Father and son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British novel since 1950 9780299192136, 9780299192105, 9780299192143

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Father and Son

Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the generous support of the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Father and Son Kingsley Amts,

Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950

Gavin Keulks

THe UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711

www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/

3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2003 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved

3542

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keulks, Gavin. Father and son : Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British novel since 1950 / Gavin Keulks.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-19210-5 (alk. paper) 1. Amis, Kingsley— Criticism and interpretation.

2. Amis, Martin—Criticism and interpretation. 3. English fiction—2o0th century — History and criticism. 4. Fathers and sons— Great Britain.

I. Title: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British novel since 1950. I. Title.

PR6001.M6Z745 2003 823 °.91409 — dca2i 2003007228

For my father,

George W. Keulks, 1935-1997

Contents

Acknowledgments Vill Genealogical Dissent 3

Introduction: The Amises, Tradition, and Influence:

Brief Anecdotal History: The Mid-1980s and Mid-1990s 6

Tradition, Influence, and Anxiety 18

Realism and Revaluation 24

PART I. CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY: CHARTING THE ARTISTIC ALLEGIANCES

1. The Amises on American Literature: Nabokov, Bellow, Roth 33

Vladimir Nabokov: Style as Morality 37

Saul Bellow: Prophetic Realism 46

Philip Roth: Egocentric Narration 55 2. The Amises on English Literature: Austen, Waugh, Larkin 66

Jane Austen: Mannered Morality 68 Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall 79 Philip Larkin: The Comedy of Candor 88

PART 2. INFLUENCE AND INTERSECTION: THE INTERPLAY OF INDIVIDUAL WORKS 3. The Amises on Comedy: Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers 101

Lucky Jim: Cultural and Generational Conflict 105

Critique II5 “The Two Amises” 120 The Rachel Papers: Revaluative Inversion and

4. [he Amises on Satire: Ending Up and Dead Babies 133

Henry Fielding and Horatian Satire 142

Mikhail Bakhtin and Menippean Satire 147

Characterization and Closure 153 vl

Contents .« vil 5. [he Amises on Realism and Postmodernism: Stanley and

the Women and Money: A Suicide Note 162 Chauvinism, Feminism, and Misogyny 164

and the Women 166

The Autobiographical Abyss: Jakes Thing and Stanley

Revaluative Feminism? Money, Misogyny, and Doubling = 174

The Amises, Realism, and Postmodernism 183 Revaluative Realism: Money and Metamimesis 189 6. The Amises on Love, Death, and Children: The Letters

of Kingsley Amis and Experience: A Memoir 199

the Unconscious 201

Higher Autobiography: Experience, Midlife Crisis, and

Personal Realignment: Hilly Redux 208 Professional Realignment: The Old Devils 210

Personal Realignment: Experience 218 Conclusion: Projecting a Future: The Amises, Genealogical

Dissent, and the British Novel since 1950 227

and Beyond 232 of Fiction 242 Night Train 245

Whither the Novel? Realism, Postmodernism,

After Kingsley: Martin Amis and the Event Horizons Professional Realignment? Love, Children, and

Notes 257 Bibhography 307 Index 323

Acknowledgments

As with all scholarly works, numerous people have helped shape my ideas. Special thanks go to Jonathan Allison, John Cawelti, and Steven Weisenburger, all of whom offered invaluable advice in the early stages

of composition. James Diedrick, Jerome Meckier, and Dale Salwak similarly deserve commendation for their exceptionally insightful com-

ments on later drafts of the manuscript. In addition, Id like to thank Suzi Krasnoo for helping to coordinate my visit to the Huntington Library and Alan H. Jutzi, Avery Chief Curator of Rare Books, for giving me an informal tour of Kingsley Amis’s working library. Numerous of my students also leant their emotional strength to this project, but I'd like to single out Celeste Barker and Adele Johnson for their intellectual rigor and tireless support. Most of all, | extend my deepest thanks to my wife, Preeti, who has inspired me through her remarkable patience and dedication. She has shared all of the frustrations and joys associated with this book, and my debt to her is limitless. I would also like to thank the University of Kentucky and Western Oregon University for their gracious financial assistance with this project.

Vill

Father and Son

BLANK PAGE

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence: Genealogical Dissent The existence of several established broadsheets in the capital is often assumed to be a sign of diversity and health. What you end up getting, though, is a relativist’s echo chamber—what Kingsley called pernicious neutrality. Every “public feud” or “literary dogfight” or “undignified scrap” must have two sides to it, mustn't it, or how will it run? — Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

If the past is any indication, literature will never become a family business. Perhaps too much is at stake, or perhaps the solitary act of writing does not transmit its allure in ways that other, more public professions do. In our highly publicized, hypermediated times, it is always easier to glamorize the doctor, the lawyer, or the sports hero than the iconoclastic exile—the lonely, struggling writer. Whatever the reason, even the most educated individuals struggle to remember more than a handful of literary families. One recalls immediately the intellectual dynasties of the Brontés, the Huxleys, the Rossettis, and the Trollopes, and one envies the fertile, familial coteries that nurtured the likes of Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf.! In contemporary times, one thinks of a number of husband and wife pairs, including Iris Murdoch and John Bayley,

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, among others. The sister tandem of A. S. Byatt and Margaret 3

4 e« Introduction Drabble also suggests itself, as do the impressive brothers Shiva and V. S. Naipaul. But by and large, the production of literary works has historically remained a solitary and exclusive endeavor, conducive more to the garret than to the hearth.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the history of Western literature provides few examples of father-son pairs. Alexandre Dumas pére et fils spring first to mind, followed closely by Evelyn and Auberon Waugh. But then the mind falters. Eventually, one may recall

the Ginsbergs, the Mathers, and the Updikes in America, the Gosses and the Mills in England, and the Mauriacs— Francois and Claude —in France. When one further restricts the criteria, however— requiring, for instance, long-term productivity and equality of reputation—a few of these pairs become problematic: David Updike’s career is still in ascen-

dancy, for example, and the Gosses, Mathers, and Mills seem overly polymathic to warrant inclusion, concerned with literature too tangentially or with less commitment than the model might require. ‘There remains, however, one literary pair who can rival these others for historical primacy and preeminence: arguably, no other father-son tandem has produced a corpus as sizable and significant as that of Sir Kingsley Amis (1922-95) and his son, Martin Amis (b. 1949). They have maintained

not only a quality of writing but also a duration of productivity that other literary families simply have not matched. As Martin told Melvyn Bragg in 1989, ‘there is no point in writing at all unless you think youre

the best. Every writer thirsts for Johnsonian longevity of esteem and posthumous survival — but will never know if he gets it.”

Between them the Amises have published over thirty novels; a handful of short-story collections; numerous screenplays for television and film; and literally hundreds of reviews, essays, and articles ranging in topic from English university expansion and the state of modern fiction to alcoholic beverages and the video game Space Invaders. Kingsley was twice nominated for Britain's Booker-McConnell Prize, which he won in 1986 for The Old Deviis, and though Martin has been shortlisted for the award once only—for Time’ Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense, in 1991—in other years his name’s absence from the list has fueled the controversy that his work, and the Booker Prize in general, perennially attracts. As James Diedrick and others have noted, the similarities between the Amises sometime border on the uncanny: both

| The Amises, Tradition, and Influence »« 5 writers garnered the Somerset Maugham Award for their first published novels; both attended Oxford University; both satirize the social changes that confronted England since World War II; and both have been called, often with equal conviction, pornographers and the defining writers of their literary generations, ceaselessly vocal at the center of mid- and late-century debates over the future of English fiction in both its realistic and postmodern forms.3 That their work differs in presentation and theme soon becomes obvious to any attentive reader. Such a reader will also recognize that these authors apparently reside in an antithetical literary relationship, opposing each other’s most cherished stylistic values. This too is not surprising. The works of an author such as Kingsley Amis, whose first novel, Lucky Jim, appeared in 1954, and those of a generationally younger one such as Martin Amis, whose first, Te Rachel Papers, appeared in 1973, should, after all, diverge dramatically. At least the history of the twentieth century novel proves as much. Yet for most of the last thirty years — from the early 1970s, when Martin began work on his first novel, to 1995, when Kingsley passed away—these two writers shared a parallel yet turbulent relationship not only as popular and critically important novelists but also as book reviewers, critics, and social commentators. Many people regarded Kingsley as a man of letters long before Paul Fussell appended the label for good, and it is becoming impossible to avoid ascribing the same appellation to Martin.4 When one compounds the Amises’ professional similarities with their unique familial relationship, one begins to comprehend the hothouse tensions that continue to surround these two successful and highly controversial authors. Whether critics ask to be admitted to the club or have to be clubbed into admission, as John Barth once quipped, there exists almost uniform consensus regarding the Amises’ historical significance. Despite the revisionist critical agendas of the past quarter century, most scholars and reviewers still admit— albeit at times begrudgingly — that Kingsley’s and

Martin's positions within the canons of twentieth-century English literature remain secure. Given this fact, it is relatively surprising that so little scholarship has explored the famous, or infamous, literary quarrels between the two Amises. Such renowned critics as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, and Bernard Bergonzi make brief, passing references to the Amis father-and-son relationship, but to date only one writer has

6 . Introduction attempted to synthesize the mutually informative work of the Amises.° Nothing approximating a comprehensive study has yet to appear, although in the year 2000, Martin's Experience: A Memoir did address the subject firsthand, albeit through the lens of close personal involvement. In the chapters that follow, my primary purpose will be to examine the essays, interviews, and novels of Kingsley and Martin Amis with an eye open for instances in which they seem to instigate or to maintain a creatively generative father-son dialogue. My critical method will employ a collage or “snapshot” approach, looking for subjects upon which both Amises wrote as well as particular novels that function as logical pairs or companion texts. I intend to show that the Amises’ wellpublicized disagreements always exceeded the narrow limits of familial peevishness. As they became increasingly vocal about their literary and political disagreements, their dialogues gradually evolved into so-

phisticated literary debates whose primary topic was a classic one: “Whither the novel?” Animated by a potent combination of personal and professional, oedipal and historical energies, the Amises’ relationship also helps scholars contextualize many of the complex forces that inform issues of literary tradition, influence, and inheritance. Analysis

of the Amises’ writings reveals the extent to which they were consciously engaged in competition over four of the most pressing issues in

twentieth-century literature: the psychodynamics of literary inheritance; the status and the future of the realistic novel; the historical transition from modernism to postmodernism; and the humanist condition

of post-World War II life. As this study will show, the Amises’ personal and professional relationship eludes categorization in numerous extant critical models. ‘lo effectively categorize it requires a unique combination of several different models of influence as well as particular theories of interauthor and intergenerational transmission. To this combination I have appended the label genealogical dissent, implying the analogies of both familial descent and, of course, generational opposition and succession.

Brief Anecdotal History: The Mid-1980s and Mid-1990s As the dedicated journalists of England and America are fond of reporting, the Amises’ relationship was rarely free of controversy in either

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence + 7 the personal or professional theaters. But although their instances of intellectual conflict or emotional head-butting were sometimes numerous and nasty, their opposition was always tempered by mutual respect and love. As Martin proclaims toward the end of Experience, “If these pages have so far been free of a sense of grievance, it is not because | have been trying to keep it out. It is because it isn't there.”° Indeed, the Amises’ relationship — like all long-term relationships — thwarts generalization, simultaneously eluding and inviting classification. Although Martin’s assertion does not satisfactorily summarize the Amises’ famil-

ial wranglings, it is supported by actions as well as by words. When Kingsley’s marriage to his second wife, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard,

unraveled, it was Martin and his siblings, Philip and Sally, who engineered their father’s remarkable relocation to the home of his first wife, Hilary, and her third husband, Alistair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. Before that, Kingsley’s well-known fear of isolation was alleviated by his children’s nightly visits and stays. Toward the end of his life weekly din-

ners with Martin and the celebration of grandchildren peppered his days with diversion and joy. Julian Barnes, Martin’s former friend and a fellow novelist, has proffered one of the best interpretations of the Amis family bond, suggesting that they accepted their love as a given, wholly unshakable, despite

their public disagreements. According to Barnes, Kingsley’s professional rejection was to Martin “a hurt that will never go away.” However,

it functioned beneficially as well. For one thing, Barnes explains, it acted as a critical “vaccination”: when your own father can stand neither your books nor your politics—which are “a lot of dangerous, howling nonsense’ — what then do the opinions of strangers really matter? Mar-

tin echoes this perspective in the opening pages of Experience, commenting, “Fame is a worthless commodity. It will occasionally earn you some special treatment. . . . It will also earn you a far more noticeable amount of hostile curiosity. I don’t mind that—but I’m a special case.

What tends to single me out for it also tends to inure me to it. In a word — Kingsley.” Later, he addresses the question in more detail: “They seemed to think that it must have been extra difficult for me, coming out from behind my father, but it wasn't; his shadow served as a kind of protection.” Although Kingsley acknowledged that a “strong, even furious opposition of views” distinguished their relationship, he never failed to

8 . Introduction regard his son as one of his “best and closest” friends. “I admire him very

much as a man,” he told Mira Stout in 1990. “He’s responsible, and above all sane. I like sanity.” Martin assents to this taut connection as well: “It’s a very enjoyable adversarial type of relationship in that we agree a lot more about literature than we do about politics, but we don’t agree that much about literature. So it’s argumentative but close.”” When considering the Amises’ relationship, it is helpful to remind oneself of the playful self-consciousness of their familial negotiations, if only to counterbalance unfair attempts to polarize their relationship, to misread professional difference as personal antipathy. With Kingsley’s death in 1995, Martin lost not only a spirited father but also an intellectual equal, and as history (and Martin Amis himself) attempts to conceptualize the Amises’ professional tensions, one should not forget that, above everything else, human closeness powered their relations. Outright rejection, of course, would have resulted in silence. Instead, playful rivalry energized their work and their lives. Even today, years after Kingsley’s death, their relationship remains creatively inspirational, as

Martin continues to seek communion with his father’s spirit, having composed both personal and political memoirs, each of which employ Kingsley as an emotional fulcrum. “What I miss,” Martin recalled to Valerie Grove months after Kingsley’s death, “is ringing Kingsley up to check a language point. And hed ring me up to ask, ‘what would a contemporary idiot say when he meant this?’ I miss that.” Two vignettes best illuminate the playful rivalry, both personal and

professional, of the Amises’ relationship. The first, and perhaps the most comical, assessment comes from Martin’s memoir, Experience, where he recounts an early conversation between Kingsley and his sons. “At some point in our late teens,” Martin writes, “Kingsley asked my

brother and me what we wanted to do in life. ‘A painter, said my brother, who became one. ‘A novelist,’ I said. “Good,’ said Kingsley, rub-

bing his hands together rapidly, even noisily, in that way he had. “That means the Amises are branching out into the other arts while keeping their stranglehold on fiction.’” The second, and more serious, assessment comes from Kingsley. Although he could never tolerate his son’s politics and found his novels willfully experimental, Kingsley once confirmed a basic similarity between their work, which Martin is fond of

The Amises, Iradttion, and Influence »« 9 citing: “I think if anyone’s reading us in 50 or 100 years’ time, we shall seem like very much the same kind of writer. We're more similar than we seem in some ways; we have a similar sense of verbal, spoken humor. We compete with each other on that, always have, in a family-jollity way.”? As one would expect, such familial competition eventually found its way into the Amises’ fiction. Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women (1984),

for example, teasingly features an unstable son who returns to his father’s home, where he is living with his second wife. In a moment of rage, the son shreds a copy of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. As chapter 1 of the present study will show, Bellow is one of Martin’s acknowledged literary mentors and a surrogate literary father. Significantly, he 1s also one of Kingsley’s literary nemeses. As chapter 5 will also show, numerous parallels exist between the characters in this novel and Kingsley’s marriage to his second wife, adding a further biographical connection. Elsewhere in the novel, father and son debate the existence of illusion and reality in words that approximate Robert Scholes’s discussion of fabulation and realism, two topics that informed many of the Amises’ literary grapplings and that lie at the heart of their individual brands of comedy and satire. Such positioning in this and other novels helps illuminate their respective positions within the historical evolution from modernism to postmodernism. Not to be outdone, Martin’s novels routinely feature characters that struggle through strained familial relationships. In one novel, however,

he specifically refers to the legendary relationship with his father; Money. A Suicide Note (1984) features a fictionalized character named Martin Amis who speaks to the narrator, John Self, who will eventually

employ Martin to revise a screenplay. At their initial encounter, Self embarrasses him, striking at the root of every author’s commercial phobias. ““Sold a million yet?” he asks. Even though Martin responds with a “flash of paranoia, unusual in its candour, its bluntness,” Self does not relent: “‘Your dad, he’s a writer too, isn’t he? Bet that made it easier.”” “Oh, sure,” Martin answers sardonically. “‘It’s just like taking over the family pub.’”!° Instances like these abound in the plethora of profiles readily found in British and American periodicals, and they provide a

great deal of vicarious entertainment. However, one year especially stands out as a focal point or benchmark in the Amises’ history. That

10 e Introduction was 1995, and it became both an apogee and a terminus, an annus mirabilis and annus horribilis, for these two iconic English writers. By the time it ended, the Amises’ relationship would be irrevocably melded with fame, controversy, and tragedy.

Midway through that year Eric Jacobs published his authorized biography of Kingsley Amis, resurrecting discussion of the Amis family feud. The text contained excerpts from Kingsley’s letters to many

lifelong friends, including fellow poets Robert Conquest and Philip Larkin. Surreptitiously attained—by Kingsley, incidentally, and not Jacobs—from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, these letters made patently clear the combative nature of Kingsley’s strong opinions as well as the

emotional and intellectual typhoon Martin confronted when he opposed his father.!! One of these letters famously found Kingsley lambasting Martin's politics, lamenting that his son had “gone all Lefty and

of the crappiest neutralist kind, challenging me to guess how many times over the world can destroy itself, writing two incredible bits of ban-it bullshit in the Obs[erver] (of course), one a ‘paperback round up’ (of books about the nuclear winter etc.), the other a T'V review (of pro-

grammes saying Reagan wants to blow up the world.” “Luckily,” he concluded, “having now a 2nd baby has given him . . . other things to think about.” Soon afterward, and in a now famous line, Kingsley would label Martin “a fucking fool, and the worse, far worse, for having come to it late in life, aetat. [aged] nearly 37, not 17.”!2 To this day, one can attribute to this letter much of the controversy, or public misunderstanding, that has surrounded the Amises during the last fifteen years. Certainly, no one is used to speaking of one’s children as “fucking fools,” at least not in public. Then again, the Amises used such parlance frequently in family communication, and Kingsley was

not speaking in public but in private correspondence. Of course, this fact does not fully diffuse the quip, as Kingsley obviously knew his letters would eventually be published (he had already begun negotiations

toward this end), and in other letters the same terminology is used without emotional moderation. Jacobs’s biography, however, entered such hitherto private conversations into the realm of social discourse, with deleterious results. Not surprisingly, other letters must also be acknowledged. A 10 May 1979 letter to Philip Larkin simultaneously evinces paternal pride and authorial envy when Kingsley queries, “Did I

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence .« UW

tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE? Last year he earned £38,000. Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit.” This letter is preceded by earlier ones that express the same mixture of envy and pride, referring occasionally to “lazy Martin” or “Savage little Mart” and announcing elsewhere that “Scoundrelly Mart has sold his novel to the Yanks for $3,000 advance. Pretty good, eh?” Finally, on 3 August 1982, Kingsley directly disparaged Martin’s novels, among those of other writers, asking Larkin, “Have you actually tried to read Clive Sinclair and Ian MacEwan and Angela Carter and M**t™* *m**? [sic] Roll on is all | can say boyo. Fucking roll on.”!3 One final instance from the late 1980s completes the initial foundation of the Amis public controversy: In mid-1987, The National Portrait Gallery invited the Amises to pose together to commemorate their sig-

nificance to English literature and letters. Kingsley, however, refused, prompting an exposé on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph. AIthough he would later admit to regretting the commotion, Kingsley’s attitude seemed patently clear to many people: he would not be memorialized with his son. In a letter to John Hayes, director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kingsley discussed this clear misunderstanding, but as is common with fame, the public image would form without his input: “Many thanks for your letter inviting me to sit for a portrait with my son Martin. This is one of the most amazingly inept and tactless suggestions that has ever been made to me. Martin fully agrees with this judgement. Whoever put it forward originally is obviously waiting for a vacancy at Harpers and Queen or Tatler.” Kingsley concluded tersely, “If this refusal leaves your artist with time on his hands, you might get him to knock up a picture of the Two Ronnies.”!4 Of course, Kingsley had already posed for a portrait with Martin in the late 1970s, with the two men flanking Elizabeth Jane Howard. Certainly, no one would argue that it is easy to transcend the oedipal energies of a father-son dynamic. In many ways, Martin benefited from his father’s approval, especially when he chose to become a writer, something Kingsley could not claim. In a 1954 letter to Larkin, Kingsley

noted that his own father disapproved of his profession and found his poems rather morbid. Later in life, he would commemorate his father through the elegy, “In Memoriam W.R.A,” which laments the separation of father and son, concluding with the refrain

12 e Introduction Forgive me if I have To see it as it happened: Even your pride and your love Have taken this time to become Clear, to arouse my love. I’m sorry you had to die To make me sorry You're not here now.

Similarly, when Martin comments in Experience on Kingsley’s rise to wealth in the 1980s, he employs the language of psychiatry to conceptualize the subconscious dialectics of father-son tensions: “So my father, during those years, had much to defend. He was indifferent to his surroundings, indifferent to acquisition, but the big spread, as I say, was perhaps his clinching reply to 4s father, in the argument that is never over.”15

That notion of generational tension and filial critique—what Martin terms the “clinching reply” to one’s father—is what distinguishes the Amises among the small subset of literary families and inspires

the present study. Both men were aware of the uniqueness of their entanglements — and of their professional supremacy. Silently appropriating his father’s words in an interview in January 2001, Martin beamed, “It’s because I’m a genetic elitist, a living V-sign to democratisation — or better say, a single finger, because there’s only one of me. If all that ‘It’s

been easy for me’ stuff were true, then there'd be a lot more little AS Byatts and JG Ballards.” When the interviewer followed up with the question, “So you belong to a literary super-race?” Martin gleefully replied, “Yes! A master-race! With a stranglehold on fiction!”!6

Neither Martin nor Kingsley ever denied their heated disagreements over literature and politics, especially during the mid- to late 1980s, the high point of Kingsley’s fascination with Margaret Thatcher and his fears about communist invasion. As recently as 2002, however, Martin would feel obliged to comment upon these disagreements, not only in his memoir Experience and the companion text Koda the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), but with some exasperation throughout the question-and-answer sessions that attended the books’ publication tours. Early in Experience, for instance, Martin discusses his debates over nuclear weapons with his father, concluding that a perusal

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence »« 13 of The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000) leaves him with but one interpre-

tation, that “most of the time he was just winding me up, because his correspondence is largely free of obviously provocative folly.” Similar remarks occur, of course, in the concluding letter to Kingsley in Koba the Dread, which ends with the simple invocation, “Your middle child hails you and embraces you.”!” Importantly, Experience also clarifies that a “fucking fool, in [Kingsley’s] lexicon, meant someone just about bright enough to know better.”

To be fair, this neutralized reading of “fucking fool” is not exactly supported by Kingsley’s other letters, as in a December 1983 missive to Philip Larkin that proclaims without moderation, “Yes Craig Raine 1s a fucking fool. Terrible poet too. All that Martian bullshit.”18 In a coincidence whose significance could not have been lost on Kingsley, Craig Raine was Martin’s tutor at Oxford. He was also the chief figure of what

is sometimes referred to as “Martian” literature, as exemplified in Raine’s most famous poem, “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” the perspectival experimentation of which Kingsley hated. (Of course, the ironic pun implied by the word Martian would not have been lost on Kingsley’s comic sensibility.) Elsewhere in Experience Martin allows readers a further glimpse into one of the Amises’ political debates, which culminated in his ultimatum that his father “Get some new dirt on [Nelson] Mandela while I’m in America. Because your old dirt is hopeless.” Kingsley’s response was terse, but telling: “Agreed. Just one thing. You're a leaf in the wind of trend.” Eventually, these political arguments would migrate to the pages of Martin’s work. Just one year after Kingsley’s “fucking fool” letter to Conquest, Martin would respond to his father’s charges in a collection of short stories about nuclear and apocalyptic fear titled Eznstein’s Monsters (1987). The celebrated introductory essay to the book—“Thinkability” — refers explicitly to his

conversations with Kingsley, confessing that on this subject, he was ruder to his father than he had been since his teenage years, often ending their discussions with his own version of “fucking fool” — something along the lines of “Well, we'll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.”!? As anyone familiar with these writers knows, Kingsley was by far the

less charitable when it came to expressing his opinions, regardless of whether the subject was Martin’s politics or his books. Another letter to

144 e Introduction Conquest took as its theme Martin’s fourth book, Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), which Kingsley disparaged above all the others. “Between ourselves,” Kingsley wrote, “I only read about half, too boring. Little sod said on T'V you had to read it twice. Well then HE’s FAILED hasn't he?” When Martins fifth novel, Money, was published three years later to great critical acclaim, Kingsley responded even more famously: by way of silent review, he sent the novel flying through the air, at precisely the point, Martin suspects, where the Martin Amis character entered the novel, “breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself.”?° The year 1995, however, also marked a high point for Martin Amis hysteria. His novel The Information, a tale of literary envy and competition, was ready for publication, and he was seeking a historic £500,000

advance, sending British journalists to the table, knives in hand. Although Kingsley would later accuse the Times of exaggerating his more restrained comments, he was nonetheless reported to be “taken aback by his son's success.”*! For Kingsley, the controversy surrounding The Information reinforced a particularly troubling trend: it was becoming

increasingly difficult to deny that Martin’s reputation had started to eclipse his own. Was it possible, Kingsley wondered, that the novel had

outgrown his more traditional realistic forms, metamorphosing into Martin's more labyrinthine and playful postmodern tropes? Had the son succeeded in overturning his father’s earlier substitution, reworking the modernistic techniques that Kingsley had so stridently worked to

supplant? The questions gave him pause, and to Eric Jacobs he confessed to worries that educated readers — especially younger ones — were

becoming more likely to “associate the surname Amis with the Christian name Martin than with Kingsley.” For his own part, Martin recalls an episode during a television interview where Kingsley was asked to comment upon Martin: “He could barely conceal his anger,’ Martin explains. “The programme was meant to be about him.” Nowhere, however, is this professional jealousy more apparent than in a comical 1984 letter to Philip Larkin in which Kingsley simultaneously laments and celebrates the process of generational erosion that confronts all writers:

“Of course Martin Amis is more famous than I am now. His PLR money was 4800 for 4 novels. Mine was 43,300 for 15 (plus £350 for EVERYTHING ELSE) so he’s nearly caught me up. But you give the

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence « 15

boy a rest. The truth is, Phil, that we all suffer from the limitations of the age we were born in. Just as the generation before us had no time for Ulysses, so in our turn weeeeghghgh . . . [szc].”22 Although Kingsley would rally his forces for the masterful Booker Prize-winning novel The Old Devttis (1986), it was clear by the mid-1980s that Martin’s career was the one to watch, a point reinforced by the 1995 publication of James Diedrick’s Understanding Martin Amis, the first monograph devoted exclusively to Martin’s work and a companion piece to Merritt Moseley’s Understanding Kingsley Amis, which had appeared two years prior.

The year 1995 came to a sad end, of course, on October 22, when Kingsley died from complications related to a fall that had happened months earlier. Obituaries throughout Britain and the United States registered the intensity of the loss. Although Kingsley had begun his career as an opponent of the literary establishment, at least in its more artificial forms, his death deprived the literary world of one of its most eloquent, popular, and accomplished writers. It deprived it as well of the Amises’ controversial and entertaining relationship.

In the midst of 1995's maelstrom of publicity, Kingsley’s death would prove to be the defining event in Martin's midlife crisis, a process that had begun a year earlier when the Amises discovered that a relative, Lucy Partington, had been murdered by Frederick West, one of England’s most notorious serial killers. By the end of 1995, Martin would have even more to deal with. He would discover a daughter he never knew existed; divorce his first wife and marry his second; and undergo extensive and widely publicized dental reconstruction in the United States. Next, he would have to suffer the controversy surrounding the publication of The Information, the severance of his professional relationship with his agent Pat Kavanagh, and the loss of his long-time friendship with Julian Barnes, Kavanagh’s husband. Finally, he would watch his father pass away, and he would fight with Eric Jacobs over the unauthorized publication of Kingsley’s death-bed diary. Almost with

relief, Martin concluded in a profile written about him by Andrew Billen, “The trouble with memoirs is that they are so un-universal. Although the relationship between my father and me was kind of unique—... both roughly equivalent figures with equivalent bodies of

work, given the chronological difference—there is still something

16 « Introduction universal about the father-son relationship compared to the halfforgotten fuss over The Information.” Regardless of the professional jealousies and brooding envy that Martin seems naturally to provoke, one must admit that his choice of profession was remarkably brave given his father's thoroughly established reputation. The incendiary history of Lucky Jim alone would have been sufficient to silence, or at least discourage, the production of most authors’ sons. Of course, Martin had earlier acclimated himself to this burdensome climate. In interviews, for instance, he is fond of citing a competition in The New Statesman for the most oxymoronic book title. One of the winners, he recalls, was “a gentle joke” — My Struggle, by Martin Amis.*4* Given the pervasive schadenfreude of the literary (or the modern) world in general, Martin knew he would encounter initial charges of nepotism. After all, he was the son of one famous novelist and the stepson of another (Elizabeth Jane Howard). Philip Larkin, his father's best friend, was also the godfather of Martin's brother, Philip, and Martin was the godson of Bruce Montgomery, another writer. Add

to this combination the fact that he enjoyed notorious success with women— much as his father had before him—and that his prose exhibits a mastery and aggressiveness not seen since Vladimir Nabokov, and you have the potential for entrenched literary envy. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Martin’s writing often features a com-

bative, assured tone, whether he is reworking his father’s forms and themes or those of earlier literary masters. For fellow writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones, this tone resonates with psychological force: “A style

like Martin Amis’s represents both a fear and a desire. It represents a radical doubt about the business of writing, an authorial identity crisis that can be postponed by having each sentence declare the presence of

the author.” Of course, it is possible to argue that Martin never really rebelled against his father, simply retracing his footsteps by adopting the same métier. Martin explains in Experience that Kingsley had actually deglamorized the novelist’s profession. “It’s a strange surprise, becoming a writer,” he states, “but nothing is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day. ‘The pains, and perhaps some of the pleasures, of au-

thorship were therefore dulled to me.”*6 But in another, more cogent sense, it is important that Martin intentionally confronted his father on

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence «+ 17 both personal and professional fronts: throughout his novels and essays, Martin contested Kingsley’s most cherished technical and narrative values. Asserting the validity of syntactical, structural, and narrative experimentation, he directly challenged his father’s status as cultural and literary icon, an affront that Kingsley would not leave unchallenged. In a short article in the 26 June 1995 issue of The New Yorker, Martin addressed the personal and historical energies that animated his relationship with his father. Recounting the exigencies of promoting The Information, he paused to comment on what he labeled a “literary law” — that writers of an older generation should “scorn their youngers and revere their elders.” Such an attitude, he noted, hovered like a specter over his

nightly question-and-answer sessions, finding repeated expression in the query whether his father liked his work.

The answer, emphatically, was no. “My father has read my first, third, and seventh novels,” Martin explained, “and none of the others. He cant get through them. He sends them windmilling through the air after twenty or thirty pages.” Io anyone who has read The Information,

these words should resonate as an inside literary joke: no one at the character Richard Tull’s publishing house can read more than ten pages

of 4is newest novel without succumbing to debilitating headaches or other mysterious physical ailments. Io Martin, however, familial approbation was cause for neither anger nor alarm; it was instead a funda-

mental artistic imperative, endemic to the writer's profession: “Older writers should find younger writers inimical,” he explains, “because younger writers are sending them an unwelcome message. They are say-

ing, ‘It’s not like that anymore. It’s like this.’ In the present context, ‘that’ and ‘this’ can be loosely described as the thought-rhythms peculiar to your time. Implicit in these thought-rhythms are certain values, moral and aesthetic.” As Martin is no doubt aware, his comments summon a number of important literary dynamics. First, his phrase “thought-rhythms” invokes the stylistic intonations of Saul Bellow, one of his literary mentors, who provided a counterpoint to Kingsley’s less didactic form of social realism. Furthermore, such a phrase simultaneously conjoins both an ideological and a stylistic mandate, confirming an ongoing literary dialogue, an evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest contest that cannot be transcended or denied. In short, his words describe a law of generational

1% . Introduction conflict, of literary succession, that is at least as old as Plato’s attack on Homer for subjective falsification. And just as with Plato and Homer, what was at stake in Martin and Kingsley Amis’s quarrels was mimesis,

| the fidelity of realistic representation, the legitimacy of method as a means for inscribing truth. Interrogating many of these issues in their novels, essays, and interviews, the Amises’ own brand of genealogical dissent remains unprecedented among extant studies of literary tradition, influence, and inheritance.

Tradition, Influence, and Anxiety The contentious relationship between Kingsley and Martin Amis thwarts simple classification. [o begin with, their contemporaneous careers do not fit neatly into unidirectional theories of influence, as both men influenced each other, especially when Martin’s reputation began to flourish in the 1980s while Kingsley’s went into decline. In addition, it is insufficient solely to categorize the Amises within historicist studies of realism or postmodernism, as that subordinates their personal dynamics within socioliterary evolutions. Instead, the Amises instigated and maintained a creatively generative dialogue both within their works and their familial negotiations. Their complex blend of artistic inheritance draws from earlier models of tradition, influence, and realism but ultimately emerges as an entirely independent entity, considerably more than a professional assimilation, personal quarrel, or historical evolution. To their revolutionary combination of personal and professional, genealogical and generational transmission, | append the term genealogical dissent, especially because such a label simultaneously engages the

themes of generational tension and family ties that animated the Amises’ struggles. Stated otherwise, Kingsley and Martin Amis argued not only with each other in an endless battle of manifest dissension (or dissent); they also intuited and outwardly contested the intonations of historical tradition and literary descent. Both practically and philosophically, their personal and professional arguments engaged many of the critical conflicts that shaped twentieth-century literature. Yet their conflicts always originated in, and returned to, their familial genesis. In order to understand fully the ways these dual narratives of public and private engagement inform the Amises’ relationship and writing,

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence « 19

it is necessary to employ a cross-critical method. In this regard, four theories—from four scholars with different contexts and fundamental ambitions — have contributed to my conceptual model. ‘Iwo are famous theories of tradition and influence propounded by T. S. Eliot and Har-

old Bloom. Although Eliot’s influence on Bloom is clearly apparent, Bloom’s more Freudian praxis diverges significantly from Eliot’s firmly

historicized evaluation. The other two theories, put forth by George Levine and Jerome Meckier, address realism and revaluation. Partially reworking Bloom, Meckier has proposed a theory of “parodic revaluation” and “revaluative substitution” that elucidates the “hidden rivalries” contained within much Victorian and modern fiction. His theory works to extend Levine's controversial theory of realism as an assimilative, endlessly accommodating form by foregrounding the historical contexts that Levine endeavors to marginalize. Together, the work of these four scholars helps to lay a preliminary foundation for conceiving the Amises in terms of their historical and interpersonal interaction. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), Eliot famously asserts the need for writers to accumulate a “historical sense” by which they must become aware not only of the “pastness of the past,” but of its continual “presence.” This sense of historical tradition inspires feelings of identity and belonging, a recognition of one’s place among contemporary generations and those which preceded it. Tradition, of course, cannot be perfectly equated with influence, although some crossover 1s to be expected. In addition, Eliot’s Arnoldian concept of tradition is necessarily flexible and assimilative: original works certainly can and do modify the preexisting order. But in Eliot’s praxis, individual writers cannot escape the pull or the intonations of the past. Ultimately, there can be no transcendence from history: all will “inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.” Faced with this burden, writers undergo a process of necessary depersonalization, surrendering their egos to the larger waves of literary precedent. Eliot then evaluated a writer's “progress” in this regard by a standard of increasing impersonality. Rework-

ing William Wordsworth’s dictum that poetry should emerge from “powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity,” Eliot asserted instead that the act of writing demanded not “a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” It necessitated “a continual self-sacrifice, a

20 « Introduction continual extinction of personality,” which he likened to chemical catalysis, his metaphorical rationale for modernist poetry's emphasis upon

juxtaposition. In Eliot’s formulation, originality therefore became a problematic construct: talent subordinated itself to literary ancestry, and creativity was measured by the barometers of historical tradition. “We shall often find,” Eliot wrote, nearly conflating tradition and influence, “that not only the best, but the most individual parts of a poet’s work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” “No poet, no artist of any art,” he continued, “has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation 1s the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”2°

Kingsley and Martin Amis certainly share Eliot's reverence for historical tradition and are separately influenced by it. Kingsley once lamented, “You can't be expected to do much by putting pen to paper

without having a rough idea of what your predecessors have done.” Similarly, Martin has claimed, “A new tradition can only evolve out of an old one; it cannot be induced.””? In direct contrast to Eliot, however, neither Kingsley nor Martin endorse Eliot’s concept of an everexpanding canonical bookshelf. On the contrary, both Amises actively assert their literary personalities, deliberately interrogating the standards of the past as they seek to rework and displace them. Tradition functions not as an acid bath of individual ego but as a fiercely competitive arena in which egos continually and consciously strive for market share and dominance. The Amises’ writings proclaim authorial auton-

omy and independence, repudiating the erasure of subjectivity that Eliot propounded. For the two authors, literary personality and production are indelibly intertwined: lining up masters and misfits from the historical past, they willfully reworked extant forms and precedents, in-

tentionally attempting to displace literary tradition. In this respect, their example of dually (or duelly) combative and self-conscious literary influence more closely resembles that famously described by Bloom, although with significant variances.

Bloom shares Eliot’s sense of the burden of historical tradition, the enduring presence of the past. However, whereas Eliot theorizes tradition

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence. 21 within a decidedly historical framework, Bloom describes influence in transhistorical terms, as an omnipresent creative standard that crisscrosses literary periods. For Bloom, as for Eliot, all writers come late upon the scene. They are inescapably aware of the fact that their work always takes place, as Bloom claims, “after the Event.” Departing from Eliot’s construction, Bloom construes influence as Freudian and decidedly masculinist anxiety, an oedipal conflict in which writers deliberately rebel against their literary ancestors, who function as symbolic fathers, imposing and austere.>° Creative originality becomes absolutely crucial, both as psychic defense and autonomous necessity. Authorial maturity or its opposite —death and silence — depend wholly upon it. In this battle for literary survival and supremacy, Bloom argues, one must deliberately “misread” the works of one’s predecessors, intentionally supplanting their authority and influence through acts of willful misprision. In a series of four books— The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976) — Bloom popularized a controversial theory of influence that cast historically revered writers as ominous presences threatening to si-

lence subsequent writers through superior creative strength. To surmount this oppression, successful writers exhibit a Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean will to power. They employ a series of devices or defenses to engage in subconscious literary competition, battling the echoes of the past for the mantle of immortal truth. As numerous scholars have noted, Bloom's conception of influence verges upon intertextuality: he asserts that influence “means that there are zo texts, but only relationships between texts.” Moreover, a “poetic text” — exclusive of and divorced from the limits of genre—is not “a gathering of signs on a page,” but “a psychic battlefield” over which writers struggle for eternity, “the divining triumph over oblivion.”>! To clear an imaginative space for the legitimacy of their voices, new writers must undergo a process of “accommodation and assimilation” to which Bloom ascribes the notions of “misprision” or “misreading.”

Belatedly aware of their precursors’ accomplishments, new writers “swerve” —in an act of artistic clinamen—from their poetic fathers by misinterpreting the meaning of their analogical texts. This substitution of meaning ushers forth a new but false creation, resident in the middle ground between originality and parody. Finally, in a moment of literary

22 e Introduction restitution — variously referred to by Bloom as a “revisionary ratio” or tessera—the latecomer restores and refines the differences between this “ancestral text” and the new work.*? Stated differently, writers misinterpret precursor texts to clear a symbolic path for their own creative ex-

pression, and their artistic success (or maturity) depends upon the strength of their literary “misreadings.” These misreadings also conform to differing levels of deliberation and awareness. “Strong” misreadings enable writers to triumph over their “anxiety of influence,” transcending the burden of historical example. “Weak” misreadings, by contrast, further ensnare a writer in symbolic indentured servitude. As long as they fail to rework and thereby assimilate their precursors, they remain ineffective and unoriginal, trapped in a state of symbolic castration, impotence, or death—a creative silence that forecloses individual assertion as well as literary immortality. New writers must write not only against the

intonations of the past but against their own admiration as well. Dangerously, respect begets silence.

In accordance with the Bloomian model, both Kingsley and Martin Amis assault the conventions of their literary fathers. In addition, both view literature as an unceasing battle that can be won or lost, with disastrous consequences. As Richard Tull remarks in The Information, 1n a thoroughly Bloomian tone, “Writers should hate each other . . . if they mean business. They are competing for something there is only one of: the universal. They should want to go to the mat.” Similarly, Kingsley expounded to the editor of Time and Tide that “the cheapest contemporary novel has more to teach us than these painful reminders of what we have long outgrown.” Of course, Kingsley valued such a remark far more in the 1950s, during Movement poetry’s (and the “Contemporary” novel’s) rebellion against modernist experimentation, when his own work could still be classified as “Contemporary,” a label whose meaning has unfortunately slipped over the years.*3 His opinion differed notably during the heyday of postmodernism, when Martin and other authors sought to revaluate and repudiate the return to realism that characterized much literature of the Contemporary period. Despite these surface similarities, however, Bloom's oedipal framework cannot fully encompass the complexities of the Amises’ personal and professional maelstrom. Without any shadow of a doubt, Martin

Lhe Amises, Tradition, and Influence . 23 demonstrated that he could compete with his father on a level playing field. However, his works must be read as more than successful instances of efficient misreading, of exorcism by misprision. Although Bloom illustrates the Freudian psychology that underlies some of the dynamics of influence (despite its masculocentrist framework), his paradigm ultimately cannot account for the Amises’ familial amiability —as opposed to their professional antagonism. It also cannot account for the

mutuality or the complementarity of their authorial negotiations. Significantly, Kingsley Amis cannot be labeled a “great inhibitor” as regards Martin Amis. On the contrary, the Amises’ professional disagree-

ments worked to solidify each author's critical and creative modus operandi. Their relationship was not unidirectional in the sense that John Milton’s influence upon William Blake was: the Amises belonged to different generations, but they were important contemporaries with overlapping oeuvres. [Throughout their lives, and with each successive publication, Kingsley and Martin redefined the parameters of their ongoing artistic conflict. One can trace, for instance, the reverse influence of Martin’s reputation upon Kingsley, especially after Money was released, when few people would argue that Kingsley remained the shining light in the Amis literary constellation. Triumphantly, Kingsley’s

fears of Martin’s ascension and the threatened eclipse of his own achievement arguably produced The Old Devils, the novel that garnered Kingsley the Booker Prize.

This constant regeneration of influence, this simultaneity of impact, demands that one examine the Amises’ conflict in less mythic diction and on a more localized battlefield than Bloom's oedipal framework allows. Kingsley’s and Martin's “anxiety of influence” 1s best conceived, therefore, not as a transhistorical weight threatening to oppress creativity, but as a decidedly historical and generational conflict that stimulated — indeed, generated— their positions within the evolution of the twentieth-century novel. Because of the Amises’ familiarity, the historicity of their productions, and the regenerative nature of their deliberations, one must supplement Eliot and Bloom with theories that ad-

dress the historical evolution of realism. In this respect, the work of Levine and Meckier is helpful, for it has the added benefit of being less generalized, or sweeping, than either Eliot’s or Bloom's approaches.

24. « Introduction Realism and Revaluation In The Realistic Imagination (1981) and “Realism Reconsidered” (1988), Levine theorizes that realism should be considered an evaluative mode

for which conflicts of authority assume primary significance. Defining

realism as an “historical impulse that manifests itself as a literary method,” Levine contends that realistic works enact a symbolic transaction or debate, paralleling the shape of a Hegelian dialectic. “When a literary method comes to be called realistic,” Levine writes, “it tends to imply several things: first, that there is a dominant and shared notion of reality in operation, upon which the writer and his audience can rely; second, that this notion is self-consciously replacing an older and cur-

rently unsatisfying one which is open to parody and rejection; third, that there is moral value . . . in the representation of that reality.”34 Realism thus exhibits a progressive, not static, impulse: it moves from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, constantly begetting its opposite and inter-

nally generating its generic environment. In addition, it becomes necessary to speak of plural realisms for the simple reason that depictions of reality constantly war with previous, outmoded versions. Finally, there exists an intrinsic moral value to such debates: the modernist rallying cry of art for art’s sake, which underlies Eliot’s ideas, for example, was always more than an artistic dictum or parodic reappraisal; it was also a potent social weapon and an ideological imperative, an affront to previous literary evolutions.

Levine's theory has much in common with Meckier’s account of the artistic competition that attended Charles Dickens's rise to fame throughout the 1830s and 1840s. In Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

(1987), published six years after The Realistic Imagination, Meckier argues that such nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope used their novels to engage in “realism wars” with Dickens, presenting rival versions of reality that contested his own satiric portrayals of science, re-

ligion, and nineteenth-century English society. While some of these authors did not publicly acknowledge their feuds, their texts betray their hidden rivalries. Meckier argues, for instance, that in Fe/1x Holt as well as Middlemarch, George Eliot opposes Dickens’s Bleak House by re-

valuating his melodramatic, apocalyptic satire of scientific inquiry.

The Amises, Tradition, and Influence .« 25

Contesting his “devolutionary’ themes with her more ameliorative, “evolutionary” ones, Eliot crafted Middlemarch as “her most concerted attempt to rescue contemporary science from subversive refashionings of its findings into a satirist’s weapon.” The novel confirms Eliot’s decidedly Victorian humanism in the face of “Dickens’s increasing doubts

about the redemptive possibility of human nature.” In Meckier's schema, this comprises one aspect of parodic revaluation: criticism that the earlier text or author has depicted modern reality either too severely or too narrowly. In the twentieth century, Evelyn Waugh would provide the second aspect of this paradigm —revaluation that suggests that a novelist “has glossed over unpleasant realities, including harsher implications within his own material.” Waugh’s Decline and Falland A Handful of Dust, for instance, take Dickens to task for clinging to the “endur-

ing value of humanistic virtues,” maintaining a positivistic form of secular humanism that seemed pointless, if not dangerous, in the postWorld War I environment.»

Meckier’s model diverges significantly from both Bloom's and Levine's and potentially comes closest to the Amises’ own literary grap-

plings. As would Bloom, Meckier acknowledges that Dickens functioned for other Victorian novelists as a symbolic literary father, imposing and omnipotent, who had to be reworked and repudiated. In stark

contrast to Bloom, however, Meckier contends that the principal dynamic that animated these struggles is not anxiety but rivalry: through deliberate, self-conscious parody, these authors indict Dickens for falsifying, or misrepresenting, the limits of the world. In other words, they did not need to subconsciously misread Dickens's novels in acts of oedipal misprision, as Bloomian maneuvers maintain. Instead, they sought to challenge, correct, and displace Dickens’s falsifications through cal-

culated revision and response. Similar to the Amises, these authors’ conflicts with Dickens — or the multiplicity of “Dickenses” found in his work — did not stifle creativity but vitalized it. Their rival, competing works attest to a state of literary trench warfare, a Darwinistic contest over realistic representation as well as the very nature of reality itself. Meckier’s model has much in common with Levine's notion of real-

ism as an evolutionary and evaluative mode; however, one benefit of Meckier’s paradigm is that it strives to maintain the specific generational and historical divisions that Levine’s seems to erase. For Levine,

26 « Introduction realism becomes an exceptionally fluid and assimilative mode, constantly enfolding its previous manifestations. Indeed, such a dynamic becomes a source of strength for his ideas. Levine notes, for instance, that all realist writers must ultimately confront the mode’s internal flaw — the “projection of self on intransigent reality.” Consequently, they

cannot escape the realistic agenda, because representation 1s inextricably tied to language. “['T]he way to the unnameable,” Levine asserts, exists only “through the conventions of the nameable.”36 Whether they appear in their classical or revaluative and parodic forms, verisimilitude and meaning remain foreboding formal demands. The act of creating thus becomes self-reflexive. In essence, authors seek to reach through language to a symbolic “world beyond words,” attempting to erase the artifice of textuality and to depict an external reality that exists independently of its description. In so doing, however, authors must constantly confront the dual limits of their imaginative creations as well as their use of language. Tropes of representation such as metaphor and metonymy endlessly complicate the enterprise of realistic fiction. Levine's formulation, much like Bloom’s, thereby accentuates the transhistorical urge toward original production that distinguishes much literary production, especially since the romantic era. Consequently, his model expels the need for generational or historicized divisions such as the mod-

ernist revaluation of classical realism, the Contemporary novel's reappraisal of modernism, or the postmodernist revision of the Contemporary novel, all of which become subsumed within realism’s more expansive assimilationist agenda. By contrast, Meckier’s model maintains both the generational and the revaluative aspects of literary influence and thus applies itself more exactly to the Amises’ distinctly historicized literary struggles. Rather than fighting the Sisyphean burden of an oppressive voice transcending historical periods, Kingsley and Martin Amis often take

issue with the literary generation immediately preceding them, even if — or especially if — doing so indicts the practices of either the father or the son. In this respect, they approximate Walter Jackson Bate’s procla-

mation that writers seek to gaze beyond their contemporaries to find in past eras a mode of authority “remote enough to be more manageable in the quest for [their] own identity.”3” Despite their noticeable stylistic and thematic differences, the Amises do share a common impetus in that they both symbolically reject their literary “fathers” and embrace

Lhe Amises, Tradition, and Influence . 27 their literary “grandfathers.” Stated otherwise, they often disparage the dominant members of the literary generation immediately preceding them 1n favor of earlier ones who provide what they felt were necessary correctives to historical literary trends. Kingsley’s earliest novels, published in the mid-1950s, make clear his

rebellion against such exemplary modernists as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, writers famous for their pioneering work in narrative technique and structure. Accusing these authors of betraying their audience, Kingsley lambasted their formal complexities and verbal acrobatics. Throughout his life, he insisted that narration

should not deny its moral foundation, something to which both Meckier and Levine are sensitive. For Kingsley, the act of communication was never neutral; nor was it an exercise in technique. Instead, it was a sacred trust whose violation betrayed the author's duty, which historically (since the time of Horace, at least) has been to entertain and to instruct, to be both dulce et utile. The only antidote Kingsley found for the errors of his preceding generation was to turn to more conventional realistic models. The comic satires of Henry Fielding furnished him with solace and inspiration, and he was inspired by the traditional realism of George Eliot and the distinctively English irony, rhythm, and wit in the early work of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse. As the work of these authors implies, Kingsley’s satiric and stylistic masters followed a path relatively uncluttered by the narrative experimentation

that so marked literary modernism. These authors developed their characters within the contexts of firmly established social networks and

portrayed them in language that refused to sacrifice either lucidity or reason. [hey posited a fixed moral landscape, insisting upon the essential validity of social as well as literary artistic values.

Martin's novels, by contrast, articulate an intentional challenge to his father’s status as iconic literary authority; they contest his wellknown artistic values, favoring narration that is highly symbolistic, style that is aggressive and multireferential, and structure that intentionally frustrates readerly expectations. Directly contradicting Kingsley’s more traditional beliefs and realistic presentations, Martin evinced

respect for the stylistic innovations usually attributed to modernism and postmodernism, returning glory to those writers his father excoriated. Directly provoking his father, he urged that self-reflexivity and authorial involution should be perceived not as flawed indulgences but

28 « Introduction as natural consequences of the novel's evolution. Arguing that the playful introversion, the writing about writing, that is commonly associated

with postmodernism was “clearly an evolutionary development,” he compared his father to being “in the position of someone in fifteenthcentury Venice or Florence saying: “You know, I don't like this perspective stuff. Get back to when we didn’t know about perspective.’”38

In response, Kingsley charged that his son's overtly interrogative, internally generative style was artistically irresponsible. For him, these narrative gambits fell under the heading “Fucking Around with the Reader” — they were violations of an “orderly contract between writer and reader” that should be respected, if not maintained, at all cost. To Kingsley’s horror, the text itself became a battleground for theoretical debate and teleological uncertainty. Additionally, he faulted the “compulsively vivid” nature of Martin's style. Ifa narrative imparted no human lesson, Kingsley maintained, it degenerated to an exhibitionist display of verbal ability; it became a language game, ostentatious, solipsistic, and affected. Rebelling against such willful experimentation, preferring his own, more controlled experimentation with genre, Kingsley was irritated by Martin's intentional manipulation of what he once referred to as the “communication imbroglio.”3? Although Martin admits that narrative experimentation does have its limit — that it can exceed levels of credibility and tolerance — he continues to contradict the theoretical precepts his father conscientiously propounded. Thematically, his novels foreground the fragmenting effects that poststructuralist literary theory, nuclear anxiety, and entropy have on one’s efforts to create anything of metaphysical stability, whether it be family, love, or realistic texts. Although both writers produce comic novels, employing a form of moral satire that is seriocomic in nature, their depictions of the existential and ontological struggles of late-twentiethcentury life remain separate and tangential. Not surprisingly, when considering contemporary writers, the Amises’ opinions differed dramatically as well. Kingsley never warmed to the experimental achievements

that distinguish the work of current luminaries such as Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, or Graham Swift. As the conclusion to the present study discusses, Martin himself continues to scrutinize his relationship to mimesis and postmodernism, continuing his dialogues with literary tradition and his father.

The Amises, [radition, and Influence». 29 For these reasons, the Amises’ unique version of genealogical dissent

ultimately eludes classification within Bloom's, Eliot's, Levine's, or Meckier’s parameters. Although Kingsley and Martin share Eliot's reverence for tradition, they impose themselves much more actively upon it in works that are potent expressions of literary personality. Some of the psychological energies that inspire Bloom’s theory of influence do operate within the Amises’ relationship. However, Bloom’s framework provides no methodology for contextualizing either the historicity or the mutuality of the Amises’ struggles—the overlapping revaluative impulses that move not only from Kingsley’s work to Martin's, but also in reverse. Levine’s hypothesis of realism as an assimilative Hegelian dialectic that consistently reincorporates and reinvents itself does account for realism’s ability to consume difference, yet it unfortunately also marginalizes the historical contexts that are so crucial to the Amises’ debates. Meckier’s theory of hidden rivalry and parodic revaluation begins to approximate the Amises’ own, but it also, like Bloom’s, cannot ac-

count for the brazen intentionality of their struggles. In contrast to Meckier and Bloom, the Amises’ literary conflicts were never concealed: their rivalry was neither hidden nor an example of surreptitious misprision. Rather, it was a direct and self-conscious form of literary competition, a literalization—or “familialization’ — of literary rivalry. Finally, and perhaps most important, none of these theories can accommodate the Amises’ unique familial relationship, for it remains extrinsic to their theoretical frameworks. The Amises therefore furnish literary scholars with a unique and especially complex model of literary transmission and inheritance. Their relationship operates on more levels than many extant models allow; they conduct dual battles on both historical and personal fronts; and they interrogate numerous literary and extraliterary tensions that cut to

the heart of twentieth-century literature and life. In short, theirs is a specialized version of genealogical dissent: the synergy of their personal

relationship carries over into their professional lives, and throughout their novels and essays, their debates help to inscribe a whole generational shift of literary assumptions and values.

In the chapters that follow, I intend to show how these revaluative ten-

sions and energies operate not only in the Amises’ novels but also

30 360 ©—d Antroduction

within their personal literary canons. Because it is helpful to depict these dynamics in terms of each author's narrative proclivities and prejudices—the endlessly multiplying stream of borrowings and burdens that is instantly conjured by the word influence—I will begin by examining the Amises’ responses to other writers, both past and contem-

porary. [heir reactions will delineate mentors and misfits, leaders and losers, exempla and excrescences, and establish the Amises’ personal “great traditions.” Given the mutuality of my subject, however — its dual (or perhaps dueling) emphasis upon Kingsley and Martin Amis —I will

invoke a necessary schematic for this analysis, seeking authors about whom doth Amises have written. ‘The Amises have obviously been influenced by more sources than I will treat in this study, but their essays reveal numerous instances of rival or competing discourse, especially when analyzing six key writers from American and English literature. Because the Amises have held such impassioned and well-defined views

about American and English fiction, I will segregate such writers by their respective countries. [This schism is doubly effective, however, be-

cause the chief influences on Martin happen to be American, whereas Kingsley never relented in excoriating the inability of American writers to produce an influential oeuvre. ‘Treating the whole of American literature, as represented by Kingsley and Martin's reviews or essays, would itself comprise a lengthy book. However, three writers in particular stood out above the others and became the topic of numerous father-son debates. The Amises never wavered in their disapprobation or acclaim for these writers, and their particular reactions provide a primer for each author's narrative procedures.

These authors are Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, and each in his own peculiar way situates the Amises at their respective poles regarding stylistic experimentation, prophetic tone, and sexual explicitness in prose. This literary triumvirate functions as a loose holy trinity for Martin, but for Kingsley it represented the first seals unleashing literary armageddon. What renders this dynamic supremely fascinating is the way Martin intentionally embraces, as surrogate literary fathers, the very authors whom his father wholeheartedly disdained.

CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY

Charting the Artistic

Allegiances

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The Amises on American Literature Nabokov, Bellow, Roth — I think it’s merely true that standards are shot to hell, so nobody knows whether anything futuristic or modernistic is good or not.

, So you can get away with anything, and anything that seems to be merely new in some way or other, that’s to say, it hasn't been done for the last eighteen months, is certain of a reception, is certain to be published. — Kingsley Amis, interview by Peter Firchow

When he was not reeling from the racism of the American South or lambasting the tedium of American literature in general, Kingsley Amis

was fascinated with the United States. He visited the country only twice, in 1958-59 and in 1967-68, both times on teaching assignments, first at Princeton, then Vanderbilt. When Princeton offered to renew his contract for an additional two years, he briefly considered relocating. Only persistent, unmitigated fear for his children’s education prevented his migration. In his Memoirs (1991), he confessed to being “strongly pro-American’ in his attitudes, despite being shaken by “a glimpse of an episode of Dallas, a glance at a novel by Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov, or a conversation with one of those people that Americans themselves mysteriously call ‘liberals.’””! Throughout his life, he referred to the years he spent in America as among the happiest of his career.

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34. « Critical Cartography By contrast, the dominant literary influences upon Martin Amis have always been American. Perhaps this is a sign of the shifting balance of power that marked the literary and political arenas in the decades following World War II. Or perhaps it is a sign of the impact America had on Martin when, as a child, he accompanied his father to the United States as Kingsley fulfilled his teaching obligations in New Jersey and Tennessee. Whatever the cause, Martin is arguably the most American writer living in England today. He has written one collection of essays that is wholly devoted to the country and its representative figures, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986). Another compendium, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), fea-

tures numerous essays on American cultural life and literature. The country figures significantly in many of his novels, and Martin himself has gone so far as to label some of his novels as American rather than British. Although he admits to being “inescapably” English, he nonetheless confesses to needing “the North Atlantic, just for air as much as anything else,” and yearly it seems the English press seizes upon the idea that he is considering relocation, repeating the historical march of

other famous emigrés such as W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and, more recently, Salman Rushdie.?

Counterbalancing America’s seductive appeal, both authors acknowledge the country’s ravenous tendencies with writers. America was not as damaging as France, Kingsley felt, but it nonetheless ruined the likes of Norman Mailer and J. D. Salinger, mostly by elevating them to levels of reputation they either did not deserve or could not handle. The root cause of this problem, the energy that animated it, was America’s love of transience, innovation, and eclecticism, whether 1n politics or in literature. Consequently, “American literature’ —a term Kingsley always

wished to place in quotes—seemed marred by stylistic eccentricity, a “characteristically innocent readiness to take the will for the deed, if the will is signaled boldly enough.” Distinctive voice and idiosyncratic tone seemed to drown other, more traditional elements like structure and characterization. Kingsley felt that this narrative imbalance — this “literary elephantiasis” as he once called it— resulted in the unrelenting quest

for the Great American Novel, the inclusive, all-encompassing tome. As Martin himself explained in the title essay in The Moronic Inferno,

The Amises on American Literature « 35

“in a sense every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called USA.” For his own part, Martin believes the quest ended in 1953, when Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March appeared, and although Kingsley confessed that Mailer's The Naked and the Dead once made him think that “someone the size of Dickens was among us,”

he later retracted his endorsement, admitting that he had not “allowed for the fact that Mailer was an American.”3 Regardless of the mutual respect the two Amises shared, their artistic allegiances divide neatly along national lines, adding a topographical

tension to their generational battles. Throughout his life, Kingsley never forgave America for falling for the literary swindle of modernism. Nor did he ever waver from his general derogation of American litera-

ture and its claims for sovereignty. At the top of his literary “most wanted” list—for novelists at least—sat the names of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, usually followed by Philip Roth. Verbally and in print, the Amises vehemently opposed each other in their defense or excoriation of these three writers, and consideration of their various responses sheds light upon the Amises’ own creative attitudes as well as their positions in the twentieth-century battles among realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Of all the instances of Amis family conflict that found their ways into American and British publications, one appearance surpasses the others in providing answers to, and justifications for, the Amises’ particular brand of literary genealogy and familial dissent. More important, it acts as a springboard to a more specialized understanding of their particular linguistic styles, their entrenched theories of the novel, and their antithetical literary lineages. It positions them in relation to specific stylistic and structural differences, and it reveals them taking up arms in the historical battles over the shape and function of the realistic novel, mapping the genealogical networks within which they write. The earliest recorded instance of the Amises’ professional tension

occurred in 1974, when they spoke with Kevin Byrne for the BBC World Service program Bookcase, a brief interview that is reprinted in the 15 August 1974 issue of the Listener. Occasioned by the fact that their first novels both garnered the Somerset Maugham Award, the interview

quickly shifted to talk of contemporary American and English fiction.

