`Provided That It Serves Another's Good'

Kingsley Amis sold his papers to the Huntington Library in 1984 and lived another eleven years. Included in the first shipment of manuscripts, delivered in 1987, was an untitled, undated poem that is probably also unfinished. Amis’ biographer, Zachary Leader, believes the poem dates from the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, when Amis was soon to turn sixty. It was first published in The Times Literary Supplement in May 2004:

“Things tell less and less:

The news impersonal

And from afar; no book

Worth wrenching off the shelf.

Liquor brings dizziness

And food discomfort; all

Music sounds thin and tired,

And what picture could earn a look?

The self drowses in the self

Beyond hope of a visitor.

Desire and those desired

Fade, and no matter:

Memories in decay

Annihilate the day.

There once was an answer:

Up at the stroke of seven,

A turn round the garden

(Breathing deep and slow),

Then work, never mind what,

How small, provided that

It serves another’s good

But once is long ago

And, tell me, how could

Such an answer be less than wrong,

Be right all along?

Vain echoes, desist”

An old man watches as life’s pleasures and purpose evaporate. “Vain echoes,” indeed – of Larkin, of course, and, less likely, Beckett in the final lines. The surprise for many readers begins in line fifteen and continues: “Then work, never mind what, / How small, provided that / It serves another’s good.” Amis detractors will find this laughable. The novelist carefully crafted his curmudgeonly image, but readers of Paul Fussell’s The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (1994) know better. For Amis, serving another’s good didn’t mean public displays of virtue (“virtue signaling,” as the cliché has it). “Another’s good” means generosity of spirit; for a writer, the obligation to be a munificent host and entertain his readers. Few recent writers of fiction are less pretentious and more amusing than Amis at his best. Name a novel funnier than Lucky Jim. (There are a few. Go ahead.) Willful obscurity implies a minging contempt for readers.