That Time Margaret Thatcher Spanked Christopher Hitchens

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Politics

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Biography, British Parliament, British politics, Carly Fiorina, Charisma, Christopher Hitchens, Donald Trump, François Mitterrand, Government, Hitch-22, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, memoir, New Statesman, Philip Larkin, politics, sex, The New York Times, The War Against Cliché

“I had written a longish article for The New York Times Magazine, saying in effect that, if Labour could not revolutionize British society, then the task might well fall to the right. I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting from the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. (To this day, I have never had so much anger mail, saying, in effect, ‘How could you?’)

I felt immune to Mrs. Thatcher in most other ways, since for all her glib ‘free market’ advocacy on one front she seemed to be an emotional ally of the authoritarian and protectionist white-settler regime in Rhodesia. And it was this very thing that afforded me the opportunity to grapple with her so early in her career…

Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bow lower!’ Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. ‘No, no,’ she trilled. ‘Much lower!’ By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words ‘Naughty boy!’

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse—of what someone in another context once called ‘the smack of firm government’—that I had been afforded. Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of ‘Thatcherism,’ as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.”

Margaret Thatcher 2

__________

A segment from Christopher Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22.

I thought of this encounter during the recent GOP debate in which Carly Fiorina dispensed one by one with her male counterparts, spurring even The Donald to bow in submission (a first for him, no doubt). That their particular clash came on the heels of Trump’s terrible comment about “that face” only doubled the association to Thatcher, whose looks, despite what Austin Powers may’ve thought, had more than a few fans on the left and right. (I’ve heard similar compliments about Carly, confirmed just a few days ago by a female journalist friend who interviewed her last week.)

It was Thatcher who once mused, in a poached version of a famous labor union saying, that, “being powerful is like being ladylike — if you have to say you are, you probably aren’t.” The same goes for other adjectives, like smart, classy, rich, and many of Trump’s other favorite words which he likes to apply to himself. Yet it’s precisely this do-don’t-tell orientation which makes a female politician like Thatcher so potent. What you think you see ain’t necessarily what you’ll get. As Mitterand said, “she had the eyes of Caligula and mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”

If you’re at all familiar with Hitch’s work, you’ll know this type of fixation on and flirtation with women were central to his persona. His best pal, Martin Amis, along with Amis’s father Kingsley and several other Englishmen of those generations, had a lot to say about Mrs. Thatcher — most of which didn’t have to do with her stance on Rhodesia. Martin uses the above interaction as a basis to analyze Thatcher’s appeal to the English male psyche. In an excerpt pulled from his essay collection The War Against Cliché, he writes:

I once discussed Mrs Thatcher’s feminine qualities with Christopher Hitchens who had recently spent some time in her company. This was his verdict: ‘Oh, she stinks of sex.’ And this is my father, Kingsley Amis, in his Memoirs: her beauty, he writes, is ‘so extreme that… it can trap me for a split second into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2200. The fact that that is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty, and that sexuality is still, I think, an underrated factor in her appeal (or repellence).’ Helplessley I reach for the commonplace about the glamour of power. I could further infuriate my father’s shade by adducing another cliché: English nostalgia for chastisement. Philip Larkin shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the Prime Minister (‘I adore Mrs Thatcher’). Larkin was a great poet… he once asked Mrs Thatcher, who had professed herself a fan, to quote a line of his. She blinked and said, ‘All the unhurried day/ Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’

I like that she could quote Larkin. Counts for a lot in my book. What would my Larkin nomination be? I’m glad you asked. “The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said.”

By the way, is his repetition of “saying, in effect…” in the first paragraph a rare Hitchens misstep? Watch him relay the encounter below.

You can also move on:

A Eulogy for Philip

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

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eulogy, funeral, Kingsley Amis, Larkin, Philip Larkin, poetry, requiem, Richard Bradford, speech, The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin

“We are here to mourn the death of our friend Philip Larkin. He was the most private of men, one who found the universe a bleak and hostile place and recognized very clearly the disagreeable realities of human life, above all the dreadful effects of time on all we have and are. The world of his fellow creatures was hardly less forbidding: privacy was to be jealously guarded. In the sense of complete physical solitude, he found it a daily necessity. He saw people as hopelessly cut off from each other, and revealingly misquoted Donne in declaring, ‘Every man is an island.’