36 266 «= Critical Cartography

Kingsley held that the state of English fiction was “deplorable”; the state of American fiction, however, was “far, far worse.” Soon afterward he is-

sued a comment, in his characteristically bold style, that he would be asked to defend for years to come: “Not a single American novelist has ever established an oeuvre.” Calmly, Martin replied that American fiction was “far more hopeful than English fiction at the moment,” and he drew attention to one trait that at that time distinguished American fiction from its British counterpart: “I find it remarkable,” he mentioned, “that someone who is as linguistically aware as my father should never have sought to experiment in prose at all, or to have seen any virtue whatever in slightly experimental prose.” Kingsley’s brief response, articulated in the dual tones of a father correcting his intransigent son and a colleague correcting a subordinate, was pointed: “Experimental prose is death.” This brief exchange illuminates not only one of the Amises’ perennial literary battlegrounds but also the professionally combative nature of their relationship. One perceives, in the first place, how Kingsley pontificates more than Martin, usually with provocative intent. Martin appears less dismissive, more respectful, of his father’s opinions, even though other instances reveal no softening in their entrenched opinions on style. Robert Byrne, acting as moderator, immediately addressed Kingsley’s reductivism and suggested an author whose oeuvre is substantive and influential and whose relocation, moreover, qualifies him as an American. His choice couldn't have been more inflammatory. That author was Vladimir Nabokov, and without qualification, he functions as a literary touchstone for the two Amises, a depth charge that sounds

their locations in the waters of narrative experimentation. Confronted by Byrne's suggestion, Kingsley remarked that he hated Nabokov “like poison.” Martin said simply, “I think he’s marvelous.” In many ways, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Amises’ attitudes towards his work, stands at the heart of their literary quarrels, interrogating each of their entrenched views on stylistic experimentation. Furthermore, it is difficult to view their arguments over his work as exclusively intellectual, disconnected from the unavoidable emotional impact, on Kingsley’s behalf, of

the fact that a contemporary author—and a detested one at that—had supplanted his literary authority, assuming the role of surrogate literary father for his son.

Lhe Amises on American Literature « 37

Vladimir Nabokov: Style as Morality In 1987, when Esquire magazine's Charles Michener asked Kingsley to comment on the merits of Martin’s novels, Kingsley responded “with-

| out blinking” that he found them difficult to read, though no more so “than others of my generation would find them.” He confessed that it was not the subject matter or ideology of Martin’s novels that troubled him but the style, which he found ostentatious and showy. “Martin can be the funniest writer, and I admire his intelligence and discipline,” Kingsley explained, “but there’s a terrible compulsive vividness in his style. I can't get to the end of a paragraph. It’s too ornate. It reminds me of what someone said about Kipling —“bombarded with felicities.’ It’s very important to write a dull phrase from time to time.” For Kingsley, only one explanation existed for the presence of such lushness in his son’s prose: “It goes back to one of Martin’s heroes — Nabokov,” he re-

marked, “I lay it all at his door—that constant demonstrating of his command of English.” A 22 March 1982 letter to Philip Larkin puts the matter much more candidly: “That chap is an absolute shibboleth, isn’t he? What do you think of Nabokov? Well— BANG!! He’s what's wrong

with half of US wirtn [szc],—there are other things wrong with the other half—and has fucked up a lot of fools here, plus, or including as you might wish to say, my little Martin. I don’t know about you but I can bear anything, even stream of conc. [sic], better than realizing there’s a narrator here whom I can’t trust.”5

Kingsley’s comments proclaim a stylistic aversion to the selfagerandizing nature of Nabokov’s style, which seemed to abuse the reader through its relentless display of linguistic lights, the son et /umiére of its presumed “logomania.” The vividness of which Kingsley speaks was not only compulsive and ornate; it bombarded the reader with end-

less verbal detail, forgoing the respite an occasional dull phrase provides. In a historical context, Kingsley’s words also reveal the intractability of his feelings toward Nabokov, for his statements hark back to his review of Lo/ita (1955) nearly thirty years earlier. In many ways, this

review functions as an important touchstone for the Amises, for it delineates Kingsley’s narrative prejudices and proclivities and provides a context, both historical and personal, for the irreconcilable stylistic conflicts with his son. Significantly, it is also a review that Martin would

38 3=« «Critical Cartography

later work to refute, validating Nabokov’s methods in the face of his father’s rival example.

Kingsley began his critique by proclaiming that “a personal style, a distinguished style” usually results in little more than a “high idiosyncratic noise level in the writing, with plenty of rumble and wow from imagery, syntax and diction.” After surveying the work of John Donne, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf, he concluded that the end product of such writing “sadly involves a Charles Atlas muscle-man of language as opposed to the healthy and useful adult.” Such exhibitionist displays of linguistic ostentation, Kingsley felt, invalidated questions of authorial distance: “One will be told, that this is the ‘whole point’, that this is the hero, Humbert Humbert, talking in his own person, not the author, and that what we are getting is ‘characterization’. All right; but it seems illadvised to characterize logomania by making it talk 120,000 words at us, and a glance at Nabokov’s last novel, Pain, which is not written in the first person, establishes that this is Nabokov talking.” Despite Nabokov’s disavowal of precisely such a conflation, Kingsley’s critique attempted to assimilate him with Humbert Humbert, the novel’s main

character, and he faulted Nabokov for betraying the expectations of both aesthetic distance and common sense.®

It may appear incongruent for a writer with as distinctive and as polished a style as Kingsley Amis to criticize attempts to push literary language to its limits. Furthermore, it would be wrong to assume that Kingsley’s novels stake no claims to literary experimentation. On the contrary: David Lodge has written authoritatively of the significance of Kingsley’s use of language, and we must not underestimate the function of parody, mimicry, and profanity in Kingsley’s work, the subversion of convention and propriety, the assault on established values from within their representative confines. Io effectively conceptualize Kingsley’s remarks, one must turn to their historical context: the reaction against modernism epitomized by Movement poetry and Contemporary literature.’ By the late 1950s, English writers such as Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, and Philip Larkin were already launching attacks upon the stylistic indulgences of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf, proponents of that “hankering for experiment” that, according to Kingsley, “still dies hard.” Movement literature, with its injunctions against abandoning a “rational structure and a comprehensible

The Amises on American Literature. 39 language,’ sought instead to reaffirm the social function of literature, eschewing the torturous solipsism that too often stemmed from narrative innovation. As has been well documented, a very noticeable “reaction against experiment” set in, and English literature returned to its provincial roots, casting a cold eye on all things international.® As some critics have explained, the political background of this debate cannot be divorced from the humanistic response to World War II.

Malcolm Bradbury, for example, notes how writers in America, England, France, Germany, and Italy sought to redefine literary expression, which had suffered from what Jean-Paul Sartre described as a “cri-

sis of language, or what George Steiner labeled a “Retreat from the Word.” Both Sartre and Steiner refer to the staggering horror, the urge

to silence, that attended the revelation of Nazi horrors at Auschwitz and elsewhere, a splintering not only of souls and bodies but of language itself. Theodor Adorno famously remarked, “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’; Kurt Vonnegut flatly declared that “there is nothing to say after a massacre”; and William Cooper eloquently asked, “[I]f we have to fight again against having Belsens and Dachaus, how much help are we going to get from people who have already settled for existence itself being absurdity, nausea, or nothingness?”? In short, writers sought to locate some kind of moral and social authenticity that could confront the nihilism and the absurdity of postwar existence.

Aesthetically, however—in an apolitical sense—this debate over style owes much to Pater's assertion that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” a claim that invokes Friedrich Nietzsche’s divisions in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music between Dionysian and Apollonian polarities. Stylistically, what Kingsley and other Movement writers objected to, in theory and practice, was Dionysian indulgence, a seemingly irrational and ecstatic linguistic wildness that turned its back upon Apollonian rationality and its ordering, logical balance. The Dionysian urge is intensely individualistic, potentially solipsistic. By contrast, the Apollonian is more social, communal. One leads toward the self while the other eschews it, abandoning the realm of the narrowly personal for the universally public. Movement writers, Blake Morrison writes, had “little regard for [Stephen] Dedalus’s creed of non serviam: they want[ed] their artists not to rebel, but to go along with the aims of

their community.”!° Indeed, that is the eventual terminus of much of

40 e« Cnitical Cartography 1950s fiction. Movement literature’s general direction was toward reason, comprehensibility, and social value, away from irrationality, opacity, and willful display. At the heart of Kingsley’s critique of Lo/ita lay

just such intertwined stylistic and social imperatives, indicative of Movement precepts against stylistic indulgence, obscure subjectivity, and social irresponsibility.

In his review, Kingsley admitted to one, and only one, success of Nabokov’s novel, and that was the portrait of Lolita herself. “I have rarely seen the external ambience of a character so marvelously realized,” he confessed, before complimenting Nabokov for portraying her with “seldom more than the necessary undertone of sensuality.” However, the successful portraiture of Lolita found its unfortunate corrective in the narrative failure of Humbert Humbert, to Kingsley, her graven externality betrayed representational flaws: “She is a portrait in a very full sense, devotedly watched and listened to but never conversed with, the object of desire but never of curiosity. What else did she do in Humbert’s presence but play tennis and eat sundaes and go to bed with him? What did they talk about?” Such comments reveal the extent to which Kingsley employed the Movement ethos of common sense and accountability to indict Humbert’s (and Nabokov’s) reduction of Lolita to a paper-thin stereotype. She seemed to Kingsley no more than a petite fille fatale, a wanton nymphet accompanying her scabrous stepfather on their parodic journey across America, pursuing life, liberty, and happiness—or rather, Humbert’s life, liberty, and happiness. Humbert and Lolita traverse the United States, fleeing responsibility, society, and the past, but neither character can escape their reductive imprisonment, whether occurring through language or the circuity of Humbert’s obsessions. The novel’s failure, Kingsley concluded, was both stylistic and moral: “The pity is that Humbert could not care less about the darkness of [ Lolita’s] life at home,” he wrote, “he could not care less about what she was really like.”!!

Parenthetically, it is important to note that Kingsley did not object to the explicit nature of the novel. Instead, he claimed that the novel was “not pornographic enough,” by which he meant the narrative presentation of Humbert Humbert was improbable, overly reductive, just as Lolita’s was externally complete but internally limited. Humbert’s

mental and linguistic imprisonment—the “atrophy of [his] moral

The Amiseson American Literature . Al sense’ — eventually manifested itself as “dullness, fatuity, and unreality.”

Humbert’s “moments of remorse are few, brief and unconvincing,” Kingsley expounded, preparatory to issuing this apothegm: “There is plenty of self-absorption around us, heaven knows, but not enough on this scale to be worth writing about at length, just as the mad are much less interesting than the sane.”!? Of course, Kingsley was aware of the obvious counterpositions to his complaints, which Martin would later seize; what was important, however, was how Humbert/Nabokov’ss style came to suffuse the entire moral fabric of the novel. Style itself, not subject matter, became the novel’s moral barometer. Consequently, impugning the style maligned not only the narrator and his narration but also the moral sensibility and concomitant social effect of the novel. Curiously enough, this connection between style and morality was one upon which both Kingsley and Martin could agree. Eventually, Martin would formulate the epigram concisely —“[S]tyle is morality. Style judges” —but Kingsley proclaimed

at more length: “every style has a way of infiltrating what is being presented, so that, offered as the vehicle of Humbert’s soliloquy, this style

is involved with the entire moral tenor of the book.”!3 Despite this moral similarity, however, the Amises’ attitudes would eventually di-

verge, and they would do so precisely along the lines laid out by Kingsley’s review of Lo/ita—the lines of authorial responsibility to one’s characters as well as to one’s readers.

In 1993, speaking to friend and fellow novelist Will Self, Martin admitted to an oedipal rivalry with his father over Nabokov and joked about a new introduction he had written for Lo/iza, stating, “I must give my father this piece and say, “Take that!” The introduction would attempt to

topple the aesthetic and moral objections that Kingsley had earlier raised. Martin knew that his father was correct in insisting that “the long battle against style still hangs in the balance, and [that] a reverse over Lolita could be damaging,” for what was at stake in the Amises’ quarrel was not simply the status of Nabokov’s novel but the validity of their own aesthetic foundations. In launching his revisionist campaign against his father, Martin had first to attack Kingsley’s remark that there exist no aesthetic distance between Nabokov and Humbert—or that whatever distance does exist is negated or rendered absurd by the

42 e« Critical Cartography exigencies of stylistic demands. Contradicting his father, Martin argued that Nabokov fully subordinates his authorial identity to his character’s internal development, constructing “a mind in the way a prose Browning might have gone about it, through rigorous dramatic monologue.” Underscoring the division between author and character that Kingsley

sought to erode, Martin noted that the reader is entirely dependent : upon the narrator's portrait of Lolita. Although Humbert may be a reliable narrator “in the strict sense” — conveying his motivations and obsessions accurately and in detail— he was “not otherwise reliable,” how-

ever, and the gradual awareness of this fact reinforced Nabokov’s aesthetic control of the novel. “Let us remember,” Martin stressed, “that Nabokov was capable of writing entire fictions — Despair, The Eye, Pale Fire—in which the narrators have no idea what is going on af a/l.”14

In addition, Martin contended that Kingsley had overlooked the morality implicit in Nabokov’s narrative cruelty to Humbert, which is arguably crueler than Humbert was to Lolita. “We all share the narrators smirk,” Martin explained, “when he begins the sexual-bribes chapter with the following sentence: ‘I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals.’ But when the smirk congeals, we are left staring at the moral heap that Humbert has become, underneath his arched eyebrow.” Although Martin admitted that Nabokov may legitimately be labeled the “laureate of cruelty,” he rejected his father’s indictment of Dionysian linguistic flights, his presumed loss of

artistic control. Echoing Gustave Flaubert’s famous pronouncement that an artist must “stand to his work as God to his creation, ... [that] he must be everywhere felt but nowhere seen,” Martin asserted that Nabokov remained in “subtle moral control” throughout the novel: although Humbert’s mind may swirl and spiral on the page, Nabokov “outsoaringly anticipates every possible moral objection from page one.”! As anyone familiar with Nabokov will recognize, Martin's critical approach originates in Nabokov’s own literary criticism, specifically his definition of the technical relationship between reader and writer as developed in Lectures on Literature. For Nabokov, a mature appreciation of

any novel was achieved only when readers sought not “the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters” and not “the adolescent purpose of learning to live.” Rather, they should seek to share the emotions of the author, “the joys and difficulties of creation.”!¢ This

The Amises on American Literature . 43 theoretical division served Martin well in exonerating Nabokov from Kingsley’s charges of moral perversity, for within it, two levels of interpretation are simultaneously created. One level posits Nabokov in an amoral external position to his work, responsible solely for the fullness | of his stylistic presentation. The other level, existing within the work itself, posits Humbert as the self-acknowledged author of the text, responsible for all parts of the narrative save the foreword and, in some editions, Nabokov’s appended commentary. Nabokov cannot be held accountable for the actions of his character, Martin implies, for he describes fictitious events that did not occur, whereas Humbert depicts events that, from his point of view, actually _ do take place. Denied Nabokov’s comfortable separation, the internal maelstrom of the plot is very real for Humbert, and consequently, Nabokov can hold him accountable for any moral transgressions. Whereas Kingsley felt that Nabokov and Humbert should be held equally liable for stylistic (and therefore moral) indulgences, Martin exonerated Na-

bokov by drawing attention to the implicit moralism of the novel's structure, especially its tropes of self-destruction and death. For Martin, Humbert’s sins as a character remain inexcusable. Much as he does with

Lolita, Humbert abducts his readers, removing them to a ludic realm where poetry predominates, where he believes his transgressions will be forgiven in the light of his celebratory, redemptive lexicon. As an artist manqué— the mad or failed artist, who, “because he cannot make art out of life, makes their lives into art” —Humbert subsumes all passions and desires to himself, perverting the standards of art to which his narrative aspires and committing a “sin against the ordinary”: the narrative Humbert provides us, Martin explains, is “not a love story but a travesty.”!7 In other words, Humbert’s achievement remains a crime against art,

whereas Nabokov achieves a victory of artistic control, assuming the position of the obscured controller, the literary gamesman, the composer of “riddles with elegant solutions.” Of course, Nabokov expects the reader to fall for his narrative gambit, mistaking the separation between creator and created. Similar to the novel’s other internal traps, an inattentive reader (such as Kingsley, Martin implied) would miss Nabokov’s subtle snare— Humbert’s culpability and Nabokov’s artistic innocence. “It is the central miracle of the novel,” Martin concluded, “that the tiny madman in his tiny cell becomes, artistically, by a series of

44 e« Critical Cartography radical shifts in context, a lord of infinite space. .. . The angle 1s a tortured squint, but the vistas are large.”!® Martin successfully refuted Kingsley’s aesthetic conflation of Nabo-

kov and his character Humbert, but Kingsley additionally faulted the novel for a much more serious problem —“logomania,” an assault on the

reader with words—that Martin would next have to address. Undermining this critique, Martin substituted the modernist criteria of full imaginative rendering for Kingsley’s logomania. Arguing that Nabokov could be held responsible solely for the novel’s internal development, regardless of its effect upon character, Martin praised Nabokov’s commitment to the artistic demands of his tale: “Even in the present phase of literature, with its paraded fastidiousness about all exterior values, the novelist retains the instinct to correct the erring puppets he creates.

How will he do this? Not by trite punishment or improbable conversion, not by candid censure, not by any process of penitence and redemption; and not, finally, by any displacement of the cautionary tale.”

Instead, Nabokov chose to render the possibilities “as intensely, as open-endedly and as perilously” as he could, allowing style to determine his choice. Nabokov does punish and correct, Martin allowed, but not through traditional, linear processes of penitence and redemption.

Whatever morality Nabokov’s tale invokes, it is not engrafted, but a natural product of the narrative’s internal expansion, of the inherent inclusivity of Nabokov’s galloping style. In his review of Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, Martin expressed this point succinctly, arguing that although the subject “may be crude and repulsive” its expression “1s artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.”!? Martin elaborates these ideas in “The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces,” in which he explains how Nabokovss style

“emerges not as a fancy appendage but as the key to his perceptual mode, his tireless attempt to pay full justice to the weird essence of things.” Once again, Martin followed Nabokov, especially the latter's essay “On a Book Entitled Lo/ita,” which appears as the afterword to the Vintage paperback edition of the novel. In that essay, Nabokov claimed that he was not interested in didactic fiction and that Lo/ita propounded no moral judgment. ‘Taking his clue expressly from Nabo-

kov, Martin therefore located Lo/ita within the literary mode of the

Lhe Amises on American Literature. 45 sublime, whose history can be traced backward from Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer through Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Longinus. To Martin, this mode best interrogates “our fallen world of squalor, absurdity and talentlessness,” for it replaces “ideas of motiva-

tion and plot with those of obsession and destiny,” suspending judgment in favor of “remorselessness, a helter-skelter intensity.” Rather than proceeding to any firmly fixed conclusion, sublime texts instead accumulate endless possibilities for pain and danger. In this mode, Nabokov’s chief responsibility is solely representational, not didactic: he

must render the complexity of the imaginative world as passionately and painstakingly as possible, regardless of its extraliterary effect. Required to portray the fullness of the “thoroughly secular, contingent and relativized world,” Nabokov becomes accountable only to his work, not to readers or their extraneous morality.?° Significantly, the modernist aesthetic of Martin's reviews not only refutes his father’s criticism and vindicates Nabokov’s method but also directly attacks one of Kingsley’s most cherished technical principals. In “Communication and the Victorian Poet” —a précis of his failed dissertation at Oxford University— Kingsley addressed what he called the “communication imbroglio” in literature. Contending that there ex-

isted an orderly contract between reader and writer, Kingsley argued that when the writer ignored the reader, writing instead for himself or for art’s sake, the result was always deleterious. Unlike E. M. Forster, who notoriously lamented in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that a novel must, alas, tell a story, Kingsley celebrated the moral ramifications of plot: “perhaps the modern practitioners of a chap-fallen Romanticism,” he wrote, “may give up exhibiting themselves before their readers and at

last set about telling them something.”2! Whether conflating the distance between author and text (as in Lo/iza), playfully allowing the text to fold in upon itself (as in Pale Fire), or swamping the reader with endless verbosity or anagramatical puzzles, Nabokov repeatedly violated Kingsley’s tacit agreement between writer and reader.

Martin, however, eschewed such Movement literature-inspired principles. For both Martin and Kingsley, as well as Nabokov, morality derived intrinsically, from style, which is “not neutral” and “gives moral directions.”22 Yet whereas Kingsley brought external standards of com-

mon sense, reason, and comprehensibility to bear upon the internally

46 .« Critical Cartography validating matrix of the novel, Martin permitted no such allowance. What was logomania to Kingsley became full imaginative rendering to Martin. Indeed, the aesthetic criteria that Martin used to champion Lolita were classically modernist, diametrically and intentionally opposed to Kingsley’s precepts. He contended that Kingsley’s objections, and the values they represented, existed outside of the hermetically closed object of the novel, and consequently, their application remained tendentious at best, inadequate at worst. Clearly, there could be no mediation between Kingsley’s and Martin’s perspectives. Whereas Kingsley indicted Nabokov for stylistic in-

dulgence, representational failure, and moral perversity, Martin applauded Nabokov’s tireless dedication to art: the life of his creation, the fullness of his depiction, and the expansiveness of his style. With Lo/tta, Nabokov became for Kingsley a convenient whipping boy, a protean béte-noir. For Martin, however, he became both master and mentor, exemplar and emissary, in direct opposition to his father. Neither Kingsley nor Martin ever relented in castigating or championing the work of this particular author, and he illuminated the Amises’ stylistic divergences and acted as a necessary fulcrum for Martin against his father, a means to upend and supplant Kingsley’s literary authority. On a professional level, Kingsley vehemently disagreed with his son; on a personal level, however, he could not have overlooked the fact that his son had assimilated the lessons of a detested rival, in flagrant opposition to his own example. These factors combine to make Vladimir Nabokov the best locus for glimpsing the Amises’ overt genealogical dissent. There exists one other author who functions for Martin as a surrogate literary father, and that author is, as was Nabokov, an exact con-

temporary of Kingsley Amis. Rather than writing from a decidedly modernist lineage, however, this second mentor writes from within the realistic paradigm so touted by his father —albeit with a separate stylistic and thematic repertoire. In this respect, he offers Martin an internal critique of his father’s fictive values —a revision from within.

Saul Bellow: Prophetic Realism Martin has never denied that the two most formative influences upon his work have been Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. In Experience:

The Amises on American Literature .« 47

A Memoir (2000), he calls them his “twin peaks,” and he has written seven essays on Nabokov and five on Bellow, all of which clarify his own

literary proclivities as well as those of his mentors. As did Nabokov, Bellow imparts a number of thematic and stylistic lessons to Martin, but chief among them is his particular example of prophetic realism — which Martin also terms “Meditative Realism, or Inner Realism’ —a combination of social diagnosis and existential prophecy that manifests

itself through both characterization and voice.?? Blending the omniscient force of third-person narration with the active limitations of firstperson narration, Bellow succeeds in combining the expansive, universal perspective within the limited, individualized gaze. In a 1990 profile of Martin Amis, Mira Stout spoke with Saul Bellow regarding the merits of Martin's style. He remarked that an author

can follow one of two divergent paths in the depiction of his fictive worlds: one that employs “an uncharged language which subordinates itself to the story and characters entirely’; or one that utilizes a “charged language,” which refutes any such submission. Bellow’s next comment, however, clearly indicated the influence he had on Martin and the similarities between their narrative methods. Likening Martin to Joyce and

to Flaubert, Bellow remarked that he saw “signs of a very large outline.”24 As we shall see, this large outline looms attractively for Martin. It is Bellow’s legacy to him. Developments in point of view and characterization derive naturally from it, but it is the source. Martin has unswerving respect for Bellow. Friends since the early 1980s, the two men have interviewed each other and appeared together

on television, discussing the state of modern fiction and modern life. Martin once claimed to have carried The Adventures of Augie March with

him throughout America—to “remind him of what really matters” — and since Kingsley’s death in 1995 Bellow’s significance in Martin's life has grown exponentially. James Diedrick has theorized that “the proximity and intensity” of Kingsley’s influence has led Martin “to seek a se-

ries of father substitutes whose influence he can acknowledge without filial conflict,” and in Bellow we find evidence of precisely such emotional surrogacy, a complement to the literary paternity always present in their relationship. “Saul is my mentor in several senses and I won't feel entirely fatherless as long as he is still alive,” Martin remarked in 1998. Even more touchingly, however, he proclaimed two years later

48 . Critical Cartography that “Saul took up the reins and it made a big difference. I feel I’ve got some type of father in him, .. . I expect I will feel all over again the loss of my father when Saul dies. The safety net will have gone and | will come crashing down.” Due in large part to his abilities to expound the existential truths of twentieth-century life, Bellow assumes the stature of a secular prophet for Martin; he is “the writer that the twentieth century has been waiting for,” for he has “made his own experience resonate more memorably

than any living writer.” In “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” Martin describes the ramifications attending what he labels Bellow’s endeavor to “evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century.” Of specific relevance is Bellow’s attempt to reclaim for fiction the validity of a “High Style” that tries to speak for all humanity “with suasion, to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten or stopped trying to regrasp.” This “High Style” —or “high euphony,” as Martin calls it elsewhere — does not come easily, however.*° Nor is it as diversified as one would expect. Though many authors wish to portray not localized individual portraits but universal ones, transcending personal boundaries, the twentieth-century novel is marked by reductions in scope and scale, by limitations of both voice and character. Bellow’s example provides Martin with a complementary means for writing in the first person, with its Nabokovian issues of reliability and manipulation. As Martin explains, such narration became nearly endemic in twentieth-century fiction but remains still generally misunderstood. Refuting the assertion that autobiographical narration should be viewed as a technical flaw, as Kingsley had argued, Martin contends that the “dominance of the self” should be perceived instead as an evolutionary occurance: “One might as usefully accuse Shakespeare for having, in his tragedies, a ‘weakness’ for kings and noblemen and warriors.” Martin elaborates such issues in “Saul Bellow in Chicago,” the concluding essay in The Moronic Inferno. “The present phase of Western

literature,” he writes, is “inescapably one of ‘higher autobiography, intensely self-inspecting.” Beginning with the “spittle of Confessionalism,” the author has become “increasingly committed to the private being.” Of course, Martin does not consider this development to be wholly productive; for him, Bellow is the first writer to escape this potential labyrinth: he has emerged on “the other side of this process,

The Amises on American Literature. 49 hugely strengthened to contemplate the given world.”27 Invoking that other genre of confessional literature, which runs from St. Augustine to Thomas Merton, Martin thus associates Bellow’s stylistic quest with a secular night-of-the-soul. Showing signs of symbolic transformation, of internal descent, Bellow’s journey culminates symbolically at the threshold of oracular prophecy, of prophetic articulation. It is that expansive voice that most attracts Martin to Bellow, foretelling for Martin the future of first-person narration. However, that future of reenergized “High Style” must accept certain stylistic and thematic burdens, inherent problems of characterization and voice.

In “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” Martin addresses the reasons for the pervasiveness of autobiographical narration, and signifi-

cantly he explains the development in terms of characterization. “In thumbnail terms,” he writes, “the original protagonists of literature were gods; later, they were demigods; later still, they were kings, gener-

als, fabulous lovers, at once superhuman, human and all too human; eventually they turned into ordinary people. . .. Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal lower down the human scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.”28 Such a reduction in literary character has been mandated, many would argue, by a similar reduction within twentieth-century life itself—by a descent into contin-

gency, a loss of animating, transcendent absolutes. | As Victoria N. Alexander points out, this remains a point of conten-

tion among Martin Amis, Nabokov, and Bellow: whereas Bellow attempts to recuperate humanistic and religious values in his work, Martin, following Nabokov, seems reluctant to accept such stabilizing forces and is comfortable with more playful, involuted literary maneuvers. Indeed, Martin's “twin peaks” did not always agree, as he explains in Experience: Nabokov once dismissed Bellow as “a miserable mediocrity,”

whereas Bellow confessed to struggling with the “aristocratic triumphalism” in Nabokov’s work.?? One can also identify a number of resolutions to this divergence that Alexander neglects to note: regardless of their philosophical orientations, Bellow’s chief lesson to Martin remains the same as Henry Fielding’s was to Kingsley —both authors learn from

their mentors how to treat low things in a high style. In addition, and perhaps more important, Martin should be seen as a symbolic negotiator between all of his literary influences: his is an amalgamationist

50 « Critical Cartography

models. |

approach, seeking correspondence within their apparently antithetical Bellow’s exuberance in portraying his gloomy, introspective sufferers

teaches Martin that even the gutter can accommodate transcendence, especially if it is vitalized by a vigorous lexicon, an inherently Nabokovian “charged language.” Citing a passage from Bellow’s story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Martin asserts that Bellow’s creative origins, like those of his characters, derive not from usual conceptions of tran-

scendence, but from a distinct form of inverted or negative transcendence. According to Martin, Bellow’s characters assume their true identities only while functioning as emblematic “messengers of species.” Such ecstatic transformation operates for Bellow neither as trite sentimentality nor as pat consolation. Instead, it denies his characters release from the conditions that inform their struggles. Uhe transcendence that Bellow describes is negative in nature, downward in direction, a descent

| into the commonality of existence, and this accords nicely with Martin’s own concerns. For Martin, such inverted transcendence imparts to the reader an “enduring mortal pang” that signifies the eventual terminus of first-person narration. Speaking of Augie March, Martin explains, “Augie is on a journey but he isn't going anywhere. If he has a destination, it is simply a stop called Full Consciousness. In a sense Augie is heading to the point where he will become author of his own story. He will not necessarily be capable of writing it. He will be capable of thinking it. This is what the convention of the first-person amounts to.”3° The Amises clearly disagree over the utility of such narration—the violations of Flaubertian or Jamesian distance, the self-conscious dis-

plays of verbal mastery. Yet for Martin, such narration invests the human character, with its multiple permutations and outgrowths, with an exemplary, emblematic quality. In a revealing passage from “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” Martin explains how this prophetic impulse manifests itself in Bellow’s later novels. Although the later works of Bellow still feature a familiar opposition—the “rich, generously comic and fanatically detailed record of the human experience and habitat, set against a wayward dreaminess or mooniness, an intoxicated receptivity to ideas”— Martin notes two changes in emphasis. The first is a formal artistry notable for its keen sense of pattern and

The Amises on American Literature « SI

balance. The second is a “countervailing ferocity” in his depiction of modern “disorders and distortions.”3! Martin appropriates these lessons of characterization and tone from Bellow’s work. Speaking of his in-

creased artistic control, his tautness of detail, and inclusive, encyclopedic grasp, Martin notes how Bellow’s “poetry of meditation” takes on

a less willful artistry in later works. Martin notes no reduction in the fullness of Bellow’s presentations, however. Instead, Bellow seems relentless in his pursuit of the obsessions, flaws, and misapprehensions of the modern age. Merging the high with the low, the exemplary with the antiheroic, the transcendent with the commonplace, Bellow stylistically succeeds in showing Martin how to combine exuberance with fanatical detail, directing his narrative glare upon human fallibility and the po-

tential for improvement. He casts his larger philosophical concerns within a traditional realistic paradigm—one that maintains the aesthetic distance between author and text and that asserts the presence of transcendent absolutes within the contingent human universe. The result is a blended form of prophetic realism that is both moral and visceral, elegiac and celebratory. . These sentiments rise to a peak in Martin's review of Bellow’s The Actual (1997), where Martin comments upon the increasing presence of soul in Bellow’s work. Noting that Bellow’s remarkable productivity continually frustrates categorization, Martin describes the emergence of a concentrated focus in his mentor’s recent novellas. “The author's relationship with language has evolved into something like sibling harmony. The desire for vatic speech is undimmed, yet no riffs, no party pieces, accompany it... . Later Bellow is something like that: all business.” Elaborating that this new terseness in no way detracts from the

magical allure of Bellow’s language, Martin succeeds in enacting a symbolic negotiation between his two mentors. He clarifies how their chief disagreement— their contrasting forms of elevated style—can be

mediated by Bellow’s later work, with its potent amalgamation of _ terseness, oracular prophecy, and lyricism. If Nabokov's Lo/iza, with its charged language and perspectival manipulation, was “exactly the kind

of novel that its predecessors [were] pointing toward,” then for Martin, Bellow’s later fiction epitomizes the necessary terminus of that continuum. It bridges the gap between literary gamesmanship and

52. « Critical Cartography oracular pronouncement, pointing toward such luminous qualities as love and soul while maintaining the artistry, the “crystallized beauty,” of language.*?

Not surprisingly given the realist tendencies of both authors, Kingsley Amis did not consider Bellow to be as pernicious an influence as Nabokov. In fact, one can even identify a few moments in which Kingsley’s literary pronouncements seem to chime with Bellow’s. One interview, for example, finds Kingsley describing the writer's “proper task,” which is none other than to write about the “permanent things” in human nature, of which his short list features ambition, sexual desire, vainglory, and foolishness. Bellow would not disagree: these traditional subjects

are his as well. Bellow might also assent to the next comment from Kingsley, that “the dress in which these abstractions are clothed must be contemporary,” and that “the contemporary details must be right.”33 In these remarks, Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow seem to share a similar, realistic concern for mimetic representation, contemporaneity, and the

commonality of human experience. After all, Bellow does not to any degree approximate the linguistic gamesmanship of Nabokov. Nor does he share Nabokov’s love of literary puzzles or of texts that playfully erode the aesthetic distance between writer and text. One would be mistaken, however, to assume that Kingsley ever endorsed the Bellovian canon. On the contrary, their surface agreements mask a deeper antagonism, one to which Martin was neither blind nor immune. Only once, it appears, has Bellow spoken negatively of Kingsley in public, although he was the subject of many conversations with Martin.

Paul Fussell’s book The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters records how Bellow once described Kingsley as “an over-estimated writer affecting the high social style of club curmudgeon.” By way of re-

joinder, Kingsley eventually declared that “John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow.”3+ Despite their superficial resemblances, Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow part company when

confronting two interrelated questions: whether an author has any express duty to diagnose the contemporary Zezfgezst, and, of course, what style he should employ in such a presentation. In an interview with Dale Salwak in 1975, Kingsley denied that the job of the novelist was to represent the contemporary scene: if authors

The Amises on American Literature « 53 were any good, he argued, they might find themselves doing that naturally; but “that’s not something you can intentionally try to do,” because if you try, you become “either propagandist or trivial.” Given his interest in social satire, Kingsley never objected to Bellow’s valuation of realism or to his attempts to depict contemporary life. However, he did object to Bellow’s prophetic voice, the Tiresian intonations of his narrators. As anyone who has read Lucky Jim can confirm, such oracular assumptions would verge dangerously close to the unmitigated pretensions of the characters Bertrand and Professor Welch, whose affections threaten to harden into solipsism. In Experience, Martin touches upon the key differences nicely: “Saul Bellow, much to the furtherance of his spiritual isolation, writes about the self from the perspective of the soul, the permanent soul. Such a perspective was available to my father’s poetry but not to his fiction, which is firmly social, quotidian and end-stopped; his

world, in a judgement of John Updike’s that I cannot get out of my head, is ‘stiflingly human.’”?>

By historical coincidence, Lucky Jim would appear soon after one of Bellow’s most respected works — The Adventures of Augie March (1953) —

and we can glimpse the two men’s antithetical approaches through Kingsley’s review of that novel in the Spectator. Overall, Kingsley evaluated the novel semifavorably, although a skimming reader could easily overlook this fact. Initially criticizing the book’s expansive scope, Kingsley wrote that Augie March is a “very long book, which could be taken as a cue for prattling about epic and breadth of scope and all-inclusive vision of life.” But “in fact,” he continued, “what we have is a very long book.” Symbolically correcting his father’s review forty years later — much as he had earlier done with Lo/ita— Martin would state that Augie

March was the unequivocal victor in the quest for the Great American Novel. Kingsley’s critique, however, faulted both the scope and the style of Bellow’s work. Mourning the novel’s loose, episodic structure — especially Bellow’s 150-page delay in setting the narrative in motion— Kingsley lamented the rendering of Augie’s early environment, which

abounded in “patches of that highly poetical, neologising style which

marks the American sentimental vein.” |

Throughout his evaluation, Kingsley relied on a pattern of analysis in which praise was quickly established, then qualified. ‘Two sentences after complimenting Bellow for creating an “important” work that was

54 e Critical Cartography also an “entertainment,” for example, Kingsley mentioned that the narrative sorely lacked “wit and astringency.” As late as the mid-198o0s, Kingsley would echo this complaint, writing to Larkin that when reading Bellow, you must “reconcile yourself to never getting a single spark

out of the writing.” In yet another letter, Kingsley would invoke the name of Ronald Firbank, claiming that “he summed up all the crappy things about novels that Saul Bellow left unsummed-up.” Finally, in one of the more comically understated lines in the Augie March review, Kingsley provided a hint of the “wit and astringency” he found lacking in Bellow: after tallying the book’s numerous deficits, he claimed they

were “only the important ones.” These tonal and thematic criticisms would reappear in an essay titled “Sacred Cows,” in which Kingsley lamented how painful it was to watch Bellow try to “pick his way between the unidiomatic on the one hand and the affected on the other.” Such linguistic awkwardness, he continued, was invariably intertwined with the lack of tradition that so marred American literature. “No coherent tradition could emerge,” Kingsley asserted, from America’s melting pot of nationality and heritage. Lacking the guidance of a viable tradition, a writer became “nervously self-assertive, an individualist lost in a crowd of individualists.”37

Such objections can of course be seen in the light of Matthew Arnold’s and TT. S. Eliot’s attempts to legitimize literary tradition, or F. R. Leavis’s attempts to solidify it, or even as echoes of the Little Englandism that infected English writers in the years following the Second World War. But they also reflect Kingsley’s most entrenched literary values, his aversion to stylistic pretension and to violations of the sacred contract between reader and writer. In Kingsley’s critique, one recognizes his familiar groan that experimental prose led only to full stops, to fictive dead ends. One notes as well his literary nationalism, his sweeping condemnation of American literature. What infuriated Kingsley about the stylistic examples of Nabokov and Bellow—as well as his own son Martin —was these authors’ willful insistence upon voice at the expense of narration and common sense. Jogether, they represented the polarities of stylistic indulgence, cautiously ranging from the exuberant to the oracular. Writing in 1984, Kingsley would seize upon this Dionysian indulgence, evincing pleasure in disliking Martin's novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a book that Martin has directly attributed

The Amises on American Literature « 55 to Bellow’s influence. To Larkin, Kingsley wrote, “I laughed heartily at your excellent jest about Martin's book. You almost had me believing you sort of, well, enjoyed it or something, ha ha ha. If I didn’t know you better, I'd, etc. I hated its way of constantly reminded [sic] me of Nabokov. But of course I’m very old-fashioned. Set in my ways, what? I ex-

pect you read a lot of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Norman Maaaaghgh [sic]. . . .°38 In brief, whereas Nabokov assaulted Kingsley’s stylistic sensibilities with ceaselessly effulgent prose, Bellow attacked

his narrative prohibitions against didacticism and tone. Although Bellow abjures Nabokov’s structural manipulations, he too emblazons his texts with ludic joy, transcending the reticence of Kingsley’s precepts. Together, these two authors assailed Kingsley’s more traditional realist principles, either externally, as in Nabokov’s case, from outside the parameters of the mode; or internally, as with Bellow, from within the paradigm itself.

If Martin witnessed the literary careers of Nabokov and Bellow, gleaning valuable lessons about stylistic innovation and prophetic tone, he also paid close attention to Philip Roth, who acts as an admonishing

literary exemplum. Roth's influence is admittedly less powerful than that of either Nabokov or Bellow, but Roth is an instructive model for Martin's own explorations with narration. He is another contemporary of Kingsley Amis, and not surprisingly, the elder Amis spared no breath in excoriating his novels. For both Amises, Roth imparts stylistic lessons relating to the limits of fictional sexuality and of autobiographical prose. He complements Nabokov in the former respect, therefore, and Bellow in the latter.

Philip Roth: Egocentric Narration Over the course of his career, Martin has written at least eight reviews of Philip Roth’s novels, and in each he has exhibited a qualified, restrained enthusiasm for Roth's literary program. Individual novels often fail, trapped in the vortex of their autobiographical subject, but they never fail to make a lasting impression on Martin. Perhaps that is because Martin and Roth both share a common theme, that of thwarted satisfaction — “how the crudities of reality subvert our most dignified hopes’ — that is remarkably similar to Bellow’s grand theme of negative

56 « Critical Cartography transcendence, immersion within the maelstrom of universal human wants and weaknesses.3? Of course, such a theme is Nabokovian as well, indicative of the dichotomy between the griminess of reality and the redemptive artistry of language. But Roth has something unique to contribute to this particular triad of influences, and it is none other than his own version of what could effectively be labeled “egocentric narration.”

After nearly four decades of postmodernism, the characteristics of egocentric narration are rather easy to define. Certainly, one can expect a close proximity of narrator and author, a near erasure of aesthetic distance. In addition, egocentric narration approximates autobiography in that it is characterized by a highly personalized idiolect, the dialect not of the tribe but of the self. Exhibiting an exuberance, or compulsivity, for introspection, painfully honest confessions dismantle the protective layers surrounding the narrative self. Not surprisingly, a crucial aspect of

this type of narration—indeed, often its instigating force—is sexual conquest. On a primary level, the sexual drive energizes the narrative drive. Although historically this fact has inspired the controversy surrounding Roth's (and both Amises’) work, it finds its fullest force not in titillation but as a necessary subset of characterization. In a 1985 interview, Martin admitted that the first question he asks himself when creating new characters is how their sexuality will convey their identity. He elaborated that sex and drink figure so prominently in his novels because “they are the magical area of ordinary life: the area where people behave very strangely and yet go on being themselves.”

Such concerns equally motivate Roth. In the first of two reviews grouped under the title “Philip Roth: No Satisfaction,” in 74e Moronic Inferno, Martin identifies three distinct types of female characters in Roth’s novels, and these types illuminate the influence of Portnoys Complaint upon Martin’s own depictions of women, especially in the controversial novels London Fields and Money, which are most often cited as examples of Martin’s presumed literary misogyny.” According to Martin, the first type of Rothian woman falls under the category of The Girl Who Will Do Anything, of which the classic example is The Monkey from Portnoy’ Complaint. Despite the animal imagery of her reductive tag, The Monkey (and characters like her such as Drenka in Sabbath’ Theatre), tend ultimately to produce a willful regret, a narrative uneasiness about the ways they are “unfrightened by

The Amises on American Literature « 57 their own waywardness.” Sexual intercourse with them seems ultimately to produce not gratification but, as the epigraph to Portnoy’ Complaint reveals, “overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.” However liberating and life affirming relations with these characters may be, their gifts of physical joy are fleeting. Martin labels the second type The Ball-Breaker, whose mission is to “ensnare, flatten and stomp on the Roth man,” rendering him impotent and sexually confused. In Portnoy’s Complaint this role is assumed by Alexander’s mother, Sophie. To her son, she bestows a hefty

burden of guilt and shame, a constant watchfulness, a supercharged Superego. It is from her that Portnoy acquires the fullest sense of socially normative behavior; it is against her that he ostensibly reacts. Intimidated by the threat of his maturity, her unacknowledged duty is to tether her son to the restrictive space of hearth and home. Martin labels the third type of Roth woman The Big Woman; she is a “tender realist, methodical, protective, self-abnegating.” Possessed of a “determined if precarious working relationship with reality,” she “longs to rescue the Roth man for the sane world—she is, above all, unpsychotic.”4! But The Big Woman, for all her charms, is a sexual washout in bed, the irrevocable undoing of any relationship in a novel by Roth or Martin Amis. In Portnoys Complaint she finds voice in the character of The Pumpkin (Kay Campbell), The Pilgrim (Sarah Albott Maulsby), and even later, in the guise of The Jewish Pumpkin, Naomi. All of these women remain unattainable, all withhold sexual favors, and all trap Portnoy inescapably within his desires. Rothian women, as well as those in Martin’s novels, therefore assume variant typologies, ranging from lamias to innocents, predators to prey. The fact that they can be typed is not cause for alarm, of course—or at least not impassioned alarm. After all, contrapuntal male stereotypes can be traced throughout literature from the demonic lover, vampiric and criminal, to the knight in shining armor,

proprietary and royal. Rather, what is important for Martin in these Rothian types is the thematic interplay of guilt, desire, and unattainable salvation. Speaking with Susan Morrison in 1990, Martin explained that sexin — his novels suffers from the rampant mediation that permeates all aspects of modern life. Noting that “authentic experience” now seems difficult to find, he explained that his interest in the conflict stems from the tension

58 « Critical Cartography between two emotional extremes: one that is transcendent, stemming from feelings that “the earth moves, this great union is found, and the self is lost”; and one that is “athletic,” focused upon the “hot lay, where the self is in fact not lost in the moment but is masterful and dominant.” The first derived from D. H. Lawrence and romantic poetry, Martin explained; the latter derived from advertising and pornography. Although he admitted that there’s a lot of romanticism in his novels, he acknowledged that “it’s thwarted by distortion and perversity, false commercial images on tv [sic], literature, and pornography.”*2 For the characters in both Martin’s and Roth’s fictions, romantic liberation remains the self’s most urgent quest. Tragically, however, the sexual act fails to guarantee ecstatic transformation. Although the characters may talk a great deal about sex, they actually achieve relatively little. Instead, the sexual pleasure they attain often does no more than reinforce the quiddity of their

isolation and despair. Hardly ecstatic, it is more prison than release, buttressing the labyrinths against which they grope for exits. The chief benefit of a novel such as Portnoy’s Complaint is that it provided Martin with a stylistic example of how (and how not) to incorporate sexuality into prose. What differentiates such narration from that of Nabokov in Lolita, however, is the degree to which Roth prohibits his narrator from transmuting his experiences into art. For Alexander Portnoy, transcendence becomes ultimately impossible; he is endlessly ensnared in the mundane. Although he shares with Nabokov’s Humbert an exuberant narration and a celebratory egotism that can be, often at the same moment, both self-affirming and self-abnegating, Nabokov's narrator attempts to transcend his crimes through artifice. “I am think-

ing of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” he explains at the novel’s end, “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” This rarefied realm is forever denied Alexander Portnoy, for he cannot escape the prison of his wants and desires. Writing elsewhere about Roth's 1995 novel Sabbath’ Theatre, whose narration, like that of Portnoys Complaint, is chiefly “performative,” Martin continues this critique, noting, “ he dangers of writing concertedly about sex are numerous, and Roth skirts none of them. To his left, the Scylla of schlock; to his right, the Charybdis of pornography. ... After a while it provokes in the reader only one desire: the desire to skip. You toil on, looking for the clean bits.”*

The Amises on American Literature .« 59 Roth’s egocentric narration thus departs from Nabokov’s in its uneven attempts to maintain a redemptive, transcendent lexicon. Furthermore, it diverges from Bellow’s as well in that its gaze is reductive and limited, verging upon solipsism. For Martin, this is a common condition in Roth’s work, one that counterbalances the flashes of brilliance that Roth's prose can attain. Despite his seeming universality, Portnoy’s complaints remain painfully his own. Although Roth may succeed in portraying an especially vibrant and energetic narrator, Portnoy’s Complaint lacks both the formal artistry and the prophetic intonations that characterize Nabokov’s and Bellow’s work. Roth’s utterance is too personalized and limited, and he struggles to maintain a balance between celebratory language and elevated scope. Roth deserves comparison as a literary mentor alongside Nabokov and Bellow because he indicates a border, an admonishing frontier. The unevenness of Roth's writing evokes in Martin a similar critical uneasiness, and it is helpful to watch Martin struggle to reconcile Roth’s stylistic strengths with his structural difficulties. Often, when reviewing Roth's work, Martin's praise is restrained, tempered by disappointment. Yet Martin's frustration arguably teaches us more about his own precepts than the boundless acclaim he heaps upon Nabokov and Bellow. Wrangling with the problems inherent in Roth’s autobiographical narration allows Martin to think more clearly about his own literary strivings, especially because he shares many of Roth’s literary tendencies. Of course, Martin’s own work has faced charges of tonal imbalance, sexual explicitness, and egocentric, self-referential prose, often from his own father, Kingsley. These complaints resemble Martin’s about Roth, and they center upon one literary point: the loss of narrative control, which is the topic of Martin's comments about Roth’s My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. In these brief reviews, Martin reaches some significant conclusions about the potential limits of autobiographical narration, something Kingsley had long proclaimed and that Martin is still working to resolve in his own writing. In the second section of the essay “Philip Roth: No Satisfaction,” Martin describes the narrative failures of Roth’s My Life as a Man, which stems, he feels, from an atrophied artistic vision. Noting Roth’s movement “Jeyond autobiography,” Martin argues that Roth no longer perceived life through the “selective eye” of the novelist but that he instead

60 « Critical Cartography observed his past with the “fastidious frown of the literary critic, grading, evaluating, trying to separate the serious from the unserious.” Invoking his earlier review of Portnoy, Martin notes that there still remained no reprieve, no release of hold, from the narrator’s swirling self-immersion. Moreover, My Life as a Man seemed disturbingly derivative: similar to Portnoy, Kepesh (the protagonist of My Life as a Man) appears to be “lost in a truly lugubrious solipsism.” My Life as a Man exhibits an additional and more serious weakness, however, in that all ironic distance has vanished; Martin notes that “nothing separates author and narrator; Roth sees no more than Kepesh sees.”“4 In this respect, Martin's criticism approximates Kingsley’s earlier denunciation of Nabokov's Lo/ita. In Martin's eyes, many of Roth’s Zuckerman novels (of which My Life as a Man was the first) have not under-

gone sufficient artistic transformation: they read like “[e]xperience reworked, displaced, mordantly heightened—but not distanced, and not transformed.” Identifying limitations of verisimilitude and voice, Martin writes that there is “not enough laughter or lyricism, . . . not enough happening on the page”: the Zuckerman novels look like “life before art has properly finished with it.”4° For Martin, there could be no greater alarm to signal the limits of autobiographical narration. Whatever powerful attraction he feels toward Roth’s use of language — noting that he has read the novel “twice with constant disapproval and no loss of interest and pleasure” — he cannot reconcile Roth’s scrupulous realism with his stylistic achievements. In essence, this opposition between style and scope reveals a nuanced conflict between the lessons Martin has assimilated from his other men-

tors, Nabokov and Bellow. As does Roth, Martin exists in a middle ground between these two authors, borrowing freely from their examples but striving to clear an imaginative space for his own voice. In only one novel — The Counterlife, the concluding work in the Zuckerman series —

did Roth succeed without qualification in Martin’s mind. That novel, Martin has written, 1s “a work of such luminous formal perfection that it more or less retired postmodern fiction.”4¢ Whereas he had earlier noted structural imbalances between Roth's solipsistic narrators and the worlds they wished to depict, The Counterlife shows him that Nabokov’s perspectival intensity can be wedded to Bellow’s prophetic expansionism.

The Amises on American Literature .« 61 With this masterpiece, Roth finally emerges as an exemplum for Martins own experiments with autobiographical narration. In short, Martin has gleaned from Roth important lessons in the risks of using egocentric narration to depict themes of psychosexual en-

| trapment. Drawing repeatedly upon the corrosive effects of the postmodern world upon authentic experience, Roth's corpus verges upon reiteration. In instances where this occurs, Martin's criticism draws upon the same criteria that his father used to indict Martin's stylistic masters,

revealing some common ground between the Amises and validating Kingsley’s more traditional realist ideals. More important, however, is that by critically engaging the imbalance of Roth’s productions Martin _ succeeds in clarifying his own stylistic and thematic preoccupations. Consciously or indirectly, he symbolically uses Roth to free himself not only from his father’s critical influence but also from the potent examples of his chief mentors, Nabokov and Bellow. In the foreword to The War against Cliché (2001), he states the matter succinctly, reflecting upon “the corruption of power” that sometimes marked his early reviews: “I am also struck by how hard I sometimes was on writers who (I erroneously felt) were trying to influence me: Roth, Mailer, Ballard.”4” In 1969, Kingsley Amis reviewed Portnoy’s Complaint for Harper's maga-

zine, a review that is reprinted as “In Slightly Different Form” in his collection of essays, What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions (1970). As one might expect when Kingsley encountered ludic prose, the review was generally unfavorable, and Kingsley’s comments reflect

his entrenched opinions regarding the narrative transgressions of explicit sexuality. Whereas Martin vacillates in supporting Roth's literary program, Kingsley never relinquished his claim that Roth’s novels were

distastefully graphic. Never one to reject iconoclasm on ideological grounds, Kingsley nonetheless accused Roth—as well as Nabokov and Martin — of needless literary exhibitionism. Kingsley’s critique of Portnoy’s Complaint had three main components. First, Kingsley faulted Roth for subordinating the demands of

narrative and character to the facile affirmations of tone. Next, he argued that this stentorian voice transgressed the necessary distance between reader and text, imposing itself upon the reader. Finally, he

62. »« Critical Cartography disliked Portnoy’s overly ecstatic revelations, which disbanded the novel’s structure, rendering it fragmentary and incoherent. Referring to Portnoy’s seemingly endless descriptions of sexual conquest, Kingsley drew attention to the communal experience of reading, a rhetorical ma-

neuver that invoked his sacred contract between reader and writer. What Portnoy does is “gone into in depth,” Kingsley wrote. “Some of this is all right, and far from unbelievable. But, since reading is a sort of social experience, in the sense that it is like having somebody talk to

you, some of it is embarrassing, and Portnoy’s straight-to-audience, tape-recording, person-to-person style of address intensifies the embarrassment. For Kingsley, that embarrassment was not simply a violation

of taste but one of manners, an uncomfortable situation wherein the reader is manipulated into becoming a confidant. By contrast, Kingsley believed that a writer could only hope to put the comic aspect of sex into fiction. All else was disillusionment and folly. “To write about actual sex activity — what people do in bed, as opposed to people's sexual interests, schemes, seduction campaigns—except comically, I think, is impossible,” he told Dale Salwak in 1975.*8

Chief among Kingsley’s other complaints was the charge of structural instability, a recurrent reproach from his earlier criticism of Nabokov and Bellow. According to Kingsley, Roth foreswore the idea of coherent narrative approximately three-fourths of the way through the novel, at precisely the point where Portnoy delineates his experiences with shzkses. In these virtual appendices or “scraps,” not even the force of

Roth's demonstrative voice could weave the fragments together. The problem, Kingsley maintained, was that Roth took what used to be a small part of the novel and exaggerated it into the whole: although individuality had “always been an ingredient” in first-person narration, it became smothering in Roth's example. “It’s a// the tone of voice,” Kingsley lamented; not only was the novel written in the first person, it was written “to and for the first person, by, with, and from the first person.”*” Given the painful example of D. H. Lawrence, Kingsley noted with

dismay that it had “become all right to supplement the deficiencies of one’s personal life as source material, not by re-arranging it, editing it, extrapolating from it, but merely by coating it with style and tone of voice.” Whereas Kingsley had earlier criticized Nabokov for violating narrative

credibility and linguistic stamina, he penalized Roth additionally, for

Lhe Amises on American Literature . 63

coupling these literary transgressions with literary impropriety. Although Portnoys Complaint was presented in an equally seductive, collo-

quial style, it was notoriously more graphic and more tonally unbalanced than Lo/t¢a. For all its impassioned assertions, the novel remained for Kingsley “a heavily orchestrated yell of rage.” Nine years later, serving on the committee that would legislate the Arts Council fiction com-

petition, Kingsley would comically chastise this stylistic indulgence, writing to Larkin, “When I tell you that so far C. P. SNOW is EASILY the most readable, stylish witty. ... See? But then there’s Man of Nazareth by Anthony Burgess to come, and wllLiAm GoLdInG, and $hilip Roth, and Doris Lessing oh sweet jesus shoot me dear christ shoo [sic].” Famously, he ended his review of Portnoy’s Complaint with a celebrated plea for restraint: “Could we have a modest return, or advance” to “fiction as fiction?”® Kingsley and Martin both agreed that Roth’s work reflects the limits of imagination. Although the Amises required different texts to reach their conclusions, they concurred about the barriers Roth’s egocentric narration would face. A writer, Kingsley noted, is “doing well if... once in his career, something turns up in his experience which can, without too much alteration, be transcribed in the form of a short story, let alone a novel,” and Martin was left to wonder the same thing, asking whether Roth’s vision would “re-expand, as it seems to yearn to do,” or whether it would continue to “squirm deeper into the tunnel of the self.”5! Dissolving the lines between fiction and reality, Roth exemplified the limits of Nabokovian stylistic exuberance, which could implode unless molli-

fied by formal restraint. His work also furnished some of the earliest agreement between Amis pére et fils, as both men questioned the confines of Roth's scope, his precarious balance between solipsism and universality. Of course, Roth also provided valuable instruction in the diffi-

culty of depicting sexuality in prose, ranging from sentimentality to incredulity.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which Kingsley and Martin Amis disagreed over the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. At its heart, this debate was energized by questions of style and tone, characterization and voice, realism and experimentation that

quickly exceeded the limits of personal petulance. Their professional

64 « Critical Cartography antithesis surfaced in their evaluation of these three exemplary American writers, and their comments illuminate how Martin defines his literary identity in stark opposition to his father’s. Given the influence of Martin’s American mentors, it should come as no surprise that his own style is more often categorized as American than British. Certainly,

when contrasted to the distinctively English rhythms of Kingsley’s work, this claim is irrefutable. Martin’s adoption of an American lineage through such writers as Nabokov, Bellow, and Roth, among others, has resulted in a potent transnationalism that itself has strongly influenced other contemporary novelists. Neither Kingsley nor Martin ever relented from chastising (or championing) their American alliances, and neither could have ignored for long the psychological implications of their arguments. As did Kingsley, Nabokov, Bellow, and Roth all rose to prominence in the 1950s; Bellow and Roth are even Kingsley’s exact generational contemporaries. [hese three American writers all employ an energized, personal style, displaying a preference for self-referential, first-person narration and for depicting internally charged, contingent worlds that impede their characters’ attempts at self-definition and transcendence. When so combined, these things were anathema to Kingsley, as Martin clearly understood. Long before Martin even entered his teens, Kingsley had publicly pledged his artistic allegiances, and Martin's contrarian reworking of his father’s norms was both calculated and direct, a revaluation aimed to legitimize Martin’s own techniques within the Amis family tradition. By appropriating the lessons of his American mentors

and using them to rework his father’s techniques, Martin began the necessary process of supplanting his father’s professional authority. Although he never came close to rejecting his father personally, these authors became his surrogate literary fathers, helpful allies in the nascent civil war against Kingsley’s more famous professional precedent. From

Nabokov, Martin took a formal artistry and verbal gamesmanship; from Bellow, he adopted an epic scope and prophetic tone; and from Roth, he evolved a comic exuberance and a method — distinctly different from Nabokov’s—for treating sexuality and egotism on the page.

Even today, these authors continue to exert their influence, although their voices have become more subdued as Martin’s own has become more self-assured.

The Amises on American Literature « 65 Never participants in a suppressed oedipal rivalry, the Amises engaged in direct, head-to-head combat over formal techniques, genres, and modes. Furthermore, they did so in full awareness of each other's stances and willingness to retaliate. This would seem exaggerated were it not for the fact that these Americans writers so dramatically contradict Kingsley’s aesthetic precepts. Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth: Martin could not have selected any more distasteful examples to wield against his father. In championing the work of this particular triumvirate, he intentionally challenged his father’s literary authority, opposed his more famous judgments, and symbolically issued his own emancipation proclamation, a critical declaration of independence.

- English Literat Austen, Waugh, Larkin | ss T think of myself like a sort of mid- or late-Victorian person, not in | , outlook but in the position of writing a bit of poetry... , writing novels, being interested in questions of the day and occasionally

, _ writing about that. I’m not exactly an entertainer pure and simple, not exactly an artist pure and simple, certainly not an incisive critic ,

| of society, and certainly not a political figure though I'm interested , , in politics. I think I’m just a combination of some of those things. , , _ —Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis,” by Dale Salwak :

__ If the representative authors of American literature sent the Amises re-

| treating to their corners, defensive and alert, then it seems logical to | _ consider which English writers they found most influential, most in| structive. Can one identify, on the other side of the Atlantic, an equivalent line in the sand? Did English literature inspire the same enmity and _ contention as its American counterpart? To answer these questions one

must first consider the Amises’ relationship with English literary tradi-

: tion, that national network of predecessors that T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis found so imposing.

| _ Literature is “a talent contest,” Martin once quipped, and every | reader must find his “personal great tradition.” Thankfully, both Kings_ ley and Martin Amis have spoken of the major English influences upon 66

The Amises on American Literature »« 65 | | Never participants in a suppressed oedipal rivalry, the Amises en- | gaged in direct, head-to-head combat over formal techniques, genres, | and modes. Furthermore, they did so in full awareness of each other’s stances and willingness to retaliate. This would seem exaggerated were it not for the fact that these Americans writers so dramatically contradict Kingsley’s aesthetic precepts. Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth: Martin could not have selected any more distasteful exam-

ples to wield against his father. In championing the work of this partic- | -_-ular triumvirate, he intentionally challenged his father's literary author-

| ity, opposed his more famous judgments, and symbolically issued his own emancipation proclamation, a critical declaration of independence.

68 . Critical Cartography the limits of stylistic innovation), English literature helped them historicize their conflicts, interrogating issues of irony and wit, morality and class.

