Letters from an old devil

Kingsley Amis was one of the century's most prolific letter writers, so editing his correspondence was never going to be easy. Zachary Leader describes the perils and pleasures of the job - and how he got it by playing tennis with Martin Amis

Editing the letters of Kingsley Amis has been the single most enjoyable job of my life - but it has not been without difficulties. Within three days of Amis's death, his friend and biographer Eric Jacobs offered his unexpurgated diary of the novelist's last year or so to two Sunday newspapers. This diary included intimate details of Amis's final illness and debilitation as well as hurtful private remarks about close relations.

The family was outraged, and though Jacobs agreed to withdraw the diaries from serialisation (only temporarily, as it turned out), he had lost its trust. As a consequence, he also lost the job of editing the letters, an appointment Amis himself had approved. Wounded, Jacobs rounded on Martin Amis, the family's spokesman, and later, after Martin announced that I was to take his place, on me. 'The curiously named Zachary Leader,' he wrote to one of Amis's correspondents, would be getting no help from him.

Martin chose me because we were friends, he'd read my work (which partly discusses editorial procedures and principles), and we saw each other weekly, to play tennis; so the inevitable hassles I'd subject him to as a researcher - about dates, biographical details, identifications - could be woven into a weekly routine, after play. Martin himself was working on his memoirs (to be published, wholly fortuitously, within days of the letters), and, after a while, the post-tennis queries ran both ways.

That we had each recently re-read his father's novels and poems meant we could also consult about elusive quotations and obscure literary allusions. It was a great way to work, especially since I was given free rein to print whatever letters I wanted (excepting a handful of letters containing wounding passages about relatives). Nothing Amis wrote about Martin himself was censored, nor, I should add, did anything in the letters ever shake Martin's confidence in his father's affection.

I began immediately with the job of collection - less arduous in a selected correspondence than a complete one. Soon after I started, I was given Amis's last address book and wrote in search of letters to everyone listed in it. I also tried to contact all possible recipients mentioned in the Memoirs (1991), in Jacobs's biography (1995), and present at the memorial meeting for Amis held at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 22 October 1996.

A number of interesting letters, mostly to fans (Amis was scrupulous about answering fan mail), resulted from requests for correspondence, or information about correspondence, placed in British and American newspapers and literary periodicals. I also found important letters to fellow writers in over 20 university libraries and research institutes.

Though laborious, the search was unanxious. From the start it was clear how rich the core of the book would be and where I would find it: in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where Philip Larkin had deposited 531 previously unpublished Amis letters, and in Robert Conquest's garage in Palo Alto, California, where more than 100 letters were carefully stored in a cardboard box. Everything else I found - in public and private collections, the archives of publishers, editors, agents, critics, radio and television companies and newspapers - would be gravy.

Choosing which letters to print, from a trawl of several thousand, was more difficult, though my criteria of selection were straightforward. When two letters made the same general points, observations, jokes, or transmitted the same news, I chose what I thought the stronger or livelier letter. My aim was to print letters from all periods of Amis's life and to a range of his correspondents. As well as letters to friends and fellow writers (including John Betjeman, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, C.P. Snow, John Wain and others), I also included a number of business letters. From the time he resigned his Fellowship in English at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1963, Amis supported himself and his family as a novelist and freelance writer. The letters show how he did it.

Amis's correspondence with women posed several problems. When Jacobs asked Amis who he thought might have letters, Amis replied 'women', adding immediately, in Jacobs's reconstruction (recorded in a note in the Huntington Library in California), 'that the trouble with that was that I might find some, then he would not want them published - for whatever reason - and then the women in question might be upset'.

The only such letters I print were written to Amis's second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilly Amis (Lady Kilmarnock), his first wife, burned all his letters in 1963, the year their marriage collapsed. Though she does not remember how many there were, the figure must have been high. When they were separated for a month in October 1949 (Amis had just taken up a lectureship in English at Swansea), he wrote daily.

The letters to Hilly that survive, those written after 1963, are mostly notes about money and arrangements for the children. They are chastened, considerate, affectionate, but in no way communicate the depth of his feelings for her over the years. After the break-up of his second marriage, Amis became clearer (or at least more public) about Hilly's importance to him: leaving her, he claimed, was the single biggest mistake of his life. In the fiction, the biographical writings, and the poetry, his feelings for her are carefully pondered; in the extant letters they figure only rarely, or in passing, though when they do appear the writing takes on a special intensity.

