Phyllis Richardson on Amis at the
Garrick Club & the Huntington
[excerpted from the Los Angeles Times Book Review, 4
June 2000]
I was pleasantly surprised to receive an
invitation to attend a party at the Garrick club, near Covent Garden in London;
surprised because the Garrick, founded in 1831 by "a group of literary
gentlemen," is renowned for its refusal to allow women members and, as an
American woman, I have to confess to feeling a certain amount of frisson at
being admitted into the sanctuary of that curious anachronism, the Upper Class
British Male club.
The event was the launch party for the publication of the letters of the late
Sir Kingsley Amis, and I found myself in good company, among such formidable
women as Lady Kilmarnock and the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Kingsley's
first and second wives, respectively, as well as a number of fairly reputable
male writers. Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and William Boyd all
turned up in jacket and tie (required at the Garrick) to toast the efforts of
Professor Zachary Leader in bringing the epistolary collection of one of
England's most influential postwar novelists into print.
A professor of English at the University of Surrey Roehampton, England, Leader
is an American who has lived and taught in the United Kingdom for the last 30
years (and still no trace of a British accent). . . .
As we sipped white wine in the Morning Room, talk was not only of this
achievement but of another resounding success: Leader's organization of the
recent conference on the British novel which was held not in the fold of
Kingsley's favorite dimly lit club but in the airy halls of the Huntington
Library in Pasadena. Like many students of British literature, Leader was
compelled during his own research to take up residence near the Huntington to
complete his study of the Amis papers, for the Huntington has in its collections
not only the 600-year-old Ellesmere Chaucer and several priceless editions of
Shakespeare but also the letters and, as of three years ago, the library of
Kingsley Amis. . . .
So it was no accident that "The Novel in Britain, 1950-2000" took
place in Pasadena and that some of the biggest names in British fiction and
criticism were there to discuss the achievements and the fate of the genre. What
was somewhat unusual for this scholarly conference, according to Robert Ritchie,
director of research at the Huntington, was the participation of the authors
themselves. Martin Amis, McEwan and Hilary Mantel all read from works in
progress. Mantel's reading was dubbed "electrifying" by one panelist;
her work, "Fludd: A Novel," is just now being published in the United
States by Henry Holt to excellent reviews.
Talks ranged from Christopher Hitchens' "Reactionary Humor" and
Christopher Ricks' "The Shakespeare Inheritance" to the more modern
theme of "Lad Lit," as discussed by Elaine Showalter. John Sutherland,
professor of English at Caltech and University College London, and Lindsay
Duguid, fiction editor of the (London) Times Literary Supplement, spoke on the
current British fiction market. As Duguid pointed out, the range of topics has
to do with the varied nature of the British novel itself. "There is no
consensus about it, unlike with the American novel. I'm quite patriotic about
it, that it comes from a small place and does not attempt to encompass the world
and yet has an appeal to people on the other side of the world."
It was probably no surprise that a much different point of view and some of the
most pot-stirring comments came from Kingsley's son, whose memoir, Experience, was published in the U.K. within a few weeks of the
1,200-page volume of his father's correspondence. No stranger to controversy,
Amis has commented that as a writer in the current multicultural, sexually
revolutionized, globalized climate, "The project is to become an American
novelist." He has not, of course, but he continued the theme to general
amusement by declaring "the dying out of the Jewish American novel" as
written by the likes of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and seeing for himself a
career opportunity in the void. . . .