Jane Austen: Mannered Morality In 1957 Kingsley Amis reviewed the Macdonald reprint of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park for the Spectator. The essay was entitled “What Became of Jane Austen?” and it would inspire three letters to the editor, a rejoinder from Kingsley, and eventually assume the lead position in Kingsley’s first collection of essays, What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions (1970). A balanced yet pointed appraisal, the essay is important for

two primary reasons: it illuminates the interplay in Kingsley’s work among characterization, morality, and class; and it crystallizes his reasons for repudiating Leavisite literary canons. By denouncing the didacticism of Mansfield Park on both moral and ideological grounds, Kingsley helped clarify the precepts of his own moral fiction and criticism. As was common for Kingsley, he could not take such a stance without angering the foremost literary critic of his day. Kingsley began his review by questioning the merits of Mansfield Park. A pointed treatment of the social imperatives of upper-class manners and mores, the novel seemed to Kingsley to show few signs of a deepening moral vision. Instead, and in contrast to her earlier works, it seemed morally deficient, uncomfortably championing the verities of class and status instead of satirically reappraising them. Arguing that an aesthetic hollowness resounded throughout Austen’s characterizations, Kingsley lamented that the author had sacrificed her usual equipoise for didacticism. Although he admitted to liking the novel’s “invigorating coldness” and praised its dialogue — which seemed to reach “new heights

of flexibility and awareness” that anticipated the modern novel— Kingsley criticized the novel for philosophical, not aesthetic, reasons. He deemed Mansfield Park to be a book of overbearing “moral oughts,” writing, “Although it never holds up the admirable as vicious, it continually and essentially holds up the vicious as admirable, an inversion ren-

dered all the more insidious by being associated with such dash and skill, and all the more repugnant by the co-presence of a moralistic fervor which verges at times on the evangelical.” Noting that the novel’s

Lhe Amises on Enghtsh Literature .« 69 characters exceeded all limits of credibility and verisimilitude, Kingsley chastised Austen for creating a coterie of stock figures who embodied rival ideologies. Fanny Price appeared a “monster of complacency and

pride,” the epitome of egotism “unredeemed by any humor or lightness.” Similarly, Edmund seemed “vitiated by a narrow and unreflecting pomposity’; his boorishness and misguided sense of decorum rendered him, too, morally reprehensible.’ Were these oppositions arranged for satire, Kingsley reasoned, then the fault would be minor: in other works, after all, Austen had created

similar groups to illuminate the redemptive qualities of her central pairs. What troubled Kingsley about Mansfield Park, however, was Austen's surprisingly unbalanced moral tone: None of her other novels, he argued, rivaled Mansfield Park for its “habit of censoriousness where there ought to be indulgence, and indulgence where there ought to be censure” (13). Problematically, Austen appeared to celebrate the dubious attitudes of Edmund and Fanny, despite the characters’ self-satisfaction and pride. For Kingsley, these failings of class and egotism assumed their most incredulous forms in the novel when Fanny returns to her Portsmouth home, finds everybody underbred, and faults even her own mother for refusing to “take much notice of Miss Price from Mansfield Park” (13). During this crisis of conscience, Fanny sacrifices her moral

integrity by renouncing her heritage, substituting the values of the gentry for those of her family. Moreover, her self-serving horror at Maria's elopement with Henry Crawford was enough for Kingsley to “exclude pity in any word or thought”: humorless, fatuous, and egocentric, Fanny appeared to lack all vestiges of “self-knowledge, generosity, and humility” (16). Displaying an utter lack of sympathy or civility, especially toward people she considered her inferiors, Fanny's complacent morality eroded for Kingsley the redemptive qualities that Austen may have intended when she opposed Maria and Julia Bertram at the onset. If Kingsley was disturbed by Fanny Price’s morality, he was equally

troubled by Edmund's, whose comeuppance seemed illogically constructed. Laboring to affirm Edmund's participation in the Lover’s Vows theatricals as indicative of his moral stumbling, Austen sought to portray his demise as sympathetically tragic. Kingsley, however, perceived an ideological inconsistency within Austen's depiction, noting that Edmund objects to the play on untenable moral grounds; even to rehearse

70 « Critical Cartography it “must do away with all restraints.” Alluding to Edmund's moral incon-

sistencies, Kingsley argued that his “reluctant consent to participate, which we are invited to see as the tragic overthrow of a noble mind worked on by Mary Crawford, becomes a squalid and ridiculous bellyflop, and his consequent humiliation is deserved in two sense, since it 1s earned —can we really be reading Jane Austen? — not by being too priggish, but by not being priggish enough” (15-16). Edmund assumes the posture of someone who takes insult at violations of propriety, but only a few chapters later, he and Fanny both “launch into a canting, pietistic tirade” against Mary Crawford’s brother-in-law while still in her presence.

In short, the thematic oppositions that had less seriously marred earlier works became aesthetically illogical and morally distasteful in Mansfield Park. In the final analysis, Kingsley felt that Austen validated a conservative ethos that squandered her “enviable moral poise” (14). Sacrificing realism for conventionality, humor for respectability, she undermined the book’s narrative and moral credibility. “What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed),” Kingsley concluded, “who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? Far from being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave.

That is another way of saying that her judgment and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption” (17). The exclamatory assurance of Kingsley’s remarks is not what is most significant about this early essay, however. Mansfield Park is among the more didactic of Austen's novels, and Kingsley simply responds in kind. Instead, and in a broader context, Kingsley’s review should be viewed as

a personal reappraisal of Leavisite attitudes. In the same manner that Lucky Jim (1954) rebelled against the /iterary examples of preceding generations, especially modernist innovations with time and consciousness, “What Became of Jane Austen?” —published just three years later —rebelled against the critica/ imperatives of the past. This revalua-

tive impulse manifested itself through Kingsley’s disagreements with Q. D. Leavis, who had written the introduction to the edition of Mansjreld Park that Kingsley reviewed. Dismissing as oversimplified Leavis's claim that the Lover’s Vows spectacle is “well grounded in conventional notions of decorum,” Kingsley noted that one should expect a “more intelligent, more liberal, more manly” response from a character such as

Edmund. Even a quick reading of the Lover's Vows play, he asserted,

The Amises on English Literature. 71 shows that it is “innocuous rubbish” (15), wholly unfit to bring about the comeuppance that both Austen and Leavis desired.

This instance of critical head-butting would not be the last to involve Kingsley with the Leavises. Five years later in 1961, when both men were fellows at Cambridge, F. R. Leavis would repay Kingsley by calling him a pornographer. Then, in Dickens the Novelist—which was released in the same year as Kingsley’s collection What Became of Jane Austen?—the Leavises would relegate Kingsley’s work to a derogatory footnote, ridiculing the thinness of his social criticism when contrasted

with that of other writers, especially Dickens. Finally, Q. D. Leavis would lambaste Kingsley and his contemporaries in “Che Englishness of the English novel,” calling Lucky Jim an irresponsible work that is “surely only a puerile scenario for a cinema-type farce.” Using Kingsley as a fulcrum against which to leverage society's moral degradation, she lamented that “Uhough he has gone from bad to worse, English Literature academics write respectful articles on Amis’s novels and Amis has become, significantly, an Establishment figure.” In response to Kingsley’s own tradition, which ran from Henry Fielding to Angus Wilson

and emphasized comedy over morality, she remarked simply that his productions represented a “complete rejection of the English tradition.” Although Kingsley refrained in his Memoirs from chastising the Leavises in any detail, he did proclaim that on the whole, F. R. Leavis seemed to have “done more harm than good to literature, never mind the study of literature.” In their purest form, these accusations and rebuttals show Kingsley claiming territory in the ongoing debate between realism and modernism. Taking on two of the most influential critics of his day, he legitimated his own authority as a rival literary critic.

One would be wrong, of course, to assert that Kingsley rejected Austen or the Leavises in toto, for they do follow some similar paths. In a 25 February 1946 letter to Larkin, for instance, Kingsley calls Fiction and the Reading Public “sodding good,” although he would later modify his position by confessing that “Mrs Leavis is more acceptable to me when she's attacking craps than when she’s praising ‘good’ people.” In addition, both Kingsley and the Leavises emphasized the moral presence of literature, although the senior Amis felt no compunction about letting comedy usurp morality. As did Austen, Kingsley rebelled against the dominant literary modes of his time, something for which he was

72 « Critical Cartography given insufficient credit by the Leavises. Whereas Austen reworked the

gothic and sentimental novel, parodying their melodramatic plots, Kingsley rejected the examples of high modernism, excoriating the elemental reductivism of D. H. Lawrence and chastizing the Bergsonian experiments with time and consciousness that distinguished the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Finally, Austen and Kingsley both criticized the lack of realism in contemporary fiction, the falsity of life that Austen addressed in her “Plan of a Novel” and her famous parody of the Gothic novel in chapter 20 of Northanger Abbey.' Kingsley, however, was uncomfortable with the moral foundations of Austen's art, which the Leavises praised. He was troubled by her authorial endorsement of gentility and class, and he disliked her propensity to maintain mannered civility in the face of absurdity. Mansfield Park failed for him because it upheld hierarchies of class instead of reworking them: it celebrated conformity over individualism, diminishing humanism and comedy, in contrast to Kingsley’s more subversive revaluations in such early novels as Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling (1955), and I Like It Here

(1958). Even though Kingsley’s later works would reveal an increasing and often aggressive conservatism, he always maintained that in contrast to Austen, his conservatism stemmed from the abundant absurdity of the external world: even in his latest novels, he never endorsed a naive

and untested submission to the norm. He never valued complacency over individualism; he never sacrificed humanism for class. For Austen, especially in Mansfield Park, manners appeared to unify

civil society. They exposed the falsity of the external world, with its crudity and villainy, and they asserted a temperate, restraining order within social organizations. These tensions figure prominently in the novels of the Amises too, but in contrast to Austen, Kingsley and Martin both work to subvert social hierarchies, to undermine conformity and class, to oppose placidity. Even though all three authors depict mo-

rality as a choice between overlapping, not contrasting, possibilities, neither Kingsley nor Martin foreground it to the degree that Austen does. Instead, they problematize all forms of social ethics and codes, eroding the ideological assurances that enable Austen’s moralizing assurance. Individually, the Amises each reworked Austen's themes and sensibility to suit their alternate versions of reality. Interestingly, they appeared to swap critical positions on this subject, as it has always been

The Amises on English Literature +. 73 Martin and not Kingsley who has championed Jane Austen despite his status as an experimental postmodern novelist whose works are stylistically antithetical to Austen's. Martin wrote two important essays on Austen during the 1990s, both of

which illuminate his own literary sensibility as much as they do Austen's. The first essay, entitled “Miss Jane’s Prime,” reviews the classic appeal of Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The second, entitled “Jane’s

World,” surveys the Austen-euphoria that swept the film industry in England and America during the mid-1ggos. Taken together, both essays provide a context for the Amises’ divergent worldviews. Their aes-

thetic disagreements over Austen's characters and themes betray a deeper philosophical opposition, as Austen functions for both Kingsley and Martin as a lens through which to focus their debates concerning the nature of modern reality. Although Martin jokes that he would welcome the inclusion of a twenty-page sex scene between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, he admits that Austen always succeeds in making “Mrs. Bennetts of us all.” Her “divine comedies of love,” with their dialectics of passion and prudence, sensibility and sense, love and money, continue to assert as much relevance for the modern world as they did for the eighteenth century. “After a long immersion in her work,” Martin confesses, echoing a comment he made about Bellow, “I find that her thought-rhythms entirely invade my own.”> Martin's fascination with Austen is much more surprising, and may be more illuminating, than his allegiances to either Nabokov or Bellow. It also prompts its own series of questions: What does Martin take from Austen that he cannot find in other mentors, including his father? How does her work continue to speak across gender lines to a late-twentieth-century audience? How does he rework her themes and her characters in his own novels, and finally, what light do these issues shed upon the conflict with his father as well as the transition from realism to postmodernism? As was Kingsley, Martin is drawn to Austen's precise use of language and dialogue. In “What Became of Jane Austen?” Kingsley acknowledged that Austen's dialogues paved the way for the modern novel, and Martin continues where his father left off: “She deals in auras and presences. Her creations fill a certain space with a certain personal style, and

74 « Critical Cartography they are shaded by their idiolects.” Her work does not urge social transfigurations or upheavals, he explained. Rather, it presents moods that

demand neither revolution nor change, gravitating toward irony, not satire: “Satire is militant irony. Irony is more long-suffering. It doesn’t incite you to transform society; it strengthens you to tolerate it.” This tonal contrast between irony and satire should be considered the first installment in Austen’s legacy to Martin. It also operates nicely within a postmodern, rather than realist, context, as it seeks to celebrate the con-

tingent moment, abandoning all hope of fixity and resolution. As George Levine and David Lodge have both observed, one of the crucial distinctions among realism, modernism, and postmodernism lies in the author’s representation of reality: whereas realist writers seek to reach through language to a stabilized empiricism underneath, and whereas modernist writers assert the extent to which reality is subjectively constructed, postmodernist writers depict reality as especially “absurd [and] meaningless, resistant to totalizing interpretations. ”° There exists a fine line between irony and complacency, of course,

which is where the Amises diverge in their assessments of Austen. Kingsley never forgave Austen for confirming the validity of social hier-

archy and class, a complaint he expressed against the latter novels of Evelyn Waugh as well. Dwelling specifically on Pride and Prejudice— which Kingsley once described as “rather nasty on the whole” — Martin

concedes that Austen seems to lose interest in her characters at the point where respectability weakens. Although he feels that of Austen's works Pride and Prejudice sounds the loudest note for romantic possibility, Martin stipulates that even Austen could not maintain that vision: dreams of respectability ultimately replaced those of romantic union — class, in other words, superceded emotion. In contrast to Kingsley, however, Martin notes that this indiscretion remains aesthetic, not political or moral. Citing the elopement of the characters Lydia Ben-

net's and Lieutenant Wickham, Martin explains that Lydia's subsequent disappearance from the novel seemed thematically logical: she has committed crimes against the novel’s dual worlds of respectability and money, and exile is the punishment they exact.’ When her elopement renders her more isolated (from either money or prudence) than Charlotte Lucas’s marriage to Mr. Collins, Austen has no choice but to write Lydia out of the book. Doing otherwise would sacrifice the novel's thematic coherence.

The Amises on Enghsh Literature « 75 It is important to note that while Martin does not praise Austen for her artistic preyudice—her authorial noblesse oblige — he also refuses to

bring extraliterary criteria to bear upon the text. This maneuver parallels his vindication (following Kingsley’s earlier criticism) of Vladimir Nabokov, and consequently, James Diedrick is correct to label Martin a

modernistic critic who refuses to violate the edict of art for art’s sake. Hermetically enclosed, accountable only to itself—a “crystalline” artifact in Iris Murdoch's famous definition —art functions for Martin not as contract but as covenant: it is a sophisiticated exercise in language.® Rather than rejecting Austen's literary schema outright, as Kingsley had done, Martin reworks her methods through his use of irony and theme, updating her aesthetic criteria for an unstable postmodern world. In opposition to Austen, neither of the Amises loses respect for his characters when propriety does. Instead, social separatism tends to define their characters, who are most truly inspired when they assert their freedom from convention. Austen’s too-subdued iconoclasm, in other words, remains problematic for both Amises. Writing about the completed edition of Austen’s novel Sandition, Martin clarifies not only the strengths but the limitations of her novels’ genuflection toward convention: “I would argue,” he writes, “That all the pathos and eloquence of the novels derive from the characters’ subservience to convention: the reticence and constraint allow for a quiet undertow of emotion which it is impossible to simulate in more uncorseted fiction. Take away the conventions,” he concludes, “and little remains.”? If one continues to probe Martin's distinction between convention, irony and satire, moreover, one finds that it provides an explanation for the Amises’ antagonistic worldviews and methods of characterization. Through their response to Austen’s plots and themes, the Amises engage in a covert battle over the nature of modern reality and mimesis. In this respect, it is helpful to consider the “melting of Darcy’s pride” in Pride and Prejudice, which Martin viewed as the central force in the

novel. Invoking the sentiments of an earlier revaluation of Austen— Charlotte Bronté’s famous complaint that “the passions are perfectly unknown” to her— Martin criticized Austen's refusal to “descend into the chaos of unrestrained dreads and desires,” an area where she “fears to linger, even in her imagination.” By the end of the novel, Darcy appears “chastised, deepened, and democratized by love.”!° It is rare, if ever, that

such things occur in Martin’s novels, however. Instead, he celebrates

76 « Critical Cartography his heroes’ abilities to Juxuriate in chaos, which for him remains the more truthful representation of late-twentieth-century reality. Similar to W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” Martin’s fictive environments seem poised between a destructive present and an even more terrible future. Facing massive contingency, entropic decay, and destabilization on both existential and ontological levels, Martin's characters

struggle blindly against an indifferent world that promises, a la Matthew Arnold, neither joy, nor love, nor certitude, nor help for pain. By contrast, Kingsley’s characters seek stillpoints amid the chaos of postmodern life. As even a cursory glance at his novels will confirm, his characters operate from within worlds of established stability: they

are accepted by social institutions, financially secure, often middleaged and middle-class. The most frequent location for these themes’ expansion is academia, as in Lucky Jim, Jakes Thing (1978), and The Russian Girl (1992), and its professional satellites—the publishing houses and libraries in That Uncertain Feeling, I Like It Here, One Fat Englishman (1963), The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990), and The Biographer’ss Moustache (1995). Forms of propriety and convention are

constantly on parade, as they are in Austen, but these tributes to historical tradition are equally vulnerable to erosion. Often, in the narrator’s eyes, this erosion tends toward absurdity and illogic, a renunciation of all the traditional Amis hero stands for: common sense, logic, reason, humor, wit, and connection. As the character Richard Vaisey— a descendent of Jim Dixon and Jake Richardson—states in The Russian Girl, “Nobody, however learned, however wise, can stand in the way of regress.” !!

Although later Kingsley Amis novels seem to sympathize with the very middle-class values against which his early work reacts, his protagonists cherish their ability to reconcile the seeming instability of the outside world with their internal senses of reason, order, and logic. As David Lodge has argued, isolation stems from dual failures to communicate and to integrate one’s personal desires with one’s social predicament. Kingsley endorses his characters’ descent into anarchy only when the external world appears mechanistic and suffocating. Their opposition to such situations reasserts both comedy and vitality. As some critics have noted, even an early novel such as Lucky Jim shows a decided tendency toward social accommodation and reconciliation, as Jim’s final job in London might attest.!?

The Amises on English Literature» 77 Whereas Kingsley’s characters remain integrated into society (albeit lacking the status that ensures acceptance in Austen's world) Martin's

remain impulsively alienated, even when they exceed the levels of wealth or intelligence that ensure such stability. Ironically, given their generations, it is Martin's heroes, not Kingsley’s, who seem more deserving of the label “angry young men”: they are younger, more reckless in motive and action, and risk less in sacrifice or rebellion. Comprising a motley troupe ruled by perversion, compulsion, and despair, Martin's

characters subscribe to few established or conventional values. Often “infected” by time, they stubbornly refuse to yield, asserting a Nietzschean will to power that manifests itself most dramatically when they evade the boundaries of normalized society. “YIELD say the traffic signs,” the character John Self tells the reader in Money: A Suicide Note (1984), comically updating Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “but don’t you listen! Not yielding, that’s the thing. To strive, to seek, to butch it out— it’s all a question of willpower.” With its complex nexus among pride, money, love, and sex, Money can almost be called a postmodern inversion of Pride and Prejudice, an example of “undoing through outdoing,” in Jerome Meckier’s schema. Yet in Martin’s antithetical fictive world, relationships crumble under selfishness, greed, and egotism, and reality itself becomes exposed as artifice, an elaborate trick. These elements of characterization and tone derive in many ways from each author’s reworking of Austen. Both Amises fault Austen for allowing class to become “classy,” in Martin’s locution; yet beneath that

agreement, unique differences appear.'4 Although Kingsley shares Austen's realistic tendencies and her stylistic temperance, he rebels from her more mannered, subdued conventionality. Although Martin shares her deep irony and her emphasis on external forces (such as money and class) that influence social relations, he extends her thematic protocol,

creating notoriously more graphic and more deterministic texts. This conjures the second and most postmodern element in Austen's endowment to Martin: the theme of thwarted romance. In Martin’s novels, romantic degeneration stems from the rampant mediation, disunity, and contingency of postmodern life, but his admiration for Austen’s treatment of love qualifies her as a counterweight to Philip Roth. In many novels, Martin's troupes of unregenerate misfits

deliberately invert Austen's paradigm: “Austen's characters resist the ministrations of the therapy age. As literary creations, they ¢hrive on

78 « Critical Cartography their inhibition. It is the source of all their thwarted energy.” In stark relief, Martin’s characters thrive on their excesses, restlessly courting their

encroaching dooms. Surprisingly, Martin appears the more classical writer in this regard than either Kingsley or Austen. ‘Taking to heart Heraclitus’s famous dictum that character is fate, Martin allows his characters little, if any, enlightenment. Often self-aware to the point of obsession, his characters remain powerless to use their knowledge to effect change. Ultimately, they are incapable of taking any action to forestall their allotted fates. To state the dynamic in terms of chess, as Martin is fond of doing, his heroes (or antiheroes) are caught in zugswang, compelled to move when subsequent action will only precipitate defeat.

Whether they actively court their fate, as does Nicola Six in London Fields (1989), or whether they remain oblivious to it, like John Self in Money, who frenetically asserts his willpower, Martin's characters often find that life is a grand and malicious joke. All forms of transcendence become dubious in Martin’s deterministic worlds, and he invalidates the type of transformative romance that Austen depicts. In contrast to Austen’s more traditional comic heroines, Martin’s doomed deceivers never triumph over their obstacles, gliding toward festive marriages and comfortable social status. Similar to identity and motivation, love seems an outmoded, “shagged-out” intellectual construct, inapplicable to the ab-

surdity of millennial life. In short, Austen functions for Martin and Kingsley in the same way that Philip Roth does: she is an admonishing border, an instructive exemplar against which their own works react. With their dysfunctional characters and iconoclastic social grapplings, both Amises revise Austen for the twentieth century. Whereas Kingsley dismisses her ideological gentrification, Martin more consciously exploits her thematic tensions.

Whereas Kingsley erodes her literary authority (as well as those who championed her, like the Leavises) to legitimate his own moral fiction and criticism, Martin revalues her structural foundations to create postmodern, deterministic versions of her intricate social environments. Of course, Austen was not alone in her contributions to the Amises’ use of romance and irony, as analysis of Evelyn Waugh and Philip Larkin will confirm. Waugh predated Kingsley and Martin by one and two generations, respectively. Philip Larkin was Kingsley’s best friend and

the godfather of Martin's older brother, Philip. Whereas Waugh

The Amises on Englsh Literature. 79 complemented Austen's use of irony, elevating it into a stylized black humor, Larkin counterbalanced Saul Bellow, supplanting his thematic transcendence with tones of candid resignation. Together, these two writers complete one’s understanding of the distinctively English nature of the Amises’ literary heritage.

Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall In No, Not Bloomsbury, the title of which derives from Lucky Jim, Mal-

colm Bradbury annotated the degree to which Kingsley’s career shadowed Evelyn Waugh’s. Both men, he argued, began as “spectacular Young Turks,” writing novels that expressed the malaise of a younger generation. In addition, both captured the manners, “moral upsets, cultural dislocations and social instabilities” generated by a recent war, espousing a “secret but gradually more explicit nostalgia” in the face of modernist experimentation. Finally, both were antiromantic writers who darkened into a fixed conservatism over the years. As John McDermott concluded in his introduction to Kingsley’s 1990 collection of essays, The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990, “Amis has

come to occupy the Evelyn Waugh Chair of Savage Indignation. Like Waugh, he is splendid with prejudice, rich in bracing dislikes. Also like Waugh, he is a consummate writer of sentences, a mordant practitioner of perfected English prose.”!®© In many ways, Kingsley’s response to Waugh’s later novels parallels his response to the later works of Austen; Waughs first three works, however, provide an instructive basis for conceptualizing Kingsley’s own comic satires. As the six reviews of Waugh in The Amis Collection reveal, Kingsley never concealed his admiration for Waugh’s early work. In a 1978 retrospective of Decline and Fall entitled “Fit to Kill,” Kingsley recounted the explosive personal impact of Waugh’s first novel: “Half a century ago this month,” he wrote, “there appeared the first— what? Modern novel?

Post-Great-War novel? Novel written for me, and not for some porcelain-collecting multilingual gourmet? — thereby degrading Aldous

Huxley, who had been doing well in my esteem on other but related grounds. Whatever it was, it changed things. No writer could go on in the old innocent, docile way after that.” For Kingsley, the novel’s most significant achievement was formal, not thematic. Arguing that critics

80 .« Critical Cartography had done the book (and Waugh) a disservice by overemphasizing its satiric aspects, Kingsley redirected attention to the novel’s comic veneer, remarking that the novel should be read as a “pessimistic romance presented as a farce.” Waugh’s most lasting gift to Kingsley was a lesson in the rules of modern comedy. By not offering solutions to the horrors of postwar existence, Waugh showed Kingsley that satire was hierarchi-

cally subordinate to comedy. The novel’s lampooning of smart-set foibles ultimately bowed to its comically “enlivening bitterness,” which sought to temper postwar relations, whether secular or social. Dec/ine

and Fall emerged from Waugh’s intention to “make cruel things as funny as possible, because that is one of the very few ways of making them a little less intolerable.” Speaking elsewhere of Officers and Gentlemen, Kingsley lamented the absence of Waugh’s earlier comic style, re-

ferring to that “disconcerting blend of the funny, the horrific and the painful which is Mr Waugh’s distinctive contribution to the repertory of literary effects.”!”

The problem for Kingsley was that Waugh did not remain committed to the farcical vein that distinguished Decline and Fall. His other, more serious and exclusively satirical vein began to proliferate in subsequent works such as Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A Handful of Dust (1934). Although these books remained among Kingsley’s favorites— especially A Handful of Dust— Kingsley watched with dismay as his mentor’s didacticism hardened into Brideshead Revisited (1945), which seemed the nadir of Waughs talent. Much as Mansfield Park had signaled Austen's descent into literary complacency, so too did Brideshead Revisited amount to a literary betrayal for Kingsley, a falsification of Waugh’ earlier balance between toleration and despair, satire and farce.

Throughout his life, Kingsley reveled in excoriating the novel’s tonal failures. Noting that the book sacrificed comedy for a false sentimentalism, he argued that it displayed “symptoms of radical decline so numerous and appalling that prognosis almost broke down.” Could the author

of Decline and Fall, he asked, “really be going to turn into a kind of storm-trooper from the Sixth at Downside with nothing to offer his audience but a universal grudge and invocations of a fanciful past?” Writing about the television serialization of Brideshead released in 1981, Kingsley

The Amises on Englhsh Literature . 81 lamented simply that nothing could be done about the boredom at the center of the production, a mistake he attributed equally to the show’s duration and to the unfortunate selection of text. Paralleling his response to the work of Austen, he increasingly withdrew support for Waugh’s evolving pomposity. While his admiration for the lyrical precision of Waugh’s style remained intact, Kingsley mourned the decline of his mentor's comic sensibility. Although he always shared with Waugh a thematic concern for social and moral disintegration, he never forgave the author for allowing “snobbery to corrupt judgement.” Regretfully, such attitudes appeared frequently in Waugh’s later novels, including the Sword of Honor trilogy, as the “habitual austerities” of Waugh’s style failed to moderate his increasing conservatism. Kingsley’s criticism be-

came even more pointed and personal in his letters, culminating in a 1984 letter to Larkin that stipulated, “Very silly fellow [Waugh] was. Only a first-class cunt could have written the ‘funny’ parts of S of Honor and the whole of B’head. More and more I think of him as a chap who wrote one marvellous book (D&F) then WENT OFF having joined the Catholic Ch” [szc].18 Ironically of course, critics have lambasted Kingsley’s own works for similar failings, beginning with Jakes Thing and Stanley and the Women

(1984). Like Waugh’s, Kingsley’s burgeoning conservatism ousted the

liberalism of his earlier days, rendering him a self-acknowledged Thatcherite Tory with only “a few, left-over liberal bits on abortion, hanging, and homosexuality.” Criticized for being a chauvinist in the age of feminism, and therefore a political dinosaur, Kingsley’s increasing resistance to social change began to mirror Waugh’s earlier condemnations. Both men, Malcolm Bradbury explains, refined the art of rhetorical comment, conflating the distance between artistic and public personae. [hey transformed youthful attitudes into something “crusted with an air of powerful prejudice,” and they insulated those prejudices with comic convictions that were equally troubling and engaging. “Both turned their comic masks into public faces, into a manner that was both clubable and crusty, amusing and bitter, rotund and misanthropic, a disguise that did not seem to disguise everything.”!? As did Waugh’s, Kingsley’s artistic persona derived from a firmly

grounded humanism whose targets were institutionalized affronts to

82. « Critical Cartography common sense, reason, and humor. In addition, as James Wolcott explains, both authors exhibited a syntactical rhythm and linguistic precision that were distinctively English and personal. Whereas Waugh, like

Wodehouse, perfected the intonations of the English upper-crust, Amis, like Fielding, “loosened the collar of English prose,” investing his writing with the “largest volume of chat.”?° Through his witty, incisive vernacular, which pilloried all pretensions, Kingsley revaluated Waugh’'s

more formalized satires, constructing a skeptical form of social and moral realism that “dismissed aesthetic over-formulation, knocked against pretension, and gave to the stuff of ordinary life a comic enjoyment. Bradbury has referred to this achievement as a “reinvigoration of the banal,” and although its farcical stance became difficult to maintain as Kingsley’s conservatism grew, its subjects remained notoriously similar to Waughis: the erosion of decency, understanding, and reason; the quest for stability in a hostile, indifferent world; and the hidden dangers of egotism and isolationism. Although Kingsley eventually broke from Waugh’s “cult of elegance, dexterity, brilliance, and command,” both authors assumed their positions in the tradition of comic and moral realism that runs from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen to Charles Dickens. Waugh showed Kingsley the efficacy of balancing comedy and despair, farce and realism, which helped inform Kingsley’s own comedic satires. As Bradbury concludes, [Amis and Waugh] both . . . turned, with their virtues and their faults, into major writers whose mixture of basic craft, remarkable social perception, comic vision and gift for rage and outrage managed to construct a lifetime of writing of extraordinary dimensions and decided influence. It has been said that few contemporary comic writers can get free of the intonations of Amis, and the tradition of modern comic fiction in Britain has an inescapable source in Waugh, who will, I think, be seen as one of the great black humorists of the century. Both suggest that the comic is both a stylistic capacity and a form of human pain, and both indicate what I think is a very British way of dealing with it which may have striking limitations and peculiar strengths. As a result, both are difficult to write about, provoking both annoyance and respect, a sense of a talent often imperfect yet of an extraordinary force.?!

Evelyn Waughss influence on Martin Amis may be less dramatic, but it is no less real or apparent. More so than with Austen, Waugh’s black comedies inform Martin's own treatments of history and culture,

The Amises on Enghsh Literature . 83 and Martin's expressly class-oriented novels — Success (1978), Money, and

London Fields— derive their internal strength from the cultural erosions of value that Waugh so effectively portrayed. The chief difference remains one of degree or of scope: whereas Kingsley Amis, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh separately recorded shifting norms of value, connection, and history for their respective generations, only Martin Amis surpasses Waugh’s brooding pessimism. Martin and Waugh both conceive the human character as paralyzed by history, and both record the spiritual exhaustion of twentieth-century life, its utter implosion of culture, tradition, and value. One difference, however, surfaces between

the two satirists: unlike Waugh, Martin does not identify any higher forces of societal redemption. In Martin's fictional worlds, faith remains as inauthentic and fleeting as money. One thing that Martin clearly borrows from Waugh is his sense of dark humor, as opposed to Austen’s (and Kingsley’s) more lighthearted touch. Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, Vile Bodies—each vividly

portrays the spiritual hollowness of a postwar culture lacking understanding of sin and value. Through their endless flickering from experience to experience, characters such as Brenda Last, Nina Blount, Adam

Fenwick-Symes, and Charles Ryder exhibit vitality without purpose, energy without belief. Wedded to the fleeting moment, their hectic activities contrast the older-order stability of Waugh’s stolid estates — Hetton Abbey in 4 Handful of Dust, King’s Thursday in Decline and Fall, and Brideshead in Brideshead Revisited. Violating their responsibilities as stewards of the land, the landed aristocracy in these novels prove themselves unfit lords: spiritually bankrupt, incapable of resuscitating the older values of family and tradition, they mimic real connection and value. For Waugh, a civilization of excess internally combusts. The only solution he could ultimately identify was the stability of faith, which redeemed the continuity among past, present, and future, something his gothic mansions could not achieve.

In stark contrast to Waugh and Kingsley, Martin does not look backward through time with any sense of nostalgia or retreat. Instead, the anxieties of the present agitate memories of the past, which remain unable to comfort or console. In this respect, Martin's fiction 1s heavily teleological, tending toward fatalism, end points, and exits. Eznsteins Monsters (1987) and London Fields are haunted by the stoppage of time,

84. « Critical Cartography for instance, which manifests itself symbolically through black holes, solar eclipses, the constriction of the universe, and nuclear war. Two other novels — Orher People (1981) and Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the

Offense (1991)— portray the inescapability of repetitive or regressive time, which constantly threatens to trap the individual in a world of exhausted potential. Despite his expressed opposition to “Big Ideas” in fiction, Martin’s black comedies entirely banish confidence in Waugh’s redemptive values.2* Systematically recording the disintegration of all transcendental absolutes, whether they be tradition, identity, time, or faith, Martin reworks both his father and Waugh in order to validate his deterministic worldview. He presents a rival version of reality, updating their previous portrayals of societal fragmentation. Not surprisingly, metaphysical exhaustion manifests itself in each author’s conception of history. For Waugh and Kingsley Amis, history remains linear, gradual, even to some extent predictable. The reader knows, for instance, that no good will come of Tony Last’s voyage to the jungle in.4 Handful of Dust, mooring him as it does to the primitive past. Similarly, Decline and Fall forewarns the reader about Margot’s pernicious influence on both King’s Thursday and Paul Pennyfeather. Self-centered and deceptive, she embodies the newer, more degenerate regime slowly supplanting the old forms of honor and responsibility, as her industrialization of King’s Thursday suggests. For Martin Amis, however, following Joyce, history remains a nightmare from which one tries to awake. Nonlinear, multireferential, and moving backward as often as forward (or not moving at all), Martin’s novels, for all their entropic decay, depict worlds in which catalytic events have a/ready taken place. One lives, however, in constant fear of greater, impending doom. Whereas Kingsley’s and Waugh’s characters are often implicated in

creating the instability of their fictive environments, Martin's seem blameless and inert: they inherit such instability and remain powerless to effect meaningful change. Despite their ardent strivings, their impact on the external world seems limited at best, ineffectual at worst. Only a handful of characters—'Terry Service in Success, John Self in Money, and Gwyn Barry in The Information (1995)—can parallel the role of Grimes in Waugh’s Decline and Fall, they are unscrupulous tricksters who elude both comeuppance and history. Numerous characters,

The Amises on English Literature. 85 however, resemble Paul Pennyfeather or Lord Tangent from the same book—victims of an absurd, ironic, punishing fate. Apocalypse and nuclear war remain the most famous examples of Martin’s nightmarish view of history, and both themes figure prominently in his fiction from the middle and late 1980s. His collection of short stories, Eznstein’s Monsters, arranges itself wholly around such topics, as does London Fields. Accentuating the anxieties of fractured time,

emotional disconnection, and lost possibility, both works convey Martins feeling that panic is the most appropriate response to the nuclear age. “The children of the nuclear age,” he writes in Experience: A Memoir (2000), “were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when youre bracing for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.”?3

Not surprisingly, Martin's political opinions contrasted Kingsley’s later conservatism, as the senior Amis feared a Soviet takeover of England and supported Western stockpiling of weapons. The Amises’ political battles eventually migrated into Martin’s concise antinuclear manifesto “Thinkability,” from Einstein’ Monsters, which portrayed nuclear weapons as a generational betrayal of duty, an irresponsible paternal legacy. “I argue with my father about nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “In this debate, we are all arguing with our fathers. They emplaced or maintained the status quo. They got it hugely wrong. They failed to see the nature of what they were dealing with . . . and now they are trapped in the new reality, trapped in the great mistake. Perhaps there will be no hope until they are gone.”*4 (As late as the year 2002 Martin would still be engaged in resolving these disagreements, speaking to his father in absentia through Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, quarreling about Soviet politics and his father’s conservatism.) By subverting both his father’s and Waugh’s views of history, Martin overturns the assumptions that often stabilize those authors’ works. He engages the foundations of their dark humor and satire, outdoing their pessimism and eroding their political consolations. Martin expanded upon these topics in a review of Brideshead Revisited in 1981, the same year that his father reviewed the television serialization of the novel. Like Kingsley, Martin criticized the fundamental

86. Critical Cartography problems at the center of the novel, including its Catholicism, its snob-

bery, and its underdeveloped characterizations. Whereas Kingsley faulted Waugh for extraliterary issues, specifically those of class and religion, Martin's concerns remained exclusively artistic— matters of style

and voice. For Martin, the book’s failing stemmed not from ideology but from structural imbalance and stylistic cliché, the same demerits that had, to his thinking, previously handicapped the work of Jane Austen and Philip Roth. He began by calling Brideshead Revisited “a problem comedy, like Mansfield Park,” and proceeded to criticize Waugh’s snobbery, which seemed to be an artistic failure akin to sentimentality. Noting that historical nostalgia and decay are themes as old as litera-

ture, Martin reiterated that style and tone are an author’s only real choices. Waugh’s snobbery, in other words, emerged from codified stylization: it was “stock response,” lifeless on the page. Waugh’s uncon-

scious lapse into cliché, Martin acceded, “was a temporary one, and never again did he attempt the grand style.” Nevertheless, his prose chiefly activated the “coldness and contempt at the heart of the novel, and contribute[d] crucially to its central imbalance.”25 In Martin's novels, contra Austen and Waugh, class remains a subset

of spiritual exhaustion, interminably enmeshed in his deterministic view of history. No longer capable of sustaining the individual, refinement and culture function in Martin’s novels as outmoded ideals, more likely to be trampled than revered, ignored rather than nurtured. Neither Keith Talent, Guy Clinch, nor Samson Young intuit a benevolent future in London Fields. Keith celebrates, and Guy laments, the impotence of class to shelter one from pain, while Samson bemoans the failure of language to redeem time. Similarly, John Self, in Money, expresses his own Vile Bodies-esque credo, telling the reader that he is “the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness.” Like Waugh, Martin portrays class as the locus classicus of cultural disintegration. Unlike Waugh, however, he does not credit the power of tradition to recuperate history. Mixing the high with the low, the “demotic” with the “mandarin,” his fiction injects the frustrated energy of the street into a “bourgeois lexicon,” seeking to eliminate all transcendent stabilities, whether semiotic or cultural. What the reader feels when confronting a novel such as Brideshead Revisited, Martin wonderfully contends, is nothing other than the “fat wet handshake and

The Amises on English Literature . 87 grinning dentures of bad art.” To him, the novel reads like a “golden treasury of neo-classical clichés,” due in large part to Waugh’s “conversion’ to the Baroque in all its “decadent, bastardized literary form.”?6

Martin therefore assimilates important thematic lessons from the dark satires of Evelyn Waugh. He shares Waugh’s grotesquely dark humor; he dramatizes the wastage of contemporary civilization; he polarizes his characters as passive victims and cunning victimizers; and he

interrogates the dangers of positioning value in the physical world. If Austen contributes to Martin’s thwarted sense of romance, then Waugh provides an enlightened pessimism that energizes Martin's own existen-

tialist and ontological grapplings. Like Kingsley, Martin cannot endorse Waugh's Catholicism or belief in cultural tradition. Instead, he castigates Waughs bastions of social stability, conceptualizing the decay of tradition, culture, and connection as millenial side effects indicative of fractured time, limited possibility, and impending apocalypse.

As they did with Austen, both Amises reworked Evelyn Waugh, updating his literary themes and values to suit their own depictions. Kingsley recoiled against the snobbery he perceived in Waughs later works, but he celebrated Waugh’s early employment of a farcical style that repudiated simple consolations. Martin rebelled against Waugh’s

valuation of culture, tradition, and history, but he, too, assimilated Waugh’s dark humor into his own fatalistic determinism. In the process of reworking mentors such as Austen and Waugh, the Amises asserted not only the relevance of their generational conflict but also the intract-

ability of their philosophical orientations. As with their American counterparts, these earlier canonical English writers operated as catalysts, spurring the Amises to engage literary tradition as well as their more personal, ideological differences. There exists one other writer whose impact on the Amises has been

supremely powerful and lasting. The only poet grouped among the Amises’ chief influences— although early a novelist — Philip Larkin be-

came the subject of more essays and retrospectives than any of the Amises’ other mentors, whether American or English. Whereas Austen provides an early model against which the Amises could define their own treatments of romance and class, and whereas Waugh helps them solidify their uses of history and culture, Larkin illuminates the tonal intersection of irony and elegy. His blend of wry lamentation, sardonic

88. «= Critical Cartography acceptance, and temporal discomfort provide a response to Austen’s more festive romances and to Waugh’s more sweeping satires.

Philip Larkin: The Comedy of Candor It is impossible to do justice to the depth of Kingsley Amis’s relationship with Philip Larkin in anything less than a separate monograph. Zachary Leader's edition of Kingsley’s letters begins to convey the symbiosis of their correspondence, as do Eric Jacobs’s and Richard Bradford’s biographies of Kingsley. Kingsley never denied that Larkin was his “inner audience,” and although Larkin’s career achieved success long before Kingsley’s, both men valued the other’s opinion on a variety of subjects, ranging from women to jazz. In The Amis Collection alone, Kingsley included five essays dealing with Philip Larkin’s work and his critical reception. In addition, he devoted an entire chapter to Larkin in his Memoirs (1991), which was published mercifully before the infamous

reappraisal that followed Anthony hwaite’s edition Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s controversial biography Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1993), which Kingsley called “a bloody dis-

grace.” Close friends since their days at Oxford University —a friendship that Larkin recalled in his introduction to the second edition of his novel Ji// (1944)— Kingsley and Larkin continued to correspond until Larkin’s death in 1985. In his eulogy, Kingsley praised his friend for his honesty and bravery, remarking that his poetry derived entirely from the heart: “[H]e never showed off, never laid claim to feeling what he didn’t feel, and it was that honesty, more total in his case than in any other [person] I’ve known, that gave his poetry such power. He meant every word of it; and so, though he may not have written many poems, he wrote none that were false or unnecessary.” In essence, Larkin’s work appealed to Kingsley because of its attention to mood and detail, clarity and honesty, understatement and seriousness. For him, as for others, Larkin resuscitated the native tradition

of English poetry that had been supplanted by the modernist verse of T. 8. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats.

Associating Larkin with the opposing lineage of Matthew Arnold,

Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, and Edward Thomas instead, Kingsley praised his friend for evolving a wry vernacular style that

The Amises on English Literature . 89 counterbalanced the self-indulgence of modernist verse. “He continued to treat the world with jovial acerbity,” Kingsley explained in his Memoirs, “a sense that the fools and charlatans, the Pounds and Picassos and many of their living heirs were doomed by their own absurdity.”28 In contrast to the didactic pretension that Kingsley associated with

the moderns, Larkin proffered a deflationary antiromanticism that forswore transcendence and questioned absolutism. “He is serious,” Kingsley remarked, “which also means non-trivial, though he is fond of starting with the trivial: in the past a jazz record, a holiday train, a photograph album . . . a seaside crowd, a gin and tonic, a provincial hotel. But then—what a dizzying, appalling, electrifying swoop into the midst of most things that matter: death, solitude, loss, change, the past, our re-

lations with others, religion... , nature... . There are no love poems, thank heaven, any gobbets of over-private, under-personalized chatter about the poet's wife or girl such as pass for love poems these days.”?? The use of minute, finely observed detail; the simultaneous evocation of mood and memory; the admission of poetry’s public audience; and a movement from the particular to the universal that rejects mythopoeia — these were the foundations of both Larkin and Kingsley’s literary personae. Both men sought in literature to conflate public and personalized moods, evolving a poignancy of detail and feeling that maintained close connection with the contemporary world, even (or especially) as their literary ideals gave way to postmodernism. To Kingsley, Larkin’s clarity, perspicuity, and honesty were the triumphant results of a mature style and enlightened self-awareness. Such things did not come easily to Larkin, however, and Kingsley recorded the extent to which Larkin’s early poems often suffered from symbolistic tendencies. Referring to the occasional opacity of Larkin’s early poems, Kingsley noted that some of Larkin’s finest poems were clouded by “little fleeting puzzles,” especially toward their close. “Nobody seems to know quite what those high windows are doing in the poem of that title,” wrote Kingsley. “And I for one, more sadly, can make almost nothing of the sense of falling and the arrow-shower at the end of “The Whitsun Weddings’, which he grudgingly conceded . . . he thought as good as anything he had done. It is as if clarity was something he had to be perpetually battling towards.” Throughout Kingsley’s life, Larkin remained one of the few poets who could pass Kingsley’s “night-owl test,”

90 « Critical Cartography competing for attention with music during the evening’s final scotch.%° In such poems as “First Sight,” “Cut Grass,” “To the Sea,” “Show Saturday,” “Annus Mirabilis,” and “Aubade,” Kingsley felt Larkin’s voice achieved levels of immediacy and intelligibility that equally weighted detail and emotion, honesty and exposition. It established a public forum for personal disappointment rooted in irony, integrity, and candor. In many ways, Larkin functioned for Kingsley as a necessary coun-

terweight to Austen, repudiating her qualified romanticism through

candid resignation. For Larkin, romance was always frustrated, bounded, and curtailed. No ecstatic transfiguration blanketed his central lovers. In a humorous, self-referential moment, Kingsley once revealed how Larkin’s “eagerly awaited” poem “Letter to a Friend about Girls” forged a portrait of romantic isolation too painful to be funny: the “amorous friend” of the poem (“needless to say a composite figure,” Kingsley added) stages “staggering skirmishes / In train, tutorial and telephone booth” whereas the speaker resides in a dim “grey world where ‘none give in: / Some of them go quite rigid with disgust / At anything but marriage.’”! To Kingsley as well as the general reader, death and the fear of death appeared as Larkin’s greatest themes. A sense of limited potential pervades his poetry as it does Austen’s novels, but Larkin’s melancholy 1s

promulgated by the recognition that death is utter blankness, bereft of spiritual deliverance. His poems chart the limits of frustration and disappointment, among which love possesses no power to transfigure, faith no power to redeem. He describes the glacial slowness of change, if not stasis itself, and he lends a uniquely personal and controlled voice to humanity's public fears. “I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,” Larkin famously reminds the reader in “I Remember, | Remember.” “‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’” And of course, there is the finality of “Dockery and Son,” which concludes with the heavy refrain, Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.>?

Symbolically, Larkin helped Kingsley indirectly respond to Evelyn

Waugh, for his work is less prescriptive, less socially directed than

Lhe Amises on Enghsh Literature . 91 Waugh's. Writing about Larkin’s second novel, 4 Girl in Winter (1947),

Kingsley complimented his friend for refusing to embrace the transcendent absolutes promised by so many other romantic novels: “What

I most liked about [the novel] was its air of UTTER COMPETENCE. ... I liked the way their [szc] was no BROKEN ENGLISH RUBBISH and no IMPLICATIONS OF UNIVERSAL IMPORT FOR OUR SOCIETY RUBBISH.” In brief, Larkin and Waugh both sought to evolve a rhythmic and conversational style that eroded the boundaries between satire and comedy. Their works are elegies for a fading world of connection, meaning, and action. Like Waugh, Kingsley looked out upon a postwar world marked by ennui, fragmentation, and aimless motion. Unlike Waugh, however, he refrained from social

diagnosis and solicited the symbolic retreat “inside the whale” that George Orwell so famously described, seeking a humanistic stability whose chief virtue was the desire to escape further pain.*9 Dramatizing moments of inverted, negative transcendence, Larkin

opposed Waugh in that life is bearable only if bereft of meaning: he championed a mature acceptance of metaphysical blankness. 4 Girl in Winter, for instance, which Martin once reviewed, portrays a day in the

life of Katherine Lind, a European refugee in England after World War I. The novel culminates in a palinode to the past, retracting the possibility of future regeneration. Larkin’s poem “Reference Back” sim-

ilarly dismisses the metaphysically wide view, the all-encompassing stare: Truly, though our element is time, We are not suited to the long perspectives Open at each instant of our lives. They link us to our losses: worse, They show us what we have as it once was, Blindingly undiminished, just as though By acting differently we could have kept it so.

In such poems as “Annus Mirabilis,” Kingsley contended, Larkin’s voice rose to a level of “triumphantly comic self-pity” that balanced his ironic

resignation.*4 Yet Larkin never allowed himself to posit the potential for culture, faith, or romance to redeem time or the individual; his is an elegiac world of limited horizons and lost opportunities. Through his personalized expression of public fears and anxieties and his detailed

92 « Critical Cartography engagement with the real, not romanticized, world, Larkin’s writing deeply informed Kingsley’s own depictions of ironic loss and restraint. Fittingly, it is easy to find echoes of Larkin in Kingsley’s writing. Although Kingsley’s treatment of romance is not as qualified as Larkin’s, and although his characters do not endorse Larkins bleak resignation, Larkin’s example enabled his friend to refine his own somber yet breezy vernacular style, asserting rationality in the face of pretension and transcendence. Eric Jacobs and Janice Rossen annotate the extent to which Larkin acted as an intimate audience for Kingsley’s Lucky Jim, and one detects Larkin’s ironic tone in many of Kingsley’s other novels as well. Kingsley’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, ends by relaying the evocative mood and attention to detail that Kingsley found

triumphant in Larkin: “I took Jean’s arm and we moved across the square. [he shift at the pit had just emerged and colliers in their neat suits and caps were walking past us or toward the pub. I waved to an overman I knew. An ancient bus half full of more colliers chuntered by.

At the pub door we had to wait for a moment until the way cleared ahead of us. To anyone watching it might have looked as if Jean and I, too, were coming off shift.” Similarly, the character Jenny Bunn’s conversation with her lover Patrick Standish at the end of Take a Girl Like You (1960) seems thoroughly Larkinesque: ““You know,” she says to Patrick at the book’s end, “‘I should really never have met you. Or I should have got rid of you while I still had the chance. But [ couldn't think how to. And it’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?” Acknowledging, in one of the book’s double entendres, that her “‘old Bible-class ideas have certainly taken a knocking,” Patrick tells her, ““Uhey were bound to... darling, with a girl like you. It was inevitable.’” Jenny closes the novel with the simple lament, ““Oh yes, I expect it was. But I cant help feeling it’s rather a pity.’”°> As chapter 6 of the present study will make clear, Larkin also hovers in the background of Kingsley’s novel The Old Devils (1986), saturating its depictions of love and aging. Through his fiction, poetry, and friendship, Larkin provided Kingsley with literary, intellectual, and emotional support. The two of them concurrently developed a chatty, vernacular style that prioritized the low over the high, the real over the false, the honest over the insincere. Although a relationship as long lasting and significant as theirs cannot easily be condensed, Larkin supplied his friend with an elegiac corrective to Austen’s

The Amises on Enghsh Literature. 93 conventional romances and an ironic corrective to Waugh’s less temperate, more caustic satires. If the Amises agreed upon the value of one writer in their personal

pantheons, that writer was Philip Larkin, so one cannot identify the same level of professional opposition that marked their discussions of previous literary influences. Partly, such consensus stemmed from Larkin’s personal relationship with the Amises: a fellow poet and novel-

ist, Kingsley's lifelong friend, and the godfather and namesake of Martin's brother, Larkin was both a professional colleague and a family acquaintance. As such, both literary and nonliterary impulses inform the Amises’ musings about Larkin.

In the last fifteen years, Martin Amis has written two tributary essays on Larkin, both of which contribute greatly to one’s understanding of the Amises’ literary genealogy. In these essays, Martin not only exam-

ines the reasons behind the critical backlash that attended Larkin’s death, but more significantly grounds his comments within the context of generational revaluation, both literary and evolutionary. Characterizing Larkin’s critical reappraisal as equally lamentable and expected, Martin crystallizes many of the assumptions that underlie the Amises’ conflicting worldviews as well as their own brand of generational dissent. In other words, although consensus began to displace the professional disagreements that marked some of the Amises’ debates over Austen and Waugh, that consensus simply confirms the Amises’ continued entrenchment in a twentieth-century realism war, a literary/critical battle over contemporary literature and life. One of Martin’s more famous essays, “Don Juan in Hull” seeks to counterbalance the backlash against Larkin that occurred in the early 1990s. An empathetic critique of the vagaries of literary fame, Martin's essay also previews the themes that he would later more fully explore in his novel The Information and his memoir Experience. ‘The essay is important in that Martin discusses not only the political forces that inform

literary revaluation but also the evolutionary tendencies that inspire generational conflict. Speaking of the extrinsic forces that animated the Larkin controversy, Martin notes with dismay how Larkin’s reputation

became dependent upon a troubling public spectacle. “Vhe word ‘Larkinesque’ used to evoke the wistful, the provincial, the crepuscular,

94 « Critical Cartography the sad, the unloved,” Martin laments; “now it evokes the scabrous and the supremacist. The word ‘Larkinism’ used to stand for a certain sort of staid, decent, wary Englishness; now it refers to the articulate far right.”

Noting that the reaction against Larkin had proceeded with unprecedented violence and hypocrisy, Martin clarifies that its energy could not originate in literary objections; instead, it derives from social ideology,

or from the “vaguer promptings of a new ethos.” In essence, he concludes “none of this matters, because only the poems matter. But the spectacle holds the attention.” As James Diedrick points out, Martin's critical persona in this essay functions as a “civilized and civilizing instrument’: he deconstructs the “rhetoric of righteous sensationalism adopted by Larkin’s attackers” in an attempt to restore balance to the debates over Larkin’s life and work.36 Such moderation is important to

the Amises’ debates, however, in that it depicts a note of agreement where there used to be conflict. Throughout their lives, Martin was always more respectful of his father and of his father’s work than Kingsley

was in return. As “Don Juan in Hull” reveals, Martin never shunned public displays of filial loyalty either. Humanely attempting to resurrect the reputation of his father’s closest friend, Martin unites with Kingsley in opposing the hyperpoliticized controversies that surrounded Larkin’s (as well as the Amises’ own) work.

Although Kingsley and Martin both concurred about Larkin’s human failings— emotional and financial parsimony, racial blindness, and difficulties with girls, as Kingsley put it—they explicitly denied that personal idiosyncrasies should devalue his work.3” Such motivations would eventually inform Martin’s writing of Experience, which similarly seeks to protect the Amises’ relationship from the vagaries of historical distortion. With such a protective layer established, however, an addi-

tional dynamic appears in Martin’s analysis that was absent from Kingsley’s. Not static or unidimensional, Martin’s loyalty to both his father and Larkin operates in a complex, multifaceted manner, revealing processes of accommodation as well as divergence. On one hand, Martin shares his father’s antipathy for the political, nonliterary forces that fueled the Larkin controversy. On the other, he probes the internal rationales that drove these forces, grounding his analysis within larger contexts of generational rebellion and assimilation. In the process of contex-

tualizing Larkin’s life and work, Martin deftly analyzes the historical

The Amises on Enghsh Literature . 95 evolution of “political correctness” in England, France, and America. In so doing, he clarifies the heightened tensions that complicate personal relationships within literary families as well as the ideological imperatives that inform literary and generational revaluation. In words that refer back to his earlier comments in Eznstein’s Monsters about nuclear weapons, Martin argues that political correctness should be categorized as an attempt, both understandable and misinformed, to “accelerate evolution.” He refuses, for instance, to excuse Larkin’s “racial snarls,” which he labels “mood-clichés,” “inherited propositions, shamefully unexamined, humiliatingly average.” Furthermore, he argues that Larkin’s poetic honesty— his “comedy of candor” — made him especially vulnerable to scholarly reappraisal, opening him to criticism as bigoted, sexist, and preyudiced. While political correctness might be troubling or misguided in a /iterary context, being too dependent upon shifting political climates, it did illuminate the revaluative generational impulses that operate in an ahistorical, nonaesthetic context. Writing about the ways

such impulses manifest themselves in the human character, Martin comments upon the personality differences between his own generation and those of his father and Larkin: “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 are too many fronts to cover.”38 In many ways, Martin's real topic in “Don Juan in Hull” might not be Larkin and his critical reappraisal but the perspectival responses to modern life. An unmistakable temporal component animates his comments as he invokes the revaluative modes that vary between historical generations. [his dynamic functions also in one of Martin’s best analo-

gies, which he uses to comment upon both political correctness and, significantly, his father. Describing the critical problems of using politi-

cal correctness as an evaluative tool, Martin annotates the extent to which ideology always enacts a historical fallacy. “Imagine a school of sixteenth-century art criticism,” he explains, “that spent its time jeering at the past for not knowing about perspective.”3? ‘This remark is significant not only for its commonplace critique of political sensibility, but also for the reason that Martin had employed it previously and in relation to his father.

96 . Critical Cartography Speaking about his novel London Fields with Susan Morrison in 1990, Martin used the same words to describe his father’s antiquated dislike for experimental techniques such as narrative involution, selfreferentiality, and problematic closure. “My father,” he explained, thinks that there’s an orderly contract between writer and reader, which

has very much to do with his generation, and he’s incensed by any breach of those rules. I would justify it simply and pragmatically by saying that once a lot of writers have become interested in something, then

it’s useless to say to them, “Snap out of it; you're just annoying.” Because it’s clearly an evolutionary development, and this is what writers need to do. And this doesn’t come naturally to my father. He’s in the position of someone in fifteenth-century Venice or Florence saying: “You know, I don’t like this perspective stuff. Get back to when we didn’t know about perspective.” .. . On the other hand, perspective was such an obvious gain for painting, whereas this kind of literary innovation is, even to me, not such an obvious gain.*©

Whereas Martin's earlier analogy to Italian Renaissance painting imphicated political correctness as a critical transgression, here it theorized his father as outmoded and retrograde. In other words, Martin invoked

age as a determining factor in literary evolution, and he further proposed evolution to be an artistic imperative: it is what writers “need to do.” Kingsley’s rejection of narrative experiment cannot therefore be ex-

cused as a matter of volition. Instead, his father is constitutionally removed from such experiments: they do not come “naturally” to him. This linkage of politics, literature, and art is significant because it accentuates many of the perceptual and procedural differences among Martin, his father, and Larkin. Arguably the representative voices of their generations, each author defined a distinctive voice for expressing modern disillusionment. Questions of sexuality, gender, and race inform all three authors’ works, and each has been taken to task for violations of political correctness. Additionally, both Amises intuit Larkin’s tone of quiet resignation, the controlled, ironic misanthropy that Martin perceived to be “so desolate and inhospitable that even the English were scandalised by it.” Despite their surface agreements over Larkin’s significance, potent generational forces coalesced in the Amises’ responses to their family friend. To Martin, Kingsley and Larkin seemed constitutionally stubborn, adamantine, dismissive of the

stylistic innovations succeeding their own generations revaluative

The Amises on English Literature .» 97 efforts. The somber, receptive blankness at the heart of Larkin’s poetry would inevitably invoke his critical reappraisal, and regardless of its critical justification, such an enterprise would illuminate an essential modern truth: “In the age of self-improvement,” Martin noted, “the self is inexorably self-conscious” — and thus vulnerable to deconstruction.*! As both Martin and Kingsley pointed out, Larkin rejected change and recoiled against history, rendering him nakedly exposed to shifting po-

litical climates. Martin perceived, of course, similar qualities in his father’s character—a historical assurance and fixity that no longer seemed valid in a contingent, postmodern, nuclear age.

Comically, and perhaps indicative of the truth of Martin’s words, Larkin and Kingsley both evinced horror at Martin’s novel Money, the title of which owes credit to Larkin’s poem by the same name. Whereas Kingsley found the novel unreadable, tossing it through the air after a few chapters, Larkin at least finished it, although he could not restrain a “big shriek” at the postmodern liberties Martin took with the book. In

his memoir Experience, Martin identified the specific line that prompted Larkin’s exclamation of horror: “Larkin seized on a moment where extravagant (and expensive) sexual temptation is greeted by the prediction of extravagant (and deflationary) disappointment.”* In short, the Amises’ differing responses to Austen, Waugh, and Larkin

illuminate the complex forces of genealogical dissent that lay at the heart of their literary and political opinions. Although their deliberations of these exemplary English writers generally lacked the energy of their American debates, Kingsley and Martin continually engaged each other’s most cherished values and beliefs, whether literary, political, or generational. By revising the foundations of these authors’ work, the Amises created a forum for expressing their philosophical and political differences, something their more aesthetic analyses of American literature did not sufficiently allow. Jane Austen furnished a model against which the Amises could define their own explorations of class and romance; Evelyn Waugh helped them reconsider their uses of history, tradition, and culture; and Philip Larkin provided an example of the con-

troversial relationship between poetry and politics. If one positions Austen and Waugh at polar extremes of a tonal spectrum, then Larkin’s

elegiac tones and ironic resignation define a middle ground between

98 « Critical Cartography Austen's comic festivity and Waugh’s acerbic misanthropy. In their unique ways, these three English authors influenced the Amises’ own comic, satiric, and romantic expressions. Contesting the merits of these English exempla, the Amises not only validated their artistic and philo-

sophical convictions but also challenged each other's perception of modern reality. In its purest form, theirs was a contest of familial oppo-

sition and generational dissent: equally aesthetic and emotional, the Amises’ wranglings over Austen, Waugh, and Larkin posited rival versions of reality.

With an understanding of the major influences and impulses surrounding the Amises’ work, it is now possible to turn attention to the ways these oppositions assume practical form in many of their novels. Starting out from different origins and following dissimilar routes, Kingsley and Martin Amis can be viewed as contestants, and at times combatants, 1n the territorial struggles among realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Iranslating their theoretical divergences into fictional form, their novels consciously adopt strategic positions in the artistic war over mimesis. To illuminate such developments, one could proceed thematically, contrasting the Amises’ worldviews and narrative proclivities in an ahistorical context, moving haphazardly from text to text. However, when surveying the Amises’ novels, numerous logical pairs suggest themselves for comparison, supporting a more grounded methodology. By examining the Amises’ complementary productions, or companion novels, one can better perceive how their works dramatize their familial tensions as well as the modal transformations that lie at the base of the twentieth-century transition from realism to postmodernism.

