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Sir Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) |
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Novelist, poet, critic, and teacher, father of the writer Martin Amis (1949-2023), generally grouped among the "angry young men" in the 1950s with such writers as John Osborne, John Braine, John Wain, Arnold Wesker, and Alan Sillitoe. However, Amis himself denied the affiliation. A radical in his young adulthood, Amis was later know for his conservative critique of contemporary life and manners. He once said, that if you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing. In a few more seconds Dixon had noticed all he needed to notice about this girl: the combination of fair hair, straight and cut short, with brown eyes and no lipstick, the strict set of the mouth and the square shoulders, the large breasts and the narrow waist, the premeditated simplicity of the wine-coloured corduroy skirt and the unornamented white linen blouse. The sight of her seemed an irresistible attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions: something designed to put him in his place for good. The notion that women like this were never on view except as the property of men like Bertrand was so familiar to him that it had long since ceased to appear an injustice. (from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Penguin Books, 1976, p. 39) Kingsley Amis was born in London, the only son of William
Amis, a
business
clerk, and the former Rosa Lucas. His parents were Baptists and
Conservatives. 'The Sacret Rhino of Uganda,' Amis's first story,
appeared in the Norbury College school magazine. Amis was educated at the City of London School and St. John's
College, Oxford. There he joined the Communist Party, edited the Oxford
Labour Club Bulletin,
and led the Labour Club choir.
At Oxford, his friend included Philip Larkin. ". . . to some extent he
suffered the familiar humorist's fate of being unable to get anyone to
take him seriously at all. Kingsley's 'serious side' was political,"
Larkin recalled. (Required
Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin,
Farrar, Straus, Guroux, 1983, pp. 21-22) "Now, really, you know, this won't do at all, leaving the Party like that. . . . Most party members join without any knowledge, some, it is whispered, without any intelligence. I think you can, without undue conceit, give yourself marks above the average for knowledge and intelligence," Amis wrote in November 1941 to John Russell Lloyd, a member of a study group organized by the Communist Party. (The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader, Hyperion, 2001, p. 1) During the war, Amis served in the army with the Royal Corps of Signals, earning in 1943 his commission as second lieutenant. When he was stationed in Belgium and Germany, he co-wrote with his fellow officer a novel, which dealt with his affair with a married woman. Although Amis failed to win a reserch degree with a thesis entitled 'English Poetry, 1850-1900, and the Victorian Reading Public,' he was appointed lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea. Amis was a visiting fellow in creative writing at Princeton University (1958-59) and in the early 1960s he taught at Cambridge. In 1947 Amis published his first collection of poems, Bright
November. It was followed by A Frame of Mind (1953), Poems:
Fantasy Portraits (1954) and A Case of Samples: Poems
1946–1956
(1956). During this perid Amis was a member of the
literary group The Movement, whose members included Robert Conquest,
Elisabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. Following the Soviet crushing of
the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Amis became disillusioned with
Communism – his political views drifted gradually to the right, and
eventually, joining Robert Conquest, he supported the American presence
in Vietnam. As a novelist Amis made his debut with Lucky Jim (1954), which was hailed as a work of born novelist. It won the Somerser Maugham Award, although Maugham himself saw its protagonist as a representative of a new class which was "mean, malicious and envious" and "scum". ('Amis, Kingsley (William),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 45) Amis's second novel, That Uncertain Feeling (1956), also had a comic main character, John Lewis, a librarian. The book was filmed in 1962 under the title Only Two Can Play, starring Peter Sellers. I Like It Here (1958), set in Portugal, was Amis's most close-to-life novel. "I did once, out of laziness or sagging imagination, try to put real people on paper and produced what is by common consent my worst novel, I Like It Here," he later said. (Experience by Martin Amis, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, p. 3) The antihero Jim Dixon of Lucky Jim is an inept junior faculty member at a small university, who faces one disaster after another with his neurotic girlfriend, a colleague, and Professor Welch, the head of his department. Dixon's job is in constant danger, he despises the pretensions of academic life, but at the same time he tries to makeProfessor Welch like him. After ruining his career during a public lecture on "Merrier England," Dixon's life finally takes a promising turn. Behind the story was the Education Act of 1944, which attempted to assimilate a larger amount of working- and lower-middle-class students into English university life. Amis's work as a junior lecturer gave him inside information about the academic life. The most important and controversial of your non-needs is a coctail-shaker. With all respect to James Bond, a martini should be stirred, not shaken. The case is little different with drinks that include the heavier fruit-juices and liqueurs, but I have always found that an extra minute¨s stirring does the trick well enough. The only mixture that does genuinely need shaking is one containing egg, and if that is your sort of thing, then clear off and buy yourself a shaker any time you fancy. (Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, introduced by Christopher Hitchens, 2008, Bloomsbury, pp. 39-40) After the death of Ian Fleming,
