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124 Dear Kelly, “Whenever you feel passionate about an author,” said the biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, “go ahead and plunge into the research. Don’t worry about what other scholars think of your project.” This advice, given years ago to a student of his fresh out of graduate school, I now give to you with the hope that you’ll make it the cornerstone of your publishing career. Bruccoli’s words are pertinent, I believe, because you have decided with some anxiety to write your next book on a living author. As you’ll soon discover, the challenges will be formidable, the discouragements will be many—but if you persist, I promise you the result will be rewarding for many reasons both personal and professional. Like many of our colleagues, you and I lead double lives. Although much of our energy is focused on exploring ideas with our students, outside the classroom we are what Richard Altick calls “scholar-adventurers .” Our intellectual curiosity and our academic passion lead us to delve into the literary documents and careers of authors we admire. Part of that quest is the exciting dream most of us hold that we will discover a fresh topic waiting to be explored. At least once in my career, I had the good luck to find it realized. In the summer of 1972 my father was in New York City to visit with his friend Gordon Ray, president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and during their conversation he mentioned that I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation on Kingsley Amis, the foremost English comic novelist of the twentieth century. Ray said he knew Amis and would be glad to write to him on my behalf to see whether he could set up an interview. I sent Ray a copy of my proposal, and a few weeks later I received a note from him along The Adventures of Scholarship [ c h a p t e r 1 2 [ 12 5 t h e a d v e n t u r e s o f s c h o l a r s h i p with a copy of Amis’s response. “I’m sure you can imagine the mixture of tickled ego and slight sinking of the heart with which I read your letter,” Amis had written to Ray in November. “Mr Salwak seems, from his dissertation proposal, a sensible enough young man, and he and I may get along together famously: but then again we may not.” He agreed to see me for a minimum of a couple of hours’ chat followed by lunch, “after which,” his proviso stated, “I’m free to disappear from his life, but may well elect (and have the leisure) not to do so.” If I was prepared to come all the way from California to London on that understanding, then he’d “very cheerfully” see me and do his best to answer any questions I may devise. I wrote immediately, and on December 18 he replied with several possible dates and added: “Obviously, the sooner you can let me know which day is best for you, the sooner I can regard the other days as free for other appointments. But, with Santa at our throats, you needn’t rush too hard.” We agreed to meet at 11 a.m. on January 24, in his club, The Travellers’, in central London. His letter came at a crucial time for me. My dissertation proposal had met with some resistance—not surprisingly, considering that choosing any contemporary writer for such intense scrutiny would have been questioned in those days. One committee member had doubted whether the project was worthy, saying that he found it difficult to justify Amis as a fit subject “in the same breath” as, say, Milton or Chaucer. Another had advised me against writing on living authors. “It could not soon be completed,” he said, “and research material will lead to endless further revision and revision.” He suggested that I look for another subject—“the deader, the better.” But owing to the unwavering support of my director (who had led me to the topic in the first place) as well as Amis’s positive response and my own consuming interest, I persisted—and two drafts later my proposal was approved unanimously. As I had argued, little of substance had yet been written on the man or his work, and so clearly this was an area wide open for exploration. “It’s...

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