INFLUENCE AND

INTERSECTION.

The Interplay of Individual Works

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Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers They seemed to think that it must have been extra difficult for me, coming out from behind my father, but it wasn't; his shadow served

as a kind of protection. And I felt no particular sense of achieve- a a - ment, either. It’s a strange surprise, becoming a writer, but nothing = is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day. The pains,

| and perhaps some of the pleasures, of authorship were therefore dulled to me. It was business as usual. — Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

| On 3 March 1953, six years after graduating from Oxford University,

| | Kingsley Amis wrote to his friend Philip Larkin, informing him that he | had chosen a title for his newest novel. Dixon and Christine was out, he said; Lucky Jim was in. Twenty-seven days later, another letter from

| Kingsley arrived, this time informing Larkin that the manuscript was completed. By the middle of April, Kingsley had dispatched the work | to Hilary Rubinstein, another Oxford acquaintance, who was employed at the publishing house of his uncle, Victor Gollancz. “As you'll see,” Kingsley explained in his cover letter, “serio-comedy is the formula really, though if it gets by at all I imagine it'll get by chiefly on the score of the comic angle.” Released in print on 19 January 1954, Lucky Jim catapulted Kingsley into literary fame. By the end of the year, twelve thou-

| , IOI

sand copies were published, the BBC had inquired about radio adaptations, and the film rights were optioned to the famed directors John and

102 « Influence and Intersection Roy Boulting after Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein reneged. Although American editions were returned to Doubleday en masse — the result of a dubious marketing ploy—the literary establishment moved quickly to embrace what was widely hailed as a work of great humor and originality.! Reviews of Lucky Jim were favorable and numerous, validating Victor Gollancz’s decision to delay publication until January, a more fortuitous release date on the publishing calendar. Sean O’Faolain announced

that Kingsley had made “the gayest of bricks with the most common straw; Walter Allen declared Kingsley a novelist of “formidable and uncomfortable talent”; John Betjeman likened the book to “a Harold Lloyd film or a Buster Keaton film in prose”; Anthony Powell praised the novel’s “energy,” “form,” and “real power”; and Edmund Fuller drew comparisons with the work of P. G. Wodehouse, praising Kingsley for writing in the “cool, detached, sardonic style which is the trademark of the British satirical novel.” Over the course of Kingsley’s life, Lucky Jim

would remain one of the greatest premieres in literary history, would never once go out of print, and would eventually be translated into over twenty languages. In other words, by the time Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers, appeared in 1973, his father was firmly established as one of Britain's most important, popular, and controversial novelists. The comparisons were inevitable. Although Martin jokes that having a familiar name with publishers and reviewers did not hurt his career, he nevertheless faced a difficult double burden, especially for a beginning writer. Throughout his career, his work would have to vie for legitimacy within historical and familial frameworks, competing with literary tradition as well as his father’s extant corpus. In short, it would be a dual battle for professional and personal validation. The viability of Martin's artistic vision was at stake, and the burden of comparison would color his achievements or failures.

As one might expect, at least two critics began their reviews of Martin's novel on precisely this note. Writing in the 24 June 1974 issue of the New Yorker, L. E. Sissman praised Martin’s “comically intense malignity,” which he defined as an “Amis family specialty.” Declaring

that Martin had “performed the rare and hazardous feat of extending his father’s mastery of the comic novel to a second generation,” Sissman

The Amises on Comedy « 103 nonetheless concluded that Martin was “quite his own man” in the sub-

ject he had chosen. Elsewhere, Peter S. Prescott portrayed the Amis pere-et-fils rivalry as a generational battle, noting that Kingsley had for years been “writing sour, witty novels combining manic energy with crapulous fastidiousness.” “Not to be outdone,” Prescott elaborated, Martin appeared to be challenging his father, “peddling hard, seemingly determined . . . to outrace Daddy’s excesses.”3 If Martin did not overtake his father, he at least caught up with him on one count: Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers both won the Somerset Maugham Award for their respective years of publication. There were, of course, good reasons for comparing father and son, irrespective of their individual novels. To begin with, their early careers seemed remarkably similar. Although Kingsley later admitted that he did not consider Martin to be “university material,” Martin nevertheless retraced his father’s steps to Oxford, where he would eventually graduate with honors. Twenty years earlier, Kingsley had taken an honors degree there as well. From Oxford, both men successfully navigated the often cumbersome passage from academia to professional employment. Although Kingsley had failed his bachelor’s degree examination when one of the examiners, Lord David Cecil, raised objections to his thesis, “English Non-Dramatic Poetry, 1850-1900, and the Victorian Reading Public,” he was offered, and eventually accepted, a lecturer position at the University College of Swansea in Wales.* (As Kingsley was fond of joking, it was the only position left vacant in Britain.) Martin’s migration to the workforce occurred equally as quickly, although with

significantly less tumult. After graduating in 1971, he immediately began reviewing books for the Odserver. Within a year, he was doing the same for the New Statesman and working as an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement. Like his father, Martin also began writing novels, working evenings and weekends to complete The Rachel Papers within a year after graduation.

Fortunately for both authors, early dedication to their craft translated into quick success —a fortuitous boon for any fledgling writer. Favorable reviews, rapid notoriety, and energetic sales paved the way for the next necessary step in their careers— retiring from their early appointments. In 1963, after spending fifteen years lecturing at Swansea, and with brief stints at Cambridge and Princeton Universities, Kingsley

104 e Influence and Intersection left the academic life for good, assuming the responsibilities of a fulltime writer. He would return to the profession only once, accepting a visiting professorship at Vanderbilt University in 1967-68. In 1980 Martin became a full-time writer as well, retiring from his journalistic duties

after only nine years. At a glance, the early careers of both Amises seemed remarkably similar: exemplary education led to instant employment, which was followed by rapid notoriety and lasting literary success. By the late 1970s, with Kingsley’s second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, writing novels herself, there was no denying that the Amises had become England’s foremost literary family, eclipsing Evelyn and Auberon Waugh, who had previously held that title. When Martin's The Rachel Papers won the Somerset Maugham Award, replicating Kingsley's earlier achievement for Lucky Jim, the Amises became the first house-

hold in literary history to feature three writers who garnered major awards for their debut novels. Prescott was correct, it seemed, to assert that even in the literary arena, “Genes matter; they really do.” While it would be ludicrous to claim that Martin had any noticeable effect on Kingsley’s novel Lucky Jim—apart from disrupting his father with toddler requests — consideration of the two Amises’ inaugural novels nonetheless furnishes an image of the Amises’ literary and familial negotiations. Writing both against and away from Kingsley’s precursor text, Martin directly challenged the foundations of his father’s comic techniques, questioning many of the stylistic and thematic assumptions that animated Lucky Jim. A self-conscious attempt to engage Kingsley on the battlefield that he had so successfully surveyed and mapped, The Rachel Papers proclaims the legitimacy of Martin’s comic methods in the face of Lucky Jim.

We can most clearly understand these developments by examining

the historical contexts and thematic concerns that surround the two novels. Because Lucky Jim preceded The Rachel Papers by almost twenty years, or nearly a full generation, it makes logical sense to begin with it

and then show how Martin's text diverges. Regardless of which text is under examination, however, this chapter will seek to explore three related critical issues: (1) how Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers inflamed competitive tensions between literary generations; (2) how issues of class and philistinism operate within the works; and (3) how Martin's novel enters into symbolic conversation (or dialogue) with his father’s text, interrogating its style, themes, and comedic techniques.

The Amiseson Comedy « 105

Lucky Jim: Cultural and Generational Conflict Inflaming both literary and social tensions upon its release, Lucky Jim would become a cause célébre, a pressure valve for some of the decades most sensitive issues. Not surprisingly, such controversies manifested themselves as impassioned generational conflicts, iconoclastic blows against tradition by an upstart author. Writing in the 26 June 1954 issue of the New Statesman and Society, J. B. Priestley was among the earliest reviewers to voice his discomfort with the new zeitgeist that Kingsley’s novel portrayed.® Although Priestley refrained from identifying authors or book titles in his survey— noting that the names were “in his mind” and that the books were “in the next room” —the June 1954 date of his article implies that Lucky Jim was one of these texts. Lamenting an uncomfortable shift in political and cultural values, Priestley mourned the lack of commitment that the “New English Novel” revealed. Faulting contemporary writers for both artistic and political transgressions, for failures of mimesis and engagement, he argued that their imaginative worlds were unconvincing: “I am never quite convinced that what they tell me is happening really is happening,” he wrote. Although Priestley admitted that such differences affirmed only a generational chasm — that he was in his sixtieth year and “these writers are in their twenties and early thirties”; that he was “wedded to one convention and they are busy creating another”—he could not reconcile his political concerns about the direction of new fiction (825). For Priestley, these problems were more than thematic: he could easily embrace “militant anarchy” as a valid response, for instance. Instead, what troubled him was the presence of something “not to be eas-

ily included in the categories of my generation’ —namely, the new novels’ propensity to reject society, to repudiate social responsibility. Calling the chief characters of these unnamed works “[b]umbling nitwits,” “highbrow casual labourers,” and “[g]ipsies in old pullovers and dirty raincoats,” Priestley argued that their attitudes and values made it impossible to sympathize with their actions and poses. Criticizing their tendency to “stroll in and out of jobs,” not caring what they do “so long as it offers no future and they have not to take it seriously,” he labeled them “[a]rtful dodgers more than open rebels.” Such “{dJeliberately unheroic” characters appeared to him to be “the most isolated and loneliest characters in all fiction” (826).

106 .« Influence and Intersection As his words convey, Priestley’s critique was both aesthetic and po-

litical, literary and social. His comments suggest the nascent grumblings of a perceived cultural shift, and he felt uncomfortable with the coming agenda. Like George Orwell, who diagnosed a similar retreat from society in his celebrated essay, “Inside the Whale,” Priestley lamented that the new fiction championed attitudes of exile and withdrawal.’ Writing in 1940, immediately following the start of World War II, Orwell could rationalize the desire to escape the emotional burdens of war, to retreat (as did Jonah) inside the “wombic” whale. Attempting to maintain contact with prewar values appeared more logical, even commendable, than a Conradian immersion in the self, an investi-

gation of the destructive element within. Writing fifteen years later than Orwell, however, and after the war’s conclusion, Priestley could no

longer sympathize with the humanistic withdrawal Orwell noted in Henry Miller's novels. “How do we go on, outside it all?” he asked, “What is it like not to be a responsible citizen, a thoughtful member of the electorate, a pillar of society?” Instead of engaging social problems from within the system, and therefore remaining connected with it, new authors seemed to be “quietly contracting out of our society,” undermining the nostalgic foundations of the past (826). Priestley was not, of course, the only spokesman for an earlier generation to criticize the new fiction Lucky Jim epitomized. For William Van O’Connor as well, such developments represented a cultural conflict: the traditional “gentleman's world [of ] Oxford accented culture” contrasted sharply with the emerging class of university-educated writers who refused to be embraced by that world. Similar sentiments, varying in tone, can also be found in the contemporaneous writings of Leslie Fiedler, V. S. Pritchett, and Stephen Spender, to name only a few.® However, by far the most famous assessment of Kingsley’s novel came nearly a year after its release. Not the first but certainly the loudest denunciation of the novel’s values, it singlehandedly inspired an onslaught of splenetic criticism that would follow Kingsley (and Lucky Jim) for the next forty-five years, illuminating its participation in the generational wars that Kingsley would later encounter, ironically, with his son. In an annual retrospective entitled “Books Of The Year—I,” pub-

lished in the Sunday Times on Christmas Day, 1955, W. Somerset Maugham issued an ideological call to arms against Lucky Jim. Gone

Lhe Amiseson Comedy . 107 was the emotional ballast of Priestlev'’s more moderate temperament; in its place lay a sense of urgency and stentorian attack. Describing Lucky Jim as a standard bearer for a more intransigent generation whose values he did not share, Maugham excoriated the “ominous significance”

of Kingsley’s character, Jim Dixon, England's rising new archetype. According to Maugham, people like Jim—and, of course, Kingsley by extension — did “not go to university to acquire culture, but to get a job,

and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious, and envious. They will write anonymous letters to harass a fellow undergraduate and listen in to a telephone conversation that is no business of theirs. Charity, kindliness, generosity are qualities which they hold in contempt.” Such characters, he famously concluded, were “scum.” Although Maugham would eventually retract this derogation, facing the rejoinders of C. P. Snow and others, his review neatly depicts the class animus that Kingsley’s novel so skillfully mined.? Despite the falsity of Maugham’s references to the novel (Jim does not harrass a fellow undergraduate, for instance, but a colleague) and his surprising lack

of humor (Jim does eavesdrop on a phone conversation, but that is hardly indicative of a social problem), his review clarifies how pointedly

Lucky Jim threatened generational conflict. In other words, Priestley and Maugham both presaged an irreconcilable intellectual division, a fissure of artistic generations. Identifying the foundation for this shift as

a progression from communal idealism to narrow self-interest, these critics denigrated the novel for ushering in a new wave of literary and cultural philistinism, a burgeoning class war.

Initially grouped with the fiction of the “angry young men” (to Kingsley’s dismay), Lucky Jim’s hero was unlike his companions in the contemporaneous work of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, or Keith Water-

house.!9 Jim Dixon is an insider who wants out, not an outsider who wants in. A beginning lecturer in medieval history, Dixon is supremely misplaced in the world of his provincial English college. He dislikes his boss, the pompous Professor Welch, and he will quickly come to hate his boss’s son, the even more pompous Bertrand Welch, a deluded bohemian painter. Like all great Kingsley Amis characters, however, Jim’s charm and his strength derive predominantly from common sense, wit,

108 « Influence and Intersection and self-awareness. He repudiates the pretentious, self-serving delusions of the Welches and successfully transcends anger through mimicry and rebellion, and this comprises his unique form of everyday alchemy, of subversive, picaresque humor.!! There is, of course, plenty of textual evidence to indict Jim Dixon as

a cultural iconoclast, as Maugham and Priestley had noted. At one point, for instance, Margaret Peel calls him “a shabby little provincial bore”; later, Bertrand calls him “a lousy little philistine.”!? Jim himself even encourages the comparison, confessing that his chief educational policy is to “read as little as possible of any given book” and that he specialized in medieval history because it was a “soft option in the Leicester course” (35). However, by far the most infamous, and least understood, phrase of the novel occurs when Jim overhears Professor Welch singing in the lavatory on the morning after the Welches’ party. Recognizing Ned’s tune as “some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart” (66), Jim provides misguided readers with evidence of his own militant philistinism, and presumably Kingsley’s as well. The most egregious example of the critical myopia that stemmed from this remark occurred in 1966, when Brigid Brophy faulted Kingsley for sacrificing the novel’s artistic form as well as the “psychological consistency” of his characters. Citing Kingsley’s “unimaginative bloodymindedness,” Brophy criticized the “blubber-lipped sentimentality” of the novel’s ending, in which satire “is sacrificed to petulance” and Kingsley’s prose “seems to reach for its peashooter.” Although she was uncertain whether Kingsley shared Jim’s morality, Brophy had no doubt that he espoused his hero’s baseness, identifying the “apex of philistinism” as Jim’s “filthy Mozart” remark. The phrase, she noted incorrectly, occurs

“again in Mr. Amis’s ambiguous reported speech.”

By 1973, Kingsley had had enough of these exercises in critical kneecapping. Responding to Brophy (and to the earlier charges of Maugham and Priestley), Kingsley “put paid” once and for all—to borrow one of his favorite phrases—to the notion that he endorsed overt philistinism. Although Lucky Jim had serious social overtones, the issues could not be reduced to simple class conflict, Kingsley argued. Instead, they were inherent elements of comedy and satire, a lampooning

of overformulated absurdities. Maintaining that he had been more driven by questions of character rather than by issues of class, Kingsley

The Amises on Comedy « 109 declared instead that the novel's social elements had been “largely invented” by English reviewers. Speaking with Dale Salwak, he revealed the impatience with which he had come to regard the critical attempts to conflate him with his character: Jim and I have taken a lot of stick and a lot of bad mouthing for being Philistine, aggressively Philistine, for saying, “Well, as long as I’ve got me blonde and me pint of beer and me packet of fags and me seat at the cinema, I’m all right.” I don’t think either of us would say that. It’s nice to have a pretty girl with large breasts rather than some fearful woman who's going to talk to you about Ezra Pound and hasn'‘t got large breasts and probably doesn’t wash much. And better to have a pint of beer than

to have to talk to your host about the burgundy you're drinking. And better to go to the pictures than go to see nonsensical art exhibitions that nobody’s really going to enjoy. So it’s appealing to common sense if

you like, and it’s a way of trying to denounce affectation. . . . | Jim’s] rather an uncouth person, anyway. He could easily be more couth without his origins being changed.14

Kingsley was, of course, partaking of the time-honored practice of public posturing during this interview. He deliberately baited his readers, drawing them in, calling their bluffs. As anyone familiar with his odzter dicta knows, Kingsley wrote extensively about all forms of liquor, including burgundy, to which the books On Drink (1972) and How's Your Glass? A Quizzical Look at Drinks and Drinking (1984) attest. By contrast, however, his distaste for high or pretentious art was genuine, as

was his Fieldingesque concern for deflating affectation. Not surprisingly, these issues manifest themselves in the provenance of the novel, which sheds the brightest light upon Kingsley’s social intentions. Writing about the genesis of the novel, Kingsley recalled a 1946 visit to Philip Larkin, who was then living and working in Leicester. After a half-hour wait in the university's senior common room, observing “Professors and lecturers sitting, standing, talking, laughing, reading, drift-

ing in and out, drinking coffee,” Kingsley remembered thinking, “Christ, somebody ought to do something about this.” He felt he had happened upon a “whole mode of existence no one had got on to, like the SS in 1940, say.” As Kingsley outlined in his essay, “Real and Made-

up People,” the novel quickly took shape from there: “What followed can most easily, and accurately, be put in note form. University shags.

Provincial. Probably keen on culture. Crappy culture. Fellow who

10 « Influence and Intersection doesn’t fit in. Seems anti-culture. Non-U. Non-Oxbridge. Beer. Girls. Can't say what he really thinks. Boss trouble. Given chores. Disasters. Boring boss (a) so boring girl (b). Nice girl comes but someone else’s property. Whose? etc.” As even these preliminary notes suggest, Kingsley was concerned not with leveling class and culture in general, but with deflating only its wrongfully contorted forms, the “Crappy culture” of university “shags.” Even Jim Dixon, unnamed at this stage, simply “seems anti-culture,” displaced by his “Non-U,” “Non-Oxbridge” attractions. Kingsley Amis, it still bears repeating, was himself too cultured to reject culture outright. Rather, what motivated his satire was the way culture is appropriated and misused by self-inflated people. “One theme of Lucky Jim is getting good things wrong,” he explained, “Culture’s good, but not the way the Welches did it. Education is good... . but it is self-defeating if it isn't done properly.”!6 Throughout Kingsley’s career, questions of philistinism and social class repeatedly bowed to questions of behavior and character. They were facets, in other words, of characterization, not of any fixed social program or cultural agenda. Jim’s employment of intentionally philistine poses therefore serves an important thematic purpose. Writing “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis” in 1966, David Lodge became one of the first scholars to show that the comedy of Lucky Jim derives chiefly from the contrast between Jim's outer and inner worlds, his public and private facades.!” As long as Jim Dixon tries to keep his subversive inner life secret, posits Lodge, he will remain trapped in various forms of “evasion, compromise, [and] hypocrisy.” He can only evolve out of this internal labyrinth when he wills his inner and outer worlds into collusion. For Lodge, the novel’s

most important scene occurs when Jim fights and defeats Bertrand Welch. Immediately afterward, Lodge argues, Jim transcends his inner limitations and articulates his redemptive, subversive thoughts, calling Bertrand a “bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation” (214). From that point onward, Jim’s luck changes for the better. He loses both job and girlfriend, but gets better ones in return. Lodge is correct to assert that Jim Dixon needs to marry thought and action, his inner and outer worlds. He ceases to be an internally divided character by learning not only to act on, but to express, his objections. Yet Lodge, too, is guilty of a subtle oversimplification. By itself,

The Amises on Comedy « III the fight with Bertrand paints an incomplete picture of Jim’s personal transformation from division to integrity. Insufficient to deliver Jim from his constrictive environment, the fight with Bertrand finds its necessary corollary in the Merrie England lecture that follows it. In both its textual and drunkenly delivered forms, Jim’s lecture more fully illuminates the novel’s serious overtones and moral imperatives, aspects that Martin Amis would later try to subvert. While the fight with Bertrand remains the pivotal point in the novel for Jim’s character, its ramifications become apparent only when Jim begins to deliver his lecture. The necessary verbal complement to Jim's more physical assertion of integrity, the lecture culminates his internal development, fully divesting him from the stifling environment of the Welches. The novel’s most catalytic episode, Jim’s Merrie England lecture settles finally the question of Kingsley’s use of philistine poses, revealing

their relationship to the novel’s dominant theme: the Bergsonian contrast between affectation and natural response, mechanism and spontaneity.!8 It also reveals the novel's revisionist criticism of modernist

agendas, its sober critique of Lawrentian primitivism and Eliotic/ Poundian elitism. Throughout the novel, Kingsley draws attention to the degrees by which characters act naturally or as if following a prelaid

plan. Midway through the novel, for instance, Jim explains to Christine Callaghan that she should not marry Bertrand, and he remarks that there exist “two great classes of mankind” — people he likes and people he dislikes (147). What attracts Jim to certain people is the degree to which their actions and their response to life can be viewed as instinctive, spontaneous, and unaffected. What irritates him to the point of parody or ridicule, however, is not simple pomposity or pretension, but their nefarious companions, inner blindness and mechaniza-

tion. At one point, Jim states that he must “mortar or bayonet Welch out of his prepared positions of reticence, irrelevance, and the longlived, wondering frown” (85), and he counsels Margaret Peel about their separation, telling her, “These things just don’t stop like that. Human beings aren't as simple as that, they’re not like machines” (79).

In brief, Jim cannot stand people who lack awareness of the roles they assume. He instinctively rebels against pretenders, shams, and intellectuals —anyone, that is, who places more value on appearance than substance. Despite his love of faces and masks, his salvation stems

112 « Influence and Intersection directly from honesty and self-awareness. He is redeemed by acknowledging not only his own limitations but also his displacement from the Welches’ falsified and dessicated world. What saves Jim is the recognition that he, too, is a sham, playing a role, acting a part. Significantly, we see him exhausting his protective masks during both the composition and the delivery of his Merrie England lecture, illuminating the Berg-

sonian and antimodernist dimensions of Kingsley’s serious comedic form.

Struggling to compose the draft of his speech, Jim muses that “Something on the lines of ‘Finally, thank God for the twentieth century would satisfy him, but it wouldn't satisfy Welch” (199). He then “seizes” his pencil, lets fly a “happy laugh,” and formulates a hypocriti-

cal end to his lecture, couched in the idiolect of Professor Welch. A false, Rousseauist and Lawrentian call to arms, his words warn of “valuable lessons” for modern humanity, living as we do “in an age of prefab-

ricated amusements.” Making a mental note to look at Welch during the delivery of this conclusion, Jim drafts a tentative end to his lecture. “One wonders,” he writes, “‘how one of the men or women I have tried to describe would react to such typically modern phenomena as the cinema, the radio, the television. What would he think, accustomed as he was... to making his own music, . . . of a society where people like himself are regarded as oddities, where to play an instrument himself, oneself, instead of paying others to do so, to sing a madrigal instead of a cheap dance lyric, is to incur the dreaded title of crank. . . .’” (199-200). At this point, however, Jim remains a divided individual. Responding to the novel's most significant question — “‘What, finally, is the practical application of all this?’” —Jim continues to write in the false lexicon of Professor Welch, the language of propriety, convention, and prefabrication. As Richard Bradford notes, Jim’s words amount to yet another covert attack on F. R. Leavis as well.!9 “‘Each of us,’” Jim writes, “‘can resolve to do something, every day, to resist the application of manufactured standards, to protest against ugly articles of furniture and tableware, to speak out against sham architecture, . . . to say one word for the instinctive culture of the integrated village-type community” (209). Immediately afterward, of course, he realizes the absurdity of his words, at least as they pertain to his own life. Releasing a “long, jabbering belch,” Jim jumps wildly around the room, doing his “ape-imitation.”

The Amisescn Comedy «~~ 133

Occurring immediately before the fight with Bertrand that Lodge identifies as the novel’s turning point, this composition scene is significant for four interrelated reasons. First, it illuminates the novel’s schism

between actual and rendered experience, active and passive involvement. Second, it is intricately connected to Jim’s Bergsonian valuation of people as either natural or mechanical. Third, it reflects the impending disintegration of Jim’s reliance on public masks and facades, and fourth, it reveals Kingsley’s critique of modernistic and Lawrencian primitivism, which forms the basis for Jim’s philistine psychological defenses. Although Jim and Kingsley might both agree that people should struggle against “manufactured standards” and speak out against everything that appears to be a “sham,” Jim’s words do not ring true, and warrant the ape imitation, because he tries to append clauses to them that he cannot endorse; hence his instant revulsion at the reference to “the instinctive culture of the integrated village-type community.” Jim’s remarks, in other words, subvert their meaning, deconstruct and turn inward upon themselves. His public persona begins to disintegrate as he

writes, and he cannot conceal his insincerity. Immediately following this scene, Bertrand appears and the fight ensues. Unable by itself to deliver Jim from the false world of the Welches,

the fight with Bertrand still portrays him as ensnared in that world. After he assaults Bertrand, for instance —and before he has any chance to relish his victory—his most demanding student, Michie, appears, reminding Jim of his professional duties. An emissary from the world of

falsity, convention, and pretense, Michie figuratively summons Jim back to that world: he mentions Jim’s teaching as well as the dreaded lecture Jim has just insincerely completely. Although Jim succeeds in merging his inner and outer identities, his public and private masks, in the fight with Bertrand, as Lodge contends, he still remains frustrated in his desire to be the Bergsonian natural man, unencumbered by pretense and facades. He may have temporarily defeated Bertrand, but the victory is only tokenistic at this stage. Jim knows that Christine will accompany Bertrand to the lecture, and he still has not broken from Ned Welch, who controls his professional fate and whose voice infects Jim’s text. Jim’s internal transformation, as well as his external deliverance, are thus but half achieved, half realized. Only during the lecture itself does Jim complete the union of his private and public facades, striking

14 « Influence and Intersection the loudest blow against the prefabricated and planned approach to life that are the targets of Jim’s lecture and of Kingsley’s comic form. During the lecture, Jim expends each of the voices with which he associates the false world of the Welches.° In addition, he submits to his natural instincts, resolving to let his intonation suggest what “he thought of the subject and the worth of the statements he was making.” Hearing himself talking “without consciously willing any words,” he extemporizes an answer to his earlier, and most crucial, question, “‘What, finally, is the practical application of all this?’” He then begins to lambaste the “homemade pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the

recorder-playing crowd, the Esperanto[-speaking crowd],” intoning that the “point about Merrie England, is that it was about the most unMerrie period in our history’” (231). Finally, he is permanently interrupted, a dual result of his drunkenness and the principal’s having seen and heard enough. This scene is the novel’s true turning point in that it portrays Jim’s

transcendent release from the constraining world of the Welches. Healthily suspicious of pretension and propriety, Jim’s is a situational ethos, specific to a world of contingency, not stagnation. Acutely perceiving the shallowness of his existence at the college, he can no longer deny that life is frozen and dead for him there. ‘That is why his earlier praise for the twentieth century is so appropriate, and why he is so supremely misplaced as a teacher of medieval history. During the novel’s final scene, when Jim attempts to win Christine at the train station, it 1s significant that he has, unlike T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, no face prepared to meet the faces he will meet. Before this he was able to approach experience, and escape it, through the use of categorical masks. Christine, however, ultimately reinforces for Jim the lunacy of prepared behavior. She is too young to adopt rigid, inflexible attitudes, and Jim is too wise to do so; they are thus better matched than she and Bertrand, who has fixed ideas about art and creativity. For all his talk of primitive art and instinctive impulse, Bertrand is emotionally and intellectually vacuous. Hopelessly tied to an overvaluation of the past, he is the real medievalist in the novel and not Jim, who is the subversive agent acting

as both prophet and living parable. A teacher at last, Jim instructs through comic example.

Through Jim, Kingsley dramatizes the Bergsonian oppositions between affectation and naturalness, pretension and ingenuousness,

The Amiseson Comedy « 15 mechanization and spontaneity. As Kingsley himself suggested, Jim Dixon is distinguished by comic enlightenment more than downright anger, and his masks and faces play a critical role in reclaiming his integrity. Endowing Jim with the attitudes of a Movement practitioner, Kingsley elevated a self-conscious rationality above the Welches’ neomodernist primitivism, appealing to common sense and reason above the Welches’ artificial and etiolated values. Although Kingsley was un-

fairly chastised for the book’s deliberate, even militant, philistinism, such criticism ultimately confirmed the cultural impact of his creation. The fact that his stances on these issues were so drastically misunderstood only affirms the irreconcilable charm of his hero, and that, to Kingsley, must have alleviated some of the frustration he felt at the critical abuse of his novel, his hero, and himself. As we shall see, these literary and cultural issues plagued Martin Amis’s first novel as well, in ways

that are too striking to be accidental. Through Charles Highway, the obsessive-compulsive narrator of The Rachel Papers, Martin directly challenged the foundations of his father’s comic form. Interrogating both the Bergsonian oppositions and the modernist critique that fueled his father’s text, Martin labored to supplant the values and viability of Kingsley’s most famous comic hero.

The Rachel Papers: Revaluative Inversion and Critique Upon its release, Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), caused a similar literary stir, though smaller in scope, to that occasioned by his father’s debut. As with Lucky Jim, reviewers of The Rachel Papers attuned themselves to the novel’s charged generational themes. Eliot Fremont-Smith labeled The Rachel Papers the “best teenage sex novel” since Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus; Pearl K. Bell proclaimed that Martin had captured the “uninhibited idiom” of England's rebellious youth; Clive Jordon announced that Martin had directed a “determined, deadpan stare at his chosen patch of the lush teenage jungle”; and Peter Ackroyd proclaimed simply, “Well, you old fogies, you were right after all. Martin Amis has exposed the younger generation for the evil and wretched creatures you always supposed them to be, and his only consolation for them is that, once over the hill of adolescence, they may perhaps improve.” In short, most reviewers agreed with Ackroyd that Mar-

tin had “fashioned a substantial character out of the rag-ends of our

6 . Influence and Intersection frantic contemporaries. 7! Although a few writers chastised Martin for the frankness of his prose, most praised his ludic exuberance, extolling the promise and versatility of this powerful new voice. That is not to say, however, that the novel did not inspire controversy. As with his father’s book, that controversy manifested itself as a conflict between literary generations. As the decidedly more explicit novel, however, The Rachel Papers was derided not only for issues of philistinism and class, but for sexism and misogyny as well. Writing in The New Leader, Pearl K. Bell excoriated the novel’s ob-

session with adolescent love and lust. Noting that the novel’s hero, Charles Highway, was “precocious and totally self-absorbed,” Bell proclaimed that his narcissism ultimately subverted the novel’s humor. A

“one-note tirade of teenage angst and absurdity,” the novel’s jokes seemed to her “labored and unfunny,” and though she acknowledged Martin's immediacy of voice and vivid characterizations, she argued that

the novel ultimately degenerated into a loose collection of vignettes: “Less a work of fiction than a collage of brightly malicious cinematic takes,’ The Rachel Papers seemed too circular and solipsistic, an effort of literary adolescence.*? This critique was shared by Peter Prince, who hypothesized that Martin may have tackled his subject prematurely.

To Prince, the novel suffered from a lack of objectivity, a stylistic overindulgence. Like Maugham, speaking earlier of Lucky Jim, Prince criticized The Rachel Papers for assaulting artistic sensibilities. “Too indulgent” and “too despairing in [its] judgements,” the novel seemed de-

signed instead to capture an irritating educational archetype—the “Early Bloomer, the Sixth Form Sneerer.” As did Jim Dixon, Charles Highway epitomized “that combination of middle-class privilege and A-level meritocracy who is such a delight for the dons and such a damn trial to everybody else until a few years pass and, mercifully, he either fizzles out or, more rarely, manages the breakthrough into rejoining the rest

of the human race.” Faulting Martin for glorifying Charles’s quests for sexual and linguistic satisfaction, Prince lamented the novel’s absence of any substantial quest. “Every now and then,” he argued, “one senses from the author a furtive, rather wistful desire to believe that there zs after all something of value in Charles Highway’s messy chatter, in all those dingy little apergus and corny paradoxes and fifth-hand aphorisms.’*3 Unfortunately, Charles (and Martin) repeatedly came up short.

The Amisessn Comedy .« U7 Finally, Karl Miller provided the most balanced appraisal by noting how the novel could be viewed as either a powerful premiere of a distinctive new voice or as an uncomfortable “spectacle of a crusadingly nasty adolescent unburdening himself in print.” To him, Charles’s obsessive dissembling was equallv solipsistic and emancipatory, an emotional pressure valve as well as a “satire on the writer's age group.” Although he could not deny the novel’s appeal to readers of a younger generation, Miller nonetheless noted that there was an ageless, archetypal attraction to Martin’s charmingly egotistic narrator. “I would bet,” Miller wrote, “that many of those attracted to the novel are older, by a bit, than its author. The British have gone in fear of their exotic young, from whom they expect a nasty princeliness, by whom they expect to be thrilled and despised. I wonder if Mr. Amis knows the pleasure he has given.” Although the fallout from Lucky Jim was much more lasting and incendiary, The Rachel Papers nonetheless garnered its share of review notoriety. In a familial context, Martin proved that he could rival his father in terms of public controversy. In a professional context, Martin

demonstrated that he could create equally resonant contemporary archetypes. Charles Highway was as shocking, memorable, and endearing a character as Jim Dixon, a point that was reinforced in 1980, when the American author Jacob Epstein plagiarized The Rachel Papers, forcing Martin to expose him in the Odserver.*4

If one recalls Harold Bloom’s (admittedly masculinist) thesis that literature originates out of an imaginative transaction between symbolic fathers and sons, and that writers try to neutralize or disarm their predecessors through strategies of critique, assimilation, and subversion, then Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers seem to be an especially relevant test case. Martin had read and liked Lucky Jim as an undergraduate at Oxford, and as The Rachel Papers developed just a few years later, he must have been conscious of the degree to which his own fiction so drastically contested his father’s efforts. It is also tempting to wonder how Kingsley would have reviewed his son's book, as he was a regular contributor at the time of its release to the Odserver and the Listener, both of which reviewed it. Both Amises, however, spoke about their particular anxieties of influence, and their comments reveal their confluence — as well as their divergences— from Bloom's ideas about anxiety and influence.

118 .« Influence and Intersection Significantly, in a 1987 interview with Charles Michener, Martin re-

marked that anxiety functions for him as an artistic imperative, as a “necessary ingredient for writing.” “Everything I do ends up getting done in a kind of chaos of anxiety,” he explained, closely approximating Bloom. “If you do not have the anxiety you're not onto anything.” This creatively generative dynamic eventually resulted in a difference of opinion between the two Amises. Martin recalls that Kingsley was unwilling to offer literary assistance. Kingsley recalled that Martin was remarkably secretive about his work. Necessarily, perhaps, Te Rachel Papers seems to have taken shape without much filial deliberation. Asked whether he helped his son with The Rachel Papers, Kingsley mentioned that when-

ever he entered a room where Martin was working, Martin would immediately place his hand over the manuscript, obscuring the paper in the typewriter. But Martin recalls an indifferent father, uninterested in his son’s literary strivings: “Aided by a natural indolence,” Martin explains, “my father didn’t take much notice of my early efforts to write until I plonked the proof of my first novel on his desk.” In the year 2000, similar comments surfaced in interviews as well as Martin’s Experience: A Memorr, in which he reminisced about his literary relationship with his father: “You couldn't have three -zngs like that. And sometimes you couldn't even have two. The same went for -ics, -2ves, -/ys, and -tions. And the same went for all prefixes too. . . . It was the only piece of literary counsel he ever gave me. And, of course, he had never expressed any desire that I should pursue the literary life, despite all the evidence that I had such a life in mind. | attributed this to sheer indolence on his part, but I now think he was obeying a parental instinct, and a good one.”*° Arguably, the Amises’ relationship exists between their two polarities of restraint and indifference. Although Kingsley was a supremely funny man, whose vocal impressions could leave both friends and family in hysterics, he was also an aloof, sometimes distant father. All authors tend to be seclusionary, of course, and a simple glance at the publication dates of Kingsley’s novels conveys that he was always working. In confir-

mation of this fact, Martin has repeatedly recounted that his father seemed always to be in his study, and the children knew not to disturb him there. Kingsley’s second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, similarly remembers that she inherited responsibility for introducing Kingsley’s children to serious literature. She was single-handedly responsible, for

The Amiseson Comedy . 19 instance, for getting Martin interested in literature, and she felt keenly that Kingsley expected her to subordinate her career in deference to his own. In short, for such a literary figure —and such a literary household —

it seems surprising that Kingsley took such little interest in his childrenss literary education. History has shown that in families composed of multiple writers, there is much greater tendency toward collusion than rejection, consultation than refusal, as the careers of the Brontés and Rossettis affirm. Perhaps wisely, both Amises endorsed a policy of segregation and isolation with regards to their writing, even though, as Eric Jacobs writes, an atmosphere of literary assistance and input did indeed exist at other times in the Amis household.26 Whether unconsciously or not, Kingsley initially rejected a literary engagement with Martin, whereas Martin defines influence and anxiety as a creative source of motivation and inspiration. There is, of course, no reason why the Amises should have sought each other’s advice regarding their literary creations. Writers do, after all, require some sovereignty in the exploration of their ideas, and Martin might have found concealment to be the healthiest response to living in a literary family, especially if his techniques so directly opposed his father’s. Little but argument would have stemmed from early conferences between Kingsley and Martin Amis, perhaps resulting in the

threatened silence that Bloom expounds. Their segregation may be purely logical, a defense against unsolicited input, yet it may also signify a more proprietary impulse, an acknowledgment of professional and familial competition and a plea for space in a potentially restrictive envi-

ronment. Although father and son only rarely functioned as an ideal reader for the other’s work—and never until later in life—neither denied the intentionality of their artistic maneuvers. Furthermore, their words differentiate them from Bloom's version of literary influence in that the Amises’ conflicts were much more open, mutual, and conscious than Bloom’s theory can allow. More than a convenient instance of effi-

cient misreading, of exorcism by misprision, 74e Rachel Papers con-

sciously undermines the aesthetic and existential foundations of Kingsley’s Lucky Jim, in full awareness of Kingsley’s efforts and eventual

response. In this instance, intertextual negotiation functioned for the Amises as literary trench warfare, a battle over genre and mode that inspired, not silenced, production.

120 « Influence and Intersection “The Two Amises” In Experience Martin laments that the event of his first novel's publication “passed in what now seems to be improbable tranquility. No interviews, no readings, no photo sessions” (25). Whether intentionally or unconsciously, however, he is wrong. For whatever reason, Martin ne-

glects to mention the most important early glimpse into the Amises’ nascent literary rivalry. In 1974, just after The Rachel Papers had garnered

the Somerset Maugham Award, Kingsley and Martin appeared together on the BBC production Bookcase with Kevin Byrne. Asked specifically about influence, both Amises moved quickly to deny similarities. “I had absolutely nothing to do, except genetically, with Martin's novel,” Kingsley explained, “because — quite properly, I think—he refused to show me any of the work in progress until it was far too late for me to make any suggestions. He did ask me about one phrase, which | think I improved. Apart from that, I had no direct influence on what he wrote in his first novel at all.” Rejecting the notion that Kingsley’s Jim Dixon might resemble Martin’s hero Charles Highway, Kingsley as-

serted that the two seemed to be “totally different characters obyjectively.” “I feel that Lucky Jim is probably a little more like me... . But | feel that Martin’s Charles Highway is much less a piece of him.” Admitting that he approached Martin's novel with the dual eyes of a novelist and a father, eager to see “how much autobiography we are going to get here,” Kingsley eventually concluded that Martin seemed to be “deliberately disavowing any possible autobiographical identification.” Although Kingsley’s remarks derived from legitimate foundations, in this instance they, too, were incorrect or problematic. It is possible, for example, to identify numerous moments of deliberate revaluation

in Martin’s text. Some are indeed autobiographical whereas others play upon the thematic correspondences between Charles Highway and Jim Dixon. Together, this intertextual dialogue contradicts the Amises’ guttural dismissal of influence and clarifies the ways Martin attempted to clear a space for his own artistry in direct opposition to his father. Early in the novel, for instance, Charles laments that, compared with his classmates, he has less inner turmoil to relate, fewer external conflicts to report. The reason? He is a “member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home.” “Not a day would pass,” he complains, “without somebody I knew turning out

Lhe Amiseson Comedy «121 to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.”?°

In this example, Martin intentionally distances himself from his character’s experience, steering the novel away from autobiography while

simultaneously reversing his own childhood experiences. At the age of fourteen, much earlier than for Charles, Martin had to witness the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. Unlike Charles, who regrets he cannot utilize such tragedies as source material, Martin had firsthand experience | with the messy effects of his father’s affairs. In their biographies of Kingsley Amis, Richard Bradford and Eric Jacobs recount the breakdown of his first marriage, to Hilary “Hilly” Bardwell, noting that the family had planned to relocate to Majorca. Kingsley’s affair with Elizabeth Jane Howard, however, complicated this move. Hilly proceeded with the relocation and took the children with her; Kingsley did not follow. In time, the children would grow unhappy, missing their father. Consequently, Hilly sent the two sons back to London, giving them instructions to proceed directly to the home where Kingsley was living with Jane. The two boys arrived around eleven at night, much to Kingsley’s surprise. After some lengthy discussion, they realized that the family would never live together again. During one of these talks, Martin’s older brother, Philip, even impressed his sibling by calling his father a “cunt.” Philip was fifteen; Martin was fourteen. Elsewhere, Martin has elaborated upon the emotional undertow of divorce, noting, “Divorce is impossible to take in at any time, ever,” and, “The pain will either come out at the time or percolate and come out later, but it’s absolutely ineradicable.”??

In the face of such direct reworking, Kingsley’s comments appear misinformed, overly eager to dismiss the autobiographical matrix of the novel. A veteran warrior of the civil wars waged by English journalists,

and experienced with their brushfire tendencies, perhaps Kingsley sensed the need to commandeer these questions before they became too insistent. Or perhaps he simply wanted to defer them, at least temporarily, until Martin could develop a more substantial corpus. For whatever reason, though, closer analysis continues to contradict Kingsley’s

remarks, revealing many instances of direct or near autobiography in Martin's novel, ones that Kingsley must have perceived but discounted.

122 « Influence and Intersection Like Martin, for example, Charles decides to “have a crack at getting into Oxford.” When his A-level results come through, his father is, as was Martin’s, both happy and surprised. Maida Vale, the location of Kingsley’s home with Elizabeth Jane Howard, also makes a brief appearance in the novel, and Charles's father, like Kingsley, once lectured at Cambridge. Later, when Charles speaks with his father about his Oxford admission, he dwells upon the corruption of the English language, criticizing Dr. Knowd, his Oxford interviewer, for using the word opefully. As anyone familiar with Kingsley’s posthumously published work The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997) will re-

call, he devotes almost a half-page to the linguistic crime of the word hopefully, which, he argues, “has never been respectable” and signifies “immediately that we are dealing with a dimwit at best.” As had Martin, Charles also suffers from painful, degenerating teeth; and he discovers, at age thirteen —a year earlier than Martin by comparison — that his father has taken a lover. “I didn’t want to see [my parents] this way, in sexual terms,” Charles explains resonantly, “I was too young” (g). To Richard Bradford, the novel is unabashedly autobiographical, and “its interweaving of autobiographical detail with comic invention reminds

one of the father.”2° Kingsley liked The Rachel Papers above all of Martin's other work, and it was one of only a few of Martin’s novels that he could finish reading. However valid, such instances of applied autobiography remain by themselves interesting yet minor counterparts to Kingsley’s simple denial of influence. To appreciate the full significance of the Amises’ fa-

milial grapplings, their combative form of genealogical dissent, one must compare the two novels’ styles, genres, and themes. In contradiction to Kingsley’s remarks, one can identify many instances of direct, parodic revaluation between The Rachel Papers and Lucky Jim, and the interplay between the novels suggests an interesting pattern that illuminates Martin's attempt to rework and displace his father’s earlier achievement. In contrast to Bloom’s praxis, however, Martin did not misread

his father’s work; instead, he launched a full critique of Lucky Jim's achievement, challenging the comedy and themes of Kingsley’s precursory example. Vying for recognition within the same literary mode, The Rachel Papers enters into direct conversation with Lucky Jim, interrogat-

ing its narrative and thematic assumptions. Te Rachel Papers can be

The Amises on Comedy « = 123

seen both as a literary and a philosophical critique, a self-conscious attempt to undermine Kingsley’s authority. Stylistically, the two novels diverge dramatically, a point that becomes instantly apparent in their opening paragraphs. Lucky Jim begins, “They made a silly mistake, though,” the professor of history said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory. “After the interval we did a little piece by Dowland,” he went on; “for recorder and keyboard, you know. I played the recorder, of course, and young Johns. . .” He paused, and his trunk grew rigid as he walked; it was as if some entirely different man, some

impostor who couldnt copy his voice, had momentarily taken his place; then he went on again: “. . . young Johns played the piano. Versatile lad, that; oboe’s his instrument, really. Well anyway, the reporter chap must have got the story wrong, or not been listening, or something. Anyway, there it was in the Post as large as life: Dowland, yes, theyd got him right; Messrs. Welch and Johns, yes; but what do you think they said then?” Dixon shook his head. “I don’t know, Professor,” he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor.

Next, Te Rachel Papers begins, My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn't think it to look at me. It’s such a rangy, well-traveled, big-cocked name and, to look at,

I am none of these. I wear glasses for a start, have done since I was nine. And my medium-length, arseless waistless figure, corrugated ribcage and bandy legs gang up to dispel any hint of aplomb. (On no account, by the way, should this particular model be confused with the springy frames so popular among my contemporaries. .. .) But I Aave got one of those fashionable reedy voices, the ones with the habitual ironic twang, excellent for the promotion of oldster unease. And I imagine there’s something oddly daunting about my face, too. It’s angular,

yet delicate; thin long nose, wide thin mouth-and the eyes: richly lashed, dark ochre with a twinkle of singed auburn . . . ah, how inadequate these words seem. The main thing about me, however, is that I am nineteen years of age, and twenty tomorrow.

As was his preference, Kingsley began Lucky Jim in medias res, with conversation in a public setting. Incessantly rambling, Professor Welch lectures Jim, who seems by contrast passive and restrained. Jim’s most

124 e« Influence and Intersection significant actions in the paragraph are watching and listening: he is defined by emotional suppression. References to Dowland and the recorder

establish the anachronistic, ready-made artificiality of Ned Welch’s world, then the localized third-person narration—so clearly that of Dixon's thoughts — interrupts, pulling our attention away from Welch's ramblings to the novel’s primary motifs, especially masks, facades, and the opposition between public and private personae. Though the narrative will eventually shift focus to Jim Dixon, we enter the novel through a side door, catching glimpses of the character and the themes that will most animate his struggles. When Jim finally speaks, it is only to express his confusion and to affirm, hypocritically, the primacy of hierarchy, convention, and propriety, suggesting his internally divided nature as well as his submission to his boss. Martin's novel, by contrast, begins assuredly in the first person, with an exuberant declaration of identity. Charles Highway begins by invoking tropes of naming and identity, then qualifies them to reveal the pretentious and obsessive cerebration that most distinguishes this character. Proclaiming the discrepancy between his name and his appearance,

Charles directs our attention to the contrast between appearance and reality, surface and substance, fact and fiction. Martin's language is also more direct and charged than Kingsley’s: adjectives feed off other adjectives, the pace is faster, and there is a serial quality to the prose, a reiterative pulse suggesting the interiority of the speaker’s quest for order. In

a Tennysonian maneuver, Charles finally acknowledges the insuffciency of words to capture or describe experience: he questions the very efficacy of language itself, which will become another of the novel’s motifs. [he second, shorter paragraph establishes the dominant motion of the novel— Charles's “maturity” from nineteen to twenty, the “end of youth” as he calls it soon afterward—and we are left with a relatively

complete picture of Charles Highway: fanatical about his bodily appearance, obsessive about his identity, and intensely aware of both the charms and the limitations of language, which is his proper domain. In short, two less similar, though equally effective, beginnings would be hard to script. The colloquial assurance and immediacy of Martin's first-person prose directly confronts Kingsley’s more balanced, controlled presentation. Stylistic differences aside, The Rachel Papers also challenges the dominant themes of Lucky Jim, opposing the bases of Kingsley’s fictive world.

Lhe Amises on Comedy « = 125

Whereas both works depict endearing, verbally gifted protagonists coming to grips with the personal changes in their lives, their approaches to experience are drastically antithetical. Jim labors to deflate pomposity, pretension, and egotism in all their variegated forms, confronting their outbreaks with philistine poses and an instinctive spontaneity. Charles, on the other hand, nurtures every possible pretension. Similar to Jim’s nemesis, Bertrand Welch, Charles embraces egotism as a redemptive virtue. He personifies affectation and self-inflation, intentionally championing the false values that Kingsley’s novel derides. As James Diedrick and Bruce Stovel have each discussed, Henri Bergson’s classic theory of comedy— chiefly articulated in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1924) —is central to both Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers.3! Stipulating that laughter derives from the con-

trast between naturalness and mechanization, spontaneity and artificiality, whether originating in gesture, language, attitude, or action, Bergson argues that comedy serves a healthy moral function by exposing and ridiculing those who substitute controlled, mechanized response for natural adaptability. Laughter works to exorcise affectation, privileging that which is genuine, flexible, or pliant. In this respect, it asserts a vital evolutionary mandate, accentuating the behavioral acclimation that better enables humanity to adapt to changing environments and conditions. Throughout Lucky Jim, Kingsley repeatedly draws our attention to the degrees by which characters act naturally or as if following a prelaid plan. Characters such as Jim Dixon and Christine Callaghan are

instinctive, spontaneous, natural, and unaffected. By contrast, the Welches, Margaret Peel, and Johns are pompous, affected, artificial, and pretentious, automatons of Bergsonian mechanization. Jim adheres to a simple, straightforward motto, propounded twice in the novel— “nice things are nicer than nasty ones” (144, 247) and through a combination of existential luck and an instinctive receptivity to experience, he finds himself the beneficiary of many of these nice things. Relinquishing control over his life—or rather, finding himself gradually divested of all control—he becomes better equipped to assimilate his life's rapid transfigurations. Charles Highway, on the other hand, adopts the exact opposite approach, attempting to control and manipulate every facet of his life. Whereas Jim reaps his rewards through a combination of existential luck and a readiness to embrace experience, Charles reaps his through a

126 « Influence and Intersection relentless imposition of will—always a problematic virtue in Martin's work. An obsessive organizer, an emotional archeologist, Charles repudiates all forms of behavioral spontaneity. He is, in other words, precisely the type of Bergsonian mechanical man that Jim despises. “I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self,” Charles declares; “You trust to the twitches and shrugs of the ego; I seek to arrange these” (180). A remarkably intertextual work, The Rachel Papers invokes the names

of numerous books and authors. Although Lucky Jim is not mentioned by name, it is clearly one of those texts, as at least two instances make clear. First, Martin conscientiously subverts the process whereby Jim wills his inner and outer selves, his private and public personae, into collusion. Poised after the fateful fight with Bertrand, Jim finds liberation in his newfound freedom from inhibition. Transcending his previous limitations, he is finally able to articulate his subversive, redemptive thoughts, transferring thought to action. In what David Lodge defines as a climactic moment, Jim not only imagines Bertrand as, but actually calls him, a “bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation’ (214). In The Rachel Papers, Charles employs remarkably similar syntax to describe his own internal processes. “Six fifty to six fifty five | had convulsions and I saw stars: vomitless retching, tearless heaves; I thought, ?’'m having convulsions and I’m watching stars” (223). In direct

contrast to Jim's mental model, in which thought gives way to action, Charles subordinates action to thought. Compulsively cerebral, willfully controlling, maniacally precocious, Charles inverts the internal process of Jim's deliverance. More convincingly, Charles revises Jim's famous motto that “nice things are nicer than nasty ones’ in the novel’s most ob-

vious instance of deliberate revision. Flipping through his “Odds and Sods” file, Charles proclaims boldly that an “anal sense of humor” pervades his age group. “Surely,” he argues, “nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets” (87). Such instances of direct, intentional rewriting attest to the taunting intertextual resonance, the parodic yet serious correspondence between the two novels. What is most significant about such revaluation, however, is not the simple fact of its occurrence, but rather the artistic arguments that underlie it. Mimicking Kingsley’s syntax as well as his dic-

tion, overturning the motto of his father’s most celebrated character, directly reversing his themes—these are not only calculated literary jabs

The Amiseson Comedy « 127 but potent personal affronts. In essence, Martin undertakes to deliver an uncomfortable message to Kingsley: through Charles Highway, Martin tells his father that his Fieldingesque formula is outmoded and ineffectual, and he asserts that his own, more grotesque form is more viable and truthful to modern life. As Blake Morrison has noted, Martin is not “afraid to borrow his father’s favorite phrases—A// fixed, How about you?, My word, I want you... Now—or his oldest jokes.” More significantly, however, The Rachel Papers makes clear that “nastiness, the comedy of the grotesque,” is to be Martin’s specialty.°2 Not surprisingly,

Martin’s comedy of the grotesque directly confronts the more traditional comedy of romance that Kingsley employed in Lucky Jim. Evaluating one of his notebooks, Conquests and Techniques: A Synthe-

sis, Charles mentions that a particular passage seems “done in a rather pompous mock-heroic style, like Fielding’s descriptions of pub brawls.” That is the sort of writing, he remarks, for which “I usually have little time” (18). Henry Fielding is, of course, Kingsley Amis’s comic master, and at least one critic, David Lodge, has attributed Lucky Jim's verbal humor to Fielding’s mock-heroic prose. Bruce Stovel, among others, has also noted the ease with which Lucky Jim may be placed within the parameters of Northrop Frye’s classic paradigm of comic romance: young lovers rebel against the constrictions of an obstructing society, implicating its entrenched laws and opinions; the heroes are idealized “comic everymen, marked by normalcy, common sense, wit, and logic; complications arise that prevent the union of the desirous young lovers; and in the end, their redemptive desire is sufficient enough to “impose a happy ending on the novel, overcoming not only the drab logic of reality, but [also] their own considered objections to their union.”*3 The Rachel Papers, however, proceeds along an antithetical comic path.

Speaking to John Haffenden in 1985, Martin commented upon the evolutionary changes that modern comedy has undergone. “Among the more mysterious processes under way in this century,” he remarked, “is a breakdown of genre, so that comic novels can take on quite rugged stuff. It seems clear to me... that what I am is a comic writer, and that comedy is a much looser form than it once was. It no longer follows the Shakespearian model where comedy means a rejection of the older society —

the older generation with its hidebound laws and prohibitions, as in 4s You Like It—and happy endings after complication: a comic shape

128 « Influence and Intersection which is still there in Jane Austen and Dickens.” His own comic form, he indicated, is less linear, less direct. Explaining that he is interested mainly in “heavy comedy” —in “hung-over laughter, where it hurts” — he noted that his form of comedy consequently features elements “that shouldnt really be in comic novels.” In other words, Martin’s comedy is a complex amalgamated form, a revisionist model more conducive to postmodern instability. On one hand, Martin strives to “deflate fear with laughter,” presenting horrible scenarios that seek to divert their realization. On the other hand, he seeks to engage laughter in its fullest complexity and range, much as he thought Lo/ita did, when he labeled it the “funniest novel in the [English] language.”34 As one would expect, Charles Highway shares these literary convictions. Midway through The Rachel Papers, he dreams of composing a synthesis of his life, a Doris Lessing-esque golden notebook, that he would defend in an open letter to the Times. “I would like to point out,” he imagines himself writing, “for the last time, to Messrs Waugh, Connolly, Steiner, Leavis, Empson, Trilling, et a/, that the argument of my The Meaning of Life was intended to be anti-comic in shape” (93-94). Elsewhere, in words strikingly similar to Martin’s, he describes the revisionist expectations of modern comedy: As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, . . . with the obstructive elements out of the way .. . and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more? (150)

These modal differences between the Amises’ two brands of comedy become especially apparent in the novels’ endings, where Martin’s final instance of parodic revaluation can be identified.

The Amiseson Comedy .« 129 The relationship between Charles and his father, Gordon Highway, is crucial to an understanding of The Rachel Papers, as important perhaps as the relationship between Charles and his lover Rachel (or that of Jim Dixon and the Welches in Lucky Jim). At one point, contemplating his many notebooks, his annotations of life, Charles pauses to comment upon the curious absence of a notebook devoted to his father, who is probably, he admits, the “most fully documented character in my files.” “Why nothing for my father?” he asks. “Is this a way of getting back at him?” (8). Ultimately, he undertakes the composition of a lengthy, Kafkaesque Letter to My Father, the delivery of which he repeatedly anticipates.and foreshadows. First, however, he must attend his admission interview for Oxford. Charles’s impending letter and the Oxford interview both serve the same narrative purposes as Jim’s fight with Bertrand and the Merrie England lecture: they adumbrate a catastrophic event, a decisive severance of ties. However, whereas Lucky Jim promises release and deliverance from the restrictive world of the Welches, The Rachel Papers furnishes only anticlimax and vague continuation. With the help of liquor, Jim finds the willpower to lambaste his redbrick university, resulting in his dismissal. In direct opposition, Martin's Charles Highway is lectured pointedly by an Oxford don, and the novel ends with his acceptance into the world of academia, unlike Jim’s expulsion from it. “Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know,” Dr. Knowd tells Charles, “You can’t just use it .. . ruthlessly, for your own ends” (215). This is the only comeuppance Charles receives in the novel, and signifi-

cantly, it does not achieve closure, which is indicative not only of Martin’s revisionist form of indeterminate comedy but also of the lingering importance of Charles's relationship with his father. Arriving home after learning of his acceptance to Oxford, Charles is surprised to find his father “genuinely delighted” at the news, frustrating his plans to deliver his letter. “He came up and cuffed me on the shoulder,” Charles recounts. “It was the first ttme we had touched for years. It made me blush” (219). Not coincidentally, this episode contrasts Martin’s real-life experience telling his father that he had been accepted to Oxford, which Kingsley recounted in a 1986 letter to Theo Richmond: “Yes, Martin did go there. I remember him giving me the news over the telephone when I was in Nashville. I said hesitantly, “Exeter? You do mean Exeter, Oxford?’ to which he replied, ‘I don't mean

1330 « Influence and Intersection the University Fucking College of the South West of England. I mean

EXETER COLLEGE OXFORD.’ I told him that answered my question.» Instead of bringing their relationship to a fateful, divisive conclusion, Charles and his father discuss scholarships, relationships, and the general state of the family. Then Charles has an internal awakening, a secular epiphany. He ceases to be on the lookout for posturings and poses, and, like Jim at the end of Lucky Jim, 1s for once without his pro-

tective mask. “This may be bluffing,” he tells the reader, “but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. [he teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left” (220). Two pages later, having reconciled with his father, he drops his Letter to My

Father in the trash. Father and son seem closer than ever, and Charles appears for the first time to be comfortable with his family’s irritating stability. Arguably, the father-son bond is the most important relationship in the novel, and significantly, it is the only narrative line to achieve closure. Perhaps having completely revaluated his own father’s narrative style and comic form Martin, too, felt that reconciliation was in order. He had successfully legitimated his rival comic method and could thus conclude his inaugural and most autobiographical novel.

