Letter to Kingsley Amis
NW3
May 12 1977

Dear Kingsley Amis,

Alan Coren and I still feel that if you would like to do the Music ‘n’ Socialism piece, it wouldn’t really hurt if you leant more on Mozart than on rock and roll. One way in would be to greet the Music For Socialism Festival as the great culmination of a constant people’s struggle in music dating back for many years, so that you could then flashback and show how Mozart, Wagner, Jelly Roll Morton etc had been freedom-loving, egalitarian, worker’s struggles champions as is evinced in every note of their elitist music…

However, I feel that here I may be batting on a sticky wicket, on the fifth day, with 400 runs to get.

A small alternative. For our summer number the editor proposed collecting in the books pages some thoughts from eminent people on the books they had never read but would willingly take away this summer to enjoy at last. As a feature on books which none of the writer had read seemed a bit tiresome to me, I would rather have the same approach but to books which you have read and enjoyed but remain unaccountably unknown and unread. Would you care to do 400-500 words on a small handful of books that you swear by and no-one else seems to know about?

For that we’d pay £60. For the socialism piece, rather more; I don’t control the purse strings but it’s minimum £100.

PS It would be a big boon if you could let me know the answer(s) on Friday. I think I’ve got your postal district right this time.