Kingsley Amis was commissioned by Glidrose Productions to write a new
James Bond adventure. The result, Colonel Sun
(1968), was not as successful as expected (but it was translated into
Finnish
and Swedish). A few year before this thriller, Amis had written a study
of
the world famous spy, which appeared under the title The
James Bond Dossier
(1965). Fleming,
like Amis, drank and smoked heavily, and they shared an aversion toward
modern architecture, "fish-and-chip culture," and gossip column
celebrities. "The people who occupy the top places in our society, or
who are thought to do so, or who are courted or adored or envied by a
lot of other people – the actors, architects, aristocrats, athletes,
ballet dances, bankers, bishops, and so on down through politicians and
pop singers to zoologists – never seem to have much of a part in the
adventures of 007." (Ibid.,
Pan Books, p. 99) In Colonel Sun the
villains are Chinese, not Soviet agents with whom Bond cooperates.
Colonel Sun Liang-tan of
the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi plan
to open the eastern Mediterranean for Chinese influence and continue to
the whole Arab world and Africa. At the beginning of the story, M is
kidnapped and his wife is killed. "The empty room
gazed bleakly at Bond. As always, everything was meticulously in its
place, the lines of naval prints exactly horizontal on the walls,
water-colour materials laid out as if for inspection on the
painting-table up against the window. It all had a weirdly artifical,
detached air, like part of a museum where the furniture and effects of
some historical figure are preserved just as they were in his lifetime." (Colonel Sun,
Kingsley Amis writings as Robert Markham, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 16) When the Soviets have realized who is their real
enemy, they
offer Bond "the Order of the Red Banner for services to peace". Bond
politely declines: "But in my organization we're not allowed to be
given medals of any kind. Not even by our own people." (Ibid.,
p. 315) Amis's unfeigned stance is seen in such anthologies as The
New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978) and The Popular Reciter (1978).
Amis loved detective stories and science fiction, and managed with his
writings to recruit new readers to these genres. However, academic
interest in science fiction horrified him:. "Science fiction has come
from Chaucer to Finnegans Wake in less than fifty years . . .
now
you can take it anywhere, and it is not worth taking," he wrote
pessimistically. (The
Golden Age of Science Fiction, selected and introduced by
Kingsley Amis, Hutchinson, 1981, p. 21) Amis published columns on food for Harper's and Queen, detective books, critical study Rudyard Kipling and His World (1975), Memoirs (1990), and The King's English (1998), mini-essays on the craft of writing well. He was very sure about his likes and dislikes, writing in July 1975 in a letter to Mr Gunston (his identity is untraced): "I dislike men and women when they are cold-hearted (a reserved manner is okay), unpleasant to those who can't hit back (waiters etc.), unable to allow others to finish a sentence, stingy, disinclined to listen to reason and fact, bad hosts, bad guests, affected, racialist, intolerant of homosexuality, anti-British, members of the New Left, passively boring (an active bore is to be avoided, but he/she earns pity, not dislike, what I can't stand is the sort that sits there looking at you and waiting for you to say something he/she will despise you for)." (The Letters of Kingsley Amis, pp. 756-757) On Drink (1972), How's Your Glass? (1984) and Everyday Drinking (1983) were books on alcohol. Poor health convinced him to give up smoking but not not scotch or gin. Amis had gained reputation as a "supreme clubman, boozer and blimp", but partly his enthusiams was hobbyistic. His second wife Jane Howard also insisted that he should, in effect, join Alcoholics Anonymous. Amis's own "New Alcoholic Policy" meant that he took 4-5 drinks a day. In the 1980s Amis wrote the Booker Prize winning novel The Old Devils (1986), about a group of retired friends and their wives. Their lives revolve around social drinking, but they also must adjust to the reappearance of Alun Weaver, a professionally Welsh literary pundit. Semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both (1994) was set between the wars, and told the story of Robin Davies, who progresses from south London suburbia, through Oxford, and on to a lectureship in a provincial university. Amis was knighted in 1990 -