One final vignette concludes the novel when Rachel, the object of Charles’s obsessions, appears to lament their romantic separation. In contrast to Jim Dixon, however, Charles neither desires nor gets the girl. Instead, he hopes Rachel will simply leave so that he can begin reorganizing his notebooks. When she departs, his words epitomize the parameters of Martin’s amoral fictive realm: remarking upon the absence of traditional conventions in his life, Charles tells the reader that Rachel left “without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of come-uppance at all” (223). The novel ends anticlimactically, with Charles refilling his pen. Martin’s finale therefore upends both the aesthetic and existential foundations of Lucky Jim’s comic form. As Charles

himself intimates, The Rachel Papers rejects the morality of previous

The Amiseson Comedy .« 131 models. The promise of a “happy-ever-more” conclusion remains unfulfilled, the young lovers are permanently separated, and the hero retreats to his study, solitary but content. Whereas Lucky Jim ends in laughter and merriment, The Rachel Papers ends in silence and contemplation. Delivered from his restrictive environment, Jim Dixon laughs

at his antagonists with Christine by his side; Charles Highway sits alone in his boyhood room, dissatisfied with a short story he is writing. In short, whereas irony underlies the endings of both novels, laughter and social integration support Kingsley’s comic deliverance. Martin’s,

by contrast, is founded on a circular and amoral isolation, a selfconscious parodic reworking that he admits to in Experience: “Rather formulaically, in my view (there is simply too much of this in my father’s corpus), the outgoing woman gets all the best moral lines. .. . It appears that I was already complaining about this, or rebelling against it, when I wrote The Rachel Papers.”>°

Such stylistic, thematic, and formal correctives confirm the subversive nature of Martin's inaugural novel. Striving for recognition within the same genre as Lucky Jim, and enjoying similar evaluative controversy, The Rachel Papers enters into symbolic conversation with Kingsley's more famous precursor text. Both novels take liberties with the stylistic sensibilities of their times; both inflame generational tensions to the point of reflex accusation or condemnation; and both feature charming, sympathetic narrators who seduce their readers through highly personalized comic voices. [he Amises’ first novels similarly portray youthful, unsettled protagonists embroiled in internal transformation, and both employ academic and sexual themes to convey the Bergsonian opposition between spontaneity and mechanism, naturalness and affectation. Finally, although Martin's novel is clearly more self-reflexive, both works fall under the rubric of realistic seriocomedies, intentionally concerned with transcending parody or farce. Through Charles Highway, Martin succeeded in accomplishing two important goals in his development as a writer: he provided a theoretical basis for his own revaluative comic form and challenged Kingsley’s literary and personal authority, declaring the greater legitimacy of his own fictive methods. Deliberately parodying his father’s comic techniques and the philosophical assumptions they implied, Martin essentially charged Kingsley with falsifying the contingency and amorality of

132 « Influence and Intersection modern life. Encoding conscious revisions of his father’s most celebrated novel, Martin staked his initial claim to professional authenticity

and independence. From the opening paragraph to the final words of his novel, he engaged his father in an implicit literary duel, disavowing both nepotism and imitation. The intertextual negotiation between Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers is the best— and most formulaic— instance of the Amises’ personal and professional tensions. Given the incisive focus that animated their first novels, it is tempting to look for other instances of revaluative conflict, or dialogue, in their later work. Despite the fact that Martin would never oppose one of his father’s texts so deliberately, and even though

Kingsley admitted to having read few of Martin’s novels—and none after Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense (1991) — episodes of liter-

ary negotiation continued to surface in their subsequent productions. Not surprisingly, the next instance occurred in 1974, with the publication of Martin’s second novel, Dead Babies. This time, however, the appropriate source text would be a contemporary production, not a masterpiece from the past. Whereas The Rachel Papers contested Kingsley’s comic form, labeling it artistically and existentially invalid, Dead Babies

would assault his satiric techniques, carving a new facet in the Amis family feud.

Ending Up and Dead Babies I felt the squeeze of immediate hurt when Kingsley, who claimed to have liked my first novel, said he “couldn't get on” with my sec- _

. ond. But there it was: I knew him to be incapable of equivocation or euphemism on any literary question. . . . Otherwise we had _ fights and rows and many hot exchanges, but nothing that wasn’t cleared up the following day. — Martin Amis, Expertence: A Memoir |

If The Rachel Papers signaled Martin's initial challenge to his father’s

-. oeuvre by attacking its foundation, Lucky Jim, then Martin's second novel, Dead Babies, appeared to continue and intensify that process.

Similar to the interplay between the Amises’ debut novels, Martin’s | sophomore effort is best seen as a deliberate response to and an inversion of another of Kingsley’s texts. This time, however, the target was

almost exactly contemporaneous. Directly contesting his father’s

133

eleventh novel less than one year after its release, Martin enacted a revaluative dialogue in real time. Whereas The Rachel Papers targeted the _ echoes of Kingsley’s past reputation, Dead Babies took aim at Kingsley’s

current achievements. |

Kingsley’s Ending Up preceded Martin's Dead Babies by one year, appearing in 1974. Complementary portraits of imploding microcosms,

the two novels should be considered as companion texts, contrapuntal | variations of a distinctive English genre, the country house novel. As

134 » Influence and Intersection instances of parodic intertextual revaluation, Ending Up and Dead Babies extend the arguments provoked by Martin's first novel a few years earlier. One change, however, is notable: whereas The Rachel Papers directly challenged Kingsley’s comic techniques, Dead Badies shifted the

battle onto new territory, summoning their satiric oppositions. To a much greater degree than their contrasting comic forms, their satirical divergences illuminate the antithetical nature of their worldviews. As was the case with The Rachel Papers, it is easy to show that Martin had read his father’s novel before, or at least during, the composition of his own. “My father’s last novel, Ending Up,” he explained in 1974, a year before Dead Babies appeared, “was all about a lot of crappy old people living in a house and getting on each other’s nerves and ending up more or less killing each other.” “My next novel,” he continued, “is about a lot of young people living in a house in the country, slightly secluded, ending up getting on their nerves and killing each other too.”! Although he quickly moved to deny the influence of his father’s text, noting casually that Dead Babies was not entitled, say, Starting Out, the congruence is less incidental than Martin implied. Numerous similarities connect the two works, affirming the Amises’ continued rivalry, both playful and serious. Dueling novels of ideas, moral fables of behavior and belief, Dead Babies and Ending Up dramatize the conflicts between an insular environment and an external society. Localized characters clash with the larger societies from which they are exiled. Subordinating external action to internal perception, this spatial opposition functions as an unbridgeable generational chasm, a conflict of value based primarily on age. Stylistically, both texts exhibit a Swiftian concern for explicit description. Although Martin clearly outpaces his father in depicting violence and sexuality on the page, neither writer ameliorates his characters’ struggles with their degenerating, uncontrollable bodies. Such conflicts are rendered without sentimentality or romanticism, invoking a realism that, in Dead Babies at least, goes far beyond the grotesque, often bordering upon the obscene. On a thematic level, physical decay mirrors the larger failings of religion and philosophy in the works. Neither Ending Up nor Dead Babies seeks to propose any stable system of transcendent belief. As a result, the characters seem trapped in suffocating microcosms: unable to sever themselves from their crises of isolation, they find

The Amiseson Satire. 135 only selfishness and despair waiting patiently at life’s end. Neither a divine God nor a secular sense of justice controls the characters or prescribes any meaningful mode of behavior. Hovering menacingly over

both narratives, death suggests only Larkinesque finality and the absence of grace. Eventually, the nwo novels converge at a similar terminus, depicting the mass deaths of all the main characters.

Such thematic similarities can be attributed to a shared historical provenance—the Amises’ residence during the late 1960s and early 19708. In 1968, faced with diminishing space at their Maida Vale home, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard relocated to a country house

north of London, on Hadley Common, Barnet, Hertfordshire. In a 1969 letter to Philip Larkin Kingsley referred to it as a “bloody great mansion, in the depths of the country though only 15 miles from the centre, and with lots of room for you to come and spend the night.” With more than thirty rooms, Gladsmuir— or Lemmons, as it was earlier called (a name that Howard restored) — had more than ample space for the extended coterie that then comprised the Amis family household. Besides Kingsley and his wife Jane, Lemmons was inhabited by Jane’s mother, who was then approaching eighty, her younger brother, Colin, whom Kingsley called “Monkey,” and Sargy Mann, a family friend. When not at school, Martin, Philip, and Sally, Kingsley's three children, resided there as well.

If one desires a source for the Amises’ fascination with death in Ending Up and Dead Babies, one need look no farther than Lemmons.

As in both novels, death made frequent visits to the house: in 1972, Howard’s mother passed away; later that same year, the poet Cecil Day Lewis would spend his last days with the Amises, dedicating his final work, “At Lemmons,” to “Jane, Kingsley, Colin, Sargy.” The poem's concluding lines preserve his appreciation: a bloom of Magnolia uttering its requiems, A climate of acceptance. Very well. J accept my weakness with my friends’ Good natures sweetening every day my sick room.?

In addition, the most important family experience took place while the Amises were living at Lemmons: on 27 December 1973, at the age of twenty-one, Kingsley’s niece and Martin’s cousin Lucy Partington

1336 « Inftuence and Intersection disappeared. She went to catch a bus, but twenty years would pass before the family would learn her fate. Eventually, in March 1994, they discovered she had fallen victim to Fred West, one of England’s most notorious serial killers. The Amises were in the midst of writing what would become two of their darkest novels, and these events provided an eerie backdrop for their creations. “I was deeply struck by their suffering,” Martin recalled; “so much so that I couldn't face thinking about it. In the soul, I really did take it on, but in my conscious mind I veered away from it. Of course, I wasn’t a parent myself for many years afterwards. I think that perhaps it’s only then that you can fully and honestly attempt to imagine such a thing within your inner family. What could be worse, frankly, than twenty years of not knowing and then knowing? One still veers away from it.”4 Kingsley, who was a parent, withdrew inwardly, refusing to talk about the disappearance. Speaking with Dale Salwak in 1984, Kingsley acknowledged that Ending Up evolved naturally out of the communal dynamics of this living situation: “I just thought one day, well, what happens when we are all very old, or pretty old. ‘Then of course I saw at once that that really

wasnt going to happen, because we were all of different ages. My mother-in-law was going to kick off before the rest of us, and indeed she did.” From there, he settled easily upon the structural framework for the novel: five people, all relatively the same age, living in an “isolated

environment which would suit old people,” but which was not as “closed, say, as a ship or a prison, because there'd be quite frequent contacts with the outside world.” Older characters appealed to him because

of their unique “intensification of character.” “That,” he concluded, “was my start.”>

If Kingsley’s novel stemmed from contemplation of an imaginative Lemmons bereft of youth, possibility, and hope, then Martin's novel seems equally rooted in such fertile historical grounds. In Experience: A Memoir, Martin relates how he wrote Dead Babies underneath the study where Kingsley was composing Ending Up. Down the hallway, Howard worked on her own novel, Something in Disquise.6 Lemmons, however, was not the only house that Martin would transmute into art. In an undated letter to Howard, he specified a second source: in 1971, he had moved to a “distant cottage” (called the Old Forge) where he lived with

a married couple and one other man. The four individuals created a

The Amises on Satire « 137 hothouse atmosphere of emotional degradation and need. “The last weeks, he wrote, “have been characterized by pretty well permanent hysteria and high volume rows. ... Things like, “You don’t love me! If you loved me, you'd look after me!’ . . . It’s novel-fodder, but that’s about all. I’ve never seen people so intent on advertising their own vulgar and self-

ish emotionalism: and making themselves so horribly and flabbily vu/nerable.” Of course, Lemmons was not devoid of its own emotional battles, either. As Zachary Leader has noted, Martin’s brother Philip moved out of Lemmons in 1966, after what Martin described as “a huge fight about drugs.” Eventually, Howard would also speak negatively about her time at Lemmons, lamenting that she sacrificed her career to become a glorified housewife and cook, as well as the family disciplinarian.’ Although the Amises’ works stemmed from a common origin, divergences in perspective become immediately apparent. Notably, Martin inverted his father’s narrative foundations, redefining his source material in accordance with his own generation. Contra Kingsley, Martin conflated his experiences at Lemmons and the Old Forge to posit a fic-

tional Lemmons defined exclusively by youth. Saturated by selfindulgence, egotism, and excess, Dead Babies vividly depicts the emotional by-products of a doomed, hedonistic generation. In brief, these two novels reveal how the Amises fictionalized the familial and generational tensions that had started to inform their own relationship.

Whereas none of the characters in Martin's Dead Babies seems older than thirty, all of the characters in Kingsley’s Ending Up are septuagenarians. Bernard Bastable, the bitter, sardonic owner of Tuppennyhapenny Cottage, is seventy-five. His spinster sister, Adela, is seventyone. Marigold Pyke, a widow of forty-eight years, is seventy-three, as is Derrick “Shorty” Shortell, Bernard’s former lover and army buddy. Fi-

nally, George Zeyer, professor of history at the University of Northampton, is seventy. By contrast, all the characters in Dead Badies are roughly two generations younger. Although Martin establishes the specific age of only one character Andy Adorno, who is twenty-four — it is clear from his text that his characters are approximately the same age.

Intentionally cut off from the past, unable to find satisfaction in the present, each struggles to avoid “slippage” into time and history, as sym-

bolized by their recurrent memories of childhood. Obsessed with sex,

1338 « Influence and Intersection violence, drugs, and abuse, they court their own destruction, either willfully, through drugs, or passively, becoming victims of homicide. Invalidating romanticized visions of childhood as sustaining and idyllic, the characters in Dead Babies continually flee both the past and the present, finding solace in neither time nor memory.

At the base of this rather simple generational opposition between youth and age, hope and despair lies a more significant philosophical contrast that manifests itself in the Amises’ divergent satiric forms. Al-

though Ending Up and Dead Babies both depict doomed characters trapped in fatalistic microcosms of hopelessness and decay, their portraits of internal descent differ greatly — not only factually, through the ages of their representative generations, but also emotionally, through the degree of sympathy with which each author invests his characters. Despite the fatalism that saturates both novels, Kingsley’s text achieves

a level of pathos and sympathy that Martin’s never tries to solicit. In Ending Up, the main themes are social — marriage, family, and friends, the fear of finding oneself alone. In Dead Babies, by contrast, the emphasis is more personal, solipsistic. Relating to each other either as victims or as victimizers, Martin's characters seem entirely divorced from family connections. As in the earlier contrasts between Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers, these tonal differences accentuate the Amises’ antagonistic worldviews. Whereas both works emphasize the degree to which reality undermines one’s more dignified, endearing hopes, an underlying humanism permeates Kingsley’s presentations of character. By contrast, Martin delights in tormenting his doomed coterie; for him, amelioration 1s defunct or absent in a deterministic postmodern world.

As Matthew Hodgart points out, Kingsley does not criticize his characters for the unavoidable discomforts of old age, which are universally blameless conditions. Rather, he chastises them for their more rectiflable deficiencies in empathy and civility. Nothing, he states, “excuses their common vices of solipsism and lack of attention, their deep vulgarity of not listening.”® Bernard Bastable is spiteful and vindictive, Adela Bastable is a simpleton, and Marigold Pyke grates on everyone, including the reader, through her irritating tendency to rhyme words. (In Marigold’s idiolect, for instance, “tunkalunks” is equivalent to thank you; “trackle-packle” means attractive; and “sweetle-peetles” signifies sweet.) In much the same way, the reader recoils from George Zeyer’s

The Amises on Satire « 139 endless repetition of nouns, despite the knowledge that he may suffer from a medical condition. Each character is also wounded, marked by either physical decay or personal disappointment. Marigold Pyke and George Zeyer are widowed. Bernard Bastable is divorced. Adela has never married. And Shorty cannot forget his army days, when he and Bernard were lovers.

Kingsley’s characterizations have led numerous readers to misinterpret his design. Despite the limitations of its characters, however, Ending Up is much more than a collage of paper-thin irritants that Kingsley dispenses with in the end.? As A. Robert Lee has correctly noted, the characters are only partially “humours-figures”; unmistakable sympathy and compassion counterbalance their distastefulness. Though the novel is constructed as a series of loosely related vignettes, Kingsley employs a form of “double satire”: he presents two distinct visions of the characters at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage — glimpses from within and from outside the house. This bifurcated perspective functions as both a spatial and a generational opposition, forcing readers to confront the characters on two levels: directly, as they present themselves through words and action, and indirectly, as they are perceived by others. As a result of this double presentation, and regardless of their individual limitations,

many of the characters ultimately warrant the reader's sympathy, for they oppose the meaninglessness and isolationism of their lives with wide-eyed self-awareness. Faced with a barren future, living in a spiritless present, they nonetheless continue to struggle, plan, and endure. However muted and low-keyed, some meaningful significance does rise

from their efforts, and Hodgart is correct to argue that although they cannot transcend their conditions, they do endure, which is a form of everyday heroism, a celebration of “ordinariness,” of small, contingent victories. !°

Instances of limited heroism permeate the novel. At one point, for instance, Bernard makes a genuine, although doomed, effort to seem more charitable to his housemates, desiring “to be mistaken for a man of ordinary decent feeling.”!! In addition, he stoically keeps the prognosis of his impending death to himself. George also strives to recapture his facilities with language, recovering from a stroke. Although he gradually realizes that “no editor or publisher [would be] interested in any article or book he might produce” (167), George nevertheless continues

140 «© Influence and Intersection to write — for himself if for no one else. Shorty, too, makes efforts to en-

liven the group with his humor and wit, and Marigold Pyke tries to remain polite and temperate, despite her fears of senility. In the novel's most compassionate passage, she thinks back over her life, reflecting poignantly upon the human impact of time: “Marigold had loved her husband for forty-eight years; so, at any rate, she would have said, and would have meant it. Now she could not remember their first meeting, their engagement, their wedding, their first house, what clothes he used to wear, what sort of voice he had had, what he had looked like—she

had photographs by the score, and she had slipped into her room to turn them through, but to see what he had looked like was not the same as remembering. It was as if he and their life together had been taken away from her” (143). As in life, neither good-heartedness nor meanspiritedness can insulate anyone from the slow fade to black that signifies death, or ending up, in the novel. Unable to effect any meaningful

changes, the characters nonetheless continue to move forward, even though they can anticipate only physical irritation, personal antipathy, and decreased mobility.

By contrast, the characters in Martin’s Dead Badies solicit neither our sympathies nor our approval. Guilty of a plethora of vices, despicable and deluded, the characters in Martin's suffocating microcosm seem to compete for the role of the novel’s most repulsive figure. An aggressive, explicit, and relentless satire whose prose was described by one reviewer as “excremental,” Dead Babies confronts not only the humanism

that undergirds his father’s novel but also the comic good humor that made The Rachel Papers so successful.!? In doing so, it directly engages Kingsley’s conceptions of pathos, human nature, and satire. Whereas Kingsley found five characters to be “about right” for a satiric portrait of a crumbling community, Martin's caustic chronicle depends on almost twice that number. Discussing the authorial burdens of

attending to so many characters, Kingsley argued that a novel such as Ending Up (or Dead Babies by extension) would become too “crowded” if

it included nine characters.!3 Curiously enough, the action in Martin's novel centers around nine major characters: six who inhabit Appleseed Rectory, and three additional victims, all Americans, who visit for the weekend. As befits a novel in the country-house tradition, the characters in Martin’s book all have upper-class origins. They exhibit no worries

The Amiseson Satire. 41 about money and are utterly divorced from common concerns. Apple-

seed Rectory is a provincial rustic manor, removed from urbanized London. The characters, however, hardly qualify to act as stewards of the land—or of themselves. They tail miserably as upper-class exempla,

being as soulless, directionless, and self-involved as the world they create. Satiric portraits of crumbling gentility, they, not the house, suffer

from decay, in contrast to Evelvn Waugh’s earlier formulations. To Martin, place is simply irrelevant: Appleseed Rectory, for instance, is barely examined, as are the grounds. Instead, his emphasis is personal and solipsistic, not social and communal. Inhabiting painfully solitary existences, finding no release in their use of sex or drugs, the characters reflect Martin's deterministic views of the amorality and disconnection of postmodern life. Every character in Dead Babies suffers from ennui, which the novel alternately terms “street sadness,” “lagging time,” “false memory,” or “canceled sex.” Indeed, the dominant movement in the novel is one of internal descent, a devolutionary spiral from traditional redemptive values. [he book’s title reflects this: in the characters’ energized lexicon, “dead babies” refers to all the humanistic concepts that have become stillborn and abortive. Values such as family, love, integrity, and endurance — so integral to Kingsley’s novel — appear vacant and meaningless to Martin’s characters. As James Diedrick notes, the title of the novel aligns it

with another novel that similarly takes its readers on an underworld journey of ideas—Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”!4 Unlike Kingsley, however, Martin undermines all levels of existential or human support: his is a darker, more fatalistic form of social criticism that ren-

ders his characters limited and expendable. Quentin Villiers, for instance, appears initially to be the novel’s most stable figure, representative of normalcy and propriety. Eventually, however, he assumes his true identity as Johnny Appleseed, the murderous Charles Manson-like figure of the group. His wife Celia is good-hearted yet shy, inexperienced with depravity or vice. Betrayed by her own limitations, she is incapable of discovering the rottenness that lies in the heart of her husband. Andy

Adorno antagonizes Keith Whitehead and the Tuckles, an elderly couple who live on the land. In addition he delights in shooting birds, and he torments, then later kills, Celia’s cat. Abandoning all quests for fulfillment through either love or sex, Giles Coldstream revels in his

142 e« Influence and Intersection neuroses and his physical degeneration. A prisoner of his own anxieties,

he commits suicide at the novel’s end. Finally, Keith Whitehead, the obscenely fat dwarf, repels all the other characters with his corpulence and acne. Eventually raped by two of the American visitors, he, too, turns to suicide, although he fails at this endeavor. From even these brief descriptions, one can perceive the ideological differences underlying the two novels. Whereas Kingsley mollifies his presentations with humanistic compassion, Martin strips his imaginary victims of all redemptive qualities. If his characters elicit sympathy from the reader, such feelings stem from the sole recognition that they cannot escape their impending fates. True to Heraclitus’s famous dictum, Mar-

tin’s toxic ensemble confirms that character is fate, that determinism supplants humanism. These differences in characterization and theme also begin to suggest the foundations of the Amises’ satirical opposition. Throughout his life, Kingsley struggled with, and eventually accepted, the dual labels of comic realist and moral satirist. Although Martin has referred to himself as a satirist as well, he too has shunned the moral and realist monikers, claiming residence for his work on “the humorous wing of self-conscious postmodern fiction.” In other words, although both Amises have been labeled satire’s modern practitioners, they do not employ the same forms. Their philosophical opposition manifests itself through their satirical differences, and one’s understanding of Ending Up and Dead Babies benefits dramatically from con-

sideration of the theoretical assumptions that inform Kingsley’s more temperate Horatian form of satire and Martin’s more aggressive and amoral Menippean methods.

Henry Fielding and Horatian Satire Interviewing Kingsley in 1974, the year Ending Up was released, Peter Firchow inquired whether Kingsley felt his novels “consciously aim[ed]” to instigate social change. Commenting upon the satirist’s potential to bring about social change, Kingsley responded that activism need not

be part of the writer's general task. Refusing to saddle satire with the burden of social prophecy or declaration, Kingsley drew attention to the Horatian nature of his own satiric preferences. Satire, he explained, “is

supposedly the correction of vice and folly by ridicule. Well, 1 think

The Amises on Satire .« 143 that’s rather a task. It’s a bit grand for me. I certainly have very strong moral ideas, but only on individual issues really—“Here and now you should do.this.’ I can't say we ought to have more tolerance, or less tolerance, because the moment you come to any particular question the case is altered.”16 Although he admitted that satire could affect society, mollifying its foibles and faults, these efforts remained secondary at best, divorced from one’s primary artistic considerations. Instead, Kingsley forswore all forms of categorical thought, and he was reluctant to theorize answers to metaphysical questions: one could make grand assumptions about literature, but one could not make such assumptions about politics or sociology. In 1957, however, the New York Times Book Review published a short essay by Kingsley entitled “Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously” on its front page. In tone and scope, it aspired to the status of a literary manifesto, and more than any other essay in Kingsley’s career, it clarified his opinions regarding satire’s social responsibility. !” The essay is unique for its tone and style. Uncharacteristically, Kings-

ley allowed himself few of his usual, illuminative digressions. Instead, his comments were more tautly expressed, more direct and condensed,

lacking his distinctive wit and discursive chattiness. He spoke in an Olympian, prognosticating tone, and his words betrayed an urgency, an immediacy and assurance, that suggested the gravity of his convictions. Despite the brevity of the article, Kingsley’s critical horizon was vast: his primary purpose was to chart a future course for English satire, and his words situate him comfortably within that mode’s historical traditions and internal bifurcations. He began with the first of many sweeping generalizations, invoking satire as a potentially humanizing, educative force. “Satire offers a social and moral contribution,” he wrote: “A culture without satire is a culture without self-criticism and thus, ultimately, without humanity. A society such as ours, in which the forms of power are changing and multiplying, needs above all the restraining influences of savage laughter. Even if that influence at times seems negligible, the satirist’s laughter is valid as a gesture —a gesture on the side of reason” (1). For Kingsley, the social instability of 1950s England rendered satire both propitious and potent: its “savage laughter” could temper the vacillant “forms of power” that then energized the sociopolitical arena. The effect of these conditions could be regenerative, bestowing a

second satirical “golden age” upon postwar England, but at the time

144 « Influence and Intersection such developments remained only nascent and directionless. Aware that

ignorance of the past produces only witless repetition, Kingsley surveyed the history of English satire, identifying its presumed successes and failures.

First, he argued that during the original “great age” of English satire, beginning in the late seventeenth century, writers such as Samuel Butler, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope transformed personal abuse into a poetic “expression of a mature and coherent view of life.” Then, in the eighteenth century, the novel emerged, and satirists such as Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift adopted human character, institutions, and society as the foundations for their attack. By contrast, Kingsley criti-

cized the satire of the early twentieth century, noting that it seemed doubly blemished, marred in tone by vituperation and didacticism, and marred in presentation by neglect and carelessness. He lamented the

decline of humor and realism—which he called the most effective weapons in the satirist’s arsenal—and he impugned the relegation of satire to the “propagandist novel of attacks on social and institutional abuses” (1). Such literary scarification did not strike Kingsley as a new occurrence, however; rather, it stemmed logically and directly from the misdirections of that earlier, exemplary age. Kingsley noted with dismay how humor and realism had gradually declined during that earlier epoch. He lamented the paucity of laughter that “emerges alongside Dryden's grandiose anger or Pope’s soaring in-

genuity, and he mourned the spartan and desiccated realism that was lacking in the “airy fantasies of Butler or the tortured nightmares of Swift.” He could not deny the importance of these early satiric masters,

but he felt that their influence functioned as both boon and bane—it limited as much as it loaned. Gains in prophetic expression found their unfortunate correctives in the consequential declines in humor and realism. In keeping with his literary ideals, Kingsley predicted that the modern novel would reject such didacticism, arguing that England’s political climate in the 1950s had rendered a satirical high style deficient and defunct. This more temperate social climate provided ample opportunity for literary revaluation, and Kingsley felt that “Until the new society is simplified and stabilized, which may not be for decades, we are in for what I have called a golden age of satire. It will be inferior in wit and urbanity to the modes which have proceeded it, but in humor, vigor

The Amises on Satire « 145 and breadth of scope it 1s likely to prove superior.” Only one writer appeared to Kingsley as a beacon for this new golden age: Henry Fielding,

a novelist whose “realism two hundred years have not dimmed and whose humor is closer to our own than that of any writer before the present century” (1). Fielding exemplified the pinnacle of English satire

for Kingsley, and not surprisingly, it was his theoretical assumptions that Kingsley most incorporated and reworked.

Cheered that postwar England seemed ripe for a Fielding revival, Kingsley noted its burgeoning presence in the work of his contemporaries, John Wain and Iris Murdoch, who tried to “combine the violent and the absurd, the grotesque and the romantic, the farcical and the horrific.” Such combinations were only one part of the new satire Kingsley proposed, however. Taking his cue once again from Fielding, Kingsley called on the contemporary satirist to renounce intellectualism (the satirist’s “occupational disease”) and its dangerous tendency to escalate

into a “withdrawn superiority.” He proclaimed the necessity of humor and realism (the “satirist’s lifebelt”), and he warned against commitment and didacticism, whose concerns are those of “the propagandist, not the satirist, and [whose] irony and indignation are those of Swift, not those of Fielding” (13). These were the qualities of the satiric form that appeared to Kingsley in his vision of satire’s new golden age. Calling the welfare democracy a “satirical arena far vaster and richer than the stratified democracy which is now yielding to it,” he celebrated the fact that older forms of privilege were waning and that “aristocratic posturings” seemed vapid and vulnerable. These posturings— the stable, aristocratic concerns of class and status — were gradually becoming supplanted by new satirical targets, new subjects in need of deflation. And these subjects, newly invigorated and energized, were the core bases of

Fielding’s resuscitative brand of satire, founded upon humor and realism: “Affectation and irresponsibility, self-dramatization and self-pity are his targets, and the gaiety of the whole performance evinces a rare skill and integrity. This is what the satirist works toward and seldom achieves.” 18

In I Like It Here (1958), published one year after “Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously,” Kingsley would pay tribute to his satiric master. A jaundiced glimpse at foreign travel and its attendant affectations, the novel rises to a climax before Fielding’s tomb in Portugal, where Garret

146 © Influence and Intersection Bowen, the narrator, speaks for Kingsley through an impromptu eulogy in words that requite F. R. Leavis. “Perhaps it was worth dying in your forties,’ Bowen thinks, “if two hundred years later you were the only

non-contemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and whole-hearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologized for or excused on the grounds of changing taste. And how enviable to live in the world of his novels, where duty was plain, evil arose out of malevolence and a starving wayfarer could be invited indoors without hesitation and without fear. Did that make it a simplified world? Perhaps, but

that hardly mattered beside the existence of a moral seriousness that could be made apparent without the aid of evangelical puffing and blowing.”!? A finely drawn division between indignation and ridicule, a realistic presentation disavowing propaganda and didacticism, a moral

tenacity that focused on human nature, not metaphysical fate: these were the hallmarks of Fielding’s version of Horatian satire, refined by one of the masters of the mode and passed down, centuries later, to Kingsley Amis. Fielding’s fictive worlds can be seen as oversimplified, but he did not presume to diagnose or prescribe for the larger society. Instead, he remained predominantly concerned with humor and realism — Kingsley'’s two grand criteria—and the result need not be qualified by current standards of taste. Twice more in the 1950s would Kingsley assert the limited scope of socially responsible art. His inflammatory pamphlet, Socialism and the Intellectuals (1957), published the same year as “Laughter’s to Be Taken

Seriously,” criticized political movements by arguing that all one could “reasonably hope for,” in politics at least, were qualified, minor

adjustments—“an injustice righted here, an opportunity extended there.” In 1958 he also boycotted the volume of essays, Declaration, in which his contemporary writers proclaimed their political allegiances and declared the social imperatives of literature. Kingsley’s response to Tom Maschler, the collection’s editor, was pointed and revealing: “I hate all this pharisaical twittering about the ‘state of our civilization,’ and I suspect anyone who wants to buttonhole me about my ‘role in society.’”

Fearing that the collection would degenerate into “dismal selfadvertising,” he trenchantly predicted it would prove a “valuable addition to the cult of the Solemn Young Man,” something that Kingsley feared. For his efforts, he incurred the criticism of Doris Lessing, who

The Amises on Satire» 147 not only misidentified him as a Welshman but who categorized his remarks as a “Victorian charitable view,” attributing his disillusionment to unchecked emotional and generational ennui.” Instances such as these reveal Kingsley’s long-entrenched disillusionment with political programs and agendas. Drawing fine-line distinctions between savage indignation and comic prodding, propounding realism over didacticism, Kingsley delineated the theoretical bases for his debt to Fielding’s satiric vision. Casting his narrative beam not upon social conditions but the behavioral limitations of particular individuals, he disavowed satire’s political mandates, returning the mode to what he felt were its humanistic, educative roots. He most distanced himself from Butler, Dryden, and Swift— practitioners of a particularly didactic, or Juvenalian satiric form—and he elevated Fielding’s more temperate Horatian model, which privileged individual failings over social diagnosis. As numerous critics have noted, Kingsley adopted Fielding’s grandest satiric target as well— namely, affectation, which Fielding defined as “the only true source of the Ridiculous.” In brief, although Kingsley felt that satire could confer a “restraining influence” upon society, he contended that its primary purpose remained always humanistic and educational, a facet of individual awareness. An enlightened “gesture on the side of reason,” satire might beget a more welcoming and cheerful society, but its paramount aim remained personal, not social.?!

Mikhail Bakhtin and Menippean Satire As expected, Martin Amis’s satirical preferences do diverge from his father’s, but both men share a fundamental assumption about the genre: both deny that it, or literature in general, can alter society or drastically change individuals. In contrast to Kingsley, who spoke of literature’s ability to act as a humanistic, educative force, Martin has asserted that the point of good art is only “remotely and unclearly . . . a humanizing and enriching process.” To Martin, literature’s main function remains aesthetic, ludic, a form of linguistic play or joutssance, to “throw out ideas and to stimulate and entertain.” Unlike Tom Wolfe, who has declared that the novel should be 80 percent research and 20 percent inspiration, Martin speaks of entering “a hypnagogic realm that’s to do with words” when he writes. Intentionally reversing Wolfe’s percentages, he

148 «« Influence and Intersection

remarks that “The ideas are just in your head. They’re not part of an agenda or a program. They've nothing to do with what youre trying to say.” Instead, Martin subordinates substance to style, privileging a Na-

bokovian expressiveness over fictional main ideas, the emphasis on which he once referred to as the novelist’s “fatal disease.” To Martin, such misguided searches for a novel’s transcendent meaning— for “something you could put on a badge” — are beginning “to screw up the

emphasis of reading.” Martin cannot therefore be neatly labeled a Juvenalian satirist such as Dickens or Swift, for although he shares with these writers a formalized social concern, his primary considerations remain stylistic and aes-

thetic, not social or political. Kingsley and Martin both deride the programmatic agenda that defines much Juvenalian satire; however, and

importantly, they revaluate the form in unique, individual ways. Repulsed by the propagandistic tones and social activism of Juvenalian sat-

ire, Kingsley embraced Fielding’s Horatian model. Martin, however, rejects the historical motivations of both Horatian and Juvenalian satire. His work is best positioned not at either extreme of the Horatian/

Juvenalian spectrum but at its axis, where satire branches off into Menippean forms. Martin diverges from his father’s brand of Fieldingesque satire by assimilating elements of both Horatian and Juvenalian modes, resulting in an aggregate effect, a cumulative, amorphous form. He rejects his father's tonal moderations, but he refuses to judge his characters, at least within the novels themselves. Furthermore, following Nabokov, he revels in an amoral artistic bliss and a conscious subordination to the creative demands of the tale. Although Martin admits to being “very interested” in the moral stances of his characters, he wholeheartedly rejects

responsibility for their well-being or enlightenment. Instead, he professes no urge “to convert them, or punish them, or bring them round— Or even to make them see what they’re doing.” For him, such things constitute a “human fallacy” —his phrase for the common misperception that an author must protect the sensibilities of the reader, either by imposing or by allocating justice at the novel's end.3

Such explicit refusal to judge means that Martin cannot easily be considered a moral satirist, as are Kingsley Amis and Henry Fielding. In fact, he rejects the inherent stability of Fielding’s fictive world, at

The Amises on Satire « 149 least as Kingsley defines it in J Like It Here. In Dead Babies and other novels, duty is not always plain; evil does not arise solely from malevolence; and “starving wayfarers” are more likely to find themselves beaten or raped than welcomed heartily “without hesitation or fear.” Martin's satirical technique therefore departs from his father’s brand of comic realism and adopts instead a more playful, amoral, and ludic form, energized primarily by words, not ideas. “I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, for a paragraph that has a spin on it,” he proclaimed to John Haffenden in 1985; “that sounds whorish, but I think it’s the higher consideration.” This stylistic imperative possibly derives from Martin’s paradoxical explanation of the creative process. Describing the creation of his novels, Martin championed a highly romantic, passive submission to his stylistic muse. “It is terribly difficult for a writer to know what he is up to,” he remarked, “since so many decisions are already made before he sits down to write—like the selection

of material,” which is not, he asserted, “a conscious choice on the writer's part.”* Such comments seem surprising, if not confusing, coming from Martin Amis, whose work is often celebrated for its manipulative qualities and themes. Martin does not equivocate, however, explaining the function of inspiration at more length. The selection of material, he argues, summoning F. R. Leavis, is “as unconscious as the deeply mysterious business of a novel arriving—when you suddenly feel a little twitch. The only thing that appeals to you about that twitch or idea 1s

that you can write a novel about it; it has no other appeal, and you might even deplore it, but there it is. All that part of it is completely amoral, unconscious, and god-given. I think Leavis said that the selection of material is a moral decision, but it’s not a decision, it’s a recognition.” Elsewhere, Martin cites with approval Northrop Frye’s remark that writers function more as “midwives” than “mothers,” attempting to deliver their works with the least interference, and he concurs with W. H. Auden, who once appropriated Michaelangelo’s famous metaphor to describe poetry as a process of “scraping away on a dusty stone

to see what the inscription is.” In an instance of probable influence, such remarks also hark back to Kingsley’s creative ethos. As Jack Gohn has noted, Kingsley described writing in similar terms during the early 1950s: “As if one were confronted with a stone inscription overlaid with

150 e« Influence and Intersection moss, or an inscription on brass or bronze, overlaid with corrosion, and you try and clean it up, so you can see the words.” This intuitive perception of the creative process is especially significant in relation to satire, because it appears to problematize Martin's relation to the mode. Traditionally, satire emerges from the confident ex-

position of an author’s biases and proclivities. Its anatomy of social defects originates in conviction, and it evinces a fixed moral position. The hierarchical judging voice, the unabashed imposing ego: these are the standard features of satirical expression. However, as is common with Martin and his work, things are never so easily fixed, so permanently moored. Apparent confusion often bestows shining clarity, and disillusionment can lead to deeper illumination. Without an understanding of the foundations of Menippean satire, it is possible to misperceive the significance of Martin’s more aggressively explicit novels, especially Dead Babies. Even today, when Martin’s artistic reputation and significance are well established, one can hear echoes of this misperception in profiles or reviews that criticize Martin's satires for registering the dark underbelly of the postmodern condition.°

Menippean satire is important to an understanding both of Dead Babies and of the Amises’ satirical negotiations because it helps resolve the potential contradictions that lay at the heart of Martin’s comments upon satire. Speaking to John Haffenden in 1985, Martin casually remarked, “I’m never sure that what I’ve been writing is satire.” His novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), he contended, was instead modified dramatic monologue, because his character John Self “never actually says anything intelligent.” Fewer than five years later, however, in a 1990 interview for Cosmopolitan magazine, Martin contradicted his earlier remarks, describing the graphic qualities of his novels as the formal requisites of satire: “Looked at seriously, of course, my books are ghastly,”

he explained, “but the point is they are satire. I don’t see myself as a prophet; I’m not writing social comment. My books are playful literature. I’m after laughs.”2/ Such statements ring discordantly from the mouth of an author such

as Martin Amis, whose work is championed for its metaphysical, overarching treatments of fim du millénaire life. At times, Martin's subordination of theme to treatment, subject to style, appears to foreclose the very foundations of satire, which derive their force from the insistent

The Amises on Satire « 151 expression of an author’s morality. Martin, however, problematizes morality and reality in his novels: unreliable narrators or author surrogates

supplant the authority of the hierarchical judging voice, and the contingency of his fictive environments destabilize moral foundations. Menippean satire resolves these apparent contradictions between playfulness and satire, entertainment and didacticism by positing a carnivalesque, amoral realm in which bacchanalian chaos displaces accepted reality. Although it would be a mistake to categorize all of Martin's works as codified Menippean satires, Menippean elements do figure prominently in six of his nine published novels. They are the dominant features in Dead Babies, as well as in Success (1978), Other People: A Mystery

Story (1981), Money: A Suicide Note, London Fields (1989), and Times Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense (1991). Only his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), and his last two, The Information (1995) and Night Train (1997), fall outside the parameters of the mode.

In Understanding Martin Amis, James Diedrick became the first critic to elucidate the relationship between Martin and Menippean satire. His work clarifies not only the extent to which Menippean assumptions operate within Martin's novel, but also that Martin was clearly aware of the mode. While serving as fiction and poetry editor to the Times Literary Supplement, Diedrick explains, Martin would have encountered Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’ Poetics (1929), a

classic text on Menippean satire, which the paper reviewed during Martin’s tenure in 1974. Furthermore, in a review printed one year before Dead Babies appeared, Martin referred to Philip Roth's novel The Breast as Roth’s “second attempt at Menippean satire—and his second emphatic dud—in a row.”78

Martin also provides several textual clues to Menippean satire in Dead Babies. The most obvious is the book’s epigraph, which is dubiously attributed to Menippus: “Even when [the satirist] presents a vision of the future, his business is not prophecy . . . it is today.” As Bakhtin explains, this attribution remains problematic at best, because none of the satires of Menippus (or Menippos) of Gadara, the thirdcentury Greek cynic, has survived; we know of their titles only through the records of Diogenes Latrtius. The epigraph, in other words, is the first of many testaments to the epistemological vortex of the novel. In

addition, Martin invokes the mode in the opening paragraphs of

, 152 « Influence and Intersection the novel, referring to Denis Diderot’s Rameau’ Nephew, a classic eighteenth-century work of Menippean satire, which the main character, Quentin Villiers, lord of Appleseed Rectory, has been reading. Finally, Diedrick notes that the narrator’s words attest to the novel’s satiric form, as the aesthetic distance guaranteed by third-person voice allows

him to manipulate the characters, to “subordinate [them] to the demands of satire”: “these are the six that answer to our purposes,” the narrator states, after introducing the characters. Later, he informs Keith Whitehead, who questions the identity of his tormentor, that he “simply 4ad to be that way . . . merely in order to serve the designs of this particular fiction.”2?

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye traces Menippean satire from the Greek satirist Lucian and the Roman satirist Varro forward in time through Petronius, Apuleius, Erasmus, Thomas Love Peacock, Voltaire, Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, and Aldous Huxley.°° This form, he explains, directs its narrative spotlight less upon the actions of individual characters than upon their mental attitudes. Within a work of Menippean satire, characters sacrifice all aspirations to fictional autonomy or development. Instead, they function as limited mouthpieces for the ideas they represent. Often, as in Dead Babies, they are gathered at a country house or other enclosed facility where they engage in intellectual dialogues whose internal development greatly exceeds their own. Other times, these debates occur independently of such enclosures, as is the form in classical Socratic dialogue, whose historical decay is often assumed to have engendered the Menippean form.*! The person who has done the most to popularize Menippean satire is not Frye, however, but Bakhtin, whose Rabelais and His World (1968) and Problems of Dostoevsky’ Poetics remain the seminal texts. In the latter Bakhtin clarifies the affinities between the menippea and another, more celebrated term, carnival. In his paradigm, the menippea is energized by

a “carnival attitude toward the world,” deriving strength from its “jolly relativity” and celebratory randomness, its dynamic revolution of all extant hierarchical forms, whether they be social status, conventional etiquette, or personal morality. As in Dead Babies, the world of Bakhtin’s menippea is dangerously interior and unstable, leading to the inverted worlds of madness and dream, disillusionment and fantasy. Insanity, split personalities, unfettered dreams, ungovernable passions, suicidal

The Amises on Satire « 153 tendencies—all figure not only structurally but also thematically into the work. The menippea, Bakhtin writes, depicts a “breech” 1n the normal activities of human behavior. This incongruous world deliberately subverts conventional facets of normality and stability, including those of language and verisimilitude. Fantastical, comic, and parodic elements blend with “crude underworld naturalism.” As a result, the menippea explodes traditional postulations of character and motivation, substituting a destabilized amoral world in which truth and value become dubious propositions, complicated by existential contingency. The result of these energies can be phoenician and restorative, for characters as well as for satire. Volatile mental states destroy the “integrity of a man and his fate,” Bakhtin propounds, but “in him the possibilities of another man and another life are revealed”: he loses his “finalizedness and singleness of meaning.” Consequently, “he ceases to coincide with himself,” and an “experimental fantasticality” prevails, lending full representation to diverse forms of eccentricity and abnormality. “In all of world

literature,” Bakhtin proclaims, “we would not be able to find a genre with greater freedom of invention of fantasy than the menippea.”>4 Menippean satire helps Martin Amis evade the tonal problems that

lay at the heart of his dislike for programmatic literature. It effects structural changes by forcing individual characters to ridicule themselves, allowing the author to reside on the comfortable margins of the

work. It also forswears the necessity for direct—or reliable—moral judgment. The onus for satirical pronouncement consequently migrates to the characters, whose uncontrollable dissemblings betray the validity or falsity of their attitudes. The author, however, adopts a more playful or devious approach to his creations, which produces noticeable effects upon closure.

Characterization and Closure One can most clearly see the Amises’ varying approaches to satire by analyzing two additional facets of Ending Up and Dead Babies: their treatment of the theme of innocence (and its corollary, experience, of course) as well as their approach to closure. Both issues involve questions of characterization or portraiture. Although no character in either work is entirely commendable, two characters in particular seem

154 e Influence and Intersection to solicit their share of readerly sympathy and pity. In Ending Up, Adela Bastable lends a decidedly human touch to Kingsley’s collection of aged grumps. Ironically, Adela’s counterpart in Dead Babies is Keith White-

head, the corpulent, acned dwarf who falls victim to his own despair and to the other characters’ relentless abuse.

As Matthew Hodgart suggests, Kingsley’s satiric purpose in Ending Up was not to indict society's treatment of the elderly or even to lambaste his characters’ general fallibility. Rather, Kingsley was more interested in presenting an unglorified portrait of old age, complete with its inconvenience and incontinence. His satiric portrayal was not allegorical for a desiccated, enervated England, as some critics have suggested.*? Instead, Kingsley strove to create realistic, unsentimentalized portraits of people struggling with the increasing futility of their lives. Although the text does not offer the consolations of religion or philosophy, and although the characters all meet their deaths at the novel’s end, the novel's

structure functions as a redemptive, resuscitative force. The contrapuntal symmetry that distinguishes Kingsley’s portraits of his geriatric quintet—their despicable vices and their empathetic struggles; their inner turmoil and their outward behavior—implies no larger transcendent unity of being. Instead, it confirms solely the formal pattern of Kingsley’s artistic control.

The emotional center of Ending Up is Adela Bastable, Bernard's spinster sister whose life ambition and greatest tragedy is that she has never found love. Despite her eagerness to marry, she remains alone, unappreciated because of her “extreme ugliness.” “She had never been kissed with passion, and not often with even mild and transient affection,” Kingsley writes (13). Thus prevented from attaining her life’s goal, she clings to Bernard and her other housemates for companionship and comfort, commiserating with their complaints. The few remaining outlets for her dislocated feelings of love, these individuals are poor substitutes for the supportive union she idealizes marriage to be. As befitted

the communal hodgepodge at Kingsley’s home, Lemmons, the five main inhabitants of Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage form a perverse extended family, complete with the hoarded bitterness and petty rivalries that comprise family life. Adela, however, tries heroically to unite the

group, to act as an adhesive force. She is the household’s symbolic mother, endlessly striving to regulate the quintet’s frequent jealousies

The Amuses on Satire « 155 and bickerings. The foil to Bernard's prejudices, she attempts to neutralize his causticity. In addition, she counsels Marigold about her fears of senility, and she admires George's dedication to recover his facilities with language, encouraging his conviction to publish even when it becomes apparent that he will never do so again. Finally, she works to mitigate Marigold and Bernard's ongoing feud, trying on more than one occasion to negotiate some form of truce. Ultimately, Adela garners the reader’s (and Kingsley’s) sympathy because she is the most blameless and innocent character in the novel. She

never stops trying to reconcile the instability of her life with her internal senses of reason, order, and logic, and her continual efforts to unite the other characters represent a victory of the human spirit. She struggles to endure, even when facing conditions that increasingly seem to lack any

redemptive value. Contemplating the departure of her only friend, Marigold Pyke, Adela reveals a depth of humanistic resiliency unmatched in the novel: “What would she do if Marigold did go? Carry on, of course; no question about that. It was odd how straightforward, how almost easy, that was, even when there was nothing to carry on until. She remembered the end of the second war in Europe, how she had gone to bed on the night of the German surrender in some apprehension, wondering what it would feel like now that a great effort was finished and her small but all-absorbing part in it was finished too. And then, the next day, nothing seemed to have changed: there was always a job to do, and there always would be, with luck” (120). As the novel increasingly confronts the meaninglessness of life that emerges when moral absolutes erode, Adela begins to emerge as a sympathetic, realistic figure, an emblem of human suffering, complete in all

her bitterness and irritation. The overriding sentiment that ultimately comes to suffuse Kingsley’s novel is one of tempered compassion —not repugnance — toward the characters, for he seems less concerned with

killing off his geriatric coterie than with wringing some value out of their rapidly fading lives. Adela keenly recognizes the group’s basic incompatibility and antagonism, yet she continually struggles to define value in their lives, even when such identification becomes increasingly difficult to locate and even harder to maintain. Amid the fragmentation

and disconnection of their lives, she rejects the impulse to submit to death, which is an assertion, however muted, of the human capacity for

156 . Influence and Intersection adaptation and endurance. Although neither she nor any other character remains capable of undertaking grand or heroic quests, she alone refuses to settle for an accommodated, semimeaningless existence. She confronts chaos with routine, isolation with sociability, and achieves in

the process some deliverance from the isolation that more severely besets the other characters. In Dead Babies, Keith Whitehead plays a similar role. Similar to Adela, he is the most innocent and sympathetic figure in the novel; however, in contrast to Kingsley’s heroine, Keith is the most tormented of Martin’s brutal gang, reflecting the increased randomness and amorality of Martin's fictive world. Acned, gullible, and dwarfish, Keith becomes the object of vicious physical and emotional abuse. The novel’s sympathetic core, he is raped, attempts suicide, and is eventually murdered, unconsciously assuming his status as an attenuated, defenseless Christ figure. Speaking with John Haffenden, Martin explained that he prefers to polarize the characters in his novels, creating a moral spectrum against which egotism, willfulness, and pride can be measured. At one end of this spectrum, he explained, he locates misfits, criminals, raging egoists — the Andy Adornos, Keith Talents, and John Selfs of the world. At the opposite pole, he positions “suave degenerates,” characters of established status and class, such as Guy Clinch and Quentin and Celia Villiers, who demonstrate the powerlessness of class to prevent contingency or pain. Both extremes portray characters who could be labeled

“victimizers.” In the middle regions of this spectrum, however, one finds characters such as Keith Whitehead: powerless, gullible victims whose lack of insight, experience, and willpower render them easy prey for the vampiric characters who encircle them.°* A protégé of Vladimir Nabokov, Martin long ago appropriated the edict that readers should empathize with the authors, not the fictional creations of their work. In this quintessentially aesthetic realm, authors

can function freely as punitive, often malicious forces—unwanted “suest[s] at the banquet,” as Martin calls them. In his own work, this playful, or devious, tendency assumes a form of schadenfreude, or gleeful superciliousness, when Martin deals with his characters. This “creative glee of an irresponsible kind” often verges upon literary sadism, he confesses, for he delights in making his characters suffer within their

The Amises on Satire « 157 fictive worlds. He admits to taking devious liberties with his characters, and at one point in another novel— Money, published ten years after Dead Babies—the beleaguered protagonist, John Self, wonders, as Keith Whitehead similarly does, who mercilessly controls him, who pulls his puppet strings. “I sometimes think I am controlled by someone,” he laments; “Some space invader is invading my inner space, some fucking joker. But he’s not from out there. He’s from in here.” Speaking earlier in the novel with the character “Martin Amis,” however, Self received the answer to his query, even though he cannot make the connection. Writing creates an “appetite for punishment,” Martin then explained to Self, “The author is not free of sadistic impulses.” Keith Whitehead suffers similarly at the hands of his creator. How-

ever, Martin admits that he learned an important lesson from Keith, one that conveys the postmodern difficulties of trying to affix meaning and value in his text. Noting that his characters often frustrate his attempts at authorial totalization or control, asserting an autonomy that supplants the fates he allots for them, Martin cites Keith as an “index of how alive and unstable my characters are to me”: “I learned this lesson from writing Dead Babies, since I kept on coming across people, usually women, who were so tenderhearted and so full of generous belief in

characters that they couldn't bear to finish the novel—because they knew that terrible things were going to happen to the character Keith Whitehead. At the time I used to think, ‘It’s only Keith! Who cares what happens to Keith?’ This guy is carefully divested of every possible reason for being liked, and yet people really do care about his character. I wrote about Keith with a sort of horrible Dickensian glee, and it never

occurred to me that his unloveableness could awaken love.” Despite Martin's surprise, the reader does eventually come to sympathize with Keith because he alone craves connection and meaning, despite his constant abuse. Similar to Adela Bastable, he is an innocent victim, more sinned against than sinning. In addition, both characters are renowned for their “extreme ugliness.” One wonders whether Martin decided to outdo his father’s portrait of ugliness, in what would be an admittedly minor instance of Amisian revaluation.*° Keith is not simply ugly, like Adela, for instance. Instead, he is corpulent, hideous, and dwarfish, and his appearance indelibly thwarts his attempts to transcend his crisis of isolation. In words that Kingsley could have used to describe Adela, the

18 . Influence and Intersection narrator remarks that Keith “hadn't minded discovering that he was small, fat, and ugly half as much as he had minded discovering that he would always be those things, that all of it could never change now” (60). During the weekend at Appleseed Rectory, Keith resolves to fulfill one symbolic quest: either he will have a “definite sexual experience” or he will make some attempt to kill himself. Unfortunately (and comically), both of these wishes come true. Similar to the other characters, Keith’s dream-weekend degenerates into nightmare. He fails to seduce Lucy Littlejohn, the novel’s “golden-

hearted whore,’ and he cannot perform when Roxanne tries to seduce him. Vindictive and irrational, she ultimately enlists her American companions, Skip Marshall and Marvell Buzhardt, to rape him brutally, prompting his suicide attempt. Perhaps the only character whose suffering is redemptive, Keith’s torture at the hands of the Americans renders him a parodic Christ figure. Persecuted and forsaken, more human than his tormentors, he attempts to mediate the unleashed tortures of the others; yet he is powerless to prevent their abuse. “Reborn” at the hospital after his overdose, given a chance to embrace his exile from the group, he instead returns to Appleseed Rectory, wondering how he could ever have “wished to be elsewhere” (206). Feeling he is “the possessor of exclusive information, tall with news,” he fails not only to convey his enlightenment but to make any meaningful connection. Instead,

he crumbles against the nihilism of Martin’s Menippean satire, which invalidates all sense of hope, transcendence, and meaning. Having already killed his guests, Quentin Villiers, acting now as Johnny Appleseed, the novel’s mass-murdering host, alone watches Keith approach the house. “Ignoring his foreboding,” Keith unwillingly meets his fate, fulfilling his role as the novel’s final victim. The novel closes on a fatal-

istic, nihilistic note, as Martin eagerly dispenses with the members of his degenerate generation. Although Ending Up and Dead Babies both conclude with the mass deaths of their characters, Martin’s ending illuminates many of the foundations of the Amises’ divergent satiric forms and their worldviews as well. In Ending Up, death comes as an accident, only partially the result of the characters’ machinations. By contrast, Martin's ending is much more sinister, deterministic, and brooding. Whereas Ending Up projects a movement from misanthropy to mediation, from prejudice to

The Amises on Satire .« 159 pathos, Dead Babies charts a journey to utter destruction, a Mansonesque bloodbath without logic or reason. Although the central issue for both authors is an ostensibly moral one— how to define value and identity in a world of increasing contingency—a triumphantly human attitude seems to rise from the ashes of Kingsley’s characters. In Martin's novel, however, the satire is unforgiving. An apocalyptic novel of ideas, Dead Babies refuses to ameliorate the characters’ spiraling indulgences. In direct contrast to Kingsley’s more humane renderings, Martin thoroughly divests his characters of all redemptive qualities. His Robert Browning-esque gallery of dissemblers symbolizes a fated generation embracing toxic ideals.3” Struggling to stay afloat in the tide pools of their behavior, unable to restrain their in-

dulgences, Martin’s characters remain severed from all moral value, whether traditional or new. Their deaths are but extensions of their despairing obsessions. In short, Martin is unswerving in his portrayals of individual and cultural decay, and his fictive cosmos allows few (if any) opportunities for transcendence or escape. Thematically drawn to misfits, lowlifes, criminals, and addicts, Martin luxuriates in their eccentric machinations, producing a ludic exuberance and carnivalesque relativity. He vividly depicts the transgressions and amorality that stem from a contingent universe bereft of all transcendent absolutes, and he refuses either to condemn or to proselytize. Such ideas formed the basis for his Menippean satire in Dead Babies and were another manifestation of the philosophical conflicts he shared with his father. By contrast, Ending Up may be one of Kingsley’s darker novels, but it is hardly Mennipean. Instead, it seeks to affirm value even as it tries to erode it, tempering fatalism with humor. A deceptively complex work, forcing readers to criticize its characters while simultaneously retaining interest in their struggles, Ending Up constantly challenges moral assumptions. Rendered without nostalgia or sentimentality, the characters

operate within a stark, unromanticized world, lacking the enlightenment, wisdom, and serenity that age is supposed to provide. In dramatic contrast to Martin, however, Kingsley mollifies his satiric treatments of aging and death with humanistic pathos and moral refinement. A Horatian satire tempered by Fieldingesque humor and realism, Kingsley’s novel softens its sympathetic portraits of old age with an awareness of the characters’ efforts to cope despite the apparent absence of value in

160 « Influence and Intersection their lives. Unable to effect any meaningful change, the characters struggle to endure even though they can anticipate only inconvenience,

antipathy, and antagonism with age. A comic satire in the countryhouse tradition, Ending Up forces its readers to interrogate not only their personal relationship with death, but the erosion of value and hope

that accompanies old age. The work is not an allegory of the human struggle with death; it is a satiric fable, both comic and moral. Whereas both Amises recoiled from the proselytizing tone of much

Juvenalian satire, only Kingsley found solace in Fielding’s more restrained Horatian form, with its cosmopolitan, urbane facade and its wry, ironic lamentation about the absurd transmutations of society. Although his work routinely anatomized the destabilizing elements of a relativized, contingent universe, as does Martin’s, Kingsley remained much more interested in traditional methods for rendering personal and existential crises. He refrained from exploring the eccentric underworld that Martin embraces, and he sought instead to illuminate the absurd-

ities that stem from rapid revolutions in thought. Forsaking the conscious retreat from humor and realism that epitomized Swift’s Juvenalian satire and Martin's Menippean form, Ending Up asserts the steadying forces of language, motivation, and character, elements that are anathema to Martin's subsequent text. Deliberately rejecting the satiric mode so favored by his father, Martin’s Dead Badies underscores the relativity of life and death in the decontextualized postmodern world. It revels in a stylistic liberation and an aestheticized bliss that are unburdened by morality, hope, or faith. Martin's Menippean satire partakes of Swift's biting sarcasm and Rabelais’s underworld murkiness, but it rejects the humanistic compassion that Kingsley provides. ‘This is because Menippean satire effectively lends itself to the enterprise of postmodernism: hybrid, assimilationist, subversive, and saturating, it is an ag-

gressively antirealistic, posthumanist mode. In other words, Martin's sophomore novel continued the novelistic competition inaugurated by The Rachel Papers, but this trme Martin challenged the assumptions of his father’s satiric master, not his comic masterpiece. If The Rachel Papers helped Martin define his comic techniques in

opposition to his father, diminishing Kingsley’s literary authority to make room for his own, then Dead Babies intensified the struggle, dramatizing the Amises’ contrasting satiric assumptions and philosophical

Lhe Amiseson Satire «. 161 worldviews. Throughout their ideological and satirical struggles, the Amises did not simply misread each other’s texts but symbolically accused each other of literary falsification. Theirs was a manifest form of generational dissent, conducted within companion novels spaced less than one year apart and composed at the same time and location. Diverging not only stylistically but thematically, Dead Babies assaulted both the underlying values and the satiric form of Kingsley’s precursor text, problematizing the transcendent absolutes that enabled Kingsley to affix judgment and value in the text. In the process of negotiating the

limits of their genealogical interweaving, the Amises therefore contested each other’s representational mistakes, implying that the other had misapprehended modern reality. As a consequence, their novels proffered rival versions of reality embedded within their satiric techniques and forms. The Amises would continue their intertextual negotiations through-

out subsequent works, but one instance best illuminated the rapidly shifting nature of their genealogical and generational dissent. If Martin’s first two novels helped to clarify the Amises’ divergent forms of comedy and satire, suggesting the bases for their literary family feud, then two other contemporaneous works completed the trifecta, providing a forum for additional deliberations. Released concurrently in 1984, Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women and Martin's Money: A Suicide Note interrogate the limitations of realism and postmodernism. They also illuminate the most intriguing aspect of the Amises’ version of literary influence —its revolutionary multidirectional impetus. The Amises’ unique brand of generational dissent enacts at this stage a creative redoubling: unidirectional forces fade, and the son begins to influence the father just as powerfully as the father once influenced the son.

“Phe Amises on Realism

and Postmodernism — Stanley and the Women and —

7 Money: A Suicide Note

-.. Of course Martin Amis is more famous than J am now. ... But you | , give the boy a rest. The truth is, Phil, that we all suffer from the limitations of the age we were born in. Just as the generation before

' us had no time for U/ysses, so in our turn weeeeghghgh... a , , — Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 8 February 1984 |

| When viewed as companion texts, or contemporaneous instances of re- valuative critique, Kingsley Amis’s fifteenth novel, Stanley and the Women (1984), and Martin's fifth novel, Money: A Suicide Note (1984) il- _ _ luminate two subjects hitherto unexamined in the Amis father-and-son relationship: the Amises’ perspectives on postmodernism and their con-. _ troversial portraits of women. Whereas Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers _ situated the Amises in relation to their divergent forms of comedy, and _ whereas Ending Up and Dead Babies positioned them in relation to their _ satiric differences, Stanley and the Women and Money extended their

| confrontations into new generic territory, interrogating their opinions about the evolution of postmodernism and realism. A novel that explic- | itly rejects all forms of literary fabulation, Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women declares the validity of classically realistic protocol. A forum for 162

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism . 163 Martins postmodernist leanings, Money subverts the narrative assumptions that inform Kingsley’s more traditional brand of social realism. Both novels, however, confront variations of literary tradition and patriarchy: one is sociopolitical in nature, concerned with distinctions between patriarchy and misogyny, and one is generic, or modal, concerned with the modal transformations within realism. While the Amises’ writings continued to reflect their engagement in a covert literary war, their two 1984 texts featured an additional dynamic: whereas previous novels revealed Martin's dedication to reworking his father’s texts and his literary authority, by 1984, Martin's career had begun to eclipse his father’s. When Martin released Money to great critical acclaim, there seemed little doubt about which Amis’s star was in ascendancy. As a consequence, Stanley and the Women can be seen as an instance of paternal — not filial— revaluation, as Kingsley addressed, reworked, and displaced Martin's postmodern techniques and themes, which had become decidedly more popular. Until the late 1970s, critics and readers alike could agree about the qualities of Kingsley’s work: raucous, sometimes dark, comic satire; controversially iconoclastic heroes; a firmly centered moral consciousness; the triumph of common sense over pretension or hypocrisy; an expert stylistic precision; and a conflation of the high with the low, producing an eminently readable, comically engaging presentation. By 1978, however, such critical consensus had become difficult to reach. Martin, by contrast, had increasingly received critical and popular praise during this period. The qualities of 41s work were easier to agree upon. Like Kingsley’s precedent examples, Martin’s early novels were raucous comic satires that featured controversial, iconoclastic heroes. But contra Kingsley’s, Martin's style was proudly assertive and dramatic. In addi-

tion, his treatment of morality, time, and consciousness perfectly matched the postmodern zeitgeist. Iwo main factors contributed to the Amises’ shifting reputations: stated generally, these were controversial charges of male chauvinism and the Amises’ positions within contemporary literary debates, especially the future of realism and postmodern-

ism. Not surprisingly, these were the chief dynamics that animated Stanley and the Women and Money, and for the first time, due to the books’ simultaneous publication, the Amises’ literary quarrels could be witnessed concurrently.}

164 « Influence and Intersection

Chauvinism, Feminism, and Misogyny Few authors in England or America have rivaled the Amises’ abilities to inflame gender controversy. As have other authors before them— Ernest Hemingway, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth, to name but a few—the Amises both write from a decidedly male perspective. They are masculinist authors whose works challenge genteel assumptions about morality and character. In many respects, gender relations were always Kingsley’s grand theme, but his less reserved, often blatantly honest depictions of women differentiated

him from his contemporaries. Like his father—albeit with different methods— Martin is an archaeologist of shifting sensibilities, a diagnostician of contemporary social mores who refuses to temper his dark treatments of modern decay, whether they occur within men or women.

