Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69059 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-08
• Binding: Paperback
• 1280 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As well as being a prolific novelist, Kingsley Amis loved to write letters. And whether one views him as a comic genius or misanthropic bar-fly, his literary output alone justifies the publication of this comprehensive collection. Here are fulminations to the press, laddish porn-swapping with best friend Philip Larkin, along with numerous communications, charming and vitriolic, to editors and agents.

Those seeking revelations might be disappointed but browsers will find a treasury of poignant detail. As an undergraduate, Amis advises Larkin on girls; he's still doing so 30 years later. As a father, he cloaks pride with irony ("Scoundrelly Mart has sold his novel to the Yanks", he fumes, a propos of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers). An avowed enemy of sentiment, he pens touching notes to his second wife, replete with pet names and illustrations. Later, he is vulnerable--terrified by alcoholism, widening waistbands and false teeth. This collection does not pretend to provide a key to his complex personality, but amply fulfils Amis's own prophecy: "What a feast is awaiting chaps ... when our ... letters come out". Not even appetites of Amis's proportions could digest this feast at one sitting--The Letters of Kingsley Amis is a book to be savoured over a lifetime. --Matthew Baylis

Synopsis
Throughout his life, Sir Kingsley Amis was a prolific, and outrageous correspondent. In his letters to friends such as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he was able to unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than 700 letters contained in this volume contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings. The letters reveal Amis's youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his successful first novel, "Lucky Jim"; his passionate love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about the vicissitudes of family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his relationship with his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; and his development into one of the country's most revered - yet also uniquely controversial - literary figures.

Customer Reviews

Two reasons enough to buy this book
First are the early letters from Amis to Larkin when they are angry young men, although not really about anything so dull as politics. The letters from Amis to Larkin and the vividly implied letters from Larkin to Amis are vicious, voracious and hilarious about themselves, jazz, drinking, lust, and the state of English writing. This part is fireworks. Second are the love letters addressed to his second wife, when Amis was bowled over by her. The second set of letters was not meant to be read by us, but the first probably was - although in 2300 on Mars, with us uncomprehending - given many allusions to future fame and biographers. In the second set we are snooping, but we see an energetic complex man overcome by sexual love, and that's not so bad - even edifying. These letters could be the best of Amis' "words".

putting wrongs to right
This is a letter rather than a review which is to actually ask why in Martins bleakest moment ,after the unfortunate passing of his father , why he felt it deacent to ridicule mr Eric D Jacobs the writer of a well liked biography , by asking another, lesser writer to re -write the `Letters of Kingsley Amis`? if some one might contact me with any responce please let me know.

All the copies I've seen are atrociously bound
You either like Amis or you don't. I can't imagine anyone unfamiliar with him buying this off the cuff. If you have read the Larkin letters, you'll have some idea what to expect; but Zachary Leader is a more censorious editor than Anthony Thwaite, or at least freer with the ellipse. A limerick about Christopher Ricks is 'unprintable', according to Leader. Whether or not it is due to editorial trimming, what is printed is fairly tame, compared to Larkin's unsound racial comments. (The previous reviewer who thinks Amis anti-Semitic can't have read the book properly.) Also, Leader makes some fairly unimportant but conspicuously unprofessional editorial errors, such as getting the name of an Amis character wrong. However, this is probably unavoidable in such a capacious volume. Prof. Leader has certainly produced a bumper tome. Obviously, the most 'important' correspondent is Larkin, and it's a shame that Amis lost many of the letters he received from Larkin, as a separate volume of Amis-Larkin correspondence would allow a reduction in the size of Prof. Leader's book. It needs it! The binding is of insufficient quality for such a large volume. It's surprisingly irritating to have to slap glue down the spine of a brand new book. A 5 star writer, a 4 star editing job, and zero stars for the bookbinding, gives an overall score of 3 stars.