Letters reveal dark side of Kingsley Amis's imagination
Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives
IF YOU READ ONE BOOK
Capture, by Roger Smith (Serpent's Tail) R180
Perhaps the most visceral of all South African genre writers, Smith takes a slight deviation here; Capture is not the action-packed crime thriller we've come to expect from him, but a harrowing psychological page-turner. True to form, his Cape Town remains a brutally ugly city with few redeeming features - like his three central characters here: a psycho ex-cop, a former hooker and stripper who is a recovering addict, and a deeply disturbed software developer with a cheating wife. Gripping.
THE ISSUE
Britain is awash with rage at sex offenders - critic AA Gill wrote at the weekend of "the torchlit mob of baying media and political peasants coming up the hill to the BBC" demanding vengeance for the late TV presenter Jimmy Savile's crimes against children - and a new book suggesting that Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis was a potential paedophile is unlikely to settle the hysteria.
Richard Bradford's forthcoming The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (Robson Press) reveals the novelist's fervent interest in young girls was a recurring theme in the letters he sent Larkin during the 1940s and early 1950s.
In January 1947, Amis informed the poet he had met a girl with "noticeable breasts". She was 12. A month later, he told Larkin, "There's only one fresh thing to report about my schoolgirl; whatever I did she would not respond beyond blushing and giggling and wriggling a little as if tickled, smiling affectionately at me and rubbing her warm cheek against mine, saying softly: 'You are funny, Kingsley'."
This, of course, was long before Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Over the years, Amis would reveal a lot more in his letters - "I have got as far as deciding on the preliminaries: a girl of 13, starting with her school hat and raincoat, takes off all her clothes while I sit and watch" - but Bradford makes it clear that however shameful his feelings, what Amis was admitting were his fantasies rather than reality.
"Amis did not molest or attempt to molest girls," Bradford wrote in the London Sunday Times, "but he was honest enough to confide his most disturbing thoughts to his closest friend. He was an intelligent and sensitive man, permanently at war with his baser instincts, a tension that enabled him to produce some of the finest fiction of the 20th century."
CRASH COURSE
How to cash in on a trend: Vina Jackson's heavy breathing trilogy, Eighty Days Yellow, Eighty Days Blue and Eighty Days Red - all similarly packaged to the Fifty Shades bonkbusters - is currently cluttering bookstore shelves. Ho-hum.
THE BOTTOM LINE
"In the course of the programme [Jimi] Hendrix used his guitar as the body of a woman, and he masturbated on the neck." - Ban This Filth! Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archives 1963-2001, edited by Ben Thompson (Faber & Faber).