Allusions and Echoes in Kingsley Amis's Letters

Abstract

MANY allusions and echoes are noted in Zachary Leader's edition of The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000), but a number go unidentified and a few are wrongly identified. Some, such as in Amis's alterations of Christmas carols (‘God rest you dismal, gentlemen’, ‘Once in royal David's bum’, 148, 301) may be thought too obvious to need noting. But when Amis begins a letter (274) ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding a poor old tail-chaser who …’, even if many readers will recognize the beginning of The Waste Land, it would do no harm to provide a reference. What is obvious to the editor may not –or not in all cases –be so to the reader; and, sadly, vice versa. Something of Amis's literary sensibility and anarchic humour is missed when sources go uncharted, though the fact that his mind is so fertile and so exuberantly inventive can make it difficult to recover everything. However, especially since Professor Leader mentions the possibility of an ‘eventual complete letters’ (xx), his already substantial record of an extraordinary and irrepressible mind may be extended to include the following: