'Chockfull of Love, Crammed With Bright Thoughts'

Several years have passed since I last entered a bookstore selling new books, such as Barnes and Noble or the late Borders. Long ago they stopped feeling like home and a visit usually turned out to be a waste of time. Serendipitous discovery was rare. The portion of the goods on their tables and shelves that might potentially interest me was small. Most of the good stuff I already owned or didn’t want, and I could smell the algorithms mandating the stock. I’m seldom in the market for greeting cards, coffee mugs or tote bags. 

So, like thousands of other readers, I rely on the few remaining used-book shops, online dealers and the occasional library sale. Much is lost, including a sentimental attachment to “real” bookstores, with their romantically crusty proprietors and bookshop cats, though something is sometimes gained – convenience, occasionally cheaper prices. Kingsley Amis’ “A Bookshop Idyll,” from his fourth book of poems, A Case of Samples (1957), reads like a report from a vanished kingdom. That was not his intent while writing it almost seventy years ago, but time sometimes adds layers of new meaning to literary works. It begins:  

 

“Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY

    Comes the brief POETRY shelf;

By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology

    Offers itself.

 

“Critical, and with nothing else to do,

    I scan the Contents page,

Relieved to find the names are mostly new;

    No one my age.”

 

Amis is ever alert to the predations of ego (including his own). The anthology is not a threat to the speaker. He continues:

 

“Like all strangers, they divide by sex:

    Landscape near Parma

Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,

    So does Rilke and Buddha.

 

“‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’

    These titles seem to say;

But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,

    Poem for J.,

 

The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter

    For several seconds;

From somewhere in this (as in any) matter

    A moral beckons.”

 

That some works are written for and marketed to women, and the same for men, is obviously true, but the lines have blurred since Amis’ time. With the growth in interest in “spiritual” matter and pop religion, no one would be surprised if a woman bought a copy of Rilke and Buddha. I once knew a woman who said the only poet she ever read was Rilke because he was “so spiritual.” Such a silly-sounding title might be written or read today by a man or woman. The poem concludes:

 

“Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart

    Or squash it flat?

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;

    Girls aren’t like that.

 

“We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff

    Can get by without it.

Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;

    They write about it,

 

“And the awful way their poems lay open

    Just doesn’t strike them.

Women are really much nicer than men:

    No wonder we like them.

 

“Deciding this, we can forget those times

    We sat up half the night

Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts,

    names, rhymes, and couldn’t write.”

 

Amis’ poem isn’t about books or bookstores or even poems after all. It’s about men and women and the truths and stereotypes that characterize us. Women possess certain advantages denied men, Amis suggests. With his echo of Byron’s Don Juan, he anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing but doesn’t dismiss us. For Amis, literature is meant to be interesting, amusing, even entertaining – qualities anathema to certain species of sticks-in-the-mud. That doesn’t mean lowbrow or one-dimensional. Consider Lucky Jim, Girl, 20, and Ending Up. He doesn’t harp but his focus is society and the social order, manners and morals. A consistent quality in Amis’ work, fiction or verse, is a comic surface with serious undertones.  

 

Amis was born on this date, April 16, in 1922, and died in 1995 at age seventy-three.