The readership for Kingsley Amis can be a surprise with a fair generational span interested in his overall work. This contrasts with others of his own era who have vanished off the literary radar. The NYRB publication is of course novel with a reasonable price tag which helps Kingsley's cause. But to go from Prynne to Amis is indeed quite a leap by thevNYRB. To each their own of course with editors as well as readers.
The pause button on his son's literary output indicates a lack of self belief with "The Pregnant Widow" a puzzle. Martin Amis also in "Lionel Asbo" produced very lightweight fare best left to a draft or a series of them. It will be ironic if Martin has to spend his later years drawing material from his father's life but avoiding his own experiences. Perhaps his well has simply run dry with a fear of really facing up to himself? Nothing unusual of course in a literary career now going back a fair few decades. "The Pregnant Widow" may have hit legal roadblocks if it was too close to the libel bone giving Amis's colourful past. One does get paid Joycean rate advances to lose the margins in the law courts. Joyce probably hustled more than Amis ever gets from modern publishers in hard cash terms. But Joyce never had academic posts to increase the kitty while always claiming that the wolf was at his door. If patrons such as Miss Beach exist in 2016 they keep their heads down carefully making no waves.
On Dylan Thomas he is part of all our early years with his 100th anniversary a major literary event. He is part of literary history and cannot be ignored. For myself at least I am more drawn to David Jones with my rating of overall Welsh writing very high. Indeed often I feel the Welsh get overlooked in a literary sense or simply do not make enough noise on their superb writing tradition? Welsh music seems to be in the same boat which is a shame across the musical genres. To find details e.g. on current religous trends in Wales is hard going on the internet. If anyone can explain the Welsh situation I will be very interested?
sc
Turn that frown upside down
On Friday, 29 July 2016, Jeremy F Green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Weirdly, NYRB Books just published Amis’s _Collected Poems_ complete w/ intro by Clive James. A bit bewildering after other recent volumes in the series - e.g. J.H.Prynne _The White Stones_.
> On Jul 29, 2016, at 12:25 PM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi Jeremy,
> The other 'fallacious assumption' I mentioned was that 'this grouping' (i.e. the supposed mainstream) disapproves of Thomas. The first - to my mind - fallacious assumption, and tedious to boot, is that the present mainstream is continuous with the aesthetics of the Movement.
> I said in my first post that the Movement's animosity towards Thomas was well documented. I'm familiar with Conquest's little-englandish and prissy New Lines introduction - who, by the way, reads Conquest these days, or more than one or two humorous anthology pieces by Amis? - but I also noted Larkin's affection for him.
> You're right though that since the late sixties/early seventies (?) Thomas has been more or less ignored by the academy, loved as he is outside of it. I think there's an element of literary snobbery about this, and alongside of that signs of readers repudiating their own youthful enthusiasms...
> Jamie
>
>
>> On 29 Jul 2016, at 16:33, Jeremy F Green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Jamie,
>>
>> I don’t think this is quite right. It’s not a fallacious assumption to say that the Movement poets disapproved of Thomas. That disapproval is trenchantly expressed by Robert Conquest in the introduction to the first New Lines anthology; it’s also evident in Amis’s “Against Romanticism.” Donald Davie has stern words for Thomas in Articulate Energy. There’s also a general sense that the 1940s was a disastrous decade in British poetry; it outlives the Movement.
>>
>> Unspooling from all this down the years, it feels as if there’s a dearly loved Thomas—the poet of Fern Hill and the sonorous reader and the author of Under M Wood—and a sense that Thomas is in fact a bad poet (recently I read an Eagleton take down of “A Refusal to Mourn…”). Arguably, the most interesting Thomas—about whom John Goodby writes (and definitely a big shout out here for Under the Spelling Wall)—gets lost in all of this.
>>
>> Best,
>> Jeremy
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> The Movement's reaction against the perceived emotionalism of his work has been documented, but the only reference I've found from admittedly early Larkin is one expressing delight and admiration. The tedious assumption, much repeated on this list, that the Movement's aesthetics flow seamlessly into what's called the contemporary 'mainstream' (including Northern Irish poetry) leads to another fallacious assumption that this grouping disapproves of Thomas.
>>> Jamie
>>
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