Our public library's permanent surplus-book shop had a copy of Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998, Vol. I. (That's as in Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse online journal. Just so you don't think I'm morbid, as the lady who sold me the book clearly did until I explained it was just a plain old lit anthology, not some kinda weird hymn to necrophilia.)
So anyhow I opened the book at random and found this:
...I've just been reading Time's biographical file on Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) and the new British intellectuals. Somerset Maugham has a beautiful comment which I'm not at all surprised to have missed in many another article on the "angry young men." He says, and I quote: "it (Lucky Jim) describes a new class, the white-collar proletariat... which does not go to the university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they get one, scamp it. (scamp?) Their idea of a celebration is to go into a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious, envious ... they are scum."
Good old Maugham: it's good to see the sledge-hammer coming down from the top for a change, instead of striking up at the belly of society from the bottom.
Of course you're so far out of it up there that you probably don't realize that the "beat generation" is taking over American literature, while the "angry young men" are the driving force in Britain. And although I'm neither beat nor necessarily angry, I'm glad to see somebody taking a stand for a change. It's the first real "movement" in literature in many a year: a point of reference, if nothing else. The writing world seems at least to have settled into two very definitely opposing camps: the pedants and the hobos. Most of the best writers fit in neither camp, of course, but then very few of them ever have. A good writer stands above movements, neither a leader nor a follower, but a bright white gold ball in a fairway of wind-blown daisies...Give up who wrote that? Answer below the fold.
...and, yes, it's Hunter Thompson, in 1958, as excerpted from The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, ed. Douglas Brinkley.
Posted by Martha Bridegam at March 14, 2005 06:00 PM'yes, it's Hunter Thompson'
Old Uncle Sham, as someone called him recently.
Posted by: ROBBIE at March 15, 2005 12:50 AMSomerset can kiss my ass.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 15, 2005 11:38 AMSurprising Maugham would come down so hard, since Amis' *Lucky Jim* is based so closely on *Of Human Bondage*.
...unless Amis was flipping off Maugham by letting the hero escape and Maugham didn't appreciate it?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 15, 2005 12:36 PMThere are some nice ironies here. Maugham went on to write that 'they [the scum] will in due course leave the university. Some will doubtless sink back, perhaps with relief, into the modest class from which they have emerged; some will take to drink, some to crime, and go to prison. Others will become schoolmasters and form the young, or journalists and mould public opinion. A few will go into Parliament, become Cabinet Ministers and rule the country. I look upon myself as fortunate that I shall not live to see it.'
It would be an intriguing exercise to ask students of post-War Britain to analyse that passage and see what he got right while being so wrong. He has, of course, mixed up some details from *Lucky Jim* - and remembered them rather inaccurately - with his own born-in-1874 view of social transformation in 1955.
When Amis, in 1956, won the Somerset Maugham travel award for writers, Maugham became less frosty.Amis wrote thanking Maugham and saying that he admired his work. 'I got a most courteous letter back...I think he thought - wrongly on the whole, I would say - that this new hero and what he stood for represented a threat to the values by which he'd always lived...later developments [Amis is writing in 1974] have seen to it that the non-gentleman and the gentleman would be standing together back to back, holding off the even more ungentlemanly people who have emerged since.'
Amis wrote a good and funny poem - *After Goliath* - on this topic.
Posted by: Tom Deveson at March 15, 2005 01:02 PM