Stanley and the Women/Russian Hide-and-Seek
Amis, Kingsley
STANLEY AND THE WOMEN Kingsley Amis/Summit Books/$14.95 RUSSIAN HIDE-AND-SEEK Kingsley Amis/Penguin (U.K.)/£2.25 Virgil Nemoianu One wonders after reading Stanley and the Women, which has...
...he thus had to become a "reactionary...
...Evelyn Waugh, talking once about recent generations of English novelists, said they were not great visionary creators, but conscientious, skilled, and tasteful craftsmen...
...Of Amis this is an apt description...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...In addition to a semi-formal banquet Saturday evening, there will be opportunities for outdoor recreation in sunny northern California...
...And when it comes to pessimism about human motives, Shakespeare can easily beat them all...
...Stanley is again helpless when facing Dr...
...Meanwhile, whither Amis—what do his latest pieces tell us about him...
...To this day, that story remains unavailable in America...
...He also offers a little historical lesson about the occupation: When the prisoner asks, "What did the Americans do...
...But there is much thought and substance in it...
...Russian Hide-and-Seek, the book in The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies presents A Symposium on the First Amendment MARCH 7-9, 1986 Stanford Law School Public Participation All persons interested in philosophy and policy applications of the First Amendment are invited to attend...
...His son by a previous marriage, an erstwhile hippie, suffers repeated nervous breakdowns and the blame is pushed onto Stanley and the son's early education...
...Information For information about the society or registration for the symposium, call or write: Mr...
...The efforts of suppression were soon under way...
...The probing into the private recesses of the soul, the simplifying and bullying jargon, the Virgil Nemoianu is a professor of English and comparative literature at the Catholic University of America...
...Its subject is a Britain occupied and ruled by Communist Russians...
...The only reasonable critical objection to Amis's latest novel that I can imagine is that the subject itself is too serious and dangerous, and thus the best way to treat it would be in the manner and with the power of a Dostoevsky or Henry James, with profundity and rich nuances and with a grasp of how love and hate continuously relate to each other...
...Delegations of law students are especially welcome...
...True, Stanley and the Women is not one of Amis's best works...
...The imaginary future described by Amis is, if anything, more probable than that of a world devastated by nuclear war, that favorite topic among American publishers...
...Professors Paul Bator, Richard Epstein, and Lino Graglia...
...He has been an outspoken anti-Communist for the last fifteen years or so...
...While thrashing out wildly against an encroaching world Stanley stumbles, almost by chance, into some deeper, darker, and perdurable realities of the human race...
...Travel scholarships will be available to defray student expenses...
...the freedom of association...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...While the tone is ominous and dull, the ending is neither despairing nor cataclysmic...
...Russian Hide-and-Seek is clearly a variation upon a theme set by Orwell—the discovery and the crushing of the opponent by the totalitarian society...
...This new edition, with modernized typography, is based on the posthumous edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume...
...The History of England illustrates Hume's belief that the growth of liberty is neither inevitable nor necessary and that the preservation of liberty requires an under-standing of the conditions which gave rise to it as well as the institutional arrangements which sustain it...
...The novelist has the right and perhaps the duty to remind us of it...
...This darker side of human nature and human relations is a stark reality, even though we usually choose to ignore it...
...Topics And Guest Speakers Panelists will discuss a variety of important First Amendment issues including: pornography and freedom of speech...
...He is jerked out of his organic somnolence by the world around him, a world equally empty and confused but much more convulsive...
...telecommunications and broadcast deregulation...
...the religion clauses and government neutrality...
...Hardcover $15.00 each volume Softcover $ 7.50 each volume Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...He begins to suspect that the genders are cruel to and perhaps in-compatible with each other, so that under the banal pieties of family life and of normal love there always lurk sexual tension and aggression...
...In an age in which the progressive and radical powers shape the sensibilities and the imagination of the West, the ephemeral and insignificant writer will pay meek homage to the prevailing (revolutionary) modes of thinking: This is in fact the most exact definition of commercial and consumer literature...
