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Published in Oxford
Menorah: Winter 1999
JCR-UK page created: 21 August 2005
Page reformatted: 4 August 2016
AMIS AND THE ORIENTAL
By Harold Pollins
It has nothing to do
with the fact that because I had moved westward from London I must have come
from the east. It was 1950 and I had been appointed to a post as part of a
research team at the University College of Swansea - Coleg Prifysgol Abertawe. I
soon learned its title in Welsh.
I knew very little about Wales. My first visit
had been to the interview which I had not enjoyed. I didn’t think I’d be coming
back and didn’t really want to. By chance after the interview, in that summer of
1950, I found myself as a madrich at a Habonim camp in the Wye valley (I think).
My main task was to be the handyman/odd-job-man, making the fires for cooking,
looking after the latrines. Some of the youngsters at the camp were from Wales
and it was there that I first heard, from them, the Welsh hymn Cwm Rhondda,
‘Bread of Heaven’.
During the camp I got a letter or possibly a
telegram from home, telling me to phone the college in Swansea. I walked to the
nearest village and phoned. I spoke to the head of the research team, a
Yorkshireman. He came, I learned later, from a mining family and had had many
jobs, the last being as bus conductor when, in his early twenties, he had been
awarded an adult university scholarship. He chose to go to Cambridge, King’s
College no less, where he had rowed in the college boat. But he had retained his
accent and also his stereotypical Yorkshire bluntness. It wasn’t meant unkindly,
it was just his manner. His message on the phone was that the person they had
offered the job to had turned it down and I was next on the list. Somehow it
came across that I was very much second-best. Yet either on the spot or after a
little thought I accepted.
The Swansea Jewish community was at its height
then and I even found myself taking the Habonim Gedud. We went camping at
Tongwynlais, a place in the valley north of Cardiff. The old Swansea shul had
been destroyed in a wartime air raid and services were held in a chapel
belonging to one of the Welsh-language nonconformist denominations. I can now
visualise a Rosh Hashanah service when two or three men came in whom I’d never
seen before. They spoke to no one else and – it was this that stuck in my mind –
they wore flat caps. In South Wales I’d heard them called ‘Dai caps’ (pronounced
‘cups’ or ‘carps’, ‘Dai’ being short for ‘David’ or ‘Dafydd’, and was used
colloquially for an ordinary person, a workman.) Other men in the shul wore
trilby hats. I have often wondered who they were and have speculated that they
worked in one of the local industries. They looked a bit small for steelworkers;
perhaps they worked in the mines. I knew that some Jews had worked in them. A
pity I didn’t take the opportunity to find out.
I soon got to know people. One was a science
lecturer who lived near me. We used to walk to college together. A quiet man,
rather pale and a little intense. We chatted amicably. Later I heard that just
before I had arrived at Swansea there had been a contretemps in the nearby town
of Neath. There had been a public meeting of some Welsh republicans at which the
Union Jack had been burnt. I was mildly surprised to discover that my walking
companion had helped to burn it and I think had been charged with some offence
or other. Fortunately, the fact that I came from England did not appear to
disturb him too much.
The title of this piece refers to relationships
with one of the people I met, a lecturer in English called Kingsley Amis. We got
on very well and with others spent time in his local, and elsewhere. He was
sophisticated and sure of himself, had a beautiful, young wife and was writing a
novel. I happened to show him an offprint of an article which another lecturer
had given me, on some minor aspect of history. The writer had made the mistake
of saying that his (unimportant) subject had been ‘strangely neglected’. I next
read the phrase when Amis’s novel, Lucky Jim, was published. It was made use of,
quite early in the book.
I wasn’t
surprised, after that, to read in his next book a description of some ghastly
furniture which was in the room I occupied in lodgings in Swansea. He had seen
it at the one and only party I put on – normally they took place at his house.
In his Memoirs (see below) he describes various incidents in his life and gives
the locations in his novels where he made use of them.
I was at Swansea for three years. Amis and I
often talked about Jewish matters, such as novels by American Jews, like Irwin
Shaw – that dates it. The new publication, The Jewish Quarterly, began to
appear. I showed him the first issue and he wrote a short critical note about
Jewish literature which the magazine published. He claimed to know a little
about Jews having met many at his school, the City of London School. One rather
bizarre conversation ensued from my current reading in Anglo-Jewish History. I
mentioned that there had been in Elizabethan England and in the early 17th
century a converso family called Añes, spelled in
various ways. I cannot now imagine the context in which I raised the matter. He
was interested when I mentioned that the name was spelled variously, one version
being, as I recall, Ames or Amis – I haven’t my notes handy to check - and he
speculated that his family might have been descended from them. I think his
suggestion rested on an ancestor of his, a grandfather I think, having a beard
and looking ‘Jewish’. We did not get very far with that topic. It was some
bizarre fantasy on his part.
After I left Swansea and went to back to London
we corresponded for a time. I found recently a carbon copy of a letter I sent
him, a rather tedious thing about Jewish literature, which may perhaps have been
the basis for an article I wrote on the subject a bit later. The letters he
wrote to me got lost at some point, perhaps when I got married and moved into a
smaller house, or during several house-moves later on. A pity. They would have
been worth a bob or two. I do have a signed, first edition of Lucky Jim. It
contains a personal message to me from him but the book is somewhat soiled and
doesn’t have a dust jacket both of which features reduce its value to
collectors. The latter, it is well known, do not read books, they only collect
them and such commodities should be in pristine condition.
I last saw him in 1961. I remember the year for
I was employed on research for the National Coal Board from 1960-2 and my job
was field research at collieries. One assignment was in the South Wales
coalfield and we stayed with friends from my Swansea years. Lena and I travelled
down with Joe, then a few months old. A party was put on for us and Amis was
there; he was to take up a post at Cambridge later that year. Back in London I
got on with my life and growing family. We lost touch. When his Memoirs appeared
in 1991 I consulted a copy at Blackwell’s but as my name was not in the index I
didn’t read it. Coincidentally, while writing this piece I found a copy of it in
the withdrawn books section at the Westgate Library. I didn’t mind parting with
£1 (along with £1 for a copy of the autobiography of Lady Reading.) The chapter
on Swansea brought back memories and his pen portraits of some of the characters
I had known were remarkably accurate.
Our close (temporary) friendship can be gauged
from this incident. When my brother Bob got married in 1953 I inveigled Amis
into sending a telegram. I wrote it out for him and gave him the money for its
cost. As it was read out at the wedding there was an unusual quiet and a gasp or
two. ‘Mazel Tov,’ it said, ‘from Harold’s goyishe friends in Swansea.’ If he had
put his name to it that would also be worth something. That year when our
academic department at Swansea closed Amis and Esmond Cleary - a colleague
whose friendship has been longer-lasting – saw me off at the railway station,
one or possibly both of them, blowing toy trumpets.
As part of our joking relationship he referred
to me, not as Jewish, but as ‘The Oriental’.
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