Kingsley goes to the toilet

In 1978, I gave a poetry reading at Hull University. Philip Larkin was glumly, politely, in attendance. I was duly appreciative, knowing what it must have cost him. He was deaf as well as disaffected. Perhaps the deafness helped. The next day, we had a lunchtime drink at the University bar. We talked about Kingsley’s recently published Jake’s Thing, a fictionalised account of Kingsley’s sexual relations with Jane Howard. Larkin was puzzled: ‘It’s determinedly foul-mouthed, which I like, but there is a central implausibility. Jake can do it, but he doesn’t want to.’ An innuendo? A suggestion that Jake, and by implication Kingsley, couldn’t? He sipped something improbable like a Dubonnet.

A year previously, Kingsley had taken me to lunch in Wheeler’s. I was teaching at Christ Church and Kingsley wanted to know if I thought an Oxford college might be called St James’s – or ‘Jim’s’ in what he called ‘popular parlance’. I thought it entirely plausible and, as he told me more about the novel, I had several other suggestions of my own. I thought he wanted to pick my brains. He didn’t. I had answered the question he wanted answered. Anything else was an impertinence. He became irritated. Finally, before he had finished his dover sole Walewska, he got to his feet and said he needed a shit. When he returned, he asked me if he had tucked his shirttail in properly. ‘One of my nightmares: everyone knows you’ve just had a shit.’