MEMOIRS

Amis's "autobiography"—or, more accurately—portraits of his acquaintances after a few opening chapters on his family, school days, and life at Oxford. Aside from the fact that "most writers lead dull lives," Amis says his holding hack saves pain: "To publish an account of my own intimate, domestic, sexual experiences would hurt a number of people who have emotional claims on me...and I have no desire to cause pain, or further pain, to them or myself." What that leaves Amis with is other people and his opinions, which he records in a daily stint of space-filling, all quite styleless for a respected comic novelist who has just had a hit on American TV with his script for The Green Man. He gets off to a great start, describing his father, who manufactures "unbreakable" glassware (if dropped on something besides a carpet, a plate or glass exploded like a hand grenade), and his paternal grandmother: "Mater was a large dreadful hairy-faced creature who lived to be nearly ninety and whom I loathed and feared...." Others he limns include Francis Bacon, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess, Roald Dahl, Malcolm Muggeridge, Margaret Thatcher, actor Terry-Thomas (a brilliant Bertrand in the film version of Lucky Jim, Amis's most famed novel), Lord Snowdon, Arnold Wesker, and many others. At times, as with Wesker, Amis paints a portrait with victorious, if not vicious, brevity—but his portraits of Robert Graves and several others are no reason to read this book. The writer's best moments are on Philip Larkin (rewritten from a version published before Larkin died), and his standing up for neglected writers, such as Elizabeth Taylor, and for Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time series. A special chapter on booze, quite funny, goes nowhere. Depthless, but the pace and variety will keep many awake.