Amis's feelings for Jane Howard, in contrast, are amply documented. As the letters she released to me show, he deeply loved her in the early years of their relationship. Gradually, however, as other letters reveal, he drew apart from her during their marriage, and he detested her after their break-up, with a ferocity as obvious in the correspondence as in the (related) misogyny of the later fiction. None of the letters I have seen to her are anything but warm and loving; but I have seen no letters from the period after she left him.

As for Amis's supposed hatred of women, though much of what he writes about them in the correspondence will be deplored, his love letters are warm, tender, even abject in their expression of feeling. Nor was he always rude to, or bored with, women he didn't want to sleep with, even feminists. In 1987, the English academic Jan Montefiore wrote to Amis for permission to quote eight lines from his poem 'A Bookshop Idyll', which she criticises in her book Feminism and Poetry. Amis responded as follows:

'Dear Miss Montefiore,

I have written to Candida Lacey giving permission for the inclusion of 8 lines from my poem 'A Bookshop Idyll' in your forthcoming monograph.

But please let me say that your interpretation of the poem is, I think, misguided. I really don't suggest (nor is it my opinion) that the love-poem is a quintessentially female mode; I was trying to make a more general point that women are less inhibited about expressing their feelings than men are, at any rate in our society. And though I'm pleased you think the poem good-natured, surely the people it patronises are not women but men, who cut a pretty sorry figure in the last verse [The last verse reads: '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 / Chockful of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes, / And couldn't write'].

All the same, I wish you the best of luck with your undertaking, and hope you are suitably enthusiastic about that great heroine of mine, Christina Rossetti.

Yours sincerely,

Kingsley Amis'

Montefiore was amazed at the amiable tone of Amis's reply: 'As you can see he really couldn't have been nicer... and it's not as if I'd ever been introduced to him or to his son, or anything like that, so he wasn't doing me a personal favour, he was just being a decent liberal - unlike his agent who wanted to withhold permission because I'd been uncomplimentary.'

Though I have found and print similarly generous and fair-minded letters, no one will be surprised to discover that the correspondence is littered with malicious, intemperate remarks about just about everybody Amis knew, Larkin and Hilly excepted.

All I can say to those of Amis's friends and acquaintances who find themselves insulted or belittled in the letters is 'You're not alone'. Which is also what I'd say to maligned authors. That Amis admits to finding it hard to finish Martin's novels puts the son in good company; he also had trouble, the letters reveal, with Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Updike, Bellow, and Nabokov. Towards the end of his life, he told Martin, the only books he could finish were thrillers, the sort that began 'A shot rang out' or 'A scream rent the air'.

The most difficult of the problems I faced in choosing letters concerned the feelings of their recipients, as of others Amis disparages. Early in my work I was offered a sheaf of letters by an American academic who had written several books on Amis. These letters stretch over 17 years and are mostly warm and affectionate, though in later letters there are glimmers of irritation.

Amis had taken this man to lunch, met his wife and son, had him to his house, introduced him to his friends, and written letters of reference for him. But he had also, I discovered, written a letter the man did not show me. A photocopy of this letter was found among Amis's papers after his death and offers a damning verdict on the first three chapters of the man's most recent work, a study of Amis's fiction. Here are its concluding paragraphs:

'It is not that I find what you have written offensive in any way, or improper to its subject. It is that the level of your performance seems to me to be so low as not to earn a place on any publisher's list.

Please realise that no imaginable rewriting would rectify the situation. The fact that I have left many passages of your typescript unmarked testifies to my weariness and boredom with them, not to their correctness or adequacy.

I think it would be best if the book were to be withdrawn.

Yours, Kingsley'

I thought long and hard before publishing this letter - it was the single most difficult decision I faced in the selection process. In the end, though, I decided to include it, for several reasons: Amis's literary executors had already deposited the photocopy at the Huntington, so it was available to other scholars; it shows an important side of Amis - how ferocious he could be in his later years; it says something about his willingness to sacrifice personal feelings for what he seems to have seen as the welfare of his reputation as a writer; and not printing the letter would have left readers with a false or partial understanding of the relations between the two men.

When informed of my decision the academic wrote that he understood, without being much pleased, adding that he remained baffled by Amis's sudden turn: 'It contradicts everything he communicated to me in person and in letters over the previous 17 years.'