And yet it was impossible to meet him without being aware in the first few seconds of his impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit, always ready to respond to a gleam of humor or warmth. He was surprised if anyone found him a gloomy person: ‘I like to think of myself as quite funny,’ he told an interviewer, and he was more than funny about those in the literary and academic world whom he considered fraudulent, and he found no shortage of those; and to hear him sounding off about a politician or any other public figure who was not to his taste did the heart good.

But there was no malice in it, no venom. If he regarded the world severely or astringently, it was a jovial astringency. He could be at his funniest when uttering those same painful truths about life as those he made so devastating in his poetry. And it was all from the heart: he never showed off, never laid claim to feeling what he didn’t feel, and it was that honesty, more total in his case than in any other I’ve known, that gave his poetry such power. He meant every word of it; and so, though he may not have written many poems, he wrote none that were false or unnecessary.

His honesty extended to himself; again, nobody was ever more totally or acutely aware of his limitations. He took life seriously, he took poetry seriously, but not himself — nobody who said he looked like a bald salmon could do that. No solemnity about himself as a poet either; when he’d written a poem he felt pleased, as if he’d laid an egg. But we take seriously what he has left us. We are lucky enough to have known him; thousands who didn’t, and more thousands in the future, will be able to share those poems with us. They offer comfort, and not cold comfort either. They are not dismal or pessimistic, but invigorating; they know that for all its shortcomings life must be got on with.

And now we must get on with ours, a little better equipped to do so with the help of those fragments of poignancy and humor in everyday things, those moments of illumination and beauty we should never have seen or known but for Philip.”

__________

As far as I know, this is the only place on the internet with a version of this tribute. It’s Kingsley Amis’s eulogy for his closest friend Philip Larkin, delivered 29 years ago this week. You can read more about their hilarious and eccentric relationship in Richard Bradford’s The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.

Top: Amis; below: Larkin.

Martin Amis on Terror, Iraq, and His Father

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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ethics, Father, foreign policy, interview, Iraq, Iraq War, Islam, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, morality, Quran, Son, Taliban, terror, Terrorism, Terry Eagleton, War

Jon Snow: Look at the war on Iraq – do you not think that would stir an urge in the Arab world when they see women and children ravaged by what we Westerners are doing?

Martin Amis: I’ve said in print that by far the greatest danger of terrorism is not what it inflicts, but what it provokes; and the Iraq war has been a disaster. I was against it at the time, and I’m against it now. Blowing up a London nightclub on lady’s night [as an uncovered terrorist plot had planned] doesn’t seem to me to be a proportionate act in response to that.

The other night, I asked an audience to put up its hands if it felt morally superior to the Taliban. To the Taliban – who have two-day massacres, slash the throats of children, not only subtract women from society, but black up the windows of the houses they’re confined to. And only a third of the audience raised its hands.

Jon Snow: But do you feel morally superior to Islam?

Martin Amis: I feel morally superior to Islamism, yes. By some distance.

Jeremy Paxman: Islam itself?

Martin Amis: Well, I feel an intellectual distance from it.

Jon Snow: What do you say to the charge that you are your father’s son?

Martin Amis: Well, he’s now being lazily and cornily defamed by his critics when he’s not around to defend himself. You have an argument with your father all your life – and he’s been dead for twelve years, and I’m still having that argument.

I was on most things to the left of him. But critics are accusing him of impulses he never had – he was never homophobic; he had a difficult time in his relations with women, but was not misogynistic; was not, in any sense, anti-semitic, except in the odd impulse. And why do we not admit to these odd impulses?

Do we cleanse ourselves? Do we pretend that we’re homogenous and pure and clean? Do we want to live with that kind of illusion?

The anti-semites, the psychotic misogynists and homophobics are the Islamists.

__________

Martin Amis in an interview with Jon Snow in 2007.

Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca

Martin Amis: Why Are So Many Writers Drinkers?

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

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Alcohol, Alcoholism, Anatol Yusef, booze, Creativity, drinking, Drugs, interview, Interview Magazine, John Freeman, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, PEN World Voices Festival, Smoking, wine, Writing

Interviewer: Why have you been less interested in writing about drugs than you have about drink? Does it have to do with how you grew up? Your father hasn’t exactly avoided booze as a subject.

Martin Amis: Yes, he’s a serious drinker. Drink, like sex, tells us an extra thing about someone. It strikes me more and more that we don’t really know much about each other, even people we know well. We keep so much hidden. You put the 10% on display: the rest is all secret. And when people are drunk, you find out another 10%; and when you discover what someone is like intimately, you discover another 10%, or maybe more.