Of course, both Amises wrote during some of the most politicized decades in the late twentieth century, complicating matters. As do most good writers, the Amises fictionally incorporate the social issues of their time, assimilating them to illuminate complexities and contradictions. If previous works depicted the Amises engaged in a struggle over the nature of modern reality, then Stanley and the Women and Money elevated gender relations to a primary status within their social and literary debates. Because questions of chauvinism (or misogyny) are so central to each author’s critical reception, the subject deserves extended treatment. However, these issues are best seen in the context of the Amises’ literary negotiations— especially their delibera-

tions over character, aesthetic distance, and realism. As analysis of Money will reveal, Martin enacts narrative measures to distance himself from his controversial protagonists. Kingsley, however, does not, embracing instead a form of moral realism that is less fabulistic, less invo-

luted than Martin’s more experimental brand. In many ways, these technical differences help contextualize the charges of chauvinism that encircle the Amises’ work. As one will see, however, Stanley and the Women and Money both present difficult problems of sympathy that problematize the dismissal of such charges.

In contrast to literary conventions, both romantic and comic, Kingsley’s later work (beginning with Jakes Thing in 1978), began to portray women as self-interested and spiteful, vindictive and mean. Of

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism . 165

course, he had portrayed men in the same light for years, beginning with Lucky Jim, but with the exception of Jim’s uncharitable “filthy Mo-

zart’ remark, no one had seemed to mind all that much. By the late 1970s, however, Kingsley found himself once more at the wrong end of the political spectrum, charged with another version of militant philistinism: a gleeful chauvinism, or more seriously, a misogynist eagerness to endorse the attitudes of his embittered male protagonists. To an increasing number of readers, including Martin himself, Kingsley’s humor on this issue had ceased to be funny. Lamentably, he seemed to have let personal prejudice taint his work, imbuing his disillusioned heroes with intonations of his own failed marriages. As did Kingsley, Martin never shied from questioning convention, especially when it came to literature. In his earlier novels, he surpassed his father’s stylistic propriety, af-

fording readers an honest (and often sometimes disturbing) glimpse into his characters’ private thoughts and sexual escapades. Moreover, in a mature work of fiction such as Money, Martin overturned many romantic and comic conventions, tricking misinformed readers into confusing John Self’s narratorial perversions with Martin's authorial endorsement. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic worked valiantly to reclassify the Amises’ novels as misanthropic (instead of misogynist), but questions about the authors’ attitudes toward their female characters continued to expand, repudiating the convenience of the misanthropy label. It would be easy to gloss over such issues, accepting the exemption that misanthropy affords, but the topic is so central to each author's fic-

tion that it should not be so simply ignored. Few novels interrogate these issues as aggressively as do Martin's Money and Kingsley’s Jakes Thing and Stanley and the Women, and not surprisingly, they are among the most frequently cited instances of the Amises’ alleged misogyny. One tonal development is notable, however, within these three works: whereas Kingsley and Martin are both concerned with reworking conventional depictions of their female characters, Martin's novel achieves a narrative distance and humor that Kingsley’s two works do not. For the first time in their familial competition, Kingsley’s representations of modern reality seemed spurious at best or patently false, something that Martin had previously noted and worked to displace. Whereas Martin

had earlier revaluated his father's texts, now, unfortunately, literary

166 .« Influence and Intersection tradition began to revaluate Kingsley’s reputation, much as both Amises had seen happen to Larkin.

The Autobiographical Abyss: Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women

As John McDermott has noted, one can locate in Kingsley’s earliest novels many “portraits of unlovely ladies.” Margaret Peel springs first to mind (Lucky Jim), followed by Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams (That Uncertain Feeling), Anna le Page (Take a Girl like You), and Helene Bang (One Fat Englishman). Often, these women win and then subsequently lose the affections of the primary male lead; at least that is the case with

Margaret and Elizabeth. Standing opposite them, as correctives perhaps, one finds such women as Christine Callaghan, Jean Lewis, and Jenny Bunn, superior for their beauty, charm, and good-heartedness. These women are portrayed as better than men, more serious and intuitive. They hold out the promise of a safe harbor, a respite from chaos. In this respect, they symbolically rescue the Amis man, “protecting him from himself.”? In Kingsley’s early imaginative worlds, nice things (or nice women) were always nicer than nasty ones, and readers had little trouble distinguishing between the categories. Beginning with Jakes Thing, however, many readers marked a disturbing change in Kingsley’s dramatis personae. A stark, unromanticized portrait of flagging desire and a faltering marriage, Jakes Thing depicts the battle between the sexes as interminable trench warfare, bereft of respite or release. A possible parodic inversion of Roth's Portnoy’s Complaint, Jakes Thing disavowed many of the values that Kings-

ley’s earlier novels championed. Marriage, love, or lust no longer furnished transcendent escape from the self; rather, they now seemed to hound Jake Richardson, the novel’s protagonist, sending him scurrying into the squirrel-cage of psychoanalysts, doctors, and sexual exams. Whereas earlier novels like Take a Girl like You (1960) presented some resolution to the issue of sexual conflict, albeit qualified or troubling, Jakes Thing seemed to leave little doubt about Kingsley’s increasingly dark comic vision.3 In this regard, the novel’s final paragraphs are illuminating. Contemplating the social implications of the medical procedures that could restore his sex drive, Jake assesses his relationships with

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism « 167 women. He arrives at a final conclusion, simultaneously humorous and bleak: Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to

tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him. So it was quite easy. “No thanks,” he said.4

Many of Kingsley’s traditional targets for deflation appear prominently in Jake’s thoughts, chief among them hypocrisy, affectation, and egotism. However, as Malcolm Bradbury has noted, this new intonation seems somehow unsettling coming from a writer who had previously “celebrated women as nicer than men and who had made the commonplace world of sexual relations the basis of a moral feeling.” A reincarnated, older Jim Dixon, Jake Richardson uncomfortably endorses renunciation and surrender, a retreat from humor and laughter, a flight from life. To many readers, including Martin and Elizabeth Jane Howard, it seemed that Kingsley’s authorial sense had become tainted by prejudice, and although acquiescence does not equal misogyny per se, Kingsley’s comedy seemed to exceed the borders of playful chauvinism..° Similar to Jakes Thing, Stanley and the Women is a forceful yet flawed

portrait of a marriage in turmoil, recounted from the male perspective and accompanied by all the confusion, ambivalence, and irritation one might logically expect from the dramatic situation. On the surface, the novel’s primary subject is madness, not gender conflict, and this point gave Kingsley pause about the title. The book's instigating action is the unexpected homecoming of Stanley’s son, Steve, the frazzled prodigal

168 . Influence and Intersection who gradually disrupts Stanley's marriage. To some critics and reviewers, however, it seemed that the novel's real subject was not madness or even family disintegration, but instead the sociosexual mores that had begun to displace members of Kingsley’s generation. Writing in the 1 September 1985 issue of the Washington Post Book World, Jonathan Yardley announced that Kingsley appeared to have “stacked the deck against women, reducing them to caricatures who reinforce the damning judgments made by Stanley and his chums.” Elsewhere, Val Hennessy noted that the book was clearly written by “some-

one who harbours a pathological hatred of women.” As Christopher Hitchens explains, such controversy almost prevented the novel from finding an American publisher: although senior editors at four different publishing houses initially expressed enthusiasm for the novel, all eventually rescinded their offers, offering no explanation. Jonathan Clowes, Amis’s literary agent at the time, attributes these rejections to sociopolitical pressures, noting that he knew of at least one instance where the

novel had been railroaded by feminist readers on editorial boards.’ Eventually, Stanley and the Women would find publication with Summit

Books, vindicating its English appearance, but by then it had become patently clear that Kingsley was again embroiled in a heated literary and political battle. In contrast to his experiences with Lucky Jim thirty years earlier, however, Kingsley found the stakes much higher in the hyperpoliticized 1980s. Whereas he had earlier been arraigned for expressing a “militant philistinism’ that angered the figureheads of an older gener-

ation, Kingsley now found himself anathema to the young, as he teetered between publication and censure. As with Jake's Thing, Kingsley tried to remind readers that Stanley was not a thinly veiled author surrogate and that “all comedy, all humor is unfair.” He certainly did not deny that the novel proposed a critical view of women, but for him it remained a work of literature, not sociology: it was not reportage, autobiography, or confession. Instead, he drew attention to the novel’s realism and verisimilitude, noting that if any novel were to be any good, it would dramatize “thoughts that some people, somewhere, have had.” Anthony Burgess also contributed to the debate, noting that all writers, to varying extents, utilize their personal lives as source material, and that none of the “stern stuff” in Stanley and the Women should be read as “coming straight from the mouth of

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism . 169 Mr Amis.”® There was, of course, some ironic justice to Kingsley’s situation, which paralleled Vladimir Nabokov’s, who was similarly asked to defend Lo/ita for its social and moral transgressions in the rgsos. Earlier, Kingsley had refused to grant Nabokov aesthetic distance from his nar-

rator. Now, critics refused to grant Kingsley the same separation from his text, noting that Stanley's problems with women seemed uncomfortably autobiographical and that Kingsley’s perspective lacked objectivity.

The distance between Kingsley and his beleaguered narrators has always been difficult to measure, but this issue is complicated by the unique historical circumstances surrounding the publication of Stanley and the Women. As Richard Bradford, Eric Jacobs, and even Martin Amis himself remind us, there exist very good reasons for associating Kingsley with Stanley Duke. The most relevant event that occurred during the composition of Stanley and the Women was the dissolution of

Kingsley’s marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard, a messy process that soured him on women.’ Separated since 1980, Kingsley and Howard made their divorce final in 1983, as Kingsley was completing the novel. While the controversy over the book raged, Howard excoriated Kingsley in the press, accosting him for ruining both her life and career. Kingsley retaliated with counteraccusations, and the two settled more deeply into their entrenched opinions. Not surprisingly, this 1s precisely the pattern that Stanley and the Women depicts: the descent from mutuality, sympathy, and objectivity to myopia, vested interest, and entrenchment.

Drawing from Kingsley’s correspondence, Jacobs and Bradford record the extent to which Kingsley repaid his ex-wife by fictionalizing her as the novel’s more intractable women. She became the foundation for both Nowell Hutchinson and Susan Duke, Stanley’s first and second wives. Kingsley had previously discussed the psychic mysteries of his character creations in a 1973 essay, “Real and Made-up People,” but by 1984, many people noted important theoretical divergences. Whereas Kingsley had earlier contended that characters functioned for authors as vehicles for self-criticism, helping them to “see more clearly, and judge more harshly, [their] own weaknesses and follies,” in Stanley and the

Women, all attempts at self-criticism seemed faltering, displaced, or blocked. Authorial approval seemed heavily invested in Stanley, however

untenable. Hardly a stranger to these familial contexts, Martin himself commented in Experience upon the romantic malaise of his father’s work

170 « Influence and Intersection during this period: “It was evident in his novels—specifically in the anti-romantic curve leading from Jakes Thing to Stanley, which appeared to cancel any hope or even memory of comfort from that quarter. | wasnt making the elementary error of conflating the man and the work, but all writers know that the truth zs in the fiction. That’s where the spiritual thermometer gives its reading. And Kingsley’s novels, around then, seemed to me to be in moral retreat, as if he were closing down a whole dimension—the one that contained women and love.”!° This tendency toward vested interest achieves a noticeable urgency at the novel’s end.

For most of the novel, Kingsley portrays Stanley Duke as a basically decent individual who treads a fine line between chauvinism and common sense. He is fallible and limited, but, at least preliminarily, it is possible to view him as the archetypal Kingsley Amis figure— the “shithero,” the “hero-as-shit.” Until the final pages of the book, Stanley does not seem to be a repulsive character. He displays an admirable tendency to adhere to a rational, centrist perspective, restraining himself from the pronounced sexism of other characters. Instead, Cliff Wainwright and Dr. Nash present the most troubling examples of male chauvinism in the book; likewise, Nowell Hutchinson, Susan Duke, and Lindsey Collins fail to confirm the judiciousness of female charity. In their own ways, these characters all antagonize Stanley, and the novel depicts him wandering between their varying levels of bitterness and self-interest. The problem, however, stems from the novel’s ending, where Kingsley

seems to undercut the tonal moderation that elsewhere supports the book's comic realism.

The novel deftly depicts Stanley’s process of enlightenment with regard to the personal conflicts between his son and his second wife. For most of the novel, Stanley functions as a satiric commentator, reflecting

upon the self-serving stances of the other characters but refusing to adopt their prejudicial attitudes. Like many other Kingsley Amis novels, Stanley and the Women adopts a middle-ground and a middle-brow position. The novel’s ending complicates such a reading, however, as it appears to validate the biased opinions of the characters that Stanley (and Kingsley) seemed earlier intent on deflating. In the novel’s final

pages, Kingsley works to prepare the reader for Stanley’s unsteady conversion, leading him through two crucial dialogues—one with

Lhe Amtses on Reatism and Postmodernism .« 71 Dr. Nash, a physician, and the other with Cliff Wainwright, one of Stanley’s divorced friends. In a passage reminiscent of Jake Richardson’s celebrated renunciation of women, Dr. Nash describes how Lindsey Collins, the novel’s feminist physician, blames Stanley for his son’s madness, acting solely out of malice and self-interest. Beginning with this scene, Kingsley seems to abdicate his novel's middle-ground perspective, striv-

ing instead toward the premise of the book's title, which portrays women as a separate and potentially antagonistic species from men.

Referring to the differences between Stanley and his women, Dr. Nash remarks that Lindsey Collins had never cared about Steve's recovery or about Stanley's efforts to help; instead, she intended all along to “fuck [Stanley] up because [he was] a man.” At this point, Stanley ob-

jects, revealing his nonprejudicial, middle-ground position, but Nash unleashes a diatribe of striking proportions: “Fucking up a man? Not enough of a motive? What are you talking about? Good God, you've had wives, haven't you? And not impossibly some acquaintance with other women as well? You can’t be new to feeling the edge of the most powerful weapon in their armoury. You must

have suffered before from the effect of their having noticed . . . that men are different, men quite often wonder whether they’re doing the right thing and worry about it, men have been known to blame themselves for behaving badly, men not only feel they've made mistakes but on occasion will actually admit having done so, and say they're sorry,

and ask to be forgiven, and promise not to do it again, and mean it. Think of that! Mean it. All beyond female comprehension. Which incidentally is why they’re not novelists and must never be priests. Not enough of a motive? They don't have motives as you and I understand them. They have the means and the opportunity, that is enough.”!!

Nash’s words escalate in intensity, leaving the reader to wonder whether Kingsley meant for comedy to supplant the seriousness of the subject or vice versa. Readers familiar with Kingsley’s personal life will also question whether Nash is a character or, in this speech at least, an authorial mouthpiece: when he mentions that women must not be novelists, for instance, one wonders whether Kingsley is speaking to the reader or, out of spite, to Elizabeth Jane Howard.! In this scene, Stanley remains unswayed by Nash’s conclusions, but this conversation prepares him for his

next meeting with Cliff Wainwright, which dissolves all doubt about the novel’s tonal balance between misanthropy and misogyny.

172 « Influence and Intersection Meeting Cliff in a pub, Stanley reveals that there may be medical reasons to assume that Susan’s injury was self-inflicted and not, as she had asserted, the result of Steve's assault. Even though such actions appear to vindicate the novel’s dim view of women, and even though the characters appear to be drunk, Cliff and Stanley’s conversation extends beyond all borders of common sense or propriety. As a consequence, the book stammers to an abrupt, unsettling halt. As Cliff discusses spousal abuse, one feels as if not only he, but Kingsley as well, has lost control over his words: “According to some bloke on the telly the other night, twenty-five per

cent of violent crime in England and Wales is husbands assaulting wives. Amazing figure that, don’t you think? Youd expect it to be more like eighty per cent. Just goes to show what an easy-going lot English husbands are, only one in four of them bashing his wife. No, it doesn’t mean that, does it? But it’s funny about wife-battering. Nobody ever even asks what the wife had been doing or saying. She's never anything but an ordinary God-fearing woman who happens to have a battering husband. Same as race prejudice. Here are a lot of fellows who belong to a race minding their own business and being as good as gold and not letting butter melt in their mouths, and bugger me if a gang of preju-

diced chaps don't rush up and start discriminating against them. Frightfully unfair.” (253-54)

One might try to exonerate Cliff, acknowledging his inebriation and excusing his perception as permanently tainted by television, but such readerly maneuvers only confirm the danger of the novel’s ideological terrain. Cliff’s sexist and racist remarks parallel similar, less noticeable, attitudes expressed earlier in the novel, and there is no mistaking the new absence of authorial mediation or correction. Cliff’s words are selfinterested and unexamined: they are “mood-clichés” or “inherited propositions,” in Martin’s lexicon. Significantly, they are also the same faults of mind for which Kingsley satirized the Welches in Lucky Jim, confirming just how far from its source Kingsley’s satire had traveled. he novel veers away from satire and toward propaganda, eroding many of the narrative foundations that supported Kingsley’s comic realism in

earlier novels. For the first time, Stanley accepts the bareness of his friend’s pronouncement and accedes that the “‘root of all the trouble is that we want to fuck them, the pretty ones, women I mean.’”}3 Finally, he concludes, “‘In fact women only want one thing, for men to want to

The Amuises on Realism and Postmodernism . 173

fuck them. If they do, it means they can fuck them up. Am I drunk? What I was trying to say, if you want to fuck a woman she can fuck you up. And if you don’t want to she fucks you up anyway for not wanting

to.... Actually, they used to feel they needed something in the way of provocation ... but now they seem to feel they can get on with the job of fucking you up any time they feel like it. That’s what Women’s Lib is for’” (254).

These discussions attempt to justify the characters’ conclusions in light of the novel’s remarkable actions, especially Susan's use of selfviolence to prompt Stanley’s rejection of his son. Despite such things, however, the novel degenerates into vituperation, abandoning the finely balanced tensions that previously animated it. Even though Kingsley takes steps to emphasize his characters’ inebriated state, perhaps intending to establish some satiric distance, Stanley’s ill-timed conclusions extend well beyond the novel’s internal justifications. Uncomfortably, Kingsley seemed to betray his own attitude toward women and the feminist movement. He revels too joyfully in his characters’ ecstatic exaltations, and in contrast to his earlier novels, Stanley and the Women lacks the tonal moderation and redemptive comedy that reverberates throughout his best, and even his darker, work. ‘The ending violates the correspondent relationship between author and reader that Kingsley championed throughout his life, and in the process it undermines the novel’s intellectual and emotional foundations. In contrast to the nonsensical charge of philistinism in Lucky Jim, in other words, there remained some validity for the socioliterary objections to Stanley and the Women. Marilyn Butler's premise that the novel worked as a vehicle for Kingsley’s own self-examination —a deconstructive “probe into his own crusty authorial personality” — ultimately fails

to account for the ending, which betrays Kingsley’s soured views of women and marriage and undermines the novel's ironic distance. Disappointingly, Stanley loses the reason, humor, and dimensional flexibility that earlier distinguished his character, and in the final analysis, he becomes little more than a caricature, painfully similar to the novel’s other sexist characters. For Martin Amis, the problem is not just artistic but ideological: “Stan/ey is in fact a mean little novel in every sense, sour, spare, and viciously well-organized. But there is an ignobility in the performance. Here the author implements— and literalizes—Jake's

174 » Influence and Intersection poetical promise: i.e., men only. ‘There is certainly no sexual disgust 1n it (Kingsley was never that kind of woman-hater). The grounds are purely

intellectual.” Martin’s conclusion is even more assertive: “I always thought it was suicide: artistic suicide. He didn’t kill the world. He just killed half of it.”!4

Equally controversial, certainly more graphic, and characteristically experimental, Martin’s Money surpasses Stanley and the Women in its narrative balance and structural complexity. Although Martin admitted in 1980 that he was “no real admirer’ of his first two novels, regarding them as a “mixture of clumsy apprenticeship and unwarranted showing off,” Money is a masterful metafictional epic that shows Martin at the height of his authorial powers, in full control of his explosive themes and overreaching characters.!° Though widely divergent in style, Stanley and the Women and Money present equally disturbing portraits of manhood in the midst of the feminist movement. Whereas Kingsley’s novel tries but fails to support its controversial stances, Martin's novel glories in its carnivalesque bacchanalia, simultaneously celebrating and satirizing the frenzy of its egotistical narrator, the appropriately named everyman, John Self.!®

Revaluative KFeminism? Money, Misogyny, and Doubling Moneys plot is far from simple. An English director of campy television commercials, John Self has been hired by an American producer, Fielding Goodney, to direct a movie, alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. The movie is doomed to failure, part of an elaborate scheme to

dupe Self out of his money. In the course of the novel, Self vacillates between extremes of self-indulgence and self-improvement. He craves autonomy yet laments his apparent lack of free will; he acknowledges his actions in the role of victimizer but fears, correctly, that he is the victim of some powerful malevolent force; and in the end, despite his numerous attempts at improvement, events collude to thwart him, and the book culminates in a whirlwind of deceit and painful recognition. Upon its release, reviewers attested to the novel’s energy and force. Ian Hamilton praised its “urban-apocalyptic high fever’; David Lodge called it a “skaz narrative in the Notes from Underground tradition, a de-

monic carnival, a suicide note from a character who indulges in every

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism « — 175

excess of the lower body”; and Karl Miller labeled it “an obscene orphan delirium.” Finally, Jonathan Yardley summarized the plot as “one long drinking bout, interrupted only briefly by a period of relative sobriety’: “It contains incessant sexual activity, much of it onanistic; it has a gener-

ous supply of sordid language . . . and it has an unkind word for just about every race, creed or nationality known to exist.” In short, Martin garnered a mountain of praise for his novel's vibrant, complex narration,

and little doubt now remained that he had assumed leadership of the Amis literary dynasty, usurping his father’s authority. As with previous novels, however, Martin’s explicit narration came at acost. Despite Hamilton’s contention that Money would be “thought of for years as one of the key books of the decade,” the novel was shunned by the Booker Prize selection committee, as was Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women.’ To many

people, these snubbings seemed to derive from similar, extraliterary sources — the presumed misogyny of the Amises’ portraits of women. As with Stanley and the Women, evidence of the book’s antifeminist matrix is easy to locate. Throughout the novel, John Self revels in a maelstrom of money, pornography, sex, and liquor, glorifying the vices of his

entropic, devolutionary, and dehumanized environment. “You know where you are,” he tells the reader at one point, “with economic necessity.”18 Elsewhere he expresses his desire to be back in London, visiting his lamia, Selina Street. “I only ask one thing,” he remarks, “And it isn't much to ask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my Selina—or not even alone, damn it, merely close to her, close enough to smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding of her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough to put in one good, clean punch. That’s all I ask” (23). In a later, more comic scene, we get yet another example of Self’s tendency

to sacrifice higher ideals, including romantic love, at the altar of lust, greed, and power. Maintaining that it is “essential to her dignity and self-respect,” Selina asks Self to open a joint bank account. Self, however, tries to disabuse her of the notion, “arguing that her dignity and self-respect can get on perfectly well under the present system, with its merit awards and incentive schemes.” After Selina breaks his resolve, dressing so unattractively that she cools even Self’s raging blood, Self recounts the changes in their relationship: “The day before last, how-

ever, I decided to open a joint bank account. I filled out the forms,

176 « Influence and Intersection coldly supervised by the watchful, sharp-shouldered Selina. That morning she went to bed in black stockings, tasseled garter belt, satin thong, silk bolero, muslin gloves, belly necklace and gold choker. I made a real

pig of myself, | have to admit. An hour and a half later she turned to me, with one leg still hooked over the headboard, and said, “Do it, anywhere, anything.’ Things had unquestionably improved, what with all this new dignity and self-respect about the place” (85).

As usual, it is impossible to deny that Martin exceeds his father's graphic depictions and blunt attitudes. However, unlike they are in Stanley and the Women, such elements in Money are not as disturbing as one might expect. Why, then, one must ask, does Money succeed where Stanley and the Women faltered? Why did Kingsley’s novel suffer at the hands of publishers and critics whereas Martin's novel was elevated to its status as a crucial fim du millénaire text? To these queries, there seem to be three primary responses, and each illuminates the intertextual res-

onance of the Amises’ novels, revealing their contrasting narrative methods as well as their literary battles over realism and postmodernism. The first explanation for why Money succeeds where Stanley and the Women fails is that Martin provides more than ample justification for his hero’s stereotypical reductions. The film industry where Self works, the people with whom he comes in contact, even Self himself—all are

masters of deceit and manipulation. Attesting to the thematic congruence between his and his father’s novel, Martin has argued that every character in Money is “a kind of artist—sack-artists, piss-artists, conartists, bullshit-artists.”!9 Indeed, the characters seem locked in a vortex of corruption, greed, and desire, an interminable black hole of individualism and solipsism. However, the grandeur of Self’s cinematic experiences gains a narrative credibility that Stanley's excoriation of wives, women, and therapists does not, even though these characters similarly function as emblematic con (and bullshit) artists. Second, and perhaps most important, Martin maintains the aesthetic distance that vanished in Kingsley’s work. Money's inflammatory depictions are less troubling because they are so clearly those of the book’s narrator, John Self. The reader tends to excuse Self’s incendiary remarks because he is comical, self-mocking, and a/ways emotionally unstable. Despite his repulsive nature, he is a remarkably endearing narrator who consistently tempers his caustic opinions, either with humor

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism .« 177

or by blatantly appealing to the reader. Undeniably one of literature’s most self-absorbed, morally bankrupt characters, Self remains acutely aware of the impression he makes on other people. “I want sympathy,” he tells us early in the novel, “even though I find it so hard to behave sympathetically” (32). Elsewhere, he apologizes for his continual relapses into pornography, remarking that he “didn’t dare tell [us] earlier in case you stopped liking me, in case I lost your sympathy altogether — and

I do need it, your sympathy” (196). Through Self’s excessive selfawareness, Martin anticipates and thereby attempts to silence the objections of his readers: he embeds a self-reflexive critique within Money that is absent in Stanley and the Women, and this second narrative level affords

him the artistic freedom to manipulate and coerce. As does Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lo/i¢a, John Self betrays himself directly, reveling in his pornographic dramatic monologue, his elaborate postmodern confession, in ways that Stanley Duke never does in Kingsley’s novel. As the furor over Lo/ita demonstrated, however, the public does not always exonerate an author from his fictive transgressions, so to deter readers from this complaint, Martin took an additional step to guarantee he not be affiliated with his charmingly egotistical hero. In a final maneuver, Martin inscribes himself into the novel, artificially enacting a separation between himself and his narrator, regardless of how one interprets such doubling. Although authors as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer have experimented with narrative involution—one could point to Francois Rabelais and Laurence Sterne as influences as well— Martin's fictional semblable derives especially from Nabokov’s carnivalesque forms of postmodern narration. As do Nabokov’s authorial surrogates, Martin's function in a complicated amoral fashion, playfully disrupting the framework of the novel. Ironically calling attention to the artificiality of his narration, Martin's secret sharers accelerate the

thematic tensions between reality and illusion, realism and postmodernism. “I was wondering whether I did put ‘me’ in the novel because I

was so terrified of people thinking I was John Self,” Martin once explained to John Haffenden. “But actually, ’'ve been hanging around the wings of my novels, so awkwardly sometimes, like a guest at the banquet, that I thought I might jolly well be in there at last.” Explaining that the precedent for his interpolation was an abandoned novella he began after completing his third novel, Success, Martin reflected that the

178 « Influence and Intersection earlier attempt portrayed him as a heavy-handed moral barometer, a central conscience designed to summon the unrepentant characters from his earlier novels (such as Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers, Andy Adorno in Dead Babies, and Gregory in Success) and “put things

right with them.” He wondered how something so “self-indulgent could be such murder to write” and soon abandoned the project.?° In Money, by contrast, Martin's namesake has a much greater range of duties and is far from the moral exemplar his earlier model purported to be. In the same way that Joseph Conrad reworked his seafaring experiences through Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Martin invoked his namesake as a parodic exploitation of the social and literary expectations he faced as a celebrity author. Viewed in the context of his narrative rivalries with his father, Martin can be seen as reworking the tonal imbalances that weakened Kingsley’s novel as well as his earlier book, Jake’ Thing. He swerved to avoid the lack of ironic distance that afflicted Kingsley’s use of Stanley Duke, and in doing so, he effectively requited his father’s most cherished ideal—the inviolable sacred contract between reader and writer. Among his many roles in Money, the Martin Amis character acts as counselor and advisor to John Self, enlightening him about the limits of

his destructive behavior. He also creates a screenplay to mediate the petty rivalries of the actors in his movie, assuaging their inflated egos. In other words, Martin lends a touch of normalcy or mediocrity to a novel

otherwise composed of eccentric narcissists, and although he appears initially to be an example of moral restraint and rectitude, opposing Self’s alcoholic and pornographic odysseys, he is eventually revealed as yet another con artist, the most skillful one in the book. “Every character in the novel dupes the narrator,” Martin has remarked, “and yet lam the one who has actually done it all to him.”2! In many ways, John Self and the Martin Amis character are postmodern secret sharers, partners

in a conspiracy of financial dependence and illusion. As with all such symbolic doubles, Self and Martin engage each other in a battle to assert the primacy of their worldviews. Numerous times, Self remarks on Martin’s lack of wealth. On one occasion, he even chastises him for not spending enough: “‘It’s immoral. Push out some cash. Buy stuff. Consume, for Christ's sake.’” Martin responds by saying he prefers not to enter the “‘whole money conspiracy’” (243), and he tries to neutralize

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism .« 179

Self’s arrogance by invoking his lack of education. Throughout the novel, Self is punished for his lack of knowledge, but this becomes especially clear when he comes up against literature, stumbling into discus-

sions, as in those with the Martin Amis character, for which he is illprepared and unable to draw the right conclusions. Even in a brothel, for instance—Self’s personal /ocus amoenus—literature haunts him, feeding on his lack of culture. Assuming Martin's name on one occasion, Self meets a prostitute who its working toward a degree in English

literature. “‘Call me Moby,” she says, before proceeding to ask what Self does for a living. Learning that he is a writer (or at least is pretend-

ing to be), she quickly breaks through his weakened facade: asking whether Self writes genre or mainstream fiction, she succeeds in confusing Self, who cannot comprehend her words and hears only the meaningless question “John roar mainstream?” (97). In brief, the Martin Amis character offers Self a rival morality based not on consumption or selfishness but on the higher ideals of literature and self-awareness. As we will see, these elements of characterization, theme, and voice also affect the book’s feminist entanglements, shedding light on Martin's controversial portraits of ladies and confirming why, even in the light of feminism, Martin's novel, unlike Kingsley’s Jakes Thing and Stanley and the Women, can be considered a classic instead of a misogynist exercise. Despite the many charges of sexism that attended the book's publication, Martin has always asserted that he does not consider Money to be a misogynist or even a sexist text. Speaking with James Naughtie on Radio 4’s Book Club in 2001, he stated simply, “I was a feminist when I wrote Money, which I think is too programmatic a feminist book, although of course it was denounced as sexist at the time.” Elsewhere, he has called himself one of the declaratively feminist writers of his generation.” If one mistakes the important facets of John Self’s character described above, it is easy to overlook the logic of Martin's claims. Money is certainly an aggressive text, which readers with tender sensibilities should probably avoid; underneath John Self’s sexist veneer, however, the novel’s thematic grammar is declaratively feminist . . . and overly programmatic, as Martin noted. Applying the work of Sara Mills on London Fields, Money might be interpreted as indicative of an avant-garde feminism that embraces the contradictions that lie at the heart of the feminist movement. Citing the

10 e« Inftuence and Intersection

work of Shan Wareing, Mills argues that it is possible for a text to present conflicting messages about its female characters, divided between an “older ideology” that portrays women as sexually vulnerable

and passive, and a “more modern position” that portrays women as “strong and active in the public sphere.” In much the same manner as racist ideologies, she concludes, a reader is confronted with a choice about these “narrative schemata’: “whether to accept them as part of his/her knowledge and as commonsense or whether to react against them.”?3 Indeed, Martin embeds such ideological dualism within Money by establishing an oppositional tension among its three major characters, John Self, Martina Twain, and Selina Street. Much as he would later do in London Fields, in Money Martin relies on a parallelism of characters to dramatize feminist energies.*+ More specifically, Martin polarizes the novel’s two main female characters,

the English femme fatale Selina Street, and the American do-gooder Martina [wain. As Martina’s name attests, she garners the majority of Martin's authorial sympathies, being a playful double (Martin A[mis]’s twain) as well as an embodiment of his feminized and feminizing viewpoints, complete with a terminal a on her name. The polarity between Selina and Martina manifests itself through numerous thematic oppositions, as both women represent contrasting, though equally valid, responses to the grimy urbanity of modern life. As her name conveys, Selina Street epitomizes a downward immersion within such griminess, whereas Martina represents transcendence above it. Street offers Self desire, the pleasures of the body, and baser things, whereas Twain offers him intelligence, the pleasures of the mind, and higher ideals. Martina tries to redeem Self; Selina continues to exhaust him. In other words, Selina is an houri, a lamia, a succubus to Self. By contrast, Martina is an

angel, savior, and redeemer. The insoluble problem for John Self, though, is his schism between perception and action: Self can see the

light that Martina offers him, but he cannot move into it.?> Self is hopelessly unidimensional, which is one reason he’s so memorable. Selina Street is equally unidimensional, however, which is why they are perfectly compatible: they are used to using others (and themselves) up. Self’s choice of Selina over Martina toward the end of the novel represents the melancholy triumph of misogyny, and Self loses everything as a result.

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism « 181 It is patently wrong, however, to label the book misogynist, as Laura Doan has done; nor is it enough to theorize, as does Robert Martinez, that Martins satires use “women as vessels to articulate a vision of modern sexuality polluted by male misogyny.” Although Martinez is right to contend that Money “rarely attempts to articulate the consciousness of women, women are certainly not “sexually subjugated”; instead, they are equally as manipulative as Self and, in the case of Martina Twain,

more enlightened and hence more powerful.” Instead, it is more illuminating to contextualize Martin's embedded use of feminism in ways that Sara Mills and Adam Mars-Jones have done, examining the conflicting messages about women that Martin weaves within his text. These messages emerge when one probes the novel’s treatment of metaphysical issues and their corresponding effects upon authenticity. John Self revels in his pornographic experiences, but they are part of the general exhaustion, iterability, and superficiality that inflict postmodern existence. Jean Baudrillard’s famous diagnosis about the “loss of the real” seems especially applicable to Money, as Self’s reality is both an illusion and an elaborate joke. Money further engages Baudrillard by questioning the nature of authenticity in the postmodern world, especially through the characters Martin Amis and Martina Twain, both of whom attempt to teach Self lessons in authenticity. Martina, for example, gives him a “how-to kit for the twentieth century” (308), composed of books written by or about such figures as Albert Einstein, Sigmund

Freud, Adolph Hitler, Karl Marx, and George Orwell. Intending to teach Self about higher ideals and the dangers that await those who vi-

olate these ideals, she comes to epitomize what James Diedrick and ‘Tamas Bényei define as the moral center of the novel, its crisis point of value and genuine emotion.’ Similarly, the Martin Amis character attempts to explain to Self some of the changes that have beset motivation and character in the twentieth century, warning him about breakdowns in logic, meaning, and closure. These lessons in authenticity assume the status of a stereotypical or

programmatic feminist rhetoric in the novel. For Adam Mars-Jones, such maneuvers are indicative of Martin’s secreted desire to “align himself with qualities traditionally associated with women, with a certain tender-mindedness.” This subtext, he contends, “bears witness to the tidal pull of feminist thinking, and to a nagging doubt about the

182 « Influence and Intersection authenticity of male experience.”*° In other words, one can recognize in Martin’s work a tendency to triangulate when speaking about feminist

issues, or to employ feminist rhetoric in a complementary fashion, couching it within the rubric of larger metaphysical threats. In later works such as Einstein’ Monsters and London Fields, for instance, feminist rhetoric is couched in the language of nuclear war, which threatens

to obliterate authentic emotive relationships. In Money, however, the threats are capitalistic: money, commodification, desire, pornography. In terms of representational verisimilitude, Martin has little choice but to portray the interests of his characters as vividly as he does. As its title conveys, Money is energized by a thematic attack upon class and upon market capitalism, along many of the same lines that inform Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Much as it does with the characterizations of Martina Twain and Selina Street, Money interrogates two polarities of class: one that pulls downward, feeding upon the commodified images that conflict desire,

and a contrary impulse to attain higher ideals usually represented by “culture.” Regardless of how much money he has, Self is denied the boons of intellect, reason, and logic. In this respect, he suffers from what Martin once labeled the “terror of ignorance.” Cultural refinement will forever elude Self because such things come only from understanding the altruistic impulses within society. Self, however, understands only the rhetoric of consumption, and his ignorance of altruism thwarts his numerous attempts at self-improvement, regardless of whether he craves acceptance by class or by women. Similar to Nicola Six in her relationship with Keith Talent in London Fie/ds, Selina Street operates as both manipulator and mirror for John Self: she feeds his desires and reflects to him the image of woman he seeks — the image of consumeristic commodification common to pornography.?? What seems to bother certain readers of Money, at least in relation to feminism, is the novel’s unstable morality. Unlike Martin’s earlier, aborted novella—in which he attempted to arraign the most immoral characters from his first three novels— Money is not an overtly moral or

instructional tale. Instead, it is an entropic postmodern allegory that endorses no truth, upholds no transcendent value. In keeping with his postmodern leanings, Martin does not prescribe utopian formulations of gender, capitalistic, and political relations. Such oversimplification

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism . 183

falls outside his literary radar. To Adam Mars-Jones, this produces a “rhetoric deeply suspect and divided” when confronting issues such as gender and nuclear war; it is Martin's “need for absolution in the modern manner, surfacing most plainly in Eznsteins Monsters, that most threatens his stature as a writer. 2° By contrast, however, I contend that it is precisely this interpretive plurality, this divided rhetoric, that makes Martin's work so revolutionary, not simply in a feminist context, but in a much larger and more important generic context as well. In numerous dialogues throughout Money, the Martin Amis character lectures John Self about the evolution of literary conventions. Although these discussions seem mostly annoying and irrelevant to Self, they are of great significance to the novel and provide a new intertextual dimension to the relationship between Money and Stanley and the Women. Martin's metafictional, self-reflexive dialogues provide the reader

with the necessary theoretical framework to conceptualize the novel. Analogous to Ezra Pound’s “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,’ Money pro-

vides practical training in the art of reading, teaching the reader how best to respond to his postmodern maneuvers. More important, however, these discussions depict Kingsley and Martin’s own feuds over the

evolution of literary modes, especially realism and postmodernism. Both literally and symbolically, the conversations between John Self and the Martin Amis character interrogate the bases for the Amises’ generational conflict. In these scenes, Martin does not simply speak to John Self; instead, Martin responds to Kingsley Amis’s own critique of postmodernism, as epitomized in Stanley and the Women.

The Amises, Realism, and Postmodernism Questions of realism and postmodernism lie at the hearts of both Stanley and the Women and Money, but whereas Stanley and the Women strives

to assert the legitimacy of realistic protocol, Money undermines the assumptions that support Kingsley’s more traditional brand of moral realism. For the first time in the Amises’ family feud, however, such revaluative conflict operated on a mutual level, as both Martin and Kingsley contested the other’s narrative foundations and techniques. A novel that intentionally scoffs at fantasy and fabulation, Stanley and the Women asserts the primacy of conventional realistic norms. A forum for Martin's

184 « Influence and Intersection postmodern precepts, Money directly confronts Kingsley’s realistic and paternal critique. Both novels inscribe the Amises’ conflicts within their work, revealing the parameters of their unique form of genealogical dissent and clarifying their positions within the twentieth-century’s war over mimesis.

Although one would be wrong to position all of Kingsley’s fiction within a traditionally realistic framework — his supernatural novel The Green Man (1969), his James Bond contribution Co/one/ Sun (1968; under

the pen name Robert Markham), and his alternative-world fictions Russtan Hide and Seek (1980) and The Alteration (1976) would reject such a conflation, for instance— the majority of his work, including Standley and the Women, validates classically realistic protocol. Kingsley appeals to a transcendent reality that can be empirically verified; he depicts individuals indelibly locked in larger, social orders; he provides narrative support for the existence of morality, logic, and reason; he renders charac-

ters and their environments in remarkably specific detail; and he proclaims motivation as a valid behavioral gauge. In addition, he strives to maintain the traditional distance between author and text, refusing to undermine the presumed reality of his fictive worlds. A 1981 letter to

Robert Conquest, for instance, foreshadows Kingsley’s complaints about fabulism, criticizing his son’s more experimental work: “Young Martin’s new novel [Osher People] is out. Tough going I find. You see there's this girl with amnesia shit you know what I mean, so she’s forgotten what a lavatory is and thinks the cisterns and pipes are statuary, but then how does she know what statuary is? It’s like a novel by Craig Raine, well not quite as fearful as that would be I suppose.” Loath to reject causality and linearity, Kingsley instinctively avoids the confusion that H. G. Wells decried when he spoke of “the splintering frame [that] gets into the picture.”3! In Stanley and the Women, Kingsley interpolates the tension between

realism and postmodernism as a thematic opposition between reason and madness, order and chaos. Significantly enough, the two characters who most exemplify this conflict are the father and son tandem of Stanley and Steve Duke.3? Stanley’s quest for logical order conflicts with Steve's schizophrenic fantasies, and their familial tensions mirror the division of realism and fabulation that Robert Scholes famously annotated in The Nature of Narrative (with Robert Kellogg, 1966) and The

The Amuses on Realism and Postmodernism .« 185

Fabulators (1967). According to the paradigm Scholes established, realism “exalts life and diminishes art, exalts things and diminishes words.” It enacts a self-conscious rejection of romance and fabulation, and seeks to hold fantasy at bay, to make chaos conform to pattern. Subordinating imaginative extravagance to empirical reality, it strives to present images of that reality that are accountable to fact, whether actual (as in real historical events) or mimetic (imitative of such occurrences). The foundation of Stanley and Steve's relationship conforms precisely to such

generic divisions, and their tense relationship reveals the extent to which Kingsley, through Stanley, continued to taunt his real-life son Martin. Through episodes of playful literary encoding, Kingsley used Stanley and the Women to respond to his son’s increasing literary fame and influence. He reasserted his own literary authority by reiterating his critical rejection of postmodernism, chiding his successful son in the process. In a minor episode early in the novel, for instance, Stanley asks Steve whether his girlfriend is still reading The French Lieutenants Woman, an allusion to another postmodern novel, like Martin's Money, in which the author appears in his work, allowing the “splintering frame” to encroach

upon the picture. According to Stanley, the novel is “Quite a read for anybody, of course” (14), echoing sentiments that Kingsley and Eliza-

beth Jane Howard had both expressed about Martin's early novels. Stanley, like Kingsley, has little regard for experimental fiction. He, too,

dislikes “com[ing] up against any of this modern stuff” (27), whether expressed in literature, psychotherapy, or gender politics. In a passage that can refer to the Amises’ generational conflict, Stanley confides to the reader that “Poor old Steve belonged . . . to one of the generations which had never been taught anything about anything” (69). Literature, it seems, is clearly one of the things he had never been taught. When Stanley and his mother-in-law later discuss Steve's attempts at writing, it becomes clear just how unmemorable those efforts are. Responding to an inquiry about “just what it is that [Steve] writes,” Stanley reflects upon his son’s literary efforts, trying to remember “anything about the few badly typed pages that, in response to many requests and with a touching mixture of defiance and shyness, Steve had planked down next to me on the couch one Sunday morning the previous winter. But it was the same now as then, really. I had not been able to come up with a single

186 . Influence and Intersection word, not just of appreciation, but even referring to one thing or another about the material. But surely I had managed to tell whether it was in verse or prose? Hopeless” (26-27). Utilizing surprisingly similar syntax, Martin has echoed the cryptographic quality of this passage in interviews, consciously or not. “My father, “ he has remarked, “aided by a natural indolence, didn’t really take much notice of my early efforts to write until I plonked the proof of my first novel on his desk.”33 These are not the only references, however oblique, to Martin’s literary preferences; his mentors, too, enter the novel in gleefully teasing ways. Inscribing the conflicts the Amises shared over American literature, Kingsley also makes reference to Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov in the novel, chiding his son’s surrogate literary fathers. At one point, Stanley and his wife discuss Steve’s treatment at the hands of his therapist, ‘Trish Collins. Searching for literary analogues that address the chasm between character motivation and action, Susan settles upon Nabokov. “You know, Lo/ita,’” she says. ““Talks balls by the yard about what he does and yet he’s an absolutely super novelist.’” Immediately, Stanley brings her words to a halt, expounding that he is more concerned about the doctor’s “general approach, as opposed to just her style” (113-14), an echo of Kingsley’s earlier critique of the discrepancy in Nabokov’s work between style and substance. Elsewhere in the novel, Kingsley refers to Bellow as well, as when a troubled Steve inexplicably tears the cover from Bellow’s novel Herzog. As in other novels in which a similar event occurs— Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong, for example, or John Wain's Strike the Father Dead— Steve's action carries thematic significance. If, as in Bradbury, ripping Essays in Criticism signifies the end of the liberal tradition, and if, as in Wain, destroying a Greek grammar book precludes a fight with one’s father, then in Stanley and the Women,

Steve’s desecration should be seen in the light of the similar literary conflict — that between fabulation and realism. It is entirely appropriate, for example, that Steve should select Herzog as his target: besides being a novel that depicts tortuous metaphysical struggles, to which Kingsley was always averse, Herzog is a decidedly realistic text, antagonistic to the wild, elaborate fantasies of Steve's creative productions.

After Steve attacks the book, Stanley tries to speak with him, hoping he will communicate his problems. In this and in other conver-

sations between them, one gets the fullest impression of the way

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism . 187 Kingsley’s novel defends the precepts of realism against the insurrections of Martin's brand of fabulation and postmodernism. “There was so much I wanted to ask him,” Stanley remarks, no deep stuff, no more than what he had actually been doing before he turned up the previous night and what he had in mind to do, but there seemed to be no way to start. ... “Do you believe in past lives?” [Steve] asked me, in a rush as before. “Eh? I'm sorry, son, I just don’t understand what you mean.” “You know, people living before and then being born again. Do you believe in it?” “Oh, reincarnation. No, I don't think so. I haven't really ... How do you mean, anyway?” “People that lived a long time ago— right? — being born again now, in the twentieth century.”

“But they .. .” I stopped short—there was no sense in starting on what was wrong with that. (40-41)

Steve tries to engage his father in a dialogue about metempsychosis, the

transmutation of souls, but Stanley refuses to transcend the realm of commonsensical everyday reality, much as Kingsley and other writers rebelled from modernist efforts to diagnose the postwar zeitgeist. The conversation ends, as do most of the dialogues in the novel, on a note of broken communication, of faulty connections. “‘] must remember to get petrol,” Stanley says, counterbalancing his son’s transcendental leanings. ““Would you keep a look out for a place on the way? I had a full tank on Tuesday, you know. It’s all the low-gear work in town’” (41). ‘Loward the end of the novel, a similar conversation takes place, but this time it leaves Stanley completely dumbfounded, amazed at his son’s

ecstatic ramblings and convinced of Trish Collins’s incompetence. Driving with his son, inquiring whether he remembers assaulting his stepmother with a knife, Stanley implores Steve to think back over the previous days’ events. Steve remarks that he remembers something but is afraid of Stanley's reaction. In return for Steve’s confidence, Stanley promises not to be angry. He then proceeds to reveal Steve's surprising revelations for the reader: “Well,” he said, staring straight in front of him, “I remember being born.” I just managed not to drive into the side of a bus. “What?” I said. “I remember being born. Everybody’s done their best to make me for-

get by telling a different story. Mum says she brought me into the

188 . Influence and Intersection world and you say you're my father and I don't really blame either of you — you probably believe it yourselves by this time. ... [But] I can remember it, actually being born. Well, I say born, attaining conscious-

ness would be better, more precise. It was like a great light being switched on.

“Yeah, I was put together by these alchemists using the philosopher's stone. .. . Kept in a vault in Barcelona till needed, then triggered off by radio beam. And here I am, ready to begin my task.” At that he looked guilty and nervous, as though he felt he had let slip something important. “Ex, I want to thank you for all your kindness, Mr Duke. Oh, and I think we should go on calling each other father and son in public. For security reasons. You understand.” (223-24)

Stanley’s response is to pull to the side of the road, “behind a van deliv-

ering a lot of eggs.” He contemplates whether Steve’s words derive from current madness or from childhood conflict, “rejecting me or his mother.” Admitting that he would always feel responsible for Steve’s condition, Stanley decides that nobody “could prove the contrary. Perhaps nobody could prove anything of importance. Having reached this conclusion I drove on, since I was going to have some time” (223-24). Immediately afterward, Stanley accosts Trish Collins, accusing her of medical malpractice and flawed prognoses.

As during other times when Steve exhibits irrational behavior — smashing Nowell’s television, spouting racist gibberish, removing himself to the branches of a tree, completing his “Potentium” manifesto —

Stanley operates as an exemplar of classically realistic values in this scene.3* Throughout the novel, Stanley labors to discern causality and motivation, searching for the logic that underlies behavior. He seeks to uncover the reasons for his son’s irrational actions; he strives to decipher

Trish Collins’s self-serving diagnosis; and he forces himself to accept Susan's jealous self-mutilation. The fictive world that he inhabits closely mirrors a nonfictional external reality, which is presented in an unromanticized, intentionally antisentimental light. A decidedly moral and social figure, despite his unsavory conclusions, Stanley struggles to maintain faith in a causal chain of action, even when this causality is threatened.

He appeals to reason and logic in an effort to recover a metaphysical stability, and he opposes Steve's wild fabulations with his commonsensical, real-world perspective, however limited and mundane it may appear. The madness of Stanley’s son, Steve, therefore functions metonymically,

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism .« 189 allowing Kingsley to indict the errors of literary fabulation as well as his own son's equally maddening experimentations with the mode.

Revaluative Realism: Money and Metamimesis If Stanley and the Women resolved the dialectic between realism and fab-

ulation in realism's favor, Money reverses that decision, antagonizing many of realism’s classical conventions. Disbanding the classical segregation of author and text, rejecting motivation as an aspect of character, eliminating causality and linearity from the narrative frame, Martin borrows freely from Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov to assert a playful postmodern form, a hybrid of realism and fabulation. Like Kings-

ley, Martin also encoded the Amis family feud into his narrative, both implicitly — through John Self’s relationship with his father Barry —and

explicitly, through direct reference. A remarkably self-reflexive text, Money satirizes Self’s neurotic obsessions as well as Martin’s dual struggles as both a developing writer and the son of a famous literary father. Early in the novel, for example, Self informs us that Martin spends a lot of time at a video arcade, or “space-parlour,” named, appropriately, Family Fun (71). Soon thereafter, he confesses ignorance of Martin’s work, innocently asking the reader, “Do you know his stuff at all?” (72). Later, Fielding Goodney, Self’s producer, reveals that he has heard of Martin, but only through “some cases of plagiarism, of text-theft, which had fil-

tered down to the newspapers and magazines”: “Little Martin got caught with his fingers in the till,” Self concludes, “A word criminal. I would bear that in mind” (218). These allusions all attest to the liberating irony that distinguishes

one aspect of Martin’s character in the novel. The reference to the “space-parlour” Family Fun, for instance, suggests both the Amis family nexus as well as Martin's previous literary offering —his nonfiction treatment of video games, Invasion of the Space Invaders, published in 1982. [he allusion to “text-theft” is similarly autobiographical in origin: though Martin is a self-proclaimed “great lifter of phrases,” the allusion refers instead to a specific incident in 1980, when Martin discovered that Jacob Epstein had plagiarized The Rachel Papers, grafting

whole sentences unchanged onto the pages of his novel Wild Oats (1979).3° Even the automobile John Self drives seems to attest to Money's

190 e Influence and Intersection intertextual continuum: as does Stanley Duke’s perfidious Apfelsine, Self’s Fiasco much prefers “hanging out in expensive garages” to driving. “Your car,” the Martin Amis character tells Self, “‘sounds like a bit of a joke to me’” (242) —an inside family joke, that is. Such instances of liter-

ary doubling multiply when one considers the affinities between the paired relationships of Kingsley and Martin Amis and the characters Barry and John Self. During their initial encounter, for instance, Self embarrasses Martin, accusing him of nepotism. “‘Your dad, he’s a writer too, isn't he?’” Self remarks. “Bet that made it easier.”” Martin responds sardonically, on edge —“‘Oh, sure. It’s just like taking over the family

pub” (86). Such genealogical ambivalence is mirrored in Barry Self’s profession as well. Barry is the proprietor of a pub named after the quintessential literary patriarch — the “Shakespeare” — and similar to Kingsley’s professional rejection, Barry, too, withholds paternal support from

his son, having on separate occasions invoiced him for the cost of his childhood and taken out a contract on his life. “Why do I bother with my father?” Self contemplates, “Who cares? What is this big deal about dads and sons? I don't know— it’s not that he’s my dad. It’s more that I’m his son. | am aswirl with him,” he says significantly, “with his pre-empting, his blackballing genes” (170). Later, Self goes to see his father, hoping to find some “clues to this whole deal with fathers and sons” (227).

Although the novel is rife with such lighthearted allusions to Martin’s life and work, they do not by any extent summarize the full intertextual resonance of Stanley and the Women and Money. Though comic in nature, these literary jostlings take on added significance when

viewed in light of the many literary conversations between John Self

and the Martin Amis character. Throughout the novel, Martin attempts to teach Self about the modal evolutions of literary realism. However, Self refuses to assimilate Martin's advice, failing to see its relevance to his life. These dialogues furnish the most complete picture of the way Money responds to Kingsley’s text and opinions, simultaneously

defining Martin’s technical aesthetic as well as his divergence from Kingsley’s more centrist realistic form. In both Stanley and the Women and Money, the opposition between

realism and fabulation functions as thematic material as well as the topic of character conversation. Where it is implied in Stanley and Steve's relationship, however, it is manifest in John Self and Martin’s.

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism .« i091

The first time that Self and Martin speak, for instance, Self inquires about Martin's artistic practices, asking whether he invents his fictions or simply reports what happens, recounting his life experiences. Even when expressed in Self’s broken, inebriated syntax—“‘[D]o you sort of make it up, or is it just, you know, like what happens[?]’” (86) — his categories are easily recognizable as those of Scholes’s fabulation and classical realism. Significantly, Martin responds “‘Neither,”” prompting Self to suggest a third category—autobiographical— that is more relevant to his own narration than to Martin’s other novels. Money, however, eludes categorization in either of these traditional categories. It is autobiographical solely to the extent that the Martin Amis character is a parodic revaluation of the real Martin Amis. It is realistic to the extent only that it satisfies many of the mode’s primary characteristics, variously defined as antiheroism, thwarted ambition and passion, representational acuity and detail, and an attention to social status, manners, and class.36 However, it also consciously erodes many conventionally realistic foundations, rejecting not only narrative causality but authorial objectivity and character motivation as well. In addition, it repeatedly draws attention to its own artifice, subverting the fictional reality it previously proclaimed. In short, Money blends elements from autobiography, realism and fabulation to produce an amorphous, hybrid amalgamation that cannot be easily classified. As some critics have noted, Money cannot simply be labeled an experimental or postmodern text. Catherine Bernard, for instance, follows David Lodge in arguing that Money is a form of “crossover fiction” that combines “defamiliarized realism,” metafiction, and fabulation.

Drawing on George Levine, Amy J. Elias similarly argues that the novel can be viewed within a long tradition of realist revisionings, consciously blurring the boundaries between realism and metafiction to define a new form of “postmodern realism” or “meta-mimesis.” Martin himself, however, seems to have given the best advice on how to read and respond to his novel: in a review of Angus Wilson's Diversity and Depth in Fiction, published concurrently with Money, Martin argued

that previous literary contexts—the “great forms” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction—had eroded to the point of exhaustion. Echoing similar sentiments by John Barth and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Martin explained, “Realism and experimentation have come and gone

192 « Influence and Intersection without seeming to point a way ahead. The contemporary writer, therefore, must combine these veins, calling on the strengths of the Victorian novel together with the alienations of post-modernism.”>’ Martin’s novel is unquestionably more experimental, more metafictional, and more postmodernist than a realist work such as Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women. However, it is decidedly more traditional, more realistic, and less experimental than such postmodernist works as John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Samuel Beckett’s Murphy or Watt, or B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates. In opposition to those writers and texts, which owe a great debt to the nouveau roman, Martin uses Money to rework realistic conventions from within the confines of the realistic par-

adigm, much as he parodically revalued his own persona within the novel itself. Money strives to record the meticulous facts of outward ap-

pearances, yet it simultaneously asserts the instability and illusion of that reality. It presents the reader with a character who craves sympathy, awareness, and understanding, yet it locates him within a false, unsubstantial environment that lacks motivation, linearity, and logic. In short,

Martin performs another critique upon his father’s insistent work, but this time his subject is realism, as he consciously revalues realistic protocol from within the mode itself, exhibiting the limitations of the mode as well as those writers who, like Kingsley Amis, failed to embrace postmodern experimentation. These technical, or aesthetic, issues become the subjects of numerous discussions between the narrator John Self and the character Martin Amis. These conversations serve to enlist the readers’ assistance in

identifying the novel’s applicable form, orienting them to the interpretive process, but they also operate as a revaluative response to Kingsley's literary aesthetic. Midway through the novel, for instance, Martin Amis and John Self discuss the “realism problem” that infects Self’s screenplay. Self instructs Martin to make the actors in his movie “‘behave realistically’” without conscious awareness, “‘just so they’ ll do it. Okay?” When Martin objects to the difficulty of this task, Self asks him, sarcas-

tically and ironically, whether he encounters similar difficulties when creating fiction. ““Do you have this problem with novels, Martin? ... I mean, is there a big deal about bad behaviour and everything?” Martin's response is telling: “‘No. It’s not a problem. You get complaints, of course, but we're pretty much agreed that the twentieth century 1s an

Lhe Amises on Realism and Postmodernism « 193 ironic age— downward-looking. Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the twentieth century” (230-31). Speaking with Mira Stout in 1990, Martin admitted that realistic rationales underlie all of his fiction —that what interests him as a writer is “trying to get more truthful about what it’s like to be alive now.” However, the contemporary scene that he depicts can only be called distinctively postmodernist: it is disjointed and fragmentary, disunified and mediated, entropic and dynamic. As his fictional namesake makes clear, Martin considers traditional realism to be outworn and outdated, an insufficient mode for capturing modern reality. One year after the novel’s release, Martin elaborated to John Haffenden that realism seemed to be a “footling consideration’: “Mere psychological truth,” he said, no longer appeared “that valuable a commodity.”2® In Money, Martin launches a multiflanked attack against the realistic protocols that energize his father's fiction. Seeking to render the contingencies and excesses of postmodern existence in a rival—and inherently

more truthful—fashion, he problematizes the whole concept of a luminous reality, eroding faith in character motivation and identity as well as metaphysical truth and causality. Although Stanley and the Women and

Money both depict a similar erosion of transcendent absolutes, Kingsley’s novel relies on the existence of such stabilizing forces for its humor and moral seriousness. Martin’s novel, however, upholds neither

logic nor linearity, and it finds only limited stability in the Schopenhaurean imposition of will on the external world. Focused on “the lost subject, .. . waning humanism, disorienting history, unfixed and transient identity,” Money portrays the postmodern condition as one in which the individual is especially vulnerable and in which interpretation — the

act of postulating the real, the true—is dangerously difficult.2? In a lengthy conversation toward the end of the novel, Self meets with Martin to lament the elaborate scheme that liquidated his assets. In his new role as the manipulated manipulator, the trickster tricked, he is reluc-

tant to challenge Martin's analysis of events, in contrast to earlier instances where his intractability is unbridled. As Martin explains the intricacies of the conspiracy against Self, Self is baffled by the lack of motivation or reason. “‘Why? Why did he do it?” Self asks Martin, referring to “‘Fielding, Frank the Phone, the fight at the rear of the porno hall, the dead room in the Carraway’”:

194 « Influence and Intersection “Where’s the motivation? On the phone he was always saying I'd fucked him up. How could I have? I'd remember. Even with the black-

outs and everything, I'd remember.”