The business of annotating the letters, the third phase of my job as editor, could be fiendishly difficult, especially when dealing with letters to Larkin. These letters, the most brilliant in the book, are filled with private jokes, allusions, obscure abbreviations, associational leaps and word games.

Most books, records, poems and songs, for example, are referred to by the first and last words in their titles, as in 'A Time' for A Dance to the Music of Time. Some are identified by the first letters, or first few letters, of their first and last words, as in 'GB' for 'Goodbye to Berlin,' or 'Appara' (an editor's nightmare this) for 'Appointment in Samarra.' Often the letters proceed associationally: 'I love the persistent mis-spelling of authors' names,' declares Amis in a letter of 25 May 1947, 'it's amazing how it lowers the tome wainsh the tone. Talking of Wainsh [ie John Wain]...'

Misspellings are of several sorts. Some derive from typos (all of which have been retained, even when most obvious), as in 'tome' for 'tone,' 'teh' for 'the,' or 'thiknign' for 'thinking' (which to Amis 'sounds really extraordinary - a character in Ibsen? Pastor Thiknign?'); others are laboriously crafted, as in 'methsleeves' for 'themselves,' or 'darts B.A.' for 'bastards.' Then there are phonetic spellings, often parodies of the sort of prim, suburban pronunciation mocked in the fiction: 'ab8' for 'about', 'hay' for 'how', 'refained' for 'refined', as in Chapter 4 of Lucky Jim, where Margaret comments of Christine after their first meeting: 'Pity she's so refained, though.'

Often I could only make sense of puzzling passages by reading the letters to which they responded. In this way I learned, for example, the identity of 'Bluebell' (Robert Conquest's dog) or 'engine driver Hunt', from a passage in a letter reading 'Praed, Hood, Gilbert - and engine driver Hunt' (Hunt turns out to be a subject, not an author, of light verse, from the pseudonymous Conquest limerick beginning 'A young engine driver called Hunt'), or the meanings of the abbreviations PWR, IWICSLMSK and BHQ (respectively, Pee-Wee Russell, 'I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate' and 'Bastard Headquarters', meaning God's Heaven, or, more generally, the place where things go wrong or get fucked up, said in one letter to be located in France).

The most fiendish of the puzzles I encountered in the correspondence occurs in a letter to Larkin of 22 March 1982. Amis had broken his leg ('standing up, trying to avoid an alcoholic fall') and was recuperating in the Kinnell Ward of the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead:

'There's an old woman here who sings all day. Wordless maunderings based on Camptown Races... Yes, all day. She's French, actually. Do you remember about Kinnell or Kinell? Used to be (milite) the more proper of a pair, the other being Kinarsoles.'

It was Denis Norden, an exact contemporary of Amis's at the City of London School, who explained to me the meaning of this passage. 'Milite' (Latin) I could get myself; in this context it means 'in military parlance'. 'Kinnell' or 'Kinell', Norden explained, are short for 'Fuckin'ell,' to go with 'Fuckin'arsoles.' Of the pair, then, 'Kinnell' is 'the more proper'. Presto! The critic P.N. Furbank then supplied a related marching song, one line of which runs 'Arsehole, arsole, a soldier of the King'. Such are the intricacies of scholarship.

One passage defeated me. In a letter of 27 August 1950 Amis calls Larkin 'my inner audience', my watcher in Spanish, the reader over my shoulder.' 'Inner audience' is clear enough and 'reader over my shoulder' comes from Robert Graves, but what is a 'watcher in Spanish'? Spanish has no equivalent of 'inner audience' or 'reader over my shoulder' involving the word 'watcher' (or spectator, observer, onlooker). No such term appears in the dictionaries of quotation or in Amis's B.Litt thesis (with its discussion of the role of the 'inner audience' in poetic composition).

The lexicographer Jonathan Green suggested that 'watcher in Spanish' might be a slang term, like 'Spanish archer' for 'elbow' (i.e. El Bow), or 'the King of Spain's trumpet' for 'Donkey' ('Don Key'). Another friend suggested 'Guardian Angel' (a 'watcher' of sorts with a Spanish name, 'Angel'). The first person to come up with a definitive answer gets a free copy.

All that remains for me now is to wait for the critics, a long-imagined purgatory. I gather Eric Jacobs has been commissioned to review the book for the Times.

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