Interviewer: I don’t know if drugs give you another 10%. Sometimes I think drugs remove something.

Martin Amis: Or obscure the original 10%, yes. In my early novels, people smoke dope and stuff, but alcohol is something everyone has an attitude towards, especially in New York where it seems everyone has stopped drinking.

Interviewer: Smoking, too.

Martin Amis: You’re more efficient when you don’t drink. But also you keep that other 10%. Someone from New York said to me not long ago, ‘You produce an awful lot, are you a workaholic?’ I said, ‘No I’m an alcoholic.’

In fact I’m not an alcoholic, but drink is present every day of my life in those few glasses of wine at the end of the day. When people say that I often think it means a few bottles. Funnily enough, a mild hangover is often a good start in order to write. I think the reason writers do drink a lot, almost without exception — American novelists, if they’re not Jewish or alcoholics — is that writers have time to recover. You haven’t got to get up the next morning. And perhaps, more than most people, you do want an escape from yourself.

__________

Excerpted from a 1976 interview with Martin Amis.

While its original text is not available on the web, this exchange was recently reenacted at the PEN World Voices Festival by Amis, John Freeman, and Anatol Yusef.

Bernard Baruch: We Need an International Law with Teeth

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches, War

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9/11, A Choice between the Quick and the Dead, Bernard Baruch, Cold War, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Einstein's Monsters, Fear, foreign policy, India, international relations, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Muhammad Atta, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Nukes, Pakistan, Pashtun, peace, politics, Soviet Union, War

“The basis of a sound foreign policy, in this new age, for all the nations here gathered, is that anything that happens, no matter where or how, which menaces the peace of the world, or the economic stability, concerns each and all of us…

Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good. Public opinion supports a world movement toward security. If I read the signs aright, the peoples want a program not composed merely of pious thoughts but of enforceable sanctions — an international law with teeth in it…

Let this be anchored in our minds: Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration…

The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war.”

__________

From Bernard Baruch’s 1946 speech “A Choice between the Quick and the Dead”.

Though he would in the following year coin the term “Cold War”, Baruch concluded this speech with the ungrudging proposal that all nuclear weapons be placed — through a thirteen-step procedure — under some intergovernmental authority. You think that sounds idealistic? Yeah, me too. Or at least anachronistic, especially in a time when the international community flounders purposelessly, not only in its attempt to curb the annexation of Eastern Ukraine, but also in keeping track of a massive commercial airliner with 200 cell-phones on board. What would it possibly do with a couple thousand nuclear bombs?

Though the number of active nukes has shriveled to around 4,100 from a peak of 68,000 in 1985, Baruch’s point is a serious one, especially when our attention is drawn to the Korean Peninsula or the once-unified Pashtun region split between Pakistan and India. Neither of those two neighbors, nor the hermit kingdom of the Kim dynasty, is yet to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, even though they are armed with an estimated 200-plus total (though not all active) warheads.

As someone born in 1989, I’ve never felt the disquiet of a duck-and-cover drill. Nor did I spend geography week in Kindergarten as my mom did: ogling anxiously at the massive Soviet Union — a red Rorschach blot that provoked only ugly words. Fear. Danger. Enemy. Still, if we can form a post-9/11 position toward nuclear weapons, it must rest on the tension between the unfortunate fact and terrifying contingency which follow: The human animal’s technological progress is outpacing its moral progress; what happens when an apocalyptic ideology lays its hands on apocalypse-inducing weaponry? In other words: can there be any doubt that if Muhammad Atta had a nuclear bomb, he would have used it?

There are two additional paragraphs, supplied by Martin Amis in his suggestively titled Einstein’s Monsters (1987), which illuminate a critical generational difference in our attitudes towards the inevitability of living with nukes.

My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn’t a case of “red or dead.” The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it’s a case of “red and dead.”

Well, dead, at any rate, is what this prescription seems to me to promise. Nuclear weapons, my father reminds me, have deterred war for forty years. I remind him that no global abattoir presided over the century-long peace that followed Napoleon’s discomfiture in 1815. And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun.

