seems possible, not while so many of his bêtes noires are still thriving. A crank, yes, especially in later years, but Amis was a rare funny crank, one morally attuned to our self-congratulatory idiocy.  Like his friend Philip Larkin, Amis earned a significant portion of his living from pointing out how truly wrong and foolish we are, while keeping us amused. Try it sometime. Either the humor or the moral acuity will tip the balance, leaving you unfunny or dishonest. In “Getting It Wrong” (1980), Amis takes on the ever-burgeoning incidence of malapropisms, the often comical and always unknowing use of the wrong word. He assembles a small anthology of such gaffes, both written and spoken, and some are real beauts. At the conclusion, he notes that the editor of the Concise Oxford Dictionary uses what are known as “usage labels” – for instance, joc. for jocular and vul. for vulgar. Amis proposes a common-sensical addition to the list of such labels, one certain to come in handy:

“What about `(illit.): illiterate, used only by those who have no wish to write accurately or vigourously’?  The principle could be extended. A dictionary records usage impartially, agreed, but whatever anybody says or does (here come some italics that don’t signal a malapropism) when consulted it is taken as prescriptive too by almost everybody who is not either a lexicographer or a linguist, and prescription is partiality. It seems harsh to deny guidance to the lonely and diminishing minority who may genuinely need and want it.”

Parse the precision of those sentences. It reminds one of Evelyn Waugh’s graceful way with words and lives up to Swift’s timeless formulation: “Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style” (“Letter to a Young Clergyman," 1720). Bad writing, for Amis, is symptomatic of muddled thinking, if not of something more worrisome. Under the heading “Writing: repetitions” in The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1998), Amis reminds us that using language correctly is not pedantic punishment but great good fun. He quotes Larkin “who said or wrote, as a memento to all literary persons, `No one will enjoy reading what you have not enjoyed writing.’ After all, it could only have been a Frenchman or Irishman who held the view that to write in the expectation of being enjoyed denoted a certain simplicity of mind.” Few writers are as consistently  enjoyable as Amis père. These words were published posthumously, but Amis was expressing comparable ideas as early as 1953, one year before he published his first novel, Lucky Jim (his best, along with Girl, 20). Here is the first stanza of “Wrong Words”:

“Half-shut, our eye dawdles down the page

Seeing the word love, the word death, the word life,

Rhyme-words of poets in a silver age:

Silver of the bauble, not of the knife.”

Clive James says of these lines: “Knives, not baubles, are what poems should be like: a very rigorous aesthetic, which Amis had begun holding to long before he got round to formulating it.”