In his New Yorker review of the recent biography of Philip Larkin, Martin Amis gave a strong defense of Larkin against the charges of sexism, racism, moral squalor, and so on, then making the literary rounds. Much of this defense was built around the idea that Larkin had grown up and lived at a time when racism, as now defined, was so common as not to invite censure, and when sexism did not exist as a category of sin into which one could fall. But, perhaps feeling that he needed to guard Larkin against the secondary charge of making no effort at all to move when the times did, indeed of resisting any such movement with determination, Mr. Amis embarked on the following philosophical exercise:

Larkin the man is separated from us, historically, by changes in the self. For his generation, you were what you were, and that was that. It made you unswervable and adamantine. My father has this quality. I don’t. None of us do. There are too many forces at work on us. There area too many fronts to cover. In the age of self-improvement, the self is inexorably self-conscious… . [Larkin] couldn’t change the cards he was dealt.

Mr. Amis here is making an important point and two minor mistakes. The first minor mistake is of thinking of his father, Kingsley Amis, as some kind of typical spokesman for his generation. That must be one of the stranger effects bred by familiarity.