HUBBUB IS NOT HUMDRUM.

For more than 41 years my wife and I lived in a pleasant, four-bedroom home in a “near”suburb of Toronto – Fores5t Hill. It was what you did. It was where you raised your kids. Never mind that it imposed on them a homogeneity that was all at once racial, religious and income-related. It felt safe.

You have to move downtown to realize what a trap that ersatz security is.

I am writing this remembering a conversation I had more than 30 years ago with Kingsley Amis, who will be remembered for “Lord Jim” whether he wrote another book or not.

I had just finished “Ending Up, a wickedly clever, witty, darkly-humorous book about a group of elderly people living together in one house. It was fun to the point of being wicked, with characters like a retired army colonel who lived with his loyal batman (who may also have been his sweetheart.)

I asked Amis why he continued to live in North London. With all the money he has made and the royalties that would pour in, why would he continue to live where he had to pay7 burdensome taxes? Why not move to some secluded palm-fringed island?

He to me he lived where he did because he was always with people. He could go to his “local” and be with people who talked and who argued. It was this yeasty atmosphere that kept his creative juices boiling. (My words – not his.)

He said that if he moved to that pal-fringed island he would write one book about living on that island and that would be it. {Period. End of Amis the novelist,

(I you Google his name you may be astonished at how prolific he was. Most people know and treasure Lord Jim, but that was just the beginning.)

Back to my own choices sharply reminiscent of what Amis said to me. So when I moved from the humdrum to the hubbub it was perhaps to keep some juices lowing. Living downtown where people congregate, where at night club-goers can be heard in the streets, where there are more restaurants per square foot than I place I have been to, where people jostle and push for space; where there is contention, and if not contention, not complacency.

I should have made me a better writer. It helped Kingsley Amis.