Read on:

I describe how Baruch became the original “Wolf of Wall Street”
Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck riff on the evils of militarism
Andrew Bacevich connects the concept of ‘original sin’ to the prospect of future war

Kingsley Amis on How to Host a Party on the Cheap

09 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor

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Alcohol, booze, drinking, Everyday Drinking, hosting, Kingsley Amis, party, sangria, whiskey, wine

“The object here is not just to give a party on the cheap, but to get away with it and even end up looking good, or good enough. The traditional strategy is notoriously to offer your guests a flat choice between (boring) red wine and (dull) white wine. Youngsters and other uncritical persons quite like this policy, but it’s becoming increasingly vulnerable to the kind of old stager who doesn’t mind asking loudly for a real drink. Yes, you can tell him there’s none around all right, but you won’t look good.

Clearly a more flexible approach is called for. Lead with the old choice of red and white, but give it a face-lift by picking a couple of those so-called country wines from southern France now to be seen in off-licences and supermarkets. They’re plonk actually, but their fancy French names will prevent the fact from getting through to most of those there. Say threateningly: ‘Of course, they are a wee bit off the beaten track’ to anyone who looks doubtful.

Follow this up with quite a large jug of Bloody Mary and another of Sangria or Wine Cup. Only the old stagers will notice that the Bloody Mary is nine tenths tomato juice and the Sangria mostly lemonade darkened with Angostura bitters — a nice touch — and they won’t dare say anything, at least not with their wives around. Those wives can be very useful. Ingratiate yourself by lighting their cigarettes, complimenting them on their appearance, even seeming to listen to what they say. Your ideal, long-term objective is a quarrel between each old stager and his wife on their way home, with him going on about your meanness and her saying you were very sweet and he’s nothing but a frustrated drunk.

If anybody has the pluck to ask for a gin and tonic or a whisky and soda, respond by leaving the room at once and staying away a good ten minutes. You spend them in some nook or niche or broom cupboard where you prepare all the drinks. In the present case fill a glass with ice, which is troublesome but softer on the pocket than booze, add tonic and pour in about a teaspoon of gin over the back of another spoon—it’s the first sip that counts. Whiskies are trickier. Use the darkest brand you can find and put the soda in first. When that’s done, hang on until you reckon you’ve been absent long enough to deter anyone from having a second try. Fill in the time by reading the paper and gulping your own private malt whisky.

If you’re entertaining the wretched crowd to dinner, not just drinks, then of course a whole new world of shortchanging opens up. And don’t, by the way, imagine that this is no more than a light fantasy. Anyone who does can’t have been around much yet.”

__________

From Amis’s manual about the sauce Everyday Drinking.

Now read more of Kingsley, in the greatest ever description of the morning after:

The Hangover

Everyday Drinking

13 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Literature

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Alcohol, beer, cocktails, drinking, Everyday Drinking, Kingsley Amis, liquor, wine

“My close personal involvement with drinks and drinking goes back all of fifty years. In that time my experience has been varied and farflung. I have drunk cognac in Cognac, port in Oporto, raki in Turkey, tequila in Mexico City, moonshine in Kentucky, not to mention poteen in Fleet Street, bitter and industrial alcohol in Oxford, Yugoslav whisky in Yugoslavia, Japanese whisky in Glasgow and sweet Spanish wine and lemonade in Swansea. Also gin in England…

Now we reach the point at which my credentials become slightly less than impeccable. With all those drinks I have got through, what I have not done is drink first-rate table wines at their place of origin, work my way through classic vintages and develop an educated palate. To do that, what you really need, shorn of the talk, is a rich father, and I missed it. No complaints, but my lack of erudition in this department is going to limit my remarks on wine to the short, the sharp and the practical, to what my own God-given taste will reach to.”

__________

A section from the introduction of Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking.

Hangover Reading

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Literature

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A.E. Housman, Alcohol, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Powell, C. S. Forester, Dick Francis, drinking, Eric Ambler, Evelyn Waugh, Everyday Drinking, G.K. Chesterton, Gavin Lyall, Geoffrey Household, hangover, Ian Fleming, John Milton, Kingsley Amis, liquor, literature, P.G. Wodehouse, Peter De Vries, poetry, reading, wine

“Begin with verse, if you have any taste for it. Any really gloomy stuff that you admire will do. My own choice would tend to include the final scene of Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 606 to the end, with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624–6. The trouble here, though, is that today of all days you do not want to be reminded of how inferior you are to the man next door, let alone to a chap like Milton. Safer to pick somebody less horribly great. I would plump for the poems of A. E. Housman and/or R. S. Thomas, not that they are in the least interchangeable. Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum is good, too, if a little long for the purpose.

