Drinks Before Lunch with Amis

...Maybe instead Amis realized that much of his work suffered, like Davis's oeuvre, from a loss of joy...

...A few minutes later I was on my way back to London, my stomach worried by the rocking of the train...

...So," he asked with an obligatory tipping of the wrist and the first hint of a smile I had seen from him, "are you a drinking man...

...He wasn't content simply to hold the beboppers, hardboppers, postboppers, and worse up to scorn...

...I think I know what he'll do," he added mischievously...

...After lunch, Amis and Thomas wouldn't let me take a cab back to the train station: They insisted on driving me there in Thomas's yellow Ford...

...I knew I was in trouble when Amis started off with a double whiskey, especially since he didn't have to ask for it: "The usual, Mr...

...there was no joy...

...I like to think now, four years later, that my tiresome presence was not solely responsible for Amis's discomfiture: He was gouty...

...The sunny corner table we settled into did have a lovely view of the small harbor- yachts, or at least some boats, were visible...

...I wasn't the first journalist to visit him at the Swansea house of his friend Stuart Thomas, nor the first to sink into the amorphous couch against the wall while Amis commanded the center of the room in a straight-backed chair, the picture of diffidence...

...Aside from some photos on the walls of sepia men on sepia boats, and a few nautical flags on a yardarm outside, it wasn't clear what relationship the club had with yachting...

...The boring ritual of polite interrogation was over...

...Certainly not enough to survive three double whiskeys before lunch...

...Professor Richard Vaisey was not corrupted by Anna Danilova, though in the end he does lie about her poems: "'In my judgment these poems of yours are of high quality, as high as any written in our time.'" He lies, not to get her into bed, but because he loves her, and can't bear to crush her hopes...

...The morning promised to fulfill that dread...

...Amis carefully cultivated his reputation as a tough interview...

...Or perhaps more accurately, a bar called the Swansea Yacht Club...

...Then there was the slight grimace-was there a groan?-when I pulled a tape-recorder from my bag...

...I doubt it...

...It prompted him to start telling me about the new novel he had just begun writing...

...Reminiscence Drinks Before Lunch With Kingsley Amis By Eric Felten It would have given Kingsley Amis no end of pleasure to learn that his New York Times obituary gave him credit for writing a number of novels that made it to the silver screen, most notably Lord Jim...

...It was a surprise, a few years later, to read The Russian Girl...

...Soon we were joined by his friend Thomas, and for most of the next couple of hours we happily regaled one another with the outrages of the Left...

...For starters, thanks to British Rail, I showed up an hour late, a rudeness that Amis did not fail to comment upon...

...With that love he not only wins her heart, but transforms her into an honest-to-God poet...

...One way or another, before his death at 73, he found that joy again...

...Sure," I lied...

...It wasn't just amelodic excess that destroyed jazz for Amis, it was something at the core of the music, something sad and ugly and visible even in the 1950s when Amis saw Miles Davis at a New York club...

...Nor, I think, was I the first he had taunted with intimations of sloth and stupidity...

...And how...

...I don't know what happened between the ride in the yellow Ford and the publication of The Russian Girl...

...I settled for a relatively benign pint of bitter...

...Laziness," Amis told me one bright September morning in Wales, "laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence...

...But the book did not devolve into the sort of exercise in misogyny that had marred many of Amis's later novels...

...There was none of the facile ridicule that had made the last hours so entertaining...

...I just don't drink much...

...Perhaps the change was nothing more interesting than the old saw about characters in novels having lives of their own quite beyond the control of their authors...

...The drinks did Amis no damage...

...On the way we passed the campus of Swansea University, where Amis taught literature and collected absurdities for Lucky Jim...

...The story is about a middle-aged professor of Russian literature and poetry who is stumbling into having an affair with a Russian girl who is a poet of sorts...

...Eric Felten is a writer and jazz musician in Washington, D.C...

...When I was young I thought the gout was funny," he told me later in the day, "but now that I have it, it isn't funny in the least...

...Lucky Jim was the title Amis gave to his famous first novel, published in 1954...

...I had hesitated to meet Amis, for much the same reasons that Amis avoided acquaintance with Evelyn Waugh: "I realized that my admiration for his works might have been seriously dinted by whatever form of social drubbing I would inevitably have got from him had we ever met," Amis wrote in his Memoirs...

...To sleep with her he'll have to tell her that her horrible poetry-it's so bad that it pains him-is good," Amis said...

...Once it became apparent that my magazine expense account was picking up the tab for the festivities, we hobbled off to lunch at a trattoria called The Bee's Knees, where there were cocktails to be had, and wine with the fish...

...The Scotch deserved much of the credit for Amis's improved attitude, but I imagine that his nascent good humor also had something to do with the banishment of tape recorder and notebook...

...The subject turned to jazz, and Amis turned serious...

...Lord Jim is, of course, by Joseph Conrad...

...In the following hour he never quite lost a pained expression that left no doubt that my questions bored him...

...In fact, they did him a world of good...

...I did my best to offer a knowing leer...

...It's not that I don't drink...

...Nor was it merely the comic romp reviewers praised it for being...

...I had the good sense at least not to attempt to match him drink for drink...

...Amis delivered his barb with a polish that betrayed practice...

...Amis called a cab, and soon we were at the bar of the Swansea Yacht Club...

...There was the hapless professor, and there was the Russian poetaster...

...Whatever the cause of his displeasure, Amis finally put an end to the tortured interview...

...The view was soon to be obstructed by some horrible new fast-food shack, Amis said with a distaste he seemed to relish...

...The music he loved had been killed, and the eulogy he delivered was not glib...