Martin considered. I felt a squeeze of warmth for the guy as he said, “I think that was all a blind. You never hurt him.” “Really? But then it’s senseless.” “Is it? These days? I sometimes think that, as a controlling force in human affairs, motivation is pretty well shagged out by now. It hasn't

got what it takes to motivate people any more. Go for a walk in the streets. How much motivation do you see?” (331)

In these comments, there exists no discrepancy between the real and the fictional Martin Amis. In interviews, for instance, Martin 1s fond of

repeating his charge that motivation has become “a depleted. . . shagged-out force in modern life,” and his fictional namesake echoes the charge later in the novel by stating that motivation is an idea taken from art, not life. It “‘comes from inside the head, not from outside,” the Martin Amis character charges. “‘It’s neurotic, in other words’” (341). [here also exists no discrepancy between John Self’s argument with Martin Amis and Martin’s own arguments with Kingsley: “Martin’s fallen into bad company,” Kingsley suggested to Charles Michener in 1987, three years after Money's release. “He once remarked to me, ‘Motivation in the novel has more or less had its day.’ I said, “Oh, really?’ It’s all those ideas about fiction—they’re fatal to the novel.”*° In short,

the conversations between John Self and Martin Amis legitimate Money's dissolution of motivation, identity, and fixed meaning, provid-

ing a practical lesson in how to read Martin's novel and a necessary forum for responding to his father’s realistic objections. By rejecting motivation as an active ingredient of behavior, Martin

dispenses with the foundation of psychological realism. The scheme against John Self originates neither in reason nor warranted grievance. Fittingly, Self’s world is one in which reality and truth have been supplanted by fantasy and fabulation, where illusion has replaced fact. His reality is mutable, artificial, and staged; he cannot discern falsity from truth. Martin's remarks also reflect the novel's reluctance to deal with fixed reference or simple interpretation. Although Martin suggests later in the novel that Self’s name may hold a key to his victimization, onomasticism itself ultimately eludes totalization. It cancels closure, refusing to be pinned down to any single referent. In true dialogic pattern,

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism «195 Self’s patronymic can refer equally to his unbridled narcissism, his lack

of identity, or his status as double to the twined pair of Martin Amis and Martina Iwain; it applies to each referent simultaneously, circuitously eroding and reaffirming his nebulous identity as well as his allegorical status.

In contrast to most realistic texts, in which the self remains an ontologically secure construct, in Money the self suggests its opposite — absence, erasure, and lack. An inverted bildungsroman in which the self gains no insight through growth or experience, the novel portrays Self in a process of gradual dissolution and exhaustion. Eventually, he finds that his whole world is but a fictional frame. His mental and physical decay, his dying tooth, his constant headaches, and his recurrent blackouts: all attest to his status as a superannuated allegorical figure. His inanition is not simply parodic, however; instead, it denotes both literary and cultural exhaustion, a breakdown of unifying structure, of transcendent, signifying meaning. Like identity, meaning, too, recedes in the face of Money's excessive signification, regardless of whether such excess is financial or hermeneutic. [his becomes most apparent in the novel’s final chapters, which convey the fullest impression of Money's metafictional matrix. True to his intractable nature, Self never relents from trying to transcend his fate, however temporary such release may be. A victim of his creator's narrative predilections, Self must struggle against not only his own limitations but those of his creator's designs. On at least three occasions, for instance, Martin reassures an emotionally beleaguered Self that everything will come out all right in the end (244, 253, 331). However, the penultimate chapter presents every indication that Martin intends to dispense with his “sad, unwitting narrator” (126). Meeting Self for what he presumes to be the last time, Martin suggests that he should leave and let Self “‘get on with it’” (343), presaging a suicide. The two characters then sit down to a Ingmar Bergman-esque game of chess that concludes when Self throws a punch at Martin and later attempts suicide. Significantly, he bungles the act. Were Money to end with Self’s death, its critique of realism would be less apparent and complete. The novel would conclude with a formal moral reckoning preceded by character enlightenment and repentance. The character of Martin’s namesake would have functioned as an ironic

196 « Influence and Intersection and comic double, but it would have served a traditional purpose —an agent of moral awakening, as old as Everyman's visit from death. Al-

though the novel would be more experimental than many traditionally realistic texts, it would nonetheless satisfy even the most flexible definitions of the mode, especially the assimilative theories of A. S. Byatt and George Levine.*! However, in true metafictional, postmodern manner, Self fails to carry out his creator's designs, ironically empowering him to

transcend his fate as well as his narrative imprisonment within the novel. A self-acknowledged “escape artist” (363), Self ultimately asserts his autonomy from the novel’s fictional constructs. He eludes his death as well as his creator’s narration, frustrating the novel’s attempts at closure, linearity, and meaning. The last chapter, presented wholly in italics, signifies Self’s release from the world of definition and form, from the world of dependency, narration, and plot. Whereas he had earlier described forebodings of illusive reality, or “ulteriority,” sensing that his existence was manipulated by external powers, Self notes in the final chapter that his life has begun

‘losing tts form,” that he can identify only “present . . . continuous present.”*? “Rogue memories” come streaming discontinuously to his mind, filling the gaps previously furnished by his blackouts (355). One of these memories presents a recalcitrant Martin Amis apologizing for subjecting Self to his fictive machinations. Later, Self recounts the final confrontation with his authorial tormentor, who had previously wondered whether there existed a “moral philosophy of fiction.”8 “Mind you, I did see [Martin] once,” Self tells the reader. “Our eyes met as he came through the door: he looked at me in the way

he used to before I ever met him—affrontedly, with a sudden pulse in the neck.... Hey, what are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘You're meant to be out of the picture by now.’ I just glanced over my shoulder and said—I don’t know why. some deep yob gene must have prompted me— ‘Fuck off out of it.’ In the bendy mirror behind the bar I saw him leave, woodenly, stung, scared” (358-

59). [he novel’s ending therefore suggests an ironic continuation, a cir-

cuitous redoubling of narrative. The Martin Amis character cannot understand how Self has eluded his narrative fate, and although Self appears to have excised himself from his earlier indulgences, he confesses

that with more money he will likely return to his previous behavior, thwarting any hope of enlightenment and closure.

The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism . 197 The inverted, negative logic of these events orients the reader to the shifting nature of reality, identity, and meaning in the novel. Money struggles against closure and totalization, problematizing narrative fixity as well as extrapolative interpretation. Martin interpellates the historical divisions between mimesis and fabulation, realism and meta-

fiction, in order to dramatize realism’s illusory stability. He blends elements from each disparate mode to create a hybrid form of experimental postmodern realism, one that enters into debate with not only literary history and critical theory, but also with his father’s correspondent text and deepest literary values. As a revaluative literary figure, John Self represents the enervation of Kingsley’s realistic methods, asserting Martin’s presumably superior technique. Given the contemporaneous publication dates of the Amises’ novels, it is not surprising that Kingsley similarly utilized his main character to criticize Martin's literary strivings, enlisting Stanley Duke to interrogate the fabulism underlying his own son's madness and delusions of grandeur. When viewed as companion texts, Stanley and the Women and Money help contextualize the Amises’ controversial portraits of women as well as their contrasting perspectives on literary realism and postmodernism.

Encoded instances of literary competition and familial chiding, the novels fictionalize the Amises’ professional tensions, invoking their literary conflict as a source for playful yet serious parodic revisioning. Illuminating both authors’ technical aesthetics as well as their subversive revaluative critiques, these novels attest to the ways the Amises mutually engaged each other’s most cherished literary values. Acutely perceiving the shifting status between Martin and himself, Kingsley used parts of Stanley and the Women to contest the foundations of Martin's

experimental postmodern form. Perhaps attempting to dethrone his father’s methods once and for all, Martin used parts of Money to subvert Kingsley’s literary valuation of common sense, logic, and reason, leveling the foundations of his father's classically realistic form. Whereas aspects of Martin's earlier novels depicted an artistic struggle against his father’s more famous example, Stanley and the Women and Money depict a significant reversal in that burden of influence. More

than a one-sided act of adolescent misprision, both novels in this instance are powerful expressions of confident, independent voices. Fully

198 « Influence and Intersection cognizant of their aesthetic assumptions, the Amises implicitly challenged the foundations that supported each other's fiction, and they did not have to misinterpret each other in order to legitimate their own practices. Rather, their literary quarrels extend beyond the narrowly personal realms of oedipal or Bloomian conflict, and their two 1984 novels reveal them engaged in a sophisticated literary debate, interrogating the status and future of the realistic novel. In Stanley and the Women, Kingsley created a realistic text that rejects and ridicules the exertions of

fabulation and metafiction, affirming the vitality of more traditional conventions. In Money, Martin created an elaborate metafictional text that scrutinizes realistic conventions from within the parameters of the mode, forsaking causality and meaning as well as character identity and motivation. To Kingsley, Martin’s effort was literary blasphemy, unreadable and contemptuous; to Martin, Kingsley’s effort represented a form of literary regression, a willful rejection of evolutionary advancement. The results were two novels that separately attempted to presage the future of contemporary fiction, affirming the continued vitality of the Amises’ fictional battles, their unique form of intertextual genealogical dissent.

~The Amises on Love, ~ Death, and Children The Letters of Kingsley Amis and

_ Experience: A Memoir

I do it because my father is dead now, and I always knew I would | have a duty 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. | — Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir

| At the time of Kingsley’s death in 1995, one could note only a smatter-

ing of scholarly references to the professional similarities between | Kingsley and Martin Amis. That all changed in May 2000 with the dual publication of Kingsley’s Letters, edited by Zachary Leader, and Martin's Experience: A Memoir, the junior Amis’s autobiography. Propel-

ling the Amises back into the limelight of English letters, a rush of reviews welcomed the newest development in the Amis literary saga. At a length of more than twelve hundred pages, The Letters of Kingsley Amis is a tour de force of editorial patience and dedication, providing a previously restricted glimpse into Kingsley’s epistolary talents.! The edition

is remarkable not only for illuminating Kingsley’s lifelong friendship with Philip Larkin (and therefore providing a necessary complement to

a 199 |

Anthony Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985) but also

200 « Influence and Intersection for clarifying Kingsley’s often embattled perspectives on contemporary writers and trends. Sadly, however, the Lefters provide little new mate-

rial about the Kingsley-Martin relationship, a lacuna Leader seems equally to justify and to lament: “That few of the letters Amis wrote to his children survive, I suggest, says little, or little for certain, about their relations.” Partly, this lacuna is Martin’s fault, for he kept none of his father’s or Larkin’s letters, to Leader’s allegedly “silent disgust.”? Experience, however, is an entirely different matter. While it would be easy to continue the analytical framework of the present study and examine the thematic correspondences between, say, Kingsley’s The Old Devils (1986) on one hand and Martin’s London Fields (1989) on the other, the appearance of Experience mandates a necessary critical swerve. In the years since Kingsley’s death, Martin has been drawn increasingly to nonfiction, especially the hybrid form of “higher autobiography” that he first described in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986). As in chapter 3 of this study, it is crucial that the Amises’ public and pri-

vate lives be equally engaged, regardless of the chronological indelicacy of including The Old Devils with their dual year-2000 texts. In Martin’s Experience, Kingsley’s The Old Devils and Leéters, the architectonics of fiction vie supremely with the realities of personal relation, shedding much-needed light upon the Amises’ inner thoughts and fears.

By all assessments, Experience 1s a remarkably courageous book. Of course, everyone had expected Martin to write a memoir of his father, which made the rhetorical situation that much more challenging. Martin even alluded to the book’s composition as early as 1998, causing expectations to build. Close readers of Martin’s fiction will also note that his novels had tended toward autobiography since 1995, following a lineal path whose thematic source was the inescapability of death. Much

like his father’s The Anti-Death League (1966), Martin’s novel Night Train (1997) can be viewed as a literary investigation into the mystery of death, a detective story that allowed Martin to navigate the losses of his father, in 1995, and his cousin, whose body was exhumed in 1994. Not surprisingly, both individuals dominate Experience, and at least one met-

aphor migrated directly from that earlier novel into his memoir. Describing his father’s corpse in Experience, Martin only slightly modifies a line from Night Train: “Instant chemistry of death, already changing him

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children . 201

from alkaline to acid.” Of course, chemical catalysis alone is not a sufficient metaphor for death, nor does Martin imply that it is, reject-

ing anything beyond a literal, physical description. Instead, one is tempted to argue that the Icarus myth is the more operative metaphor

for the Kingsley- Martin duality at this stage, but that too depends upon individual literary preferences, especially as regards realism and postmodernism. Emerging from the labyrinth of father-son tensions and energies, recognizing that one’s father can be both Minotaur and deliverer, Martin uses Experience to contextualize his loss, leaving behind the shadow and the shade, the protector and the instigator. In earlier novels, he achieved parity with, and intellectual independence from, his father. In Experience, however, he seeks emotional connection and independence. In his ascension from the complexities of death within the labyrinth to the higher complexities of death above, some individuals have argued that Martin betrays the inheritance of his father’s comic gifts; others have said that he has surpassed them. I would simply like to suggest that what is chiefly important about Experience is the memoir’s emphasis on two emotional qualities strikingly absent from Martin's fiction — forgiveness and love, especially in their regenerative forms. Whereas Night Train allowed Martin to ruminate on death from the comfortable protection of technique, employing a narrator who is doubly distanced, both female and American, Expertence reveals a painfully human voice seeking to understand a world that more than ever before seems marked by illogic, chaos, and absence. In contrast to Martin's insistence that an author should be known by his novels rather than his life, Experience is an important terminus in Martin's career.* It is a watershed text that helps situate his own fiction as well as his relationship with his father.

Higher Autobiography: Experience, Midlife Crisis, and the Unconscious Early in Experience, Martin reflects upon midlife crises, and although he might agree with Christopher Hitchens that “crisis is a condition of

all stages of life,” there is something remarkably culminative about Martin's life during the mid-1ggos. As the introduction of the present study revels, numerous events in 1994-95 coalesced into an emotional

202 e« Influence and Intersection maelstrom that deepened Martin's sensibilities. First was the discovery that his cousin Lucy Partington, who had been missing since 1973, was murdered by Frederick West, one of England’s most notorious serial

killers. The following year, Martin discovered a daughter he never knew, endured the painful controversy surrounding the publication of The Information, divorced his first wife, began his second marriage to the writer Isabel Fonseca, and underwent highly publicized dental reconstruction in the United States. The year culminated with the death of his father. Of course, an abundance of overpublicized subcrises had to be handled as well, especially the severance of his long-time friendship with Julian Barnes and Pat Kavanagh, and the conflict with Eric Jacobs over Kingsley’s funeral and the death-bed diaries.> These events fueled Martin's midlife crisis, and they comprised the labyrinth that informs Experience and that Experience also transcends.

“The Mid-Life Crisis,” Martin explains early in Experience, “compels corniness and indignity upon you, but that’s part of the torment. More materially it puts you on a beachhead of pain that your cliché has created. But later you see that there was a realignment taking place, something irresistible and universal, to do with your changing views about death (and you ought to have a crisis about that. It is critical to have a crisis about that)” (63-64). This period of “realignment” was both necessary and predictable, given not only the themes of Martin’s work but also the catastrophic events of 1994-95. Following the publication of The Information in 1995, for instance, Martin’s work entered a period of retrenchment, devoid of major new works of fiction. Night Train, published in 1997, failed to reestablish the momentum achieved by Money. A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995), and the collection Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998) ranks

among Martin’s most forgettable work. With time, one hopes that Ex-

perience, a masterful memoir, will be viewed as the conclusion to Martin's only interregnum period. However, the publication of Koba the Dread (2002), perhaps Martin’s least accomplished book, seems to prolong the wait. Surveying the whole of Martin's corpus, one perceives that the two emotions most notably absent are forgiveness and love, at least in their positive manifestations. Numerous characters suffer from a /ack of these qualities, but few are redeemed by them. ‘Iriumphantly, however, these

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children . 203 are the dominant emotions articulated in Experience. They are also the signs of a potentially new softening in Martin's authorial sensibility. Retroactively, it now seems entirely appropriate that Martin’s novels in the mid-1990s were drowned in such flurries of publicity: life itself had

begun to crowd out fiction. Te Information, for instance, is unique among Martin's major novels in that it strives to limit the postmodern experimentation found in his other great works, Money and London Fields. There are no games with unreliable narrators or levels of reality, and the first-person point of view, so clearly Martin’s own, disappears midway through the book. The Information is a “book about mid-life,” Martin explained, intimating the subject of Experience, “and for me the mid-crisis came in the form of blanket ignorance, ... I felt that I had to open up to the reader about that and say ‘How can I be an omniscient

narrator when I dont know anything.’’6 This narrative temperance marked a significant new restraint in Martin’s fiction, as if the bombast of his previous works was fading. Back in May 1995, Martin lightheartedly remarked to Graham Fuller that he considered Money, London Fields, and The Information to be a “very informal trilogy”: “Certainly they are the ones I feel are my main contribution. They’re just long novels about the same kinds of things — shifting identities, writer figures... . Either it’s a kind of trilogy or it’s just my stuff,” he concluded, “and I'll be like Graham Greene and go on writing it forever until I’m dead.” Immediately afterward, Fuller inquired about Martin's spiritual well-being given the recent upheavals of his life. Martin's response was telling: speaking in words already destined for Expertence, Martin clarified that crisis is a necessary facet of maturation, a process of psychological acclimation between the self and the world: “People tend to think of the midlife crisis as a cliché, something that happens to dopes who haven't got the character to get through midlife. I disagree; I think it’s intrinsic and that a lot of things get sorted out. I feel a bit sorted out, in a good way, and that the crisis is past now. And I’m on better terms with death than I thought I would be three or four years ago. Life seems sort of clearer. Diminished, but clearer.”7 Despite the semijocular tone of his comments about Money, London Fields, and The Information, Martin's seriousness overlies his humor. First, he seems notably hesitant about his future work, suspicious perhaps that his most ambitious novels might be behind him. Second, he

204 « Influence and Intersection seems conscious of the risk that his work might become reiterative, swirling about its recurrent themes without uncovering new territory. In both statements, moreover, he summons the idea of death, which has always played a key role in his novels but had begun to assume a more

central role with Lucy Partington’s murder, the contemplation of his own death, and his father’s impending death, which would occur five months after the interview with Fuller. Experience continues this dialogue with writing and death, providing Martin with a nonfictional forum in which to exercise his thoughts on filial attachment and love. As does Kingsley’s Memoirs (1991), Experience also attempts to settle a few scores, especially regarding the media and Eric Jacobs. However, this score settling functions mainly as filial protectiveness, an emotional and intellectual defense mechanism. Recognizing that history will write

the story of his relationship with his father whether he speaks or not, Martin chooses to speak, allowing readers the first extended glimpse into the private moments he shared with his father. Whereas Martin had earlier used his creativity to contest his father’s literary ideals, opposing Kingsley’s authority to clear an imaginative space for his own work, with Experience, Martin understandably relents. Sadly experienced with the revisionist agendas that quickly falsified Philip Larkin’s reputation ten years earlier, Martin offers Experience to the literary world as both a testament and a barricade. Within it, he not only declares his filial loyalty, elevating his father to the status of “messenger and shade,” but he also attempts to thwart postmortem revaluations, or at least forestall them with his own interpretation. Experience thus functions as an

authorial control valve: it attempts to educate rather than entertain, to lecture on life, literature, and love. If any irony can be found in a work as painfully honest as Experience, it lies solely in the fact that it is precisely the kind of memoir that Kingsley would have hated.

Featuring numerous structural and temporal discontinuities, Experience is a book that seems itself to be in crisis. Despite its emotional courage and honesty, and despite Martin’s claims to the contrary, it never dispenses with artifice. Instead, it sifts impressionistically through the past, creating a collage of absence, humor, sadness, and love. As James Wood has poignantly noted, the book is neither a memoir, a portrait of Martin's father, nor an autobiography; instead, it is an “escape from memoir . . . an escape into privacy.” Similarly, John Walsh has

Lhe Amises on Love, Death, and Children . = 205 attested to the book’s hybrid autobiographical form, arguing that Experience 1s not an apologia pro vita sua but is instead a blend of autobiography and allography, another variant of the cri de coeur, the phrase that Martin most often used to describe The Information.’ Similar to Martin’s novels, therefore, Experience continues a tradition of generic assimilation and revaluation. Thematically and structurally, Martin’s memoir owes a debt to two other experimental autobiographies, specifically Gore

Vidal's Palimpsest and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, both of which Martin read around the time of his father’s death. Taken together, these two works—and Martin's ideas about them —reveal Martins continued interest in literary hybridity, the amalgamation and conflation of genre. Martin reviewed Palimpsest the year that Kingsley died, and not surprisingly his words foreshadow the artistic infrastructure of Experience,

its mixture of heart and head, mourning and memory. “With its elaborate double-time scheme, its cunning rearrangements and realignments of the past, its blend of impetuous candour and decent reticence, Palimpsest is a work of considerable artistry. And Jimmie, the hidden other, illuminates its core. As a character, as a creation, he seems to shine through unassisted, all by himself; but this is an effect wrought by great authorial guile.” Elsewhere in his review, Martin predicts the surprise with which most reviewers would greet Experience, noting that Palimpsest works to humanize its author, inviting us to see him as a “version of Narcissus, in the classical mould, struggling with illusion, with despair, with death.”” Similar to Palimpsest, Nabokov's Speak, Memory also furnished Mar-

tin with a model for interrogating time, teaching him how to navigate the shadowed alleys and sinuous canals of memory. Throughout Experience, in other words, Martin’s emotional revelations vie with the protective artistry that shields them. The book’s numerous parallelisms of loss and pain, its circuitous flitting between past and present, its evocative summoning of personages—all combine to create a highly structured, deeply patterned aestheticism. Whereas Martin had earlier explained that a similar artistry thwarted the expression of personality in Nabokov's Speak, Memory—a work that is, he wrote, “the least revealing, because the most artistic: it traces the formation of the talent, not the personality” — Experience reveals him in full command of his unique

206 « Influence and Intersection form of higher autobiography. As did Vidal, Martin created a palimpsest of recovered history and people, rendered through impressionistic vignettes whose artistry Martin both shapes and effaces. “It was my intention in Experience,” he stated in December 2001, “to show all my nearest and dearest in the most generous possible light. There are no lies in my book, though there are lapses of memory, chronological snarlups, and so on. Some of these surprised me, startled me, but did not distress me. I suppose it’s integrity of memory that’s important.”!0 Thematically, Experience can be seen as a nonfiction companion to The Information, dramatizing issues of literary fame and rivalry. More important, however, it is an offering of respect and love. Evincing professional respect for Kingsley’s literary stamina and personal respect for his vivacious personality—the “engine of comedy” that could equally galvanize and destroy families— Martin attempts to recover his father not just for literary history but for his own sake as well. Informed by an obvious Blakean dialectic, the book was composed after a difficult period of emotional soul searching and investigative research. Seeking answers (or at least contexts) for the murder of his cousin, Martin read everything he could find about Fred West, including Andrew Hagan’s The Missing (1997), the theme of which figures prominently in Experience. Seeking information of a different sort, he reread most of Kingsley’s novels as well as the collected Le¢ters. In fact, the Letters—and not William Blake—should probably be credited as the provenance for the book's title: in a 1989 letter to Robert Conquest, written eight years after

he had last seen Elizabeth Jane Howard, Kingsley reflects upon his marriages and concludes with a line that could function as an epitaph for Martin’s memoir: “Well it’s all experience,” Kingsley lamented, “though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.”!!

Writing about one's father at any stage of life is difficult; writing about him just a few years after his death is even more so. Compound these dynamics with the added pressures that Martin faced —the literary world’s high expectations, the media’s eagerness to see scandals in the House of Amis—and one has the potential for powerful failure. When writing fiction, Martin was used to these pressures; writing his first extended autobiography, however, he would face numerous internal

Minotaurs that he could neither evade nor slay. Martin remarked in interviews that Experience was harder to write than any of his novels,

The Amuses on Love, Death, and Children . 207 partly because his confessions warred with his feelings of wounded privacy. Describing the book’s composition as “[t]heraputic, concentrated

mourning, Martin elucidated that “[w]riting a novel is close to Godlike power because you control everything, and you're completely out there on your own. With a memoir . .. there are constraints and there are other people, other people’s feelings, and the narrative of what actually happened. You are constrained by the goddamn truth.” Of course, the “goddamn truth” is even harder to deal with when one is so close to the “pain schedule,” Saul Bellow’s term for the requisite sadness and grief that awaits everyone in life.!2 As Martin’s words convey, questions of subjectivity become almost irrelevant. Experience attempts to reconcile these feelings of cosmic loss and confusion, and its elaborate artistry can be directly attributed to the fact that so little time had elapsed since Martin faced his experiences. A memoir that is equal parts confessional narrative, exorcism, biography of his father, and self-conscious psychoanalysis, Experience allows the reader access to some of the most private recesses of Martin’s mind. By definition, human relationships comprise a labyrinth of the un-

conscious and the acknowledged, and—not surprisingly, given the events of Lucy Partington’s disappearance — it is the shadow land of the unconscious that Martin most charts in Experience. “Your writing comes

from the back of your mind,” Martin argues, “where thoughts are unformulated and anxiety is silent. That’s where it comes from: silent anxiety.” Elsewhere, he contends that “the unconscious does it all” and that a writer's books are not “almanacs of your waking life but messages from your unconscious history. They come from the back of your mind, not from its forefront.” Undertaking the self-immersion necessary to compose Experience, Martin was forced to confront numerous fears, espe-

cially murder, suicide, and the contemplation of his own death. As a consequence, he recovered some disturbing repressed memories, including three instances of sexual molestation at the hands of strangers: once during a party at his boyhood home, once on a street, and once on a beach.!3

In Experience, Martin posits three continuities of human experience

that struggle to resist cancellation by time. Fathers and sons, parents and children, death and literature—these are the book’s encompassing themes, and, not surprisingly, Kingsley unites them all, functioning as a

208 « Influence and Intersection symbolic pivot or fulcrum. Despite the obvious stylistic differences of their work, and despite their well-publicized squabbles, Experience clarifies that Kingsley and Martin's relationship never suffered from prolonged separation or breakdown. There were periods of “murk” and “poor visibility,” Martin admits, but what emerges from Experience is a touching, consciously crafted glimpse of fathers and sons that extends beyond personal rivalry and literary jockeying. Memories of Kingsley open and close the book, and Martin scrutinizes the interstices of his relationship to his father and to his father’s work, eventually concluding that “literary talent is strongly inherited. But literary stamina is not” (24). It is within the arena of literary stamina that Martin exposes his father to the greatest praise and the greatest criticism. Commenting upon the problematic but “humanly open-ended” Jake’s Thing and what he calls the “hate novel,” Stanley and the Women (309), Martin eliminates all

doubt as to whether he ever endorsed the sexism of such characters as Jake Richardson or Stanley Duke, from whom his own characters John Self (in Money) and Keith Talent (in London Fields) are arguably descended. What most troubled Martin during this, his father’s blue period, was the loss of Kingsley’s animating comic spirit, his “superhumour: the great engine of his comedy” (304) that held the potential to make you laugh “not continuously, but punctually — for the rest of your life” (53). As is often the case with powerful fathers, Kingsley would show

Martin the path into and out of this descent. Emerging from his own process of personal realignment, and teaching Martin valuable lessons about intimacy, Kingsley’s art would begin to show signs of healing. Although Kingsley never forgave Elizabeth Jane Howard for their divorce, he would find the vestiges of love and forgiveness in another relationship.

Personal Realignment: Hilly Redux Although Martin claims in Experience that forgiveness was never an issue in his relationship with his father, he spends a great deal of space annotating the “failures of tolerance” (96, 147) that marked Kingsley’s life and art during the mid-1980s. Most egregious among these faults was Kingsley’s problematic treatment of love in his novels, which threatened to efface the comedy. Lamenting the artistic decline that appears in Kingsley’s work after his second divorce, Martin seems conflicted,

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children. 209 divided between personal affiliation and professional repudiation: “For many years I thought that Kingsley dishonoured Jane—and himself— when he turned revisionist about the strength of his feelings for her. He tried to rewrite the past, to unperson, to unlove; and you can't do that, or so I believed.”14

In the early stages of their relationship, Elizabeth Jane Howard personified the promise of transcendent love to Kingsley, prompting him to abandon his family in 1963. But when that relationship soured, his work noticeably suffered, culminating in a series of problematic novels whose narrative arcs spread from escapist denial to masculinist spite. First was the abrasive novel Jakes Thing (1978), a perfect portrait of a crumbling marriage. Iwo years later, the Amises separated. That same year, the science-fiction fantasy Russian Hide and Seek (1980) appeared; in it, Kingsley construed how English life would change after a communist invasion. Finally, Kingsley published Stanley and the Women (1984), which directly relayed his shifting views of women, sexual relations, and feminism. From Martin’s vantage point, Kingsley seemed to be “adrift in art and life”: “Russian Hide and Seek was a depressed book. He didn't have the energy to travel so far from his own concerns. Jake and Stanley, on the other hand, were asphyxiatingly close to the pain schedule. His life, obviously and demonstrably, had (half) survived a tormenta, a raging sea. But what had happened to the work? Only other writers, perhaps, will believe me when I say that this question felt just as serious” (230). It was at this point in their lives that Kingsley and Martin had begun to debate politics with increasing fervor, as Kingsley’s political loyalties hardened into conservatism, fully entrenched in the Thatcherite camp. The end result of this hardening process, according to Martin, was a form of artistic suicide— Kingsley had effectively killed off half his fictive world. That half was not exclusively feminist or female in nature, as women continued to get more than their share of good lines in

Kingsley’s books. Instead, and much more egregiously, the absent half—a variant entry to the missing category in Experience—contained

the storehouse of comedy that had previously animated Kingsley’s work. Through the drinking that would eventually lead to his second divorce, Kingsley steered himself into a personal storm. Ironically, however, given his views on women at this time, it would be a woman who would rescue him. In one of the strangest turns in the history of literary

210 »« Influence and Intersection coteries, that woman was his first wife, who was then on her third marriage to Alastair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. If strained relations with Elizabeth Jane Howard instigated, rightly or not, Kingsley’s anticomedic or dark-comedy phase, then Hilly returned him to his proper comic provinces, both personally and professionally. Personally, the operative values circulated around forgiveness and love: Hilly found the ability to forgive Kingsley for the emotional

pain of the past, and the Kilmarnocks agreed to look after Kingsley, who feared solitude and isolation above all things. In 1981, Kingsley re-

located to a temporary flat that he would share with the Kilmarnocks and their son Jaime. Kingsley’s 27 August letter to Philip Larkin recounts the genesis of the arrangement, noting that “my morale is much improved, in fact today I felt a// right for about 20 mins, because I’ve found, and yesterday installed here, the couple who'll look after me. They are Hilly and her 3rd husband, Lord Kilmarnock. Nay, stare not so. Well, youd be justified in staring a bit, but it was their suggestion, the boys are much in favour, it’s the only way for me to have a bit of family, all that.”!° Over the following three years, Kingsley and the Kilmarnocks would move twice more, finally settling in Primrose Hill. These relocations were much more than physical, however: Kingsley’s emotional proclivities also were relocating. While Hilly resuscitated the faded emotions of forgiveness and love, Kingsley was evolving the strength to exorcise the bitterness of his divorce. As Martin confirms in

Experience, however, the cycle would only complete itself when Kingsley'’s work similarly healed.

Professional Realignment: The O/d Devils In 1986, five years after the establishment of the Kingsley- Kilmarnock coterie, and two years after the publication of Stan/ey and the Women, Kingsley’s most acclaimed novel, Te Old Devils, would win the Booker

Prize, culminating his then thirty-year career. In the canon of Kingsley’s work, the novel is significant for reasons other than getting “Bookered,” of course, but in the context of the Amis pére-et-fils dynamic, the Booker remains one award that Kingsley garnered and Martin has not. It was an irony that could not have been lost on him, a validation of his

artistic ideals made all the more impressive in that Martin’s greatest

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children. 211 novel, Money, had been published just two years earlier, forcing many to question the literary hierarchy of the Amis family. As Martin explains in Experience, The Old Devils confirmed Kingsley’s professional resurrection, the repudiation of his blue period, and the culmination of his ma-

ture style. The novel inaugurated the final phase in Kingsley’s career, distinguished by serious comedy that could depict the pathos of aging and loss with equal degrees of humanity, sensitivity, and tolerance. The importance of Hilly’s return to Kingsley’s life cannot be underestimated. On the precise day that the Kilmarnocks agreed to take Kingsley in he struck upon the idea for Stanley and the Women, which would

function as a cathartic exorcism of his second divorce. The very next day, as the Kilmarnocks unpacked, he decided upon the plot.!¢ In Experience, Martin comments upon Hilly’s catalytic effect on Kingsley, arguing that it alone accounts for the conciliatory and elegiac tone of The Old Devils: “So I should tell my mother: I know you hated it when he played on your feelings ... but you did bring him back to life and love. That’s the best way of looking at it, Mum. He got Stanley out of the way and then he wrote Devi/s. .. . He could never have written them without you, because you reminded him of love” (312-13).

Reviewers and critics have often noted that women tend to get the best lines in Kingsley’s novels, even in sexist texts such as Stanley and the Women. In The Old Devils, however, Kingsley extended this moral im-

perative one step further, varying the narrative perspective to depict a woman's point of view more truthfully. The novel’s center of enchantment, Rhiannon Weaver, enjoys a luxury of sensibility so elevated that she would eventually migrate to Martin's own fiction as well, appearing in Night Train as the tributary Welsh character, Rhiannon.!” As the conclusion to the present study will make clear, that was not the only intertextual effect The Old Devils would have on Martin's novel: unique in Martin’s corpus, Night Train is the sole novel fully narrated from a female vantage point. Arguably, Kingsley’s professional realignment not

only initiated the final phase of his own career, but also the middle phase of Martin's own. The attitudinal softening or tonal amelioration that was so crucial to Kingsley’s novel can best be seen in lines such as the following, where Gwen Cellan-Davies laments men’s half-hearted willingness to listen:

“Tell us what you think, love—no go on, I really want to hear. And

212, e Influence and Intersection then when you tell em, well it was quite a long time before I started noticing the glaze in their eyes. They were being good about you talking.” Reviewing the book, David Lodge explained that the earlier problems

that haunted such works as Jake’ Thing and Stanley and the Women stemmed from narratorial entrapment: the reader could never get suffcient emotional distance from either Jake or Stanley’s analysis of events except through outright rejection.!8 The Old Devils, however, dispensed entirely with centralized narration. The close enclave of couples (Mal-

colm and Gwen Cellan-Davies, Charlie and Sophie Norris, Garth and Angharad Pumphrey, and Peter and Muriel Thomas) eagerly await the

homecoming of their former friends, Alun and Rhiannon Weaver. Composed of a series of emotional encounters expressed from different points of view, the novel is the most structurally experimental within Kingsley’s canon. In opposition to earlier works, numerous characters now provided contrapuntal distance, freeing the novel from unified and potentially didactic narration. [he temptation to view the novel simply

as a corrective to Stanley and the Women, or even as an atonement, should be avoided, however. Instead, The O/d Devils represents a trium-

phant shift in attitude, a reaffirmation of the need for community and companionship, especially as memories of the past intrude upon the present. Of course, it is tempting to conjecture that Martin's own experiments with temporality, structure, and point of view continued to have an impact on Kingsley’s work, informing his most innovative and critically acclaimed novel.

In many ways, The O/d Devils returned to the thematic topography of Kingsley’s earlier book about aging, Ending Up. Significantly however, the later book resolves its crises more sympathetically. During his life, Kingsley’s fears of isolation were legendary, and because of his residence with the Kilmarnocks, The O/d Devils quietly and triumphantly asserts that extended families can be equally as valuable as relational ones, that microcosms of inclusion can stave off, if only temporarily, the encroaching loneliness of age. Not surprisingly, time is therefore the dominant force in the book. As does Martin's Experience, The Old Devils teaches the reader that the present must accommodate the past, that one must confront memories as well as illusions. Two quotations neatly encapsulate Kingsley’s treatment of this temporal conflict. The first belongs to Alun Weaver, the novel’s aging Don

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children « 213

Juan, who romanticizes Wales and Welsh culture more than he does women. [he second comes from Charlie Norris, the novel’s “bullshit” barometer, or commonsensical critic, who tells Alun to forswear sentimentality and idealization. First we have Alun: “The most noticeable characteristic of the past, as seen by him, at least, was that there was so much more of it now than formerly, with bits that were longer ago than had once seemed possible” (73). Then there is Charlie: “With a conviction undimmed by having survived countless previous run-offs he felt that everything he had was lost and everyone he knew was gone. Only because there was nothing else to do he stood there assembling the en-

ergy to move, to start dressing, rather in the spirit of a skier poised above a hazardous run” (75). In these passages, the novel’s themes of re-

alignment, homecoming, and reconciliation contrast the intellectual defeatism of earlier works such as Ending Up, Jake's Thing, and Stanley and the Women. Selfishness and intellectual solipsism now bow to the

superior virtues of communication and mutual understanding. As in Ending Up, the characters know they cannot defeat time, but they successfully evolve a mindset to redeem human kindness and generosity. In this respect, Charlie Norris’s remark is especially significant, as it not only reworks the attitudes of Kingsley’s earlier novels but also invokes the poetic intonations of Philip Larkin. Indeed, if one credits Hilly with the novel’s redemptive attitudes toward love and companionship, then one must acknowledge Larkin’s influence as well, for he, too, lends the novel its tone of dignified resignation as well as its themes of qualified victory and negative transcendence. Larkin hovers over the text of The O/d Devils like a specter, rewarding an intertextual reading of the novel. Having passed away one year before the publication of the novel, his presence can still-be felt, ranging in moments from the incidental to the direct. Jazz, a great love of Kingsley and Larkin’s during their years at Oxford University, figures prominently in the novel, and so does drinking, another of their favorite pastimes. In addition (and admittedly more significantly), Rhiannon and Malcolm summon Larkin’s poem “Church Going” when they visit an empty Welsh church and feel the pangs of absolute nothingness inside. Finally, and most important, Kingsley has Charlie Norris comically revise a line from Larkin’s “Dockery and Son,” modifying “Life was first boredom, then fear” into “Life was first boredom, then more boredom,

214. « Influence and Intersection as long as it was going your way, at least” (174). In a novel with such a clear autobiographical matrix as The Old Devils, it is touching to see Kingsley pay homage to two of the most important figures in his life.

The book champions the supreme values of friendship and love, and similar to Experience, it can be seen in the context of psychological realignment. Whereas one can theorize that Martin employed his memoir to come to grips with existential crises, including his own fears of dying as well as the losses of his father and cousin, one can contend that Kingsley used The Old Devils to contextualize his own psychic fears, including isolation, impending death, and the loss of his dearest friend. Arguably, the novel’s tone owes more to Larkin than to Kingsley’s own processes of aging and loss, as in the quintessential Larkinesque line in

the novel, “Now was a time for the years to roll back. But no, they stayed where they were” (252). Although The Old Devils strives to end happily, concluding with a wedding, Larkin and Kingsley knew too well that such new beginnings do not come easily, especially to the old. Just as Kingsley utilized his diminished sexual drive for source material in

Jakes Thing, the more mature, somber style of Te Old Devils 1s informed by divorces, the death of old friends, and the ravages of time. In

other words, the novel vividly depicts what Martin would later term “My Missing” in Experience, extending his father’s analysis. The cycles of life are accepted, though never praised, and both authors investigate how time transforms experience into memory, love into loss.

Midway through the novel, two of Rhiannon’s former loves— Malcolm and Peter—attempt to resurrect their old feelings. By far the more poignant of the two relationships is Malcolm’s, as his youthful affair with Rhiannon was more curtailed than Peter’s, or more Larkinesque than Amisian. In chapter 5, devoted to Rhiannon’s narration, we witness Malcolm’s attempt to triumph over time by seducing his onetime love. Married to the novel’s scapegoat, Alun Weaver (who 1s arguably a later version of Professor Welch from Lucky Jim), Rhiannon seems painfully in need of rescue. Whereas it was easy for the rogue to triumph in Kingsley’s early novels, however, his later work charts the failure of such transcendence. As in Larkin’s poem “Sad Steps,” his characters struggle with the “wolves of memory’ and receive only a resounding zo for their efforts. Malcolm’s attempt to court Rhiannon 1s a case in point. In an episode that resonates thematically with Anthony

Lhe Amises on Love, Death, and Children . 215

Powell’s 4 Dance to the Music of Time—one of Kingsley’s favorite works — Malcolm drives Rhiannon to a small Welsh village they visited long ago. Like Nicholas Jenkins, who reencounters an old lover and can scarcely believe they ever shared a relationship, Rhiannon can barely remember the incidents that Malcolm recollects. The village furnishes no

epiphanies save time's distorting effects on memory, and Rhiannon breaks down, lamenting her absent experience. With sadness Malcolm accepts the failure of his romantic quest, and he calmly asks Rhiannon whether she remembers anything at all of their previous —and presumably pivotal —visit: “You don't remember any of it, do you? Not having lunch or walking up to St Mary’s or what I said or anything.” It was not to be got out of or away from. Coming on top of the little tensions of the day the unashamed intensity of his disappointment was too much for her. She hid her face, turned aside and started to cry.

He forgot his own feelings at once. “What is it? What’s the matter?” “I’m so stupid, I’m so hopeless, no good to anybody, I just think of myself all the time, don't notice other people. It’s not much to ask, remembering a lovely day out, but | can’t even do that.” She had his arm

round her now and was resting her forehead against his shoulder, though she still kept her hands over her eyes. “Anybody who was any use would remember but I can’t, but I wish I could, I wish I could.” (167-68)

This longing to recover the past falls equally upon every character, infusing the present with a melancholy matched only by Larkinesque stoicism. Finding it too late to transform a life, the characters reconcile

themselves to life and take solace in the communal nature of their friendships. Not accidentally, this was the same solace that Kingsley took in his daily visits to the Garrick Club and in his new life with the Kilmarnocks.

If the relationships of Rhiannon Weaver and her former lovers interject a tonal sobriety into the narrative — if it is even possible to apply that word to a novel so saturated by drink— then the book’s final scenes

complete the attitudinal softening that is the hallmark of The Old Devils. Before that can occur, however, affectation— Kingsley's lifelong satirical target — must be duly dispensed with. Kingsley does so quickly: choking on his whiskey and water, Alun Weaver dies, capping a life of

216 « Influence and Intersection symbolic intoxication and suffocation. Precisely at the moment when one might suspect The O/d Devils to follow the narrative path of Ending Up, however, Kingsley surprises the reader with a happy ending, revers-

ing the arc of that earlier text, which concluded with multiple deaths. As Barbara Everett notes, Alun’s death represents a “casting out of old devils” so that a new form of harmony, albeit tempered and qualified, can flourish. Although the ending of The O/d Devi/s is conventionally sentimental, and therefore distressing to some readers, it is entirely, unapologetically appropriate within the contexts of Kingsley’s personal life

as well as the structural demands of the novel.!? Repudiating the sardonic bitterness of such novels as Jakes Thing and Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils ends instead by affirming love and family. Chil-

dren assume crucial roles in orchestrating this thematic reversal, and it is at this point that the importance of youth—and, by implication, the importance of Kingsley’s children—can be most felt. If one accepts the proposal that Kingsley’s earliest novels are defined by the rogue’s ability to change the outer world, ousting the proponents of affectation and falsity, and that his middle novels are defined by the

personalized complaints of such characters as Jake Richardson and Stanley Duke, then the dignified resignation of Kingsley’s later phase can be seen operating in The Old Devi/s through the marriage of Rose-

mary Weaver (Rhiannon and Alun’s daughter) to William Thomas (Peter and Muriel’s son). In a triumphant moment that might have become the grounds for comic inversion in an earlier novel, William tells his father that his love for Rosemary was idyllic from the onset. Declaring that they experienced “Absolutely no snags or problems of any kind at any stage right from the start,” he concludes with the assertion that “it was love at first sight. Doesn't that sound ridiculous?” (281). His father’s answer is quietly powerful—a simple, unadorned “No.” To William H. Pritchard, this line is the most affirmative ever uttered in a Kingsley Amis novel, and it accords nicely with the personal realignment Kingsley had experienced through Hilly’s forgiveness.*° This internal reconciliation is powered by the recognition that although time cannot be reversed and mistakes cannot be undone, the complaining sexism of Jake’ Thing and Stanley and the Women could no longer be endorsed. Taking his cue from his son William, Peter Thomas eventually declares his love for Rhiannon, and in his words we glimpse the novel’s most profound

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children. 217 autobiographical sentiments. Speaking through Peter to his first wife, Kingsley expresses the calm poignancy of lost opportunity and love: “Though you might well not think so... and there was certainly a time when I forgot it myself, I’ve always loved you and I do to this day. I’m sorry it sounds ridiculous because I’m so fat and horrible, and not at all nice or even any fun, but I mean it. I only wish it was worth more” (286). Peter and Rhiannon finally communicate with genuine honesty and humility, and significantly, the novel does not invalidate their possible reunion: Muriel, Peter’s wife, even plans to relocate to England. Imaginatively returning to the country that signified the beginning of Kingsley’s life with Hilly, Te O/d Devils depicts Wales as the nostalgic locus

of memory and imagination, where lost love can be recalled but not fully recaptured. Perhaps Anthony Burgess had the best and most comic words on the subject when he praised Kingsley for courageously facing the “palpable reality” of old age: “The women survive, very movingly

love is declared toward the end, and not by the fire in the blood that prodigally lends the tongue vows. When decrepit obesity declares it, we

had better believe it.”21 At the end of the novel, even Malcolm, the jilted romantic hero, joins in the ceremonies of redemption and rejyuvenation: sitting down to translate an epic Welsh poem, his words cele-

brate the processes of reconciliation that lie at the end of experience (and of Martin's own Experience): “He had an hour or more... to work on his translation of .. . Heledd Cartad— more of an adaptation, actually, for among other adjustments he had altered the physical characteristics

of the central figure to correspond with Rhiannon’s. If she had found love with Peter he was glad, because he had nothing to give her himself. But she had given him something. The poem, his poem, was going to be the best tribute he could pay to the only woman who had ever cried for him” (294). It is impossible to overread the autobiographical implications of this passage. Malcolm's paean to Rhiannon extols the virtues of forgiveness and love, as he champions the abilities of friendship and memory to enrich and inspire. His failed romance with Rhiannon functions as a form of emotional and intellectual catharsis, freeing Malcolm from distraction and bitterness, restoring his capacity to work and to love. And this is exactly what Hilly did for Kingsley. In short, The Old Devils concluded Kingsley’s personal and profes-

sional realignment. It signified his artistic return to the possibilities of

218 « Influence and Intersection love; it helped him contextualize the loss of his dearest friend, Philip Larkin; and it articulated the tonal amelioration that emerged from his appreciation of Hilly’s efforts—and those of his children Martin, Philip, and Sally—in creating the extended family with the Kilmarnocks. The book is the apogee of Kingsley’s career, but like all achieve-

ments it had to be earned, evolving only after a harsh period of consolidation and retrenchment. To Martin, viewing the work from an insider's perspective in Experience, the novel announced a “surrender of

intransigence” and terminated Kingsley’s prior state of “willed solitude.” Martin noted that Kingsley “backed off, he climbed down. And we all have to do this at some point; we all have to come out of the room

we have sent ourselves to. My father emerged with a novel about forgiveness. He hadnt forgiven Jane, and never would, but he had forgiven women, he had forgiven love; he had returned to the supreme value” (258). Attesting to the novel’s emphasis upon psychological renewal and

youth, 74e Old Devils is dedicated to Jacob and Louis, Martin's two sons by his first wife, Antonia Phillips. Just as The Old Devils depicts the most successful and loving parentchild relationships in Kingsley’s canon, so too does Experience portray this important family arrangement, lamenting its loss and the indelible

transformations wrought by time.2* If The Old Devils epitomized Kingsley’s reconciliation to life and love, then Martin’s memoir similarly

enacts narratives of personal acclimation and realignment. Whereas Kingsley utilized a fictional framework to exercise his thoughts about divorce, death, and forgiveness, however, Martin’s memoir stands as a nonfiction masterpiece, helping him come to grips with the dual losses of his father and cousin; the discovery of a daughter he had not known; and his own maturity as a writer, husband, father, and man.

Personal Realignment: Experience In 1967 Kingsley commemorated his father in a poem titled “In Memoriam W.R.A.” Mourning the breakdown of sympathy that led “to silence / And separate ways,” Kingsley lamented that his father had to die “to make me sorry / Youre not here now.”*3 Thirty-three years later,

Martin undertook a similar enterprise, bidding farewell to his father and to their celebrated disagreements. As Kingsley invoked children as

Lhe Amises on Love, Death, and Children .« 219 a triumphant, stabilizing force at the end of The Old Devils, so too does

Martin focus on his own children early in Experience, establishing a continuity of paternal succession, a fearful symmetry of fathers and sons. Meditating on how his children will one day have to confront the Amis family burden—fame and its intractable step-sibling, publicity— Martin conjectures that “in the arts, when the parent invites the child to follow,” it is “a complicated offer, and there will always be a suspicion of

egotism in it. Is the child’s promise a tribute to the superabundance of the father’s gift? And historically what long odds you face; there’s Mrs Trollope as well as Anthony, and Dumas pére e¢ ‘fils, and that’s about it.

What usually happens is that the child is productive for a while, and then the filial rivalrousness plays itself out” (23). Experience, however, is a stark testament to the continued presence of filial rivalry in Martin’s life and work. It is a meditation upon the loss of control, both in litera-

ture and in life, and an attempt to reassert control—to restrain chaos and contingency, the very things that energize Martin’s novels. Interweaving vignettes of youth and age, birth and death, parents and children throughout the work, Martin attempts to reconcile his personal and professional relationship to death. Death and absence are the existential fulcrums upon which Experience rests. “Someone is no longer here,” Martin remarks in the book’s

opening pages. “The intercessionary figure, the father, the man who stands between the son and death, is no longer here; and it won't ever be

the same. He is missing” (7). Much later, in between discussions of Kingsley’s last words and his passing, the idea reappears with significant elaboration: “It is 1995 and he has been there since 1949. The interces-

sionary figure is now being effaced, and there is nobody between you and extinction. Death is nearer, reminding you that there is much to be done. There are children to be raised and books to be written. You have work to do” (345).24 Some of the most important material in Experience emerges out of the collision between these two dynamics of children and work, and in the process of recording his impressions of his father, Martin uncovers important lessons about life and literature. In an important formulation that occurs twice in the book, Martin asserts that a writer is chiefly three things: literary being, innocent, and everyman (85, 260). Soon thereafter, he relates how he discovered the unconscious psychology of his novels while reading a retrospective of

220 e« Influence and Intersection his work by Maureen Freely, which noted “a stream of lost or wandering daughters and putative or fugitive fathers” (280). Along with this

quotation, Martin’s tripartite definition of authorial identity summarizes all of the psychological dynamics of the Amis family bond. The

first criterion—author as literateur—summons the themes of talent and fame, the idea of surrogacy, and the oscillation between decline and renaissance. [he second one—author as innocent— evokes the theme of the unconscious, the nature of fate or design, and the passage from innocence to experience. The final category—author as everyman— suggests numerous metanarratives or heightened continuities, including generational succession, maturity, death, and love. Of course, these

continuities, and indeed all of Martin’s criteria, are interrelated, and create the perspectival polyphony of his memor. Readers looking to simplify Martin’s memoir will have to confront the fact that Experience is haunted by a plurality of perspectives, as is The Old Devils. Sometimes Martin values Eric Jacobs’s assistance with Kingsley, for instance; at other times he excoriates it. At times Martin labels Saul Bellow a surrogate parent; at other times he rejects the designation. Arguably, however, this dualistic perspective perfectly reflects the microcosmic worlds of Martin's novels, where rules both apply and

reverse themselves, and where transcendent absolutes such as time, consciousness, and subjectivity can be both illusion and reality. The one exception to this mental matrix, however, is death, which remains al-

ways fixed and inscrutable, whether in Martin's fiction or nonfiction work. Martin devotes a large part of Experience to annotating Kingsley’s professional rejuvenation of spirit, his reaffirmed correspondence with love, which Martin labels the “supreme value.” After The Old Devils, Kingsley continued in his more sympathetic, humanistic vein, producing such works as The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990) and especially The Russian Girl (1992), in which love, Martin notes, is “exalted not only above politics and—far more surprisingly — above poetry; it is also exalted above truth” (29). Prior to this reconciliation, however, Kingsley’s professional decline sent Martin 1n search of a sympathetic soul, or spir-

itual guide. As Kingsley had found in Larkin, so too did Martin discover in Saul Bellow a kinship of sensibility that could mollify the pangs of experience, including that of his father’s decay.

The Amuises on Love, Death, and Children «. 221

Bellow effectively links the first and third criteria of Martin’s authorial analogy, assuming the dual roles of literateur and everyman. Martin, however, functions as the innocent in this formulation, the student in search of a mentor or guide who can mediate his negotiations with death and loss. Bellow’s fatherly assistance in this process of spiritual

acclimation cannot be underestimated, despite Martin’s admonition that “there was of course no father-vacancy to be filled, just as Saul Bellow, with three of his own, had no opening for a son” (258). Instead, on

a deeper, unconscious level, Martin craved an emotional connection with Bellow, an extension of their professional relationship but also, and more importantly, a supplement to Martin's strained relationship with Kingsley: “Filial anxiety, | now perceive, was metastasising within me when I went to [visit Bellow in] Chicago in 1983. I wasn’t prospecting for a new father, but | was seriously worried about the incumbent. His life was now steady enough, in its external dispositions. It was the state of the talent that bothered me” (178). Twelve years later, in the midst of facing the climacteric of Kingsley’s

death—a word that is also a favorite of Kingsley’s in his Letters— Martin turned to the only individual who could contextualize the experience for him, finding in Bellow an assured wisdom that could dispel confusion.2° This fact becomes especially apparent toward the end of Experience, when Martin recollects their conversation after Kingsley's death: — You've changed since your father died, [ Bellow] said. —In what way? — More gravitas, not the kid any more.

—God, no. The id?... In the diner I had said, as I had been meaning to say, —Do you remember I called you on the day my father died? And you were great. You said the only thing that could have possibly been any use to me. [he only thing that would help me through to the other side. And I said dully, “You'll have to be my father now.” It worked, and still works. As long as you're alive I'll never feel entirely fatherless. (360)

What Bellow provided Martin, in parting, was a simple declaration of love —“Well I love you very much” — and according to Martin, that remark not only delivered him from his existential teetering but asserted a

222 e« Influence and Intersection continuity of emotion so vital to Martin’s third definition of a writer's role: writers (and fathers, of course) link the present to the past through shared experience. They function as symbolic everymen, questors and questioners, who invite others to follow their inquisitions. Fittingly, Martin claims to have reclassified himself as an agnostic after his father’s death, and one is left to wonder what role Bellow’s own faith played in this quasi-conversion.76 Regardless of whether his works explore the nature of reversed, fixed, or frozen time, the confluence of time and identity has always been im-

portant in Martin's books, figuring in at least four of his nine novels— Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), London Fields, Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense (1991), and Night Train. But in no fictive work does

Martin resolve this dialectic through the humanistic assertions of love and forgiveness that one finds in Experience. In many ways, his memoir presents the world with the most unfettered access to date of Martin Amis. More than the plethora of profiles and interviews available to scholars, Experience paints a chiaroscuro portrait of a man attempting to live without masks, willing himself to speak candidly about the importance of forgiveness, love, and family. Unlike any of his fiction, this book champions the restorative powers of these archetypal continuities, and it depicts Martin’s internal shift towards spiritual renewal. It is important to note that children interweave all of these ideas, for they en-

gage the essential notion of liminality, or archetypal transition, that unites Martin’s disparate comments about love, life, and death. Even murder and its antithetical opposite in the memoir—the discovery of lost children — function within this paradigm of temporal anxiety. Midway through Experience, Martin elevates children to the status of redeemers, guarantors of forgiveness: “At the birth of your child, you forgive your parents everything, without a second thought, like a velvet revolution.” As in Kingsley’s Te O/d Devz/s, children play a crucial role

in Martin’s personal realignment. As the title of his memoir conveys, Experience is haunted by the loss of youthful innocence, whether such loss be spiritual, and therefore a necessary part of maturation, or physical, as in the fatal disappearance of his cousin and the death of his father. In 1990, five years after the birth of his first son Louis and three years after the birth of his second son Jacob, Martin remarked to Susan Morrison that children seem to operate as symbolic magicians, freeing

The Amises on Love, Death, and Children. 223 their parents from the corded shackles of the self. Parenthood “changes

you so completely that you lose your point of comparison,” he explained. “You get out of the self a bit... . What's so great about having children is that it’s the ordinary miracle; it’s the miracle that happens to everyone.” In another interview that same year, Martin proclaimed that “children redefine everything for you. A lot of the self is lost, thank God; the internal gibber of wants and needs dies down.”?’ In Experience, Martin continues to associate children with the dynamics of personal evolution, but given the fate of Lucy Partington, he more vividly portrays a war between the orderly cycles of generation and the discontinuous cycles of loss. Speaking figuratively about his father’s impending death, Martin imagines Kingsley “positioned at the centre of a great circular vacancy’ devoid of pattern and form: “When a new child is born you reel in the apparent emptiness of the street, because the world has shoved up, making way for the new one, and the world has overdone it, and there is all this space to reel in. Death does not act symmetrically here. Death too creates space but isolates you and cuts you off within it” (359). Although Martin laments the fact that life possesses no guiding shape, unlike literature, with its hermeneutic acts of “completion” and “commensurateness,” the narrative arc of Experience seems to contradict his assertion, as love trrumphs over isolation, and form emerges strengthened from shapelessness.** Besides the losses

of his cousin and father, numerous variations on the theme of loss appear frequently in Martin’s memoir, including divorces, severed friendships, political oppression, and artistic decline. Experience is, however, far from a defeatist manifesto; instead, it succeeds in enacting an alchemist’s miracle, transmuting death into art. Although death can never be repaid in full, in Experience Martin receives psychological compensation for his losses through the surprising discovery of a new daughter, Delilah Seale, from an earlier affair with Lamorna Heath Seale. In the midst of a memoir that begins with Martin discussing fame with his sons and concludes with a tirade about journalistic irresponsibility, the dominant patterns remain those of reconciliation and recompense, the hallmarks of Kingsley’s later fiction and perhaps Martin's own, still to come. Toward the end of Experience Martin's tone becomes insistent and serious, as he struggles to elucidate the moral humanism that flows as an undercurrent through the tumults of his life.

224 « Influence and Intersection Critical to this process of internal deepening are the public impressions of his relationships with his father, Lucy Partington, and Delilah Seale. On these matters, Martin brooks little disagreement, for he recognizes that history—and its correspondent danger, falsification — will ultimately write the story of his private investigations. Experience thus concludes with a bravura display of personal assertion and conviction, as Martin targets the media outlets that have often betrayed his privacy. He criticizes the media for breaking the story of his newfound daughter before he had a chance to explain the situation to his sons, and he turns his attention to Eric Jacobs, settling an old score by recollecting a dream about Kingsley. In this dream, which strives to silence rival interpretations of their relationship, Martin summons Kingsley before him as a messenger. Leveraging his insider's role, Martin’s words bristle with the need for control, as he proclaims a symbiosis of spirit that effectively triumphs over death and dissension: He gave me to understand that I had all his trust—in the prosecution of his wishes, and in everything else. Because my wishes were his wishes and the other way around. Then he left, he briskly absented himself, returning not to death but to an intermediate vantage. He was resolute. This dream was all business. He came not as shade but as messenger. A messenger from my own unconscious, naturally. But that’s all right. Because my mind 1s his mind and the other way around. . . . So it was incredibly warming to see you, Dad. And why don’t you come more often like that? As a messenger, and not just as a shade whom I swamp and harass and bore with obeisances. It was incredibly warming to see you, but I didn’t really need the reassurance about your wishes. Because my wishes are your wishes and | am you and you are me. (363-64)

This self-willed vision, or visitation, represents one way to disempower death—to call forth one’s father’s spirit at night with the conscious or unconscious mind. It signifies a correspondence of imagination or, as Martin allows, the internal promptings of the id. Of course, it also struggles heroically, if not paradoxically, to erase the boundaries between his father’s identity and his own, affirming a symbiosis of spirit that transcends time. [his is not to say that Martin willfully falsifies in this pas-

sage (though Jacobs might be tempted to think so). On the contrary, Martin's efforts attest solely to the structural nature of psychological dy-

namics throughout the memoir: his chastisement of Jacobs and other

The Amuses on Love, Death, and Children « 225

members of the “fourth estate” serves to confirm his own fears about death, the loss of control, and the vagaries of literary revaluation. His filial defensiveness, simultaneously understandable and heroic, reflects his elevated sensitivity to the fact that, long after he, too, has passed away, history will continue to shape the story of his relationship with his

father. Writing about his father and about his own life less than five years after Kingsley’s death, Martin rushes to mark the territory upon which future excavations will be conducted. He essentially constructs a protective barricade around his father’s reputation, and in so doing not only solidifies their unique position within literary history but seeks to circumvent the revisionist falsifications that followed Philip Larkin’s death. In short, Experience confirms Martin's continued engagement in the process of personally revaluing his father’s example. Whereas he had earlier employed parts of his novels to do so, he now utilized a nonfiction format, which furnished new freedoms for expressing the tones and themes that had yet to appear in his fiction. Soon after the dream passage above, Martin asserts a final, but less insistent continuum that not only returns to his triadic definition of au-

thorship but engages his earlier dialectics of children and temporality. All of Kingsley’s books—his other, symbolic offspring— function as a spiritual repository for Martin, indelibly present and always willing to speak, beckoning communion. “After Kingsley died we were all chastened by the dimension of the void that replaced him,” Martin explains. “Tt goes all right for me, pretty much, because the books are still here and, therefore, so is his presence: sleeplessly available” (366). Appropriately, given the dual fathers of his life—one real, the other surrogate —

Martin makes a similar comment about Saul Bellow midway through the memoir, foreshadowing his final phrase above. In that earlier assertion, moreover, his remarks nearly verge upon Leavisite prophecy, as he proclaims the moral function of literature as humanistic instruction: “I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He 1s on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of com-

munication. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. That is the definition of literature” (268).