...we are told that "Vanag gave one of his merriest and longest laughs...
...True writers will usually write against the grain...
...Isaiah's "remnant," Amis seems to be saying, can appear in many guises...
...Anus is a writer devoted above all to his honest craft...
...Eugene Meyer Executive Director The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies 1625 Eye Street, NW Washington, D.C...
...Young Petrovsky, the tale's hero, is not a thoughtful intellectual like Winston Smith—he is in fact a spoiled and capricious young dandy, vain and philandering—but he is in his very defects utterly human and must therefore be annihilated...
...English and American society he often lashed at: the faddish young, the fat and the fatuous, the lusty and the ambitious...
...According to press reports (in Newsweek, for instance) Stanley and the Women was rejected by some American publishers because it had been offered in a package with an anti-Communist tale that was unacceptable to them...
...Stanley Duke is a reasonably well-to-do editorial bureaucrat, comfortably empty-headed and banal, who would like nothing bet-ter than to slide peacefully towards an indifferent old age...
...misunderstanding of motives, the bias about what is normal and social, all these make psychiatry a favorite metaphor for the way in which "social consciousness" coerces the individual and dehumanizes him...
...He is deeply uneasy with the modern world, but he is too intelligent not to realize his helplessness: He is part of it and thus in no position to judge it...
...So it was not surprising that Amis should also pay some attention to the greater evils and dangers of our time...
...Mean-while Amis is turning into a substantial conservative in the grand British tradition—the common sense and the quirkiness, the self-confidence and the contempt, the nostalgia and the reach toward values are all there...
...He seems to have tried his hand at every popular genre: The Riverside Villa Murders (1973) was a classic mystery, The Green Man (1969) was Gothic fantasy, The Alteration (1976) was historical science fiction of dazzling quality...
...In this grotesquely pastoral world (the Russians are like the Normans layered over the Saxons, or the English sahibs in India) the inevitable happens: Young parlor liberals begin to rhapsodize about the cultural rights of the lower classes, and a Romeo-and-Juliet affair springs up across ideologies and castes...
...By contrast the authentic writer can be recognized by his independence from or even opposition to leftism...
...Orwell's world was gray, abstract, and absolute...
...IiberyPnss IibertyOassws The History of England From the Invasion of Julius Caesar To the Revolution in 1688 By David Hume All Six Volumes Now Available...
...Court of Appeals Judges Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork...
...That a public out-cry was needed to see in print a work that apparently did not toe the liberal establishment line on women tells us some rather worrisome things about the state of American publishing...
...In both cases the "opponent" is ultimately the human per-son in his autonomy, or whatever is not melted totally, without residue, into the uniform and shapeless mass...
...commercial speech...
...Kingsley Amis is one of the four or five major British novelists in their prime (Murdoch, Burgess, Fowles are some of the others) and any new work by him could be expected to be published as a matter of course...
...William B. Todd, Kerr Centennial Professor in English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, has provided a new Foreword in Volume I. Hume's own cumulative index may be found at the conclusion of Volume VI...
...It died away finally in affectionate chuckles and little snorts of amusement...
...they will somehow "react" against the prevailing state of mind, against the intellectual powers and the progressing trends of their age...
...dollars...
...His upper-class mother-in-law snubs him...
...Brian J. Brille Symposium Director Stanford Federalist Society Stanford Law School Stanford, CA 94305 (415) 497-1551 1 MADISON The Federalist Society is a nationwide organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers and law students dedicated to the principles of limited government and a limited judiciary...
...Or elsewhere: "Terrible how they drag us down to their level, isn't it...
...Hume himself wrote of these volumes, "...the history of the two first Stuarts will be most agreeable to the Tories: That of the two last, to the Whigs...
...Amis describes these murky and frightening depths of unredeemed human nature ("the old Adam" as another generation would have called it) with the tools he knows how to wield: those of dark satire...
