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?

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?