It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

judging from his fictional portrayal of Bloom in Ravelstein, I wouldn't say Bellow was "in thrall" to him, unless being friends w/somebody qualifies, also aren't all public intellectuals & social commentators pretty much self-appointed? maybe self-invented is the better term.

one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help).

if Amis was merely "content to be a good writer" he'd be accused of being complacent. perhaps profundity, like humor is a matter of personal taste?

if Amis was merely "content to be a good writer" he'd be accused of being complacent.

Dunno. I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe in which Amis isn't given to those hectoring & melodramatic paragraphs on big topics (often: short sentence rhetoric + facts from his recent reading) that clog up the later novels & the non-fiction, and in which he doesn't have a bent for making pronouncements and... it's hard. I can see one world in which he's been sidelined as a limited entertainer, but another in which he's viewed as one of the British comic greats. But, yeah, I admit it's sort of hard to separate lecturing/soapbox Amis from the ambition, confidence and energy necessary for the good stuff.

I'd have thought the suggestion that Bellow was "in thrall" to Bloom was uncontroversial. It's a few years since I read "Ravelstein", but that's exactly the message I took from it. Taking two minutes to go to the Complete Review site for a memory jog/second opinion and reading a single review pretty much at random (The Guardian) I find: "Ravelstein memorialises his ..... mentor Allan Bloom"; "Bellow's hero (and it is obvious that Bloom truly was Bellow's hero)" and so on. I'm sure there's screeds more of this sort of stuff to be found if you're minded to look. Bellow, who has no mean opinion of his own intellect, repeatedly makes it clear that he feels overmatched by Bloom ("I was not about to get in the ring with this Sumo champion representing Platonic metaphysics").

As for all public intellectuals being self-appointed, you can no doubt improve your chances if you are manically pushy and think you understand nearly everything better than nearly everyone else. But I don't think that a Bloom/Hitchens level of narcissism is necessary for the public to decide you have some interesting ideas. All it probably takes is for a television producer to take a shine to your (perhaps modest and self-doubt filled) book.

Many novelists are self-aware enough to know that their talent or interest lies in writing fiction rather than discussing heavyweight ideas (Wodehouse, Jane Austen, Hemingway, Nabokov, Chandler. Wilde are some who come quickly to mind, but I'm sure it'd be possible to compile a very long list). Kingsley Amis once said, "importance is not important: good writing is". Of course people who think that way will be accused of complacency but those who don't agree. But even if you buy into the accusers' philistinism (art isn't important unless its freighted with concepts that have implications for the real world, bad news for composers and abstract painters) what do we gain if a good and popular comic novelist writes bad, pretentious novels of ideas?

I stopped reading Saul Bellow when I read that one book about that one guy who was still struggling to be an intellectual but was trying to round it out by dating hot tomatoes and hanging out with wise guys.

frankiemachine - I've thought a lot about that Kingsley Amis quote and my initial reaction when I read it was that this was absolutely the right way to look at things and this is something I still feel to a great extent. However, one of the questions that bothers me, as a big fan of Kingsley Amis (I'll get to Martin in a sec with any luck), is why KA isn't considered 'great' and whether that matters or not.

And the reason, I think, (as KA once himself said 'most of this is what I think, so I shall avoid such pseudo-humilities from now on) lies in that question of how important you feel importance is. And I've kind of come to the conclusion that importance is kind of important. It was reading Dostoevsky that made me reconsider Amis' quote. A lot of Dostoevsky's writing is enormously, hysterically slipshod, one-note stuff, and yet there's no denying its greatness (not for me anyway); he's concerned with soul defining issues. And that's a good thing.

My response to myself (sorry, this has been a long-running internal dialogue) is that K Amis is essentially a genre writer in the best sense of the concept. He uses traditional forms (comic novel, ghost story, science fiction) because he senses the excitement and fun to be had in those traditions, but he also uses them to touch, in a completely unpompous way (I'm ignoring his later stuff) soul-defining issues - art v individual in The Alteration, responsibility for ones own philosophical perceptions in The Green Man, language, thought, decay and relationships in Ending Up, to take three.

