From: StephenP
Category: Amis
Date: 7/5/99
Time: 12:48:55 PM
Remote Name: 195.171.125.1
...and it reminded me of this bit from the Amis-Self interview/love-in.
WS: Yes, as I see it one of the great achievements of your fiction is to mix high and low: the demotic and the mandarin.
MA: That's why the middle classes are underrepresented in my books.
WS: You don't like their language.
MA: There's nothing going on there.
WS: You want the proletarian cock to penetrate the bourgeois lexicon. You want it to push in there and spunk it up a bit.
MA: That's right. The novel I'm writing at the moment opens with a longish scene in which two writers are jockeying for position around each other. Then, suddenly, we cut to two bruisers who are watching these writers, for reasons that become apparent, and the injection of energy almost had me reeling back from the typewriter.
WS: That's Lawrentian, isn't it?
What a pair of tossers!