according to Martin Amis he got it partly for being "audibly and
visibly right-wing, or conservative/monarchist." He had three children
from his first marriage to Hilary Bardwell; the separated in the mid
1960s. After divorce, her second husband was D.R. Shackleton Bailey and
3rd Lord Kilmarnock. Amis was married from 1965 to 1983 to the novelist
Elisabeth Jane Howard. The author's disappointments surfaced in the
poem 'Wasted'
(1973). Amis described a memory of a cold winter evening, when he
is trying to kindle rain-soaked logs. Others have gone to their chilly
beds before the wood began to flame. "Why should that memory cling /
Now the children are all grown up, / And the house - a different house -
/ Is warm at any season?" (Collected Poems, 1944-1979, Viking
Press, 1980, p. 135) Kingsley Amis died in 1995 at the age of 73 with over 20 novels to his credit, plus dozens of volumes of poetry, stories, collections of essays, and criticism. Any money he earned from his writing Amis spent on himself and his family; collecting works of art, buying stocks or bonds - material wealth did not matter much to him. To write just for the money is not really worth the money, he stated in an article in the Observer. (The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader, 2007, p. 559) Amis's last novel, Black and White, about an attraction between a white homosexual man and a black heterosexual girl, was left unfinished. The popular notion of Amis as mean spirited reactionary has
been criticized by Paul Fussell in his monograph The Anti-Egotist
(1994). Fussell sees the author a cultural democrat, whose views on
mass culture ("the best of mass culture is very much better than the
worst of high culture") were ignored. "As a moralist requiring honesty
of others as of himself, it's hardly his fault that they so often
failed to rise to their proclaimed standards of moral and intellectual
distinctionl." (Ibid., p. 59) The only novelist Amis admitted reading (other than his
son Martin), was George McDonald Frazer, author of the Flashman series.
He argued that "John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only
MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess
who wears the top-grade laurels?" ('A New James Bond,' in What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971 p. 69) Amis's son Martin was born in Oxford in 1949. He had a childhood without any luxuries: "I slept in a drawer and had my baths in an outdoor sink. My nappies bore triangular singe marks where they had been dried on the fireguard. It was tough. My father's dinner would often consist of the contents of the doggybag that my mother brought back from the cinema café (the Tivoli) where she worked." (Experience, p. 44) Martin Amis studied English at Exeter College, worked for the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesmen, and from the 1980s special writer for the Observer. The Rache Papers, Martin Amis's first novel, came out in 1973. Other works: Dead Babies (1975), Success (1978), My Oxford (1977, with A. Thwaite), Other People (1981), Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982), Money (1984), The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Einstein's Monsters (1987), London Fields (1989), Time's Arrow (1991), Two Stories (1994), The Information (1995), Night Train (1997), Koba the Dread (2002), Yellow Dog (2003), House of Meetings (2006), The Second Plane (2008), The Pregnant Widow (2010); Lionel Abo: State of England (2012), The Zone of Interest (2014); The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 (2018); Inside Story (2020). In Experience (2000), a book of memoir, Martin Amis
draws a
compassionate, probing, and sharp portrait
of his famous father,
admitting that as a writer he always knew he would have to commemorate
him: "He was a writer and I am a writer; it feels like a duty to
describe our case – a literary curiosity which is also just another
instance of a father and a son." (Ibid., p. 7) On the pages also appears
another character, Lucy Partington, Amis's cousin, who was murdered by
the serial killer Frederick West. Martin Amis died on 19 May, 2023, due
to oesophageal cancer. For further reading: Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide by Dale Selwak (1978); Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters, ed. by Dale Selwak (1991); Kingsley Amis by Dale Selwak (1992), Understanding Kingsley Amis by Merritt Moseley (1993); The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters by Paul Fussell (1994); Kingsley Amis by Eric Jacobs (1998); Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, edited by Robert H. Bell (1998) Kingsley Amis by William E. Laskowski (1998); Experience by Martin Amis (2000); Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis by Richard Bradford (2001); Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 by Gavin Keulks (2003); The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader (2007); 'The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis,' in Lives in Writing: Essays by David Lodge (2014); 'Kingsley Amis,' in Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime by David Pryce-Jones (2018); 'Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis,' in Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages by Carmela Ciuraru (2023) Selected works:
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