From: Floyd Scarabelli (a.k.a. Bill Jarma)
Category: Amis
Date: 8/26/99
Time: 9:25:11 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97

The publication of Philip Larkin's *Selected Letters*---together with Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin---occasioned a shit-storm of condemnatory blah-blah-blah about Larkin's bigotry. In reaction to that reaction, Martin Amis bent over backward to grasp at straws in a pathetic desperate attempt to exonerate Larkin from the charges of racism & misogyny. Amis's whitewash is entitled *Don Juan in Hull*. It's obnoxious not only because it's a whitewash but for the fact that Amis stole that dumb title from a Clive James piece with the same title.

Amis's whitewash is based on the proposition that epistolary insults don't count as bigotry. Which is hair-splitting crapola as far as I'm concerned. Martinian illogic insists that since Larkin expressed his bigotry in private letters rather than in a public forum, that situation thereby exempts Larkin from the charge of racism.

Amis's second dumb mistake was his attempted exoneration of Larkin from the charge of sexism. (*Sexism* specifically meaning: the treatment of women as nothing more than sex-objects.) Andrew Motion accused 2 Larkin poems of being sexist. So Amis claims that Larkin is innocent by reason of the charge being retroactively applied. Amis tries to get Larkin off the hook by poo-pooing the sexism charge as an *ex post facto* accusation.

Amis bolsters this argument by dragging out the pictorial-perspective metaphor that he previously used in *London Fields* or somewhere. Id est, that slagging Larkin for sexism is analogous to slagging ancient painters for omitting perspective, even though those painters are blamelessly ignorant because their lives pre-dated the invention of perspective. (By the way, I'll bet you shit to Shine-ola that Amis got that pictorial-perspective idea from his artistic ex-wife, Antonia Phillips.)

Amis says about Motion: "The two poems he specifically convicts of sexism were written in 1965, at which point 'sexism' had no currency and no meaning." Amis is obviously wrong. Sexism is older than dirt. The practice of treating women like dirt is older than dirt. It's Amis's excuses that have no currency or meaning. Amis's casuistry is foolish & transparent to everyone but himself. I sincerely believe that Amis missed his true vocation as a Jesuit priest during the reign of the Spanish Inquisition. (Join us again next week in *The New Yorker* when Father Mini-Mart exonerates Godzilla on the premise that giant berserk lizards are incapable of distinguishing between right & wrong.)