Switch to prose with the same principles of selection. I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.

Turn now to stuff that suggests there may be some point to living after all. Battle poems come in rather well here: Macaulay’s Horatius, for instance. Or, should you feel that this selection is getting a bit British (for the Roman virtues Macaulay celebrates have very much that sort of flavour), try Chesterton’s Lepanto. The naval victory in 1571 of the forces of the Papal League over the Turks and their allies was accomplished without the assistance of a single Anglo-Saxon (or Protestant). Try not to mind the way Chesterton makes some play with the fact that this was a victory of Christians over Moslems.

By this time you could well be finding it conceivable that you might smile again some day. However, defer funny stuff for the moment. Try a good thriller or action story, which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions: Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, Gavin Lyall, Dick Francis, Geoffrey Household, C. S. Forester (perhaps the most useful of the lot). Turn to comedy only after that; but it must be white—i.e. not black—comedy: P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Captain Marryat, Anthony Powell (not Evelyn Waugh), Peter De Vries (not The Blood of the Lamb, which, though very funny, has its real place in the tearful category, and a distinguished one). I am not suggesting that these writers are comparable in other ways than that they make unwillingness to laugh seem a little pompous and absurd.”

__________

Another section from Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking, this one “Hangover Reading”.

How Not to Get Drunk

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor

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Alcohol, beer, drinking, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Everyday Drinking, hangover, hangovers, Kingsley Amis, liquor, wine

“Staying away altogether is a stratagem sometimes facetiously put forward at the outset of such discussions as these. To move at once to the realm of the practical, eating has much to be said for it. As well as retarding (though not preventing) the absorption of alcohol, food will slow up your drinking rate, not just because most people put their glasses down while actually chewing, but because you are now satisfying your appetite by eating rather than drinking: hunger makes you drink more than you otherwise would. According to some, oily foods are the most effective soakers-up of the drink already in your stomach, but others point to the risk of upsetting a digestion already under alcoholic attack…

Fatigue is an important element in the hangover, too. Alcohol gives you energy, or, what is hard to distinguish from it, the illusion of energy, and under its influence you will stand for hours at a stretch, throw yourself about, do exhausting imitations, perhaps fight a bit, even, God help you, dance. This will burn up a little alcohol, true, but you will pay for it next morning. A researcher is supposed once to have measured out two identical doses of drink, put the first lot down at a full-scale party and the second, some evenings later, at home with a book, smoking the same number of cigarettes on each occasion and going to bed at the same time. Result, big hangover and no hangover respectively. Sitting down whenever possible, then, will help you, and so, a fortiori, will resisting the temptation to dance, should you be subject to such impulses.

An equally unsurprising way of avoiding fatigue is going to bed in reasonable time, easily said, I know, but more easily done, too, if you allow the soporific effects of drink to run their natural course. This means staying away from stimulants, and that means avoiding coffee, both on its own and with liquor poured into it: the latter, by holding you up with one hand while it pastes you at leisure with the other, is the most solidly dependable way I know of ensuring a fearful tomorrow. Hostesses, especially, should take note of this principle, and cut out those steaming midnight mugs which, intended to send the company cheerfully on its way, so often set the tongues wagging and the Scotch circulating again…

I suppose I cannot leave this topic without reciting the old one about drinking a lot of water and taking aspirin and/or stomach powders before you finally retire. It is a pretty useless one as well as an old one because, although the advice is perfectly sound, you will find next morning that you have not followed it. Alternatively, anyone who can summon the will and the energy and the powers of reflection called for has not reached the state in which he really needs the treatment.

After all these bans and discouragements I will throw in one crumb, or tot, of comfort. I am nearly (yes, nearly) sure that mixing your drinks neither makes you drunker nor gives you a worse time the following day than if you had taken the equivalent dosage in some single form of alcohol. After three dry martinis and two sherries and two glasses of hock and four of burgundy and one of Sauternes and two of claret and three of port and two brandies and three whiskies-and-soda and a beer, most men will be very drunk and will have a very bad hangover. But might not the quantity be at work here? An evening when you drink a great deal will also be one when you mix them.

Well—if you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be.”

__________

Hopefully this advice hasn’t found you too late into your Friday evening — from the section “How Not to Get Drunk” in the all-purpose manual Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis.

