Speak, memory. Memory hold the door. I have an absolutely clear recollection of the following, which occurred during a conversation, approximately two decades ago, that featured Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and myself:

Kingsley: "Went to dinner last Tuesday at some shag's house. Met a woman who said to me, 'How's it feel to have a son who's much more famous than you?' I went, harrumph, 'Well, I'm not quite sure that he is more famous.' She trilled, 'Oh no - MUCH more famous.' "

Martin: "Cope with it, Dad. Handle it."

I don't remember the year, I don't remember the place, but I do absolutely remember the tone. And for the rest of the lunch or dinner or nightcap session or whatever it was, whenever any of us wanted to introduce a topic we'd have to begin by fluting or bugling the words, "Oh no - MUCH more famous!" (The ground for this had been partly cleared by Clive James, who in one of his "postcard" poems had tried to rhyme "famous" with "Amis", which may well work in Antipodean speech.)

So, it seems that "famous" and "Amis" rhyme even more naturally these days, what with Dad's letters being published and Martin's astounding memoir Experience about to hurtle down the slipway. I can barely wash my tights or wax my legs without someone ringing from London to ask about Martin's teeth, or his agent, or his girlfriends, or about Kingsley being a racist or a sexist.

No doubt this will intensify later this week, when Eric Jacobs - who was rightly sacked by Martin from editing the father's letters, after he parlayed his role as biographer into that of deathbed snooper - publishes his review of the letters in The Times. And, since I've read both books and remember quite a lot of the incidents, I've been tempted. Oh yes, I've been tempted all right.

On page 853 of the Kingsley Letters appears a footnote about a limerick. The limerick, written by Robert Conquest, is about Professor Christopher Ricks. Kingsley tells Conquest it's "nearer the mark than you thought". The footnote, just a little asterisk, explains in one word that the limerick is "unprintable". Aha! And I know what it says! But I'm not telling you, because it jolly well is unprintable.

In America, where I now live, there's a flattering belief that the English or the British have a saving sense of irony. Well, you wouldn't know that from the calls I get from the old country. These are lugubrious and literal-minded to an amazing degree. "Er, woontchu agree, Chris, that Kingsley really resented Mart's success? Obvious, innit, when you read the stuff?" Well, not to pull rank on you, mister (and I wouldn't use your first name unless I knew you well enough) it isn't so bloody obvious. Take this letter, to Philip Larkin, dated 10 May 1979:

"Did I tell you that Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE? Last year he earned £38,000. Little shit. Twenty-nine, he is. Little shit."

This is not a matter, like the anecdote with which I began, of having to have been there. Anyone who has read anything by Amis père knows that he deals in indirection, paradox, pretence and parody. The above is obvious paternal pride, draped in the friendly disguise of shock. It would be written in the same style, especially to Larkin, if Kingsley had just discovered that Martin had been to bed with ...no, never mind that bit.

The same goes for the old man's habit of putting his son's name down as "M**t** *m**" when he wants to deplore tendencies in new fiction. How well I remember the hilarious evenings in the unimprovably-named Hampstead paternal home, Flask Walk. Martin: "Nabokov?" Kingsley: "No good." Martin: "Ian McEwan?" Kingsley: "No bloody good." Martin: "Saul Bellow?" Kingsley: "Absolutely no bloody good." Martin: "Graham Greene?" Kingsley: "Absolutely NO bloody good AT ALL." Martin: "Well, who do you like?" Kingsley: "Dick Francis." (He must have meant the last recommendation semi-seriously, since he once told me that he'd given it to the Queen when they had lunch at Buckingham Palace. "Told her nobody else was any good." He succeeded without being indiscreet in giving the impression that his sovereign had rather agreed with him.)

Again, if you grimly leave out the element of irony, this can all sound like rather a limited conversation. But in fact, it was the most enviable father-son relationship I'd ever seen, or have ever seen.

