Odd

The advantages in shelf space-saving, not to mention cost-cutting, in supporting the wonderful but neglected service provided by local libraries, continue to be very persuasive. You couldn't think of a better idea if you tried unless you thought of a way of giving Greta Thunberg the job that useless article, Boris, always wanted, 'World King'. 

The Odd Couple by Richard Bradford, concerning the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin had never looked like a book I needed to have. He's written biographies of both of them and surely he's milking it by then doing one of them both together. 

Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't. The detail it goes into in examining these two lives is thorough to say the least and often possibly more than one wants or needs to know. It's possibly disrespectful to intrude into anybody's life quite so deeply even if they had advertised it quite so openly in their novels and poems themselves. And yet, because it's there, because it's been done, one reads it. One just doesn't pay to do so, so that must be alright, then.

Amis and Larkin were the 'odd couple' because while being such close friends at first, they were very different personalities. The book is less about literature than it is about sexual dysfunction. The problem Amis had, that he couldn't leave it alone, was probably more serious than Larkin's, that he never thought he was getting enough, although for such an unprepossessing and selfish character who just happened to write the best poems of his generation, he didn't do so bad for himself.

In some accounts, Larkin can be construed as a fogey-ish but common sense administrator who was better than he thought he was in company but it's harder to make a case for Kingsley Amis as a person, poet, or perhaps even novelist although he got first run on his mate in the race to celebrity status.

It can't have been pretty work for Bradford, wading through the letters and re-constructing the miseries of not only the two protagonists of his story but also those who came into their orbit. You either pity him the academic's role in cataloguing it all or you admire him for what it eventually becomes. 

It's odd, more than anything, though, and one wonders whether we should all have the same rubber stamp made that Larkin had to apply to unsolicited poems that he was sent that said, 'Why should I care'. 

But Bradford is better than I thought. A book only needs a few brilliant passages to make it worthwhile. I don't need to be electrified by every sentence. He does the best job in a short paragraph or two of nailing the old debate about An Arundel Tomb that anybody's ever done. Yes, of course,

Many commentators upon the poem have failed to recognise that its speaker is robustly unpersuaded by everything that he apprehends,

and

Such misreadings testify to the brilliance of Larkin's counterpointing of the respectful, deferential manner of the poem against what it actually says.

Well, thank heavens for that but it the misreadings were always less due to Larkin's brilliance than to some of his more sentimental readers not being able to read properly. It would be great if that was finally Q.E.D. on that subject.

The centre of the book is really how two such ill-matched best mates fell out, which might have been more about how the reluctant Larkin resented the success of the more exuberant Amis. If only he had been able to wait for posterity he might have seen some shift in what their subsequent reputations looked like. But Bradford is able to incorporate a wider realm of a very incidental supporting cast, like Shakespeare does with Autolycus, the Apothecary, the Nurse, Osric or Bagot. 

'Bummer' Scott 'appeared at least three decades older' than Nicky de Peche Craddock, daughter-in-law of the legendary chef, Fanny, who was the 'long-term admirer' of Nicky who occupied some of the living space of the Amis accommodation in Cambridge in 1961. He was dissolute but still recommended by Amis,

to his sons as an exemplar of good English, even when drunk, which he seemed to be for most of his waking existence.

And that's the sort of thing one reads books for. It's not for self-improvement, moral messages or even education or laughs. It's for great sentences or passages.

Bradford on Amis and Larkin could easily be mistaken for a miserable book but one only has to read it the other way and it's hilarious.