'We’ll Have to Do Some Ourselves'

“[T]here are never enough books of the kind one likes . . .” 

We’re driven by a sense of cultural obligation to read certain books: “I must have a go at the Waverley novels.” We might even feel compelled to go slumming: “Dashiell Hammett was a commie but . . .” Guilt, too, is an effective motivator: “Where’s my never-opened copy of Proust?” And don't forget plain old gut-bucket snobbery: “I really must tell the boys at the bowling alley about Sylvia Plath.”

 

In his 1975 Paris Review interview, Kingsley Amis is asked if having grown up as an only child had an impact on him becoming a writer.”[W]riting for me,” he replies, “is to a large extent self-entertainment, and the only child is driven to do that.” His answer seems commonsensical, even for those of us with siblings. The notion of the canon has been fashionably discredited but every serious reader carries around his own canon of essential books. Classics, yes, with the inevitable Shakespeare and Tolstoy, but don't leave out the idiosyncratic standards like Nabokov, Liebling, J.V. Cunningham and Guy Davenport. That vital core requires no critical defense. It can’t be challenged. It’s what remains when snobbery and even taste are left on the shelf. Those are the sorts of books Amis is talking about, and they would include his own Lucky Jim. He continues in the interview:     

 

“And as for reading, well of course I got a lot done, Again, totally heterogeneous material—what we would now call very bad literature: the boys’ comics of those days—which were, of course, compared with today’s comics, positively Flaubertian in their style and Dickensian in their character portrayal—all the way up through hardbound books of adventure stories and such, and taking in real writers like Dickens himself, Shakespeare and so on, in much the same sort of spirit. I think it’s very important to read widely and in a wide spectrum of merit and ambition on the part of the writer.”

 

Across a lifetime, reading is a continuum. True readers are motivated by a selfish quest for pleasure, which can mean many things and almost certainly will evolve with time. No one starts or continues reading because it’s an onerous waste of time. The linkage of reading and writing is intimate and obvious to some of us, including Amis:

 

“I read somewhere recently somebody saying, ‘When I want to read a book, I write one.’ I think that’s very good. It puts its finger on it, because there are never enough books of the kind one likes: one adds to the stock for one’s own entertainment.”

 

In a 1968 interview with Book World, Amis said: “You could probably isolate certain common qualities in the writers I like best—wit, energy, a way of saying something with style and economy. This is really why I started writing; I wrote Lucky Jim because I wished that I hadn’t finished reading all the books like it. I’d read all of Waugh and Powell and said, ‘Where’s more? We’ll have to do some ourselves.’”

 

Amis died on this date, October 22, in 1995 at age seventy-three.

 

[The transcripts of both interviews can be found in Conversations with Kingsley Amis (ed. Thomas DiPietro, University Press of Mississippi, 2009.)]