We now know, from the work of both, that there was some repair work to be done on Kingsley's part for a very agonising divorce and separation; still, many better-run families don't rise to the level where father and son can discuss everything, from difficulties with girls to the proper use of metaphors to the apt mixing of drinks, with so little reserve. And, since both Martin and Kingsley are accomplished mimics, and reciters of both poetry and prose, and have or had the knack of being loved by women while keeping up strong male friendship, the moments of tedium were few and the moments of routine or repetition had their enjoyably predictable side. In Evelyn Waugh's letters to Nancy Mitford, that other old master of the epistolatory form says: "I'm glad you have not heard of Kingsley Amis. NOT a worthy man." But try looking up what that old brute's children remembered about him.

This is in some way a tale of two 10-year lunch tables. There was one lunch in the Seventies and early Eighties, made up of the grizzled veterans of the cultural Right, which used to meet on Thursdays in an upstairs room at Bertorelli's in Charlotte Street. Present were Amis senior, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Braine, Colin Welch and a few others; a self-caricaturing "Peter Simple" conclave of conservative British letters. And there was another lunch, somewhat more Bohemian in temper, which would gather on Fridays in a villainous Turkish-Cypriot establishment in Holborn, and included Mark Boxer, Clive James, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Terry Kilmartin, young Amis and myself.

Kingsley was the moving and animating spirit in the first, Martin in the second. I couldn't easily say how the two regular meals compared in respect of how much alcohol was made to go away. But Kingsley would come to both lunches. (I once went as a spectre at the feast to the first one; too many sentences there would begin with the throat-clearing phrase: "Call me old fashioned if you will...") I thus got the chance to see what Professor Zachary Leader has captured so perfectly in his collected letters; the slow evolution of one of England's great wits and raconteurs, from a man who could keep any table agog as he did his impersonations of men and animals and even machines, to a man whose Tory face finally grew to fit his mask.

As late as 17 November 1986, we find him writing a furious letter to The Observer, complaining that an anonymous source is not only attributing "outrageous racist remarks" to him but citing Martin as an uneasy eye-witness. On that occasion, there was a climb-down by The Observer, and rightly so.

I'd have to say, though, that five years later it could sometimes be difficult to tell whether or not the old boy was joking about, say, the need to hang Nelson Mandela. From being fat he had gone to being swollen and dropsical; more like Sidney Greenstreet than Falstaff. From being flushed and pink he had become choleric and port-sodden in hue. From being a tease of the politically-correct he had become a bit of a droning old club-man. Also, from being a fairly omnivorous cultural consumer he had evolved into someone who really liked junk films and trash TV. These, like the rows over nuclear war, furnished the raw material of some great dust-ups with his second son. But some - I note it without relish - some of the fun had gone out of these set-tos.

The old boy told me once, when we were alone, that men like himself, risotto after major dental surgery. "You ought to do a year-in-the-life kind of a book." His risen eyebrows as he chewed showed me that the thought had slightly crossed his own mind.

Experience, the fruit of this synthesis, is still the most-closely held manuscript in the publishing industry.

I can just tell you that it makes the stale phrase "mid-life crisis" redundant for all time, if only by showing that crisis is a condition of all stages of life. It should also succeed in shaming all those who like to live vicariously off the news of turmoil in the lives of the well-known.

Kingsley in his Letters at one point makes the ignoble suggestion that I don't mind a gossip (I don't know how he ran away with that idea) but gossip as we know it is discredited by this narrative.

Opportunities for revenge or vindication or self-justification are met with and simply scorned. In place of the petty rancour and scurrility which have become so familiar in the world of the secondhand hack, we have a steady and humorous confrontation with the facts of life. "Love, poverty and war", they used to say, were the rites of passage for men. Well, I won't say that you can smell the poverty exactly but I can remember when he lived on damn-all a week and only wanted to write, and he's now written about love, birth, death and the Oedipal, as well as about serial murder, the operating room, assassination plots, betrayal and - the great subject - America.

And there's the phone again, with someone wanting to know if he had his teeth fixed "cosmetically". Why does our culture have such a problem in recognising the real thing? Maybe not for much longer.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
 

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