The photographs are of Amis and his wife Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Read the greatest literary description of a hangover (incidentally, written by Amis himself):

The Hangover

“Early One Morning” by Edward Thomas

01 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

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Tags

Early One Morning, Edward Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Poem, poetry

Early one morning in May I set out,
And nobody I knew was about.
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever.

There was no wind to trouble the weathercocks.
I had burnt my letters and darned my socks.

No one knew I was going away,
I thought myself I should come back some day.

I heard the brook through the town gardens run.
O sweet was the mud turned to dust by the sun.

A gate banged in a fence and banged in my head.
‘A fine morning, sir’, a shepherd said.

I could not return from my liberty,
To my youth and my love and my misery.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,
The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.
I’m bound away for ever,
Away somehwere, away for ever.

__________

“Early One Morning” by Edward Thomas, which can be found in his Annotated Collected Poems.

“How a poet convinces you he will not tell you anything he does not think or feel, since you have only his word for it, is hard to discover, but Edward Thomas is one of those who do it.”

Kingsley Amis, An Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse

How Can We Tell with Nothing to Compare?

06 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Poetry

≈ 6 Comments

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Instead of an Epilogue, Kingsley Amis, Life, Love, Martin Amis, Time, To H.

In 1932 when I was ten
In my grandmother’s garden in Camberwell
I saw a Camberwell Beauty butterfly
Sitting on a clump of Michaelmas daisies.
I recognised it because I’d seen a picture
Showing its brownish wings with creamy edges
In a boy’s paper or on a cigarette-card
Earlier that week. And I remember thinking,
What else would you expect? Everyone knows
Camberwell Beauties come from Camberwell;
That’s why they’re called that. Yes, I was ten.

II.

In 1940 when I was eighteen
In Marlborough, going out one winter’s morning
To walk to school, I saw that every twig,
Every leaf in the vicar’s privet hedge
And every stalk and stem was covered in
A thin layer of ice as clear as glass
Because the rain had frozen as it landed.
The sun shone and the trees and shrubs shone back
Like pale flames with orange and green sparkles.
Freak weather conditions, people said,
And one was always hearing about them.

III.

In ’46 when I was twenty-four
I met someone harmless, someone defenceless,
But till then whole, unadapted within;
Awkward, gentle, healthy, straight-backed,
Who spoke to say something, laughed when amused;
If things went wrong, feared she might be at fault,
Whose eye I could have met for ever then,
Oh yes, and who was also beautiful.
Well, that was much as women were meant to be,
I thought, and set about looking further.
How can we tell, with nothing to compare?

__________

“Instead of an Epilogue” by Kingsley Amis, which concludes his Memoirs.

Kingsley Amis, in putting the final stamp on his rather dry series of memoirs, decided not to write the prose for which he was so lauded throughout his life. Instead, he penned this, an ode to longing, love, and loss, and the unavoidable truth that we can never fully understand a moment until it is already a memory.

Kingsley himself called the poem “To H.,” with H being Hillary Bardwell, his first wife, and the women he was relentlessly unfaithful to, and divorced, yet helplessly loved throughout his life. Following his divorce from his second wife (writer Elizabeth Jane Howard), and even though he was an incorrigibly philandering and unfaithful husband, Hillary agreed to take Kingsley in, allowing him to live with her (and her new husband, Lord Kilmarnock) for the last decade of his life. This unusual ménage à trois brought Kingsley out of what his son Martin Amis called “a trough of misogyny” that had ruined his writing, rekindling in him the exuberant creativity and comedy which had brought him recognition so many years before. It was in this arrangement that Amis wrote one of his best novels, the Booker prize winner The Old Devils, at the age of 65. It was also the place wherein Kingsley wrote this poem.

“Instead of an Epilogue” reveals a side of Amis that is often overlooked in the typical view of him as a misanthrope that objectified women while objecting to all social norms and rejecting any situation where a bottle wasn’t close at hand.

Here we see a man registering full and true emotions of wistfulness and affection, projecting simultaneous moods of melancholy, gratitude, and bemused humor. You try to do that. It’s not an easy task, and it’s why “Instead of an Epilogue” stands, at least to me, at the crest of modern poetry.

By the way, the poem in close second: “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden.

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

Tag Archives: Kingsley Amis

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A Eulogy for Philip

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Everyday Drinking

Hangover Reading

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“Early One Morning” by Edward Thomas

How Can We Tell with Nothing to Compare?

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