So I still vacillate between the idea that Kingsley Amis is not seen as great because he doesn't want to be seen as great, and that in fact greatness is a bit misleading anyway (socially and politically determined canons) - which is basically the importance isn't important argument - and the idea that Kingsley Amis isn't seen as great because he isn't great: he works within himself and tradition, and that the reason he isn't great is because he doesn't gesture towards greatness.

Okay, straying well in to tl;dr territory - but I increasingly feel that Martin Amis works in a sub-KA category. No, that isn't fair. He's not sub-KA, but he is better working in a sort of genre fiction world than a bourgeois profundity world (Sunday supplement stuff?). He's great at a flying exciting sentence (like a lot of genre writers), he's a superb literary critic (understanding the rules of the game, as it were), and he's got a nifty line in variations on a masculine theme (tho he's crap at women, something often wrongly leveled at his father).

I think somewhere along the line he got the fictional writer, a Hogarth for the modern age at his best, confused with the critic - so that he comes across as a literary critic of life, almost as bad a type as the scientist critic of literature. M Amis is basically a very very good comic writer (which is a fine thing - the height of philosophy it's possible to argue) but he ain't no philosophic writer.

I've wandered off haven't I? I'm a bit pissed to be honest. I think I've just fruitlessly and less articulately said what frankiemachine said a couple of posts up.

Better press 'submit post' then. It is Christmas after all.

The Baron In The Trees, Italo Calvino (rather overtly corny and precious at times - guess I was expecting Calvino to be closer to Eco and Borges)

Don't forget KA's On Drink

OT: Time for a "winter" thread, I say.

Gamalie I don't consider KA a genre writer. He wrote some genre stuff, sure (although I haven't read much of it) but the stuff that seems core to me - Take A Girl Like You, Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils etc - is social comedy. I don't think that qualifies as genre fiction, unless you're going to call people like Jane Austen, E M Forster and Evelyn Waugh genre writers.

I'm a big fan but for me KA ends up being minor because he didn't manage to write at the top of his game for really sustained periods. There are great things in many of his novels, but there are no great novels. My guess is this was really a failure of will - KA was deeply neurotic, beset by personal problems and phobias and cauterising those - through socialising, women, booze, being a professional gadfly and curmudgeon - too often mattered more than the writing.

Re: the stuff about novelists and their big ideas, there is an interesting article by ILX pariah Gilbert Sorrentino about ILX cult favorite Edward Dahlblerg in his collection of essays Something Said where he says something like: he has no ideas but that's OK, he's a novelist and novelists are not supposed to have ideas, they are supposed to write well, which he does.

Motion's biography of Larkin portrays Kingsley Amis as the dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude. I don't have the book with me but there's a passage that states that Amis was always there to search out and destroy any sign of literariness or earnestness. A sort of Two Lads Against the World philosophy.

Another critic wrote of Auden that a posture of adolescence held on into adulthood quickly becomes seedy. Larkin's and Amis's lives seem to have become seedy right away. My feeling is that Larkin was powerful enough to transmute his life circumstance into literature (while keeping the faith in his letters) and Amis never could.

Larkin is profound enough for me within his scope. Maybe the right scale isn't intellectualism or genius, but how ruthless you are with yourself. The two both armored themselves against life, but somehow only Larkin was able or willing to write around that.

Almosina I disagree about the relative success Amis and Larkin has in transmuting life into literature, but that's a difference of taste and temperament.

But wrt Amis being the "dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude" - if there was a dominant personality in the relationship it was Larkin. Larkin was less of a social animal than Amis, colder if you like, and Amis's approval mattered less to him than his mattered to Amis. Amis always behaved like the eager-to-please junior partner, something Larkin seems to have accepted as no more than his due, even when Amis achieved much greater worldly success. While Kingsley - who of course had ambitions as a poet himself - continued throughout his life to proselytize enthusiastically for Larkin's reputation as a poet, and seems to have felt nothing other than pleasure and pride in Larkin's successess, Larkin deeply (and not altogether secretly) resented Amis's success and the wealth and celebrity that came with it.

scott, how did you get on with alasdair gray?

Colum Mccann - let the great world spin.

i'm somewhere near the beginning, and it's fine, but somewhat cliched,isn't it?