Down to Coral Gables for lunch with my friend David. At his house, atop a pile of books, sat a copy of One Fat Englishman.
“I spent a weekend at Kingsley Amis’s house once,” David said casually. I have known David for almost 20 years. I had heard about the party he attended, as a Columbia undergraduate, at James Baldwin’s house; about his brief meeting with James Merrill and Truman Capote at a restaurant in Athens; about his running into Graham Greene, forcefully, on a street in London. He had never told me about his time with Kingsley Amis.
He was living in London, and dating a woman whose father had been friends with Amis during the years he had taught at Princeton. She had been invited to spend the weekend with the novelist and his second wife and brought David along.
“He did the right thing,” David recalled, “and said, ‘Let’s have a drink before dinner.’ I didn’t say a word. I was terrified.”
“You’d read his books?”
“Yes. That’s why I was terrified.”
David remembered him talking eloquently and knowledgably about G.K. Chesterton. “The following week I read an appreciation he’d just written of G.K. Chesterton.
“He kept pouring me whiskey. He wanted to loosen me up but I ended up just getting drunk.”
“It’s like spending a weekend at Evelyn Waugh’s house,” I said.
“I dated Harriet Waugh for a while,” David said.
Over black beans and rice at Havana Harry’s, we talked about the student demonstrations at Columbia in ’68 which, of course, David was there for.
Driving home I wondered: Why do the wrong people write memoirs?