...Predict-ably, neither Stanley nor his friends grasp too well what they have run into and merely find release in rantings against the "madness of women" during their protracted pub sessions...
...There is no quarreling with this argument—I too would like to read a book of this kind...
...Early commitments to speak have been received from U.S...
...To these and other irritants Stanley responds with curmudgeonly bitterness and furious resentment...
...His superiors at work are unhappy with him...
...Trish Collings, his son's psychologist, and her minions with their psycho-social babble, but he does find some support from a kindly old-fashioned nurse and an eccentric and abrasive elderly doctor...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...Indeed, the satire in Stanley is relatively tame...
...The memory of Orwell haunts Amis as it haunted Burgess when he wrote his 1985...
...2.25 Virgil Nemoianu One wonders after reading Stanley and the Women, which has been the object of such controversy, what may have been the matter with the book...
...It was most amusing to observe how, as the years passed, and Amis was gradually sharpening his focus into a political and philosophical awareness, the benevolent smile of the editorial gurus and the intellectual pundits froze and then turned into a spiteful grimace...
...Amis's Britain of the future is more livable and more specific—therefore more possible and more frightening: a world of dull poverty and contented oppression, much like the one that we can actually behold in the Gulag empire before us...
...The statements of Amis's characters are rather toothless when measured against Swift's misogyny...
...20006 (202) 822-8138 Or THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 45 question, does however remain in print in England...
...Volume V begins with the accession to the throne of James I and ends with the execution of Charles I. Volume VI carries the history forward to its end in the Glorious Revolution...
...It is here that Amis's troubles must really have begun...
...A little conspiracy is mounted with the purpose of improving native conditions, but the conclusion of the sordid little melodrama is predictable...
...STANLEY AND THE WOMEN Kingsley Amis/Summit Books/$14.95 RUSSIAN HIDE-AND-SEEK Kingsley Amis/Penguin (U.K...
...At the beginning of his career Kingsley Anus had depicted the state of English society in broad comical strokes: a world of tiny values, big egos, and missing directions...
...The Society is represented at more than 65 law schools...
...The most chilling parts of the novel have to do with psychiatric terror, a favorite topic with British novelists from Waugh to Burgess...
...With the publication of volumes V and VI, LibertyPress/LibertyClassics brings to a conclusion this new edition of David Hume's History of England...
...I am sure he will soon be eligible for the Ingersoll Prize...
...Q101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...
...But until somebody writes it, Stanley and the Women will do...
...Where possible, visiting students will be housed in Stan-ford students' apartments...
...Amis's own Ending Up subjects aging to a satirical treatment more ruthless and jaundiced than theone Stanley gives to gender wars...
...As the sullen and impoverished populace of a devastated countryside slowly loses its last remnants of national identity, the manors witness a resurgent gentry life, a slightly coarse version of Austen and liirgenev played out by the occupants...
...Though his gift has lost much of its old comic verve, it is nevertheless groping towards a brooding and suspicious kind of wisdom...
...These are of a kind familiar to most of us: " `It's no use saying anything to a woman,' said Cliff ultimately and drained his glass...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in US...
...Or again: "I would have had a minute or more for Yasser Arafat at that stage rather than a word with a female in a hell of a tizzy, in fact one in almost any foreseeable condition...
...There will be approximately twenty speakers, including prominent judges and academicians...
...His wife abandons him for a short while...
...But we must endeavour to be above any Regard either to Whigs or Tories...
...and John Hart Ely, Dean of Stanford Law School...
...The casual affair with his colleague, Lucas Lindsey, the most decent and level-headed woman in his life, peters out...
...Vanag, a Soviet official, explains to a prisoner that the conspiracy had been concocted in and controlled from Moscow—a self-executing purge of vague potential dangers to the stability of this colonial society...
...Though standing now last in the series, these were the first (and most famous) of the volumes which Hume wrote...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
