Written in one of the few unmistakenly literary voices of our time, Amis' Memoirs have already created a furor in England. Amis writes without inhibition about Roald Dahl, Anthony Burgess, Francis Bacon, Malcolm Muggeridge, and many others. Amis' memiors are rich, hilarious, and wicked--written with tremendous verve about Oxford, the literary life, and Mrs, Thatcher--and give us a completely unvarnished portrait of him.
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From Kirkus Reviews
Amis's ``autobiography''--or, more accurately--portraits of his acquaintances after a few opening chapters on his family, school days, and life at Oxford. Aside from the fact that ``most writers lead dull lives,'' Amis says his holding back saves pain: ``To publish an account of my own intimate, domestic, sexual experiences would hurt a number of people who have emotional claims on me...and I have no desire to cause pain, or further pain, to them or myself.'' What that leaves Amis with is other people and his opinions, which he records in a daily stint of space-filling, all quite styleless for a respected comic novelist who has just had a hit on American TV with his script for The Green Man. He gets off to a great start, describing his father, who manufactures ``unbreakable'' glassware (if dropped on something besides a carpet, a plate or glass exploded like a hand grenade), and his paternal grandmother: ``Mater was a large dreadful hairy-faced creature who lived to be nearly ninety and whom I loathed and feared....'' Others he limns include Francis Bacon, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess, Roald Dahl, Malcolm Muggeridge, Margaret Thatcher, actor Terry-Thomas (a brilliant Bertrand in the film version of Lucky Jim, Amis's most famed novel), Lord Snowdon, Arnold Wesker, and many others. At times, as with Wesker, Amis paints a portrait with victorious, if not vicious, brevity--but his portraits of Robert Graves and several others are no reason to read this book. The writer's best moments are on Philip Larkin (rewritten from a version published before Larkin died), and his standing up for neglected writers, such as Elizabeth Taylor, and for Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series. A special chapter on booze, quite funny, goes nowhere. Depthless, but the pace and variety will keep many awake. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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A last round for (or on) his friends,
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This review is from: Memoirs (Hardcover)
The famous founder of the original Angry Young Men offers up these mis-named memoirs. It is not an autobiography but more a collection of pub performances in written form. Which is no handicap to enjoying the collection: conversation remained an art in England long after it became extinct in America. Some of the people profiled are not friends or enemies, but neglected writers whose stars Amis hoped to revive. The writer Elizabeth Taylor is one of these. Others, like Anthony Burgess and Enoch Powell, are simply famous people who were barely acquaintances, but with whom Amis had notable run-ins. The profiles of his literary friends are mostly strings of amusing faux pas or escapades, usually drunken. He sportingly lingers over his own social pratfalls as much as over others'. Or maybe fair play has nothing to do with it; he just recognizes good material no matter who the subject is. In his own telling, he spends much of these events half in the bag, to the point of being unable to reconstruct them from memory later. Except for a passing opinion or two, he stays away from politics and literary theories, even giving Robert Conquest's limericks more ink than his Sovietology. He sticks to the same approach even with his nearest and dearest: his wives and novelist son only appear as part of some anecdote or other. His view of America is like Frances Trollope's. Gleeful japes at the Ugly American abound, each more devastating than the last. Well, H. L. Mencken did it earlier and better. And no charge for saving England's bacon so many times, old top. Here and there genuine affection for his closest friends bubbles to the surface. Philip Larkin appears throughout the collection, in addition to his own chapter, and Amis frequently quotes from Larkin's uncollected poetry. Under Amis' treatment, the mopey old onanist almost becomes a tragic figure. Other people like post-conversion Malcolm Muggeridge make no sense to him, as Amis does not have or at least does not display any spiritual side. Taken altogether, this is a very English, sometimes acidly English, survey of one writer's circle of acquaintances, but not much of their era.
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