226 « Influence and Intersection At the end of Experience, Martin has come to grips with fatherhood, the loss of loved ones, the discovery of new relations, the inevitable relinquishment of youth, and the presence of evil and chance in the universe. [he earlier problematics of lost children and absent parents that

Maureen Freely once noted find resolution in Martin's personal life through his own children as well as the potential communion of literature. If Kingsley bade farewell to his personal period of retrenchment with The Old Devils, then Experience seems to have furnished Martin with a similar emergence from confusion. Using the memoir format to speak candidly about relationship, reconciliation, and realignment, Martin provides the world with an insider’s glimpse into his personal maturation, his literary genealogy, and his acclimation to the new role of father rather than child, as Bellow once opined. A triumphant conclusion to Martin’s midlife crisis, Experience stands as a watershed text in the author's corpus. More than any other work, it depicts the wellearned equilibrium that results from Martin's direct confrontation with loss and death, including his father’s, his cousin's, and his own.

Conclusion Projecting a Future: The Amises, Genealogical Dissent, and the British Novel since 1950 My Inner Audience did I think consist chiefly of Larkin and Conquest, especially Larkin. More lately I have added Martin. — Kingsley Amis to Paul Fussell, 27 May 1993

Numerous reviewers make passing references to the professional similarities between Kingsley and Martin Amis. Having published over thirty books, written hundreds of reviews and essays, and been intricately 1nvolved in some of the most hotly debated controversies of the late twen-

tieth century, the Amises make strong claims for preeminence among the specialized subgroup of literary families. With the exception of the Trollopes, no familial tandem has published more than the Amises, and when one limits the search to father-and-son pairs, the Amises are unrivaled in their productivity, fame, and spirit. Given the Amises’ stature, scholars will no doubt continue to examine their familial negotiations, for the subject remains too significant to remain relatively uncovered. The same can be said about their independent careers. As of late 2002, nine scholarly monographs had taken Kingsley Amis exclusively as their subject, whereas only four had examined Martin Amis’s work.! To date, however, no one has examined the Amis pére et fils relationship in 227

228 « Conclusion anything more than a cursory, suggestive fashion, and the present study is offered in hopes of filling this gap, at least preliminarily.

It is tempting to conjecture how this critical neglect developed or why it was allowed to stand for so long. Certainly, the Amises are not minor writers undeserving of attention. Certainly, too, the subject's novelty would not have deterred scholars. One is tempted to wonder whether Kingsley’s conservatism played a part, or whether the Amises’ controversial portraits of women adversely contributed. Or perhaps the reasons were less political. Certainly, questions of method and scope arise. Very real dangers exist that studies might champion one writer at the expense of the other, or that the subject would become too vast, complicating a focus. In addition, scholars intuitively sense a hidden anxiety that studies of influence often find themselves on loose, unstable ground, dabbling in assumption and armchair psychology. Any assessment of fatherson relationships runs into expected and imposing barriers, the greatest of which are ambiguity, extrapolation, falsification, and amateur psychoanalysis. Those risks increase dramatically when one member of the

pair remains productive, engaged in the process of considering (and therefore shaping) their relationship through his writing, as Martin has done with both Experience: A Memoir (2000) and Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002). Finally, it is possible that some schol-

ars have felt that the Amises follow such blatantly separate masters that the study would beg a foregone conclusion, that it would imply nothing other than a straightforward process of literary rejection and exorcism. As this study reveals, however, that is far from the case. For whatever reasons, the Amises’ relationship provides a unique version of literary inheritance and transmission. Animated by potent energies that were equally personal and professional, generational and familial, the Amises’ form of genealogical dissent is too complex to warrant inclusion within the conventional categories of literary influence. Instead, their specialized relationship and divergent approaches require an amalgamationist approach, one that combines assumptions from extant studies of tradition, influence, realism, and postmodernism. It would be wrong, for instance, to reduce the Amises’ rivalry to a provincial opposition between traditionalism and experimentation. Although Kingsley was a dedicated realist opposed to modernist (and cer-

tainly postmodernist) experimentation, his novels make legitimate

Projectinga Future .». 229 claims to stylistic and generic innovation. One should never underestimate the significance of parody and mimicry in his work, or the use of profanity to subvert convention and propriety, assaulting established values from within. As David Lodge has remarked, Kingsley’s supernatural novels The Green Man (1969) and The Alteration (1976) and his

James Bond adventure Colone/ Sun (written under the name Robert Markham, 1968), reveal a realist author taking a vacation from realism,

“finding a way to enjoy the forbidden fruit of romance without fully committing himself to the enterprise.” Writing elsewhere about authorial range, Kingsley has asserted that any “proper writer ought to be able

to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.”? One might rightly argue, therefore, that through these experiments with genre, Kingsley took the novel in directions that Martin would later embrace, playfully inverting, or revaluing, the limits of realism from within the confines of the mode itself. Similarly, one can identify moments in Martin's novels where he too seems to shun his usual predilections, turning his back upon experimentation. [wo complete novels, for instance— The Rachel Papers (1973) and The Information (1995) — can be categorized as psychological realism, albeit informed by Martin's characteristically vibrant prose and entropic concerns. Elsewhere, Martin has spoken of the hidden dangers of postmodernist involution, its potential for “huge boredom”: “Why all the trickiness and self-reflection? Why did writers stop telling stories and

start going on about how they were telling them?” In other words, Amis senior and junior both embrace a guarded reticence about easy classification, partly because labels are misleading by definition, and partly because they make it easier for one’s work to be dismissed.

Questions of genre aside, one would also be wrong to assert that Martin’s career conforms to a simple (and programmatic) Bloomian model of assimilation and misprision, though it certainly incorporates elements of Bloom's oedipal dynamic. Martin does not misread his father's texts, or have to misread them, through acts of conscious or unconscious misprision. Instead, he launches an informed attack upon the narrative assumptions that stabilize his father’s methods of comedy, satire, and realism, in full awareness that his father would recognize his

maneuvers. [hat the Amises’ literary feuds took place in the midst of their careers—while both authors were enjoying notable success and

230 e Conclusion fame—adds a new facet to their model of literary correspondence. Much as boxers clasp onto each other for stability in the later rounds of a fight, so too did the Amises seem to meet in a state of watchful leverage, alert and poised. By the time Martin began writing, Kingsley was a famous and controversial author, yet his precedent example did not s1lence or intimidate his son. Instead it inspired Martin, generating not only his own creative energies but also his revaluative maneuvers. In order to clear an imaginative space for his own work— and to diffuse accusations of literary nepotism — Martin undermined many of the narrative norms that distinguished his father’s work. As Martin's achieve-

ments and fame flourished throughout the 1980s, Kingsley became increasingly cognizant of the literary competition with his son. In his dual roles as father and fellow novelist, he playfully beamed and retali-

ated, notoriously criticizing his son’s methods. Throughout his life, Kingsley never abandoned the charge that Martin’s work was overwrought, egotistical, and ostentatious. Endorsing a more classical conception of narration, Kingsley denigrated his son’s experiments with narrative structure and style, recategorizing Martin’s technical machinations as “fucking around with the reader.” Not surprisingly, the two authors’ literary disagreements migrated into their work, as each writer encoded instances of parodic opposition into their novels. In contrast to Harold Bloom’s celebrated theory of influence, therefore, the Amises’ literary competitions were never hidden nor repressed; nor did they silence either author or force him to evade his rival’s achievements. Instead, their playful, self-conscious rivalry functioned as an active source of literary inspiration, generating and regenerating the grounds for future work. It was an internally productive dialogue that rendered each of them better writers. Were Kingsley and Martin unrelated, such literary jostlings might appear commonplace, yet another instance of a standard rite of passage: two accomplished artists debating the merits of literary technique. One thinks, for instance, of William Blake’s attempts to come to grips with John Milton, of Charles Dickens’s feud with Wilkie Collins, and even, to cite a recent example, of V. S. Naipaul’s battle with John le Carré. But Kingsley and Martin were related, and that leant their spirited conflict a personal dimension that is lacking in these other pairs. It is interesting,

for example, to observe how the Amises tread the shadowy margin

Projecting a Future. 231 separating personal from professional criticism, one that Kingsley crossed more willfully than Martin. Surprisingly, given the occasional brashness of Kingsley’s remarks and the eventual fame both Amises shared, their relationship never suffered from any protracted periods of

rejection. In Martin, Kingsley eventually found an intelligent, selfassured equal whose opinion he could not sway. In Kingsley, Martin found an outspoken literary icon who didn't deny his own prejudices. Operating on both private and public fronts, their relationship helped both writers expand their narrative techniques. Although their personal love for each other was unshakable, their mutual professional respect had to be earned—and reearned with each subsequent production. It is a testament to the creatively generative nature of their relationship that Kingsley eventually admitted Martin as a member of his inner audience. Without doubt, Martin deserves a great deal of credit for not only

following in his father’s footsteps, but also trampling upon them, knowing full well that Kingsley would perceive the damage and eventually respond.

Two complementary impulses or energies therefore animated the Amises’ relationship. In a personal or private context, they dramatized

the turbulence of familial conflict and generational negotiation. Acutely aware of their dual status as family members and as rival novelists, the Amises contested each other’s most cherished values, in both their novels and their public appearances. Such personal sparring, how-

ever, provoked serious consequences for each author's literary techniques. In the process of defining his own style, Martin worked to supplant many of the foundations upon which his father’s novels relied, circumventing Kingsley’s influence by contesting his literary authority. Never one to relinquish a challenge, Kingsley responded in kind, playfully excoriating his son's novels or railing comically against them. In a professional or public context, by contrast, the Amises enacted a narra-

tive of literary transmission and transvaluation. Dissatisfied with the legacy bequeathed them by their authorial ancestors, they consciously rebelled against their literary “fathers,” whether real or imagined, and embraced their literary “grandfathers.” For Kingsley, that meant endorsing a more conventional form of realism, quintessentially comic and social, that contrasted the thematic elitism of modernism and the stylistic pretension of postmodernism. For Martin, that meant rejecting

232, « Conclusion the aesthetic his father so thoroughly upheld and reasserting the validity of modernist and postmodernist forms. Kingsley’s most cherished model in his quest was Henry Fielding, whom he restored to glory in the face of Leavisite revisionings. Martin's favorite models were more contemporary, and significantly, he intentionally embraced, as surrogate literary fathers, the very writers who most irritated his father— Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. In their roles as rival, revaluative novelists, the Amises scrutinized a myriad of stylistic, structural, and thematic questions, and their literary dialogues help clarify many of the modal changes within comedy, satire, and realism that characterize not only their own work but also the twentieth-century transition from modernism to postmodernism.

Whither the Novel? Realism, Postmodernism, and Beyond Brian McHale has argued persuasively that the historical shift from modernism to postmodernism can be theorized as an alteration in moral imperatives. In McHale's formulation, borrowing terminology from Roman Jakobson, the “dominant” imperatives of modernism are existential, concerned with individual behavior in the face of an indifferent or hostile universe. By contrast, the “dominant” imperatives of postmodernism are ontological, concerned with being and identity and with lesser regard for the nature of the universe. Modernist writing, he contends, foregrounds such questions as “How am I to understand my world?” In opposition, postmodernist works engage such questions as “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it? What is a world?”* Although Kingsley and Martin ultimately elude categorization within McHale's theoretical framework (as they do within most others), its borders nicely accentuate some of the larger contexts within which the Amises write. Applying McHale’s framework, one can argue that Kingsley's chief concerns are existential, concerned primarily with the social and moral implications of his characters’ behavior. Kingsley is not, of course, an existentialist or a modernist writer, for he is leery of sweeping metaphysical diagnoses, not to mention the stylistic expansions of a James Joyce or

Virginia Woolf. Instead, Kingsley presents a more moderate, middlebrow perspective whose topics of satirical deflation are individualized

Projecting a Future « 233 affectation and particularized absurdity, derived from Henry Fielding’s mock-heroic picaresques. Kingsley’s chief concerns, however, accord nicely with McHale’s modernist questions, for his works foreground the

existential quest to understand one’s world and to integrate oneself within it. Kingsley’s characters, for instance, never complete their trials

as exiles from the world of commonsense, wit, and reason. Even his most problematic creations, such as Jake Richardson and Stanley Duke, discover a community of sympathy within either the fictive confines of the novel or the sympathies of the reader. As in life, so too in art, James Wolcott reminds us: “The saddest fate in an Amis novel is to be alone, ailing, and unvisited.” Unlike Martin, Kingsley does not problematize the existence of an empirical, operative reality. Possessed of a full allot-

ment of free will, his characters try to understand the world in which they live, even if they ultimately repudiate that world’s social values and

formalized absurdities. In Iris Murdoch’s famous analogy, Kingsley’s works provide a “house fit for free characters to live in.” His fictive realms posit normative behavior and social interaction as a barometer for social humanism, and he seeks to explore individual means for selfdeflation, knowledge, and insight. In only two novels (The Antt-Death League |1966] and Russian Hide and Seek {1980]) does Kingsley allow his

authorial voice to verge upon prophecy, though even then his primary concerns remain realistic— his characters’ response to their fictional reality, not reality itself. Martin, of course, explores existentialist questions equally as frequently as Kingsley, but his works more directly engage ontological issues of being and identity rather than morality or social behavior. That is one key to his postmodernist tendencies and a helpful marker within McHale's polarities. In Martin’s imaginary realms, morality and reality are dubious propositions, ones which Martin often undermines or complicates. As in Samuel Beckett’s plays, Martin’s characters seem trapped in repetitive or fixed time. They are unable to effect meaningful change, and they often discover that identity and reality are illusory constructs, manipulated by authorial guile. Time moves circularly in a work such as Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), whereas it moves backward in Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense (1991).° In London Fields (198Q), it proceeds relentlessly toward its fated termination, invalidating free will and autonomy. Finally, in Money: A Suicide Note (1984), the

234. « Conclusion character John Self discovers the artifice that thwarts his attempts at self-realization or free will, and triumphantly he throws a punch at Martin, liberating himself from his creator’s fictive prison. Whereas Kingsley recoils from large-scale social prognostication, Martin frequently engages in metaphysical diagnosis. In fact, prophecy — deriving perhaps from Bellow’s influence—seems to have become a dominant facet of Martin's recent prose, flourishing even in nonfiction works such as Koba the Dread.’ Martin is more interested in holistically examining the disconnected, decentered modern world, whereas Kingsley concentrates more upon the function of individual identity and relationships within that world. To Martin, questions of character, motivation, and fate swirl in a maelstrom of determinism and amorality. In the final analysis, few (if any) transcendent absolutes fix value or identity for Martin’s beleaguered victims. They labor in worlds that offer limited possibilities for

escape or amelioration, and their attempts at enlightenment are constantly thwarted or duped. These elements of characterization and theme also illuminate some of the formal evolutions of the novel since 1950. Just as Kingsley reacted against his modernist forebears, reyecting their convoluted syntax and structure, so too did Martin internalize and renounce the dominant literary models of his father’s generation, forswearing traditional means of representation. In their separate declarations of literary sentiments, the

Amises prefigured the transnationalist, historiographic, and autobiographical nature of literature that has come to distinguish the British novel at the end of the century. As will be discussed here, these charac-

teristics have had an assimilative effect upon genre, and that generic conflation has become a vital component not only of Martin Amis’s work but also of many accomplished novelists writing today.

When considering the future of Martin's fiction, or British fiction in general, three particular examples seem significant for their predictive potential. ‘Two are conferences and one is a review essay, but together they help illuminate some of the paths that lie before the British novel, poised yet again at the crossroads of past and future. The earliest occurred in the summer of 1978, when the English journal New Review convened a symposium to evaluate the state of contemporary fiction. Its purpose was both prophetic and diagnostic: authors were asked to assess

Projecting a Future « 235 the changes that fueled the transformation from realism to postmodernism. Martin Amis was one of the respondents, and he took as his subject the Eliotic impact of historical tradition upon his work. Although his words are over twenty years old, they still provide one of the best interpretations of his literary goals and of the general evolution of

the novel since 1950. “A new tradition can only evolve out of an old one, he proclaimed; “it cannot be induced. If I try very hard, I can imagine a novel that is as tricksy, as alienated and as writerly as those of, say, Robbe-Grillet, while also providing the staid satisfactions of pace, plot and humor with which we associate, say, Jane Austen. In a way, I imagine that this is what I myself am trying to do.” Twenty-two years later Martin attended another important conference, “The Novel in Britain, 1950-2000,” held at the Huntington Li-

brary. Appearing with writers ranging from Hillary Mantel to Ian McEwan to Salman Rushdie, and scholars/reviewers such as Lindsay Duiga, Elaine Showalter, and James Wood, Martin spoke about the “Americanization’ of British fiction. After the perfunctory admission that he might consider relocating to the United States when his sons were out of school, he intimated in a more serious tone that the JewishAmerican novel showed signs of weakening, so there would be room for him in the American literary pantheon. Martin is not Jewish, of course; nor was he speaking of converting. Rather, his remarks presage the decline in contemporary modes of literary prophecy, at which the JewishAmerican novel presumably excelled, as no writer seems poised to extend Bellow’s oracular tradition. This tradition, of course, is one that Martin uses to define his own writing, and, significantly, he perceives its desuetude. His anxiety over the survival of the mode can be glimpsed as

well in the manuscript from which Martin read during the conference, which was at that stage a sixty-page “political memoir,” a work that would eventually become much larger, evolving into Koba the Dread. Within it, Martin attempts to blend two seemingly disparate voices: the objective voice of historical fact and the subjective voice of personal connection. Importantly, that book conveys an instinctive sensitivity to human violence and a refusal to subordinate it to technique — tropes that have become more pronounced since Martin wrote Night Train (1997) and Experience. Whereas previous novels such as London Fields and Times Arrow had examined the greatest fears and lacunae of the

236 « Conclusion twentieth century, especially nuclear apocalypse and Nazi genocide, Koba the Dread attempts to combine the personal with the political, the

poignant with the prophetic. Of course, it also extends Martin's dialogue with his absent father, rhetorically invoking one of Kingsley’s best friends — Robert Conquest — as well.? In brief, the book shows Martin

working to evolve a new means of expression, one that is stylistically and generically assimilative, a hybrid conflation of modes. This development accords perfectly with comments Martin has made about the work of another celebrated American novelist — Don DeLillo.

In 1991, Martin published an important review of DeLillo’s novel, Mao If, in which he questioned the future of postmodernism, elaborating his conviction that the next phase of literature must assimilate classically realistic protocols, not strictly oppose them. Borrowing terminology from Roland Barthes, Martin praised DeLillo’s ability to create works that were simultaneously “readerly” and “writerly,” combining the old, presumably worn methods of realism with the stylistic and structural achievements of postmodernism. Martin was certainly not the first person to wonder whether postmodernism’s technical experiments had started to verge upon depletion. In part, this exhaustion derived from

the fact that postmodern writers were the inheritors of an external world where moral codes of conduct no longer applied, where nuclear weapons invalidated all forms of transcendence, and where the very natures of history, reality, and subjectivity were unstable. Metaphysical solutions had become impossible to locate, and the only choice available to writers seemed therefore stylistic— how best to render the complexities of contemporary life. It was within this criterion of technique that Martin felt DeLillo most dramatically succeeded, presaging a potential phase beyond postmodernism: “Whereas his contemporaries have been

drawn to the internal, the ludic, and the enclosed, DeLillo goes at things the other way. He writes about the new reality—realistically.”!° Writing realistically about the new reality has come to resemble what Martin calls “higher autobiography” in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986) and Experience, a mode that has much in common with Linda Hutcheon’ notion of Aistortographic metafiction. Regardless of which term one prefers, novels that fall under these rubrics are often defined by three primary criteria: an intense, self-reflexive and

often problematic subjectivity; a formal erosion (or assimilation) of

Projecting a Future . 237 genre, often powered by the use of pastiche and parody; and a complex encoding of history— one that not only confirms the validity of historical event but simultaneously calls attention to the textuality of history, its posthumously constructed, narrative nature. The resultant texts — hybrid amalgamations of multiple genres — often seek to combine autobiography, history, reportage, and fiction. For Martin, especially in such works as Eznstein’s Monsters and London Fields, this type of writing can be viewed as a by-product of the nuclear age, in which weapons transform history into apocalyptic threat, destabilizing reality. Notably, the omnipresence of fear produces deleterious effects upon subjectivity and upon transcendent emotions such as love, family, and hope. Rather than denoting the hypothetical “end of history” that Jean Baudrillard uses to define the postmodern world, however, many of the best novels of the 1980s

and 1990s incorporate history in ways that signal an evolution beyond the solipsistic and ahistorical nature of technique. More specifically, a tendency arose in many works from this period to assimilate elements from both postmodernism and classical realism, allowing for greater experiments in character and voice. The result was generic and stylistic hybridity, combining postmodernism’s playful erosion of subjectivity, history, and reality with the morality, linearity, and adherence to fact that stemmed from classical realism. Divergent forms of “Higher autobiography” and “historiographic metafiction” inscribed subjectivity into history, accentuating not only the synthesizing nature of narration but also the role of the narrator as a mediating consciousness between reader and reality. Positing history as a by-product of subjectivity and textuality helped to register the seeming amorality and contingency of modern life. As Martin explained to John Haffenden: “I think the novel is moving more and more closely to what life is like — [which is] not the same thing

as realism —and that is why it’s so autobiographical at the moment.”!! For Martin, this complex relationship between subjectivity and history has culminated in a “moral void” of meaning and value. Full-scale nuclear war has not happened; therefore the nuclear experience has ultimately become defined by variant feelings of fear and powerlessness, “exorbitant terror and absurdity.” A negative side effect of this “moral void” has been the erosion of metaphysical constructs that previously stabilized

meaning and value. More dramatically than existentialism, which posited an indifferent or hostile universe, a work of “higher autobiography”

238 « Conclusion such as DeLillo’s Underworld dramatized how nuclear weapons rendered the world not simply indifferent but rather absurd, meaningless, almost a bad joke. Significantly, Martin celebrates the combination of the personal and the political, the ludic and the lofty, in this novel: “Underworld is [DeLillo’s] most demanding novel but it is also his most transparent. It has an undertow of personal pain, having to do with the fateful irreversabilities in a young life—a register that DeLillo has never

touched before. This isn’t Meet the Author. It is the earned but privileged intimacy that comes when you see a writer whole—what Leavis called the ‘sense of pregnant arrest.’” Of course, such absurdist and deflationary tendencies would have a corresponding effect upon character, motivation, and morality, the hallmarks of classical realism. Responding to the charges of Andrew Marr, chairman of the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize committee, that the British novel seemed “clever but empty,” especially when compared with new works in the fields of history and biography, Jason Cowley questioned whether “fiction in Britain long ago ceased to be an act of moral inquiry.”! In many ways, Cowley’s words epitomize the evolutionary difficulties that have beset English fiction as it departed from older models of traditional realism embraced by writers such as Kingsley Amis to the assimilative postmodern forms of Martin Amis’s work. On one side, writers face a hypothetical Scylla of literary trickery —unreliable narrators,

innovative time schemes, subversions of identity and reality. On the other side, they face a Charybdis of cliché—pat sentimentality, clumsy romanticism, and hermeneutic closure. For some readers, most notably James Wood, these warring tensions have produced a state of fiction that seems internally divided and at risk of collapse, imprisoned within its own technical devices.43 For other readers, however, the hybrid forms of English fiction seemed to furnish vibrant opportunities for ex-

periment and renewal. The author of the present study contends and hopes that the decade of the 1980s will eventually be recognized as one

of the most important in the history of the twentieth-century novel. Energized by two interrelated human conditions— the hypersensitivity of nuclear fears and the social upheavals brought about by, among other things, urban punk culture —the political tensions of the 1980s inspired new novelistic forms that were stylistically emancipatory. Refusing to sacrifice representational fidelity to the contingencies of the nuclear age,

Projecting a Future.» 239 many of the best novels of the 1980s equally engaged history and imagi-

nation, luxuriating in their existential uncertainty. Indeed, we see evidence of such a hierarchical evolution in the late-century ascendancy of writers who privilege, as Martin Amis does, a synthesis of subjectivity,

history, and reality. |

At one polarity of this imaginary spectrum between mimesis and postmodernism (or Kingsley and Martin Amis) we can position (with Martin) such writers as Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift, as well as John Banville, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, lan McEwan, Will Self, and Jeanette Winterson, proponents of a type of experimental realism that intentionally blurs the boundaries of narrative and reality. Rushdie’s masterpiece, Midnight's Children (1980), for instance, is a novel seemingly at war with itself. The narrator’s excessive self-reflexivity, fractured selves, and pluralistic realities derive from postmodern experiments in style and structure. By contrast, the novel’s inter-

polation of Indian politics since 1947 summon Marxist and historicist dialectics into the text, demanding fixed material realities that eschew postmodern experiment and derive from postcolonialism. Paradoxically amalgamating both postmodernism and postcolonialism, the novel therefore epitomizes a condition of being “handcuffed to history,” as the opening paragraph attests: it craves the existence of material reality while simultaneously working to problematize such existence. Saleem Sinai, the narrator, confronts these same internal oppositions: throughout the book, he physically disintegrates, culminating in total fragmentation and discontinuity at the novel’s end. His narrative does not solely record his role in the historical events following India’s declaration of independence; it also registers his subjective desire to withstand erosion. In other words, his condition mirrors the unstable nature of his narrative as well as the divisive realities of Indian politics, and he employs narration as a bulwark against subjective and historical erasure. Similarly, Graham Swift’s masterpiece, Waterland (1983), traces the expansive genealogies of two families, the Cricks and the Atkinsons, through an elaborate archeology of the past. This historical reimagining, however, is prompted by the narrator Jom Crick’s attempt to reestablish order and control. In the process of trying to deduce logical reasons for his wife's abduction of a baby, [om is forced to confront the tenuous separation of history and fairy tale. He turns his classroom history lessons

240 e« Conclusion into personal recollections, abandoning his official subject, the French Revolution, for revolutions of another, more individual kind. He seeks answers to a present condition that is saturated with meaning, and in the process, he accentuates his students’ apocalyptic fears for the future. ““T never said that, sir. Never said anything about paradise. But—I1 want

a future,” Price says, articulating the anxieties of his classmates, “"We all do. And you—you can stuff your past!’” Similar exercises in theme and technique can be found in numerous novels by the other authors listed above, but the present writer would suggest that Banville's Book of Evidence (1989) and Ghosts (1993), Barnes’s Flaubert’ Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in Ten Chapters (1989), Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and Winterson’s The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989) are especially relevant.

At the opposite polarity of this spectrum between realism and postmodernism, one might situate (with Kingsley Amis) such contempo-

rary writers as Malcolm Bradbury, A. 5. Byatt, Margarett Drabble, Penelope Lively, David Lodge (with two possible exceptions), Muriel Spark, and A. N. Wilson, practitioners of a more traditional form of realism whose characters, themes, and structural grammar remain, for the most part, moral and humanistic. This is not to say that their work rejects experiment in toto or that it has not been influenced by postmodernism. Indeed, just as many postmodernist writers internalize realist norms, so too do these writers imaginatively engage postmodernist experimentation. Rather, the majority of these writers’ works declare their allegiances to more classic forms of realism, especially as regards morality, the individual, and society. “Morally meaningful behavior,” Kingsley stipulated in the mid-1980s, “depends on there being some sort of structure. No system of belief exists by which society can judge somebody and by which somebody can judge himself. When your only interest is in surviving, life becomes meaningless and not worth living.” Similarly, David Lodge has commented upon the paradoxical combining of subjectivity and history in many postmodern novels: “History may be, ina philosophical sense, a fiction, but it does not feel like that when we miss a train or somebody starts a war.’ !4

Of this group, David Lodge may be the hardest to categorize, as his celebrated parodic novel Sma// World (1984) could be classified as an ex-

ercise in experimental realism, as would his early novel of linguistic

Projecting a Future». 241 pastiche, The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965). In these novels, Lodge embarks upon his own “vacation from realism,” like the one he once diagnosed in Kingsley Amis’s work.!° The majority of his novels, however, mostly forswear such experiments in structure and style. Nice Work (1988), for example, portrays the romance between a director of an engineering firm and a feminist at a local university, dramatizing C. P. Snow’s famous pronouncement about the ideological differences between “town” and “gown.” The novel annotates the effects of feminist politics upon society, considering them from the vantage point of gen-

erational and gender separation. The novel can also be viewed as a condition-of-England novel, a modern revaluation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Whereas Gaskell’s book scrutinized the treatment of oppressed labor classes in the mid-nineteenth century, Lodge’s work similarly examines forms of intellectual and ideological oppres-

sion. He couches the rhetoric of generational and gender difference within the developing romance of the characters Vic Wilcox and Robyn Penrose and thereby illuminates the personal and societal debates feminism inspired in the twentieth century. Among all the novelists referenced above, perhaps A. S. Byatt and

Penelope Lively have best exemplified the lasting merits of mimetic forms. Like Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, Byatt’s greatest novel, Possession (1990), encodes two characters’ pursuit of love within a literary quest of academic scholarship and greed. Invoking a plethora of literary genres and personae, the novel makes reference to numerous critical essays, biographical excerpts, diaries, letters, and poems. The tonal effect of these invocations is nostalgic, as the novel seeks to champion

the dignity of Victorian restraint by intentionally juxtaposing it to the antiromantic ideals of the postmodern age. The main characters, Roland and Maud, seem to crave a purer form of asexual love and communion, and by the novel’s end, Byatt succeeds in rescuing romance and morality from the detritus of postmodernism and poststructuralism. As the present study has hoped to make clear, Martin’s novels to date exist in stark opposition to such humanistic strivings or ameliorative worldviews. Instead, his work exemplifies the fin du millénaire exhaustion of human connection and love. “Everything has been cheapened, the accumulation of experience is causing decay,” Martin told Mira Stout in 1990, “Romantic love will always be there, but it’s harder

242 e Conclusion for it to flourish. As Bellow says, ours is a sclerotic Eros.” Invoking another mentor, Martin concludes, “The fact is, my satire wouldn't work if what I’m satirizing were not valued. Like Larkin’s poetry, love is conspicuous by its absence.”!6

The key differences between these two groups of novelists neatly parallel the literary opposition that existed between Kingsley and Martin Amis. Far more significant than an insular quarrel between father and son or a provincial English conflict between realism and experimentation, the Amises’ literary debates did not solely illuminate the modal transformation from mimesis to postmodernist aesthetics. Instead, they possessed remarkable predictive powers, intimating the evolution beyond postmodernism that is still underway. The rise of such writers as Carter, Ishiguro, Rushdie, Swift, and Martin Amis attests not only to the presiding influence of “higher autobiography” and “historiographic metafiction” in contemporary literature but also to the correspondent decline of more traditional forms of mimesis. Stated in terms of the Amis father-and-son dynamic, these issues can be neatly simplified: although Kingsley was able to rally his forces to produce The Old Devils (1986), his greatest work of humanistic rejuvenation, he would ultimately be forced to concede that Martin’s more experimental forms had triumphed, emerging as the dominant literary aesthetic during the 1980s and 1990s. As 1n all such conflicts, the literary marketplace would offer its own judgment, too: in the first years of the twenty-first century, less than a decade after his death, over two-thirds of Kingsley’s novels

would be out of print in his native England; in America, only three of his twenty-four novels would remain available. ‘That is not to say, however, that Martin can claim victory at this stage in the Amis family saga.

While the adoption rates of his methods have been superior, his postmodern aesthetic has suffered challenges, especially in recent years. With Kingsley’s departure, it remains to be seen whether Martin's best work is yet to come or is already behind him.

After Kingsley: Martin Amis and the Event Horizons of Fiction In Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction, Jerome Meckier reveals the extent to which Wilkie Collins depended upon his friendship and ri-

valry with Charles Dickens for creative inspiration. Dickens was

Projecting a Future « 243 “never sufficiently satirical and sensational” to please Collins, and The Woman in White and The Moonstone stand as testaments to Collins's attempt to outdo his rival in melodramatic realism. To surpass his contemporary, Dickens later employed The Mystery of Edwin Drood, improving upon The Woman in White and The Moonstone by adding “the split personality to his panoply of satiric metaphors in Bleak House and Little Dorrit.” Fabricating a “prototype for a new satiric metaphor for breakdown, collapse, and disintegration,” Dickens requited his nemesis’s earlier examples.!”7 With Dickens's death in 1870, however, Collins was deprived of the creative rivalry that inspired his fiction. The result was a forgettable period of minor fiction, beginning with The New Magdalen in 1873. Sadly, after Kingsley Amis’s death in 1995, comparisons with the career of Martin Amis can be similarly posited.

In London Fields Martin utilizes scientific terminology to describe the distortion that takes place when an object or individual approaches a black hole in space. First, he explains, one would encounter a membrane of circling detritus, called an accretion disk. Then one would pass the Schwarzchild radius (or, more popularly, the event horizon), a “turnstile to oblivion beyond which there [is| only one future.” Crossing the event horizon would signify the collapse of “spacetime.” “Now there can be no escape,” he concludes; “during the instantaneous descent, all of eternity has passed on the outside.”!8 Though admittedly his metaphor works better to explain the pressures facing the character Nicola Six in the novel, it is tempting to apply it also to Martin's writing since his father’s death in 1995. In the years that followed, Martin has turned increasingly to nonfiction. Without doubt, more years will have to pass before the Amises’ relationship can be fully assessed. Martin's personal memotr, Experience, certainly helps to clarify the issues of influence and revaluation that surrounded the Amises’ work during Kingsley’s lifetime, and his political memoir, Koba the Dread, similarly functions as a metaphysical summons, respectfully resurrecting Kingsley to quarrel with his politics.

Throughout the latter work, Martin's political rhetoric blends with his personal expressions of fear and loss, emerging as an amalgam of genre — equal parts autobiography, biography, political science, and his-

torical fiction. In many ways, it is a nonfiction example of the type of writing Martin praised in DeLillo’s Mao IT and Underworld. We will

244 « Conclusion have to wait longer still, however, to see how Martin’s novels react to the loss of his creative sparring partner, Kingsley. Although Experience and Koba the Dread strive to depict Martin's personal reemergence from crisis, it remains to be seen whether his fiction will similarly recover. One wonders, for instance, whether Martin will be able to realign his profes-

sional sensibilities, as did Kingsley when he emerged from the mudslinging period of Jakes Thing (1978) and Stanley and the Women (1984).

One wonders also whether Martin will continue to expand the perimeter of his postmodernist terrain, seeking hybrid conflations of voice and genre, as he has done in a nonfiction framework. Despite the impressive artistry of Experience, the fact remains that Martin has struggled to produce a major work of fiction in the years following Kingsley’s death. Instead, his novels seem to be in a symbolic holding pattern, poised at the event horizon, as were Kingsley’s before the imaginative renewal of The O/d Devils. As a brief glimpse at Martins career arguably confirms, his novels have been in a controlled decline, at least critically, for the past decade, leading some to question whether celebrity has had a damaging effect on his work.!? Few people can denigrate the achievements of Money, which justly elevated Martin’s reputation to Olympian heights. But that novel appeared in 1984. Then followed a consolidation period characterized by a collection of essays, [se Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, and an edition of short stories, Einstein’s Monsters (1987). High expectations therefore attended the publication of London Fields in 1989, but that novel seemed to some readers a lengthy exposition of themes already foreshadowed by Einsteins Monsters. A sophisticated treatment of the fatalistic impact of

nuclear weapons upon human hopes and dreams, the book was justly celebrated as well as justly panned. For all its stylistic glory, it lacked the

playful exuberance that distinguished Money, and its heavy-handed ideas about fate, death, and the end of love seemed at times tendentious

and didactic, however well-stated. The short novel that followed— Time’ Arrow —was a similar tour de force of technique, but it, too, raised new questions about the emotional depths of Martin's work. Employing a series of formal devices — inverted time schemes, levels of reality, and divided consciousness — to render the trials of soul that stemmed from

Nazi war crimes, the novel seemed to some readers emotionally disconnected. Arguably, this was an intentional effect, but nonetheless, Time’

Projecting a Future « = 245 Arrow continued the downward critical momentum that has surrounded Martin's work since Money. A new collection of essays — Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993) — then followed, before Martin’s ce-

lebrity would metamorphose in the media limelight surrounding his most eagerly awaited novel, The Information. Nothing but the Booker Prize would have satisfied people at that stage, but the novel failed to make the shortlist for the year, leading some people to question whether Martin’s fiction would ever reemerge from what one critic called its “ef-

fortful decline.” In many ways, all the necessary factors seem present for Martin’s professional reemergence or renaissance. His relative silence in fiction since 1995 has been noticeable, however. Night Train returns to the themes and architecture of Times Arrow, and his most recent collection, Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), seems derivative of an earlier work such as Einstein’s Monsters. Until more years pass and more novels appear, one can only conjecture how Martin will rise from his period of re-

alignment. Will he be able to produce his most significant work now that Kingsley is not hovering in the background? Or will the loss of that creatively inspirational, internally productive relationship force Martin

into an artistic tailspin like the one that Wilkie Collins experienced, compounding professional loss with familial tragedy? Although literary | history will ultimately write the answers to these questions, some intimations about the future of Martin's fiction can be deduced from his own comments about life and literature in the mid-r1ggos.

Professional Realignment? Love, Children, and Night Train At this stage of his career, Martin seems conscious of the need for stylistic and thematic rejuvenation. He may need to swerve, as did his father before him when Kingsley repudiated the divisive themes that preceded (and prevented) The Old Devils. Martin has already relinquished some of his interest in nuclear weapons, for instance, as their imminent threats have dimmed with the fall of the Soviet empire. Wisely or not, neither the world nor Martin seems as stricken by the emotional and intellectual immediacy of apocalypse that was common twenty years ago. Martin’s antinuclear manifesto “Thinkability” (in Eznsteins Monsters) now reads like a period piece, as do parts of London Fields. Among

246 « Conclusion these shifting political conditions Martin has uncovered an emotional and intellectual freedom. Reflecting upon the pregnant anxieties of the nuclear age to Graham Fuller in 1995, Martin contemplated the void previously filled by fear: “The big question of the second half of the cen-

tury was, ‘What are we going to do with nuclear weapons.’ Now that we ve got out of the emotional idea that it could all end tomorrow, we can look at other things. That’s a success story, and an evolutionary development of huge significance.” Reviewing DeLillo’s Underworld two years later, Martin clarified the “other things” that might assume more prominent positions in his fiction: “I understand DeLillo to be saying that all our better feelings took a beating during those decades. An ambient mortal fear constrained us. Love, even parental love, got harder to do.”2! For numerous readers and critics, including Kingsley Amis, Martins work has always dramatized the conflict between voice and ideas, and it seems to be this conflict, preeminently, that Martin must work to resolve if he is to produce significantly new fiction. As Experience confirms, Martin's sensibilities deepened significantly in the mid-1990s, and since then he has begun to speak more positively of the potential for love and happiness in the modern world. His second marriage, to Isabel Fonseca, greatly accelerated the transformation, as

did the birth of his children. His two sons by Antonia Phillips, Louis and Jacob, were born in 1984 and 1986, respectively, at the apex of the nuclear experience. Their births—and a perusal of Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1984)— would spur Martin's paternalistic defenses,

informing his more political texts London Fields, Times Arrow, and Exnstein’s Monsters.** More recently, he has been given three daughters: two— Fernanda (b. 1996) and Clio (b. 1998)—by Isabel Fonseca and a

third— Delilah Seale (b. 1978)—from his affair with Lamorna Heath Seale, when she was temporarily separated from her husband Patrick. Taken together, the experiences of fatherhood and remarriage have had a noticeable impact on Martin's work in the late 1990s: they seem to have inspired the glimmers of narrative amelioration found in Night Train as well as the psychological courage of Experience and Koba the Dread, which directly confront crisis, loss, and death. The most imposing barrier that Martin may need to confront as he develops the later phase of his work remains stylistic— finding a new voice that can convey in fiction the emotional courage that energized

Projecting a Future. 247 Experience. In previous works, for instance, he has consciously sublimated positive emotions, eschewing them in favor of darker narrative proclivities. Writing in 1995 about Saul Bellow'’s The Adventures of Augie

March, Martin proclaimed that “in literature goodness has always been bad news. As Montherlant said, happiness — the positive value — ‘writes

white.” Only Tolstoy, he concluded, “made happiness swing on the page. *3 Experience proved brilliantly that Martin could address such feelings in a nonfiction format, but as of this writing in early 2003 no recent novel has performed a similar feat in fiction. Certainly, one would be deluded to expect Martin to forswear the charged language that has come to distinguish his work, and one hopes that his next novel will silence these concerns. Faced with this stylistic frontier, however, Martin

may have to mollify the technical trickery that energized his experimental middle novels Money, London Fields, and Time's Arrow. The praise he bestows upon Kingsley’s Te Old Devils and Bellow’s later work seems to convey such a recognition, as do the prominent references to love, children, and forgiveness that appeared with increasing frequency in his interviews during the middle to late 1990s.

Speaking in 1993 to friend and fellow novelist Will Self, Martin noted that he has never “written a naive novel in the sense that the action is presented as actually happening. There’s always a playful element, and there’s always a kind of writer figure hovering around, or a more than usually animated narrator.”*4 Although Martin has yet to achieve the tonal reyuvenation conveyed by Kingsley's Te Old Devils in a major work of fiction, he does appear to have taken the first steps in a minor work— Night Train, his novel about suicide narrated entirely by an American female character. Whereas Martin had previously experimented with female points of view— Other People: A Mystery Story, for instance, is written entirely from the heroine's vantage point, as are large portions of London Fields—he had never before done so through first-

person narration, so Night Train represents a notable departure. This uncharted artistic territory allowed him to incorporate new methods of characterization, voice, and theme. Mike Hoolihan, the paradoxically named female narrator, for example, is independent, powerful, and confident, an exemplar of feminist authority. However, she neither carries her feminism on her back nor wears it upon her sleeve. Instead, she renounces polarizing rhetoric, as the novel’s opening lines convey: “Iam a

248 « Conclusion police. That may sound like an unusual statement—or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say | am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police.” Justifiably, Martin received a great deal of criticism for this opening, which asserts an American idiolect that bears dubious correlation to re-

ality. More importantly, however, the novel’s opening lines declare an androgynous perspective that resides outside of (or beyond) gender politics. In this regard, Martin quietly rejects more extreme, late-phase feminists such as Héléne Cixous or Kate Millet in favor of earlier moderates like Virginia Woolf, who sought to displace essentialist politics of gender by seeking an imaginative middle ground between male selfactualization and female self-annihilation.?° In contrast to the relatively masculinist perspectives of his earlier work, Night Train thereby extends a conciliatory hand to feminism (and to feminist critics), abdicating the avant-garde extravagances that had previously offended some readers. Despite this aspect of the novel’s feminist matrix, it is important to recognize that Night Train’s feminism is consciously latent rather than overt. The novel never aspires to the status of political corrective.

Instead, Mike Hoolihan’s attempt to unravel the moral mysteries of suicide — its legacy upon the living, its judgment upon life —is presented

without Martin's usual stylistic artifice. Through segmented, cropped sentences, which are themselves a variation of suicide (or shortened exis-

tence), Martin exerts a minimalist control over the text. His narrator craves relatedness and connection with her readers, and she is, above all things, dependable. In this novel, Martin set aside the unreliable narration and the multiple levels of reality that distinguished his earlier work, as Hoolihan’s narration achieves a representational intimacy and honesty that stands apart from Martin’s other narrators. As Natasha Walter has noted, the novel betokens a new tonal softening: “There is unfeigned sorrow behind this little thriller and a sense of direct intimacy Amis has not attempted before. It is as though by taking on a woman's voice, he has found a franker, less ironic world than in his other novels.””6 Martin echoed these comments during two interviews in 1998, three years after Kingsley’s death and two years before Experience would appear. Responding to Laura Miller’s suggestion that Night Train signaled

a new direction in his work, characterized by a less lofty authorial

Projecting a Future. 249 perspective, Martin confessed to feeling that he was at “a kind of turning point”: “I’ve been playing the devil’s advocate for a long time. I sometimes think it’s easy to be dark, easy to be nihilistic.” Immediately afterward he indicated that he was engaged in writing a memoir of his father, then concluded, “When I have done that, I feel I'll have cleared the path for something.” Similarly speaking with David Aaronovitch on the television program Booked, Martin remarked simply and perhaps prophetically that “death invigorates you, funnily enough. Even though you never get over the death of your father because he’s a part of yourself and that part has gone for ever, it makes you feel that you've come into your own seniority at last.”27

It is possible that Night Train may someday come to be recognized as a pivotal turning point in Martin’s oeuvre, perhaps the inaugural text

of his later phase. Such elevation, however, greatly depends upon Martin’s subsequent productivity. By itself, Night Train is too slim a volume to rank among Martin's finest work, and for all its stylistic honesty, Mike Hoolihan’s narration is unusually forgettable, at least when com-

pared with the triumphant proclamations of, say, John Self in Money.

Without question, Martin is one of the most quotable writers since Joyce: he learned early from Nabokov that an ecstatic, invigorated lexi-

con could redeem unintentional defects in characterization and plot. The language of Night Train, however, is among the least memorable in

Martin's corpus. An obsessive collector of bon mots—someone like Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers, for example—would find little to record. These minor deficits aside, Night Train nonetheless remains a tonally significant work as well as a possible indicator of the fictional norms Martin’s future novels might engage, excepting (of course) exclusively female narration.

In the context of Kingsley and Martin’s literary debates, it is also tempting to view Night Train as a symbolic concession to, and a partial

gravitation toward, some of Kingsley's representational norms. Certainly no one should expect Martin, in the next stage of his career, to migrate as if by genetic default toward the moral humanism that animated his father’s work. However, some processes of accommodation and reconciliation have already taken place. Besides Night Train, The Information also suggested an embrace, albeit tentative, of less experimental mimetic forms. If Experience—with its elaborate time schemes

250 e Conclusion and thematic doublings— can justly be hailed as a postmodern memorr, then Times Arrow may arguably be Martin's last full-blown postmodern novel. (The Information, by contrast, should be seen as a work of higher autobiography, a hybrid conflation of realism and postmodernism.) Just

as Martin was moving spiritually closer to Kingsley throughout the composition of Experience, recollecting and reshaping his memories for publication, so too has he now moved artistically closer to Kingsley after his death, temporarily abandoning his technical sensationalism. Koda the Dread continues this adjustment, as the historical facts of that work are bordered and intersected by personal reminiscence and emotional connection, as Martin strives to ameliorate prophecy with humanism. Time alone will tell if these artistic conciliations, or homecomings, will evolve into something more substantial than their current tentative forays. If so, sufficient models exist to theorize such a shift. Suzan Harrison suggests a particularly tempting approach that certainly applies to Experience and Koba the Dread. Combining ideas from Mikhail Baktin and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Harrison suggests that in some instances involving influence, the “central issue is not [one] of control or partition, but of managing the contradictory implications of the desire for relationship . . . and the desire for intimacy, up to and including a symbolic merger with the other.” Similarly, T. S. Eliot intuited this desire for continuation, arguing that while a writer may appear to be in revolt “as a promising adolescent may revolt against the beliefs, the habits and the manners of his parents” he ultimately appears in retrospect to have been “the continuer of their traditions [and] preserves essential family

characteristics.”28 In a Bloomian context, one might also assert that Martin has used Experience and Koba the Dread to leverage his power as a “strong” writer to control his father’s reputation, simultaneously preserving Kingsley’s achievements while working to mollify his failings. However attractive such ideas appear to be, Martin’s relative silence

in fiction since Kingsley’s death complicates their application. Future revaluators of the Amises’ work might well be able to posit this new facet in their literary negotiations, but at this stage, the present study cannot, as such developments remain too uncertain to assert. That is not to say, however, that Martin has not intuited such a shift, as has Elizabeth Jane Howard, who remarked in 2000 that she felt Martin was at a stage where he would write a “much better” novel. “What I’ve felt

Projecting a Future. 251 about him,” she explained, “is he’s got this huge, savage, natural talent for writing, and for language, and for comic situations, but I didn't feel his heart was enough in it. ... He was looking at people too much from the outside.” Barely past the dawn of the twenty-first century, Martin

Amis therefore seems poised at an artistic crossroads. He long ago evolved beyond imitation of his mentors; helped accelerate the importation of American rhythms into British fiction; perfected his postmodernist style and themes; and plaved an influential role in the transna-

tionalism and conflation of genre that have come to distinguish the British novel in the last quarter century. Currently, however, he confronts an artistic future that is defined by two interrelated pressures: the absence of the creatively inspirational relationship with his father, and the need to transform his novelistic techniques, if only to stave off reit-

eration. As James Wood has noted about Martin’s last major work of fiction, The Information, “As long as the novel remains cartoonish, the structures do their work; but when [it] seeks any kind of real seriousness, they are a prison.” ?

Whatever the outcome of Martin's future work, it seems patently clear that the careers of Kingsley and Martin Amis will remain central to an understanding of the British novel since 1950. Contesting each other’s declared sensibilities, the Amises have furnished scholars with one of the most revolutionary examples of literary transmission and revaluation. Their personalized model of genealogical dissent operates along not only familial but generational lines, and it achieves a level of mutual inspiration that distinguishes them within other studies of influence and intertextuality. Actively engaged in literary debates over the future of re-

alism, satire, and comedy, the Amises adopt strategic positions in the historical battle between these modes’ traditional or classic forms and the insurrectionist attack launched upon them by both modernism and postmodernism. By interrogating many of the stylistic and structural foundations that support these forms, the Amises remain centrally concerned with literature’s internal metastasis, with the modal transformations irrevocably inspired by both its own evolution and by the theory and practice of literary competition. Regardless of the alluvial siftings of literary history, the Amises provide readers with a vibrant corpus of work that not only captured the idioms and concerns of their respective

252, « «©. Conclusion

generations, but continues to do so for new generations today. It may be a long time indeed before such feats are duplicated, at least within the limited circle of literary families. If Martin embraces a hybrid form of postmodern realism that amalgamates earlier forms, including his father’s, then Kingsley can also be

seen as reworking Martin's assimilative effort, questioning whether postmodernism can effectively convey the quiddity of self and society in the late twentieth century. Reworking their predecessors as well as each

other, the Amises debated the major oppositions that define the modern world—stability versus contingency, moral agency versus determinism, stasis versus entropy. Kingsley Amis contested the philosophical bases of literary modernism and postmodernism, as well as Martin’s mentors, and those actions inspired his son’s deliberate requital. Responding in kind, Martin has consciously revised his father’s artistic norms, rejecting his narrative localization and proclaiming, as a rival foundation, the expansive perspectives, structural innovations, and stylistic experimentation common to modernism and postmodernism. In the process of reworking each other's narrative assumptions as well as those of their predecessors, the Amises creatively engaged each other’s literary and philosophical assumptions. Theirs was a battle over the nature of reality itself, a twentieth-century realism war conducted by loving family members but rival, antithetical writers. Betraying the nature of their contrasting worldviews, their novels became a forum for revaluative parody, equally playful and serious. In many ways, the Amises’ literary competition renders their work more informed, interesting, and confident than previous models of in-

fluence allow—especially Harold Bloom’s, against which Martin’s work is most often compared. In opposition to Bloom, Martin did not undergo psychological processes of subconscious swerving, or clinamen; nor did he do so from the protective safety of the future. Instead, he di-

rectly engaged his father’s methodologies in full awareness of his father’s disapproval. Kingsley, however, did not concede to his son’s symbolic insurrections but responded in kind, reaffirming his own novelistic techniques in the face of Martin’s emergent example. Canceling all questions of silence, their literary and personal opposition functions instead as a creative and generative force, making them increasingly aware of their narrative strengths and weaknesses, and grounding them

Projecting a Future « = 253 securely within historical tradition. Kingsley repudiated his son’s amoral

determinism and iterative manipulations, whereas Martin rejected his father’s empiricism and liberal humanism. In brief, their familial jostling helped them to refine their literary techniques and allegiances. The literary conflicts of Kingsley and Martin Amis were equally historical and personal, generational and familial, and they consciously incorporated these tensions within the pages of their novels, demarcating some of the most significant shifts in structure and style that powered the twentieth-century evolution from realism to postmodernism.

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Notes Bibliography

Index

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Notes

Introduction 1. The Bronté sisters—Anne (1820-49), Charlotte (1816-55), and Emily (1818-48) — achieved notoriety for their novels as well as for their early deaths and family intrigue. The intellectual polymath Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was brother to novelist Julian Huxley (1887-1975), and both were inspired by their famous grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95). Critic and author William Rossetti (1829-1919) was brother to Christina (1830-94) and Dante Gabriel (1828-82). Frances Trollope (1780-1863) and her two sons, Thomas (1810-92) and Anthony (1815-82), wrote hundreds of novels. Ford Madox Ford’s (1873-1939) mother was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown and sister-in-law of William Rossetti. Through her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf was introduced to many of the towering intellectual and literary figures of her day.

2. Martin Amis, interview by Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, BBC, 1989.

3. See James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 4. For the Booker Prize, see Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions, The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 155-59. [he only genre not shared by the Amises 1s poetry, a point Kingsley couldn't refrain from putting to comic use, prodding Martin on at least one occasion, “I don’t seem to see a new book of poems by you...

when are you going to produce a new book of poems?” See Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” interview by John Haffenden, in Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), 16; and Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002), 272. 4. See Paul Fussell, The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis,” by Dale Salwak,” Contemporary Literature 16, no. 1 (1975): 18. 5. See John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1980, 27. The only extant work that takes the two writers as its primary

subject is Stuart Kerr, “Like Father Like Son? The Fiction of Kingsley and Martin Amis” (undergraduate thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, 257

258 « Notes to pages 7-1 1998). A cursory though generally informative treatment of the Amises’ profes-

sional similarities and differences, Kerr's work appears on the Internet at http://martinamis.albion.edu/kerr.htm. 6. Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 372-73. Martin continues by criticizing the journalistic media, or “fourth estate,’ which “is, on the one hand, ever more contented with the power that corrupts it [and]. . . is, on the other, heading towards an elephantine impotence on all the questions that really matter” (376). 7. For Julian Barnes and Kingsley, see Mira Stout, “Down London’s Mean Streets,” New York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 35. For Martin, see Martin Amis, Experience, 5; 35; see also Contemporary Authors, New Revision series vol. 27, s.v. “Martin Amis.”

8. See Martin Amis, “What I Miss Is Ringing Kingsley to Check on a Language Point,” interview by Valerie Grove, Times (London), 8 March 1996. g. Stout, “Mean Streets,” 35. See also Koba the Dread, 272, where Martin

remarks that if his and Kingsley’s birth dates had been transposed, “then I might have written your novels and you might have written mine.” For Kings-

ley, see Martin Amis, Experience, 25. Compare similar remarks in Martin Amis, “The Living V-Sign,” interview by Lewis Jones, Dazly Telegraph, 26 January 2001. 10. Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note (New York: Penguin, 1986), 86.

ur. According to policy, the Bodleian Library would not allow access to Kingsley’s letters while he was alive. For an explanation of Kingsley’s assistance in procuring the letters for Eric Jacobs for use in his Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), see Kingsley Amis to David Vaisey, 19 July 1994, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 1131-32. See also Eric Jacobs, “The Authorized Biographer” in The Literary Biography, ed. Dale Salwak (London: Macmillan/Towa City: Uni-

versity of lowa Press, 1996), 1330-36. :

12. Kingsley Amis to Robert Conquest, 7 June 1986, in Letters, 1021-22. 13. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 1o May 1979; Kingsley Amis to Hilary

Amis, 27 October 1966; Kingsley Amis to Elizabeth Jane Howard, 4 March 1975; Kingsley Amis to Elizabeth Jane Howard, 13 August 1973; and Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 3 August 1982. See also Kingsley Amis to Robert Conquest, 20 February 1981, in which Kingsley quips, “Things have come to a pretty pass when the editor of the Times’s girl friend [Tina Brown] is one of my son’s cast-offs.” Finally, a 9 March 1983 letter to Larkin takes up where the letter of 3 August 1982 left off: “Don’t know what to say about M™*t™* A*™™. Bet

you do, thoguh, what? [szc].” All in Letters, 871, 674-75, 744, 7575 951, 914, and g60, respectively.

Notes to pages tI-I4 6 ~—259 14. Kingsley Amis to John Hayes, December 1987, in Letters, 1066. As Zachary Leader explains, “The Two Ronnies” refers to Little Ronnie Corbett and big Ronnie Barker, two stars of a 1970s BBC T'V comedy. 15. Martin Amis, Experience, 191. In Koba the Dread, Martin calls Lemmons,

the family home they shared with Elizabeth Jane Howard, “a high-bourgeois mansion” (6). Kingsley’s poem “In Memoriam W.R.A.” first appeared in 4 Look round the Estate (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 31. Paternal disapproval is a condition shared by Martin's surrogate father, Saul Bellow, as well. See “Fathers and Sons,” Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1998, in which Bellow responds to Martin's query about whether Bellow’s father ever found writing to be a “proper job.” Bellow answered simply, “No, he never did. I mystified [my parents].” 16. Martin Amis, “Living V-Sign.” 17. Martin Amis, Experience, 99, and Koba the Dread, 277. See also Martin Amis, “Amis on Amis,” interview by Claudia FitzHerbert, Daz/y Telegraph, 12 November 2001, where Martin remarks, “I used to say to [Kingsley] he was the bloody fool always changing his views. I’ve been very steady really... . Kingsley

certainly saw me as more firmly rooted than he was. More independent. He feared madness.” See also Martin Amis, “How Is John Self Doing in 2001?” Independent, 25 April 2001: “Our political histories are antithetical. I have always

been pallidly left-of-centre. In our more vituperative disagreements (about nuclear weapons, for example), I used to counter-attack by saying that he was the politically excitable being, not me.” 18. For Martin, see Martin Amis, Experience, 59. For Kingsley, see Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 3, 5 December 1983, in Letters, 965. 19. For “leafin the wind of trend,” see Martin Amis, Experience, 388. Apparently, Kingsley took Martin's advice on at least two occasions. In a 7 June 1986 letter to Robert Conquest, Kingsley requests information on nuclear war to use in his arguments with Martin. Four years later (2 June 1990), he issued a similar request, telling Conquest, “Martin is getting het up again over greenhouse effect and all that. I told him it was all lefty-trendy, a vacant spot for the Trots and as-

sorted anti-West shags to go now that Marxism etc. had packed up, which spread no sweetness and light at all. Can you recommend a good short book with some facts, or demonstrations that there aren't any facts? [sic]”; both in Lefters, 1021-22 and 1090, respectively. Ironically, it has been Martin, not Kingsley, who has turned most notably to Conquest, whose work provides the foundation for Martin’s attack on Soviet politics in Koba the Dread. For “old bastards” see Martin Amis, “Thinkability,” in Einstein's Monsters (New York: Vintage, 1990), 15. 20. Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography, 344-45. Martin admits in Experience, 250, that Kingsley disliked Other People above all of Martin's other novels. For Martin’s remarks on Money, see Stout, “Mean Streets,” 34-35.

260 « Notes to pages 14-17 a1. For the best account of the controversy surrounding the advance, Martins change of agents and publishers, and his friendship with Julian Barnes, see Jonathan Wilson, “A Very English Story,” Mew Yorker, 6 March 1995, 96-106. For the best interview regarding The Information, see Martin Amis, “The Prose and Cons of Martin Amis,” interview by Graham Fuller, Interview 25, no. § (1995), on the Internet at http://martinamis.albion.edu/fuller -htm; Fuller reports that Martin received a total of £480,000 from HarperCollins. Martin denies that the novel is a roman 4 clef and claims that Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s wife and Martin’s one-time agent, read the novel and never felt “that Julian was the basis of either character in the slightest degree.” Martin also remarks that he wouldn't be interested in writing a roman 4 clef, a comment he later echoes in James Kaplan, “Tennis with Amis,” New Yor, 29 May 1995, 37-42: “Io write a 500-page book that takes five years to write, about my mate, seems to me the depth of frivolity.” Martin instead argues that the novel’s main characters, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry, are two warring sides of himself; see Martin Amis, “No More Illusions,” interview by Alexander Laurence and Kathleen McGee, n.d., on the Internet at http://www.altx .com/interviews/martin.amis.html. 22. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 8 February 1984, in Letters, 969-70. For Kingsley, see Jacobs, 4 Biography, 16. For Martin’s comment, see Elizabeth Grice, “The New Amis,” Daily Telegraph, 133 May 2000.

23. Matin Amis, “Theories on the History of Bitching,” interview by Andrew Billen, Evening Standard, 30 September 1998. 24. Some profiles of Martin are serious defamations, such as those in Time Out and Private Eye (“Smarty Anus”), mentioned in Martin Amis, “There Is a Kind of Mean-Spiritedness of Which I Am the Focus,” interview by Jason Cowley, Times (London), 4 August 1997. Others are playful parodies, such as Clive James’s “N. V. Rampart Meets Martin Amis” (London Review of Books, 18-31 October 1984, 14). For an account of the New Statesman competition, see Wilson, “A Very English Story,” 106. 25. Adam Mars-Jones, Venus Envy: On the WOMB and the BOMB (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), 15. Echoing Kingsley, Mars-Jones refers to Martin’s style as “overkill,” commenting, “The great irony of Einsteins Monsters is that a book dedicated to the unapproachable idea of disarmament should be written by someone so opposed to temperament in disarmament outside the nuclear arena” (13). 26. Martin Amis, Experience, 35. 27. Martin Amis, “Buy My Book, Please,” New Yorker, 26 June-3 July 1995,

97. See also Brendan Bernhard, “Experiencing Martin Amis,” L.4. Weekly, June 30-July 6, 2000: “You don’t really read your youngers,’ Martin explained,

Notes to pages20-2T « 261 “The only one I read, because he’s a friend of mine, but also because of his writing, is Will Self... . But just as my father didn't read me much, it’s hard to read these young guys. It’s a bit painful too. My father and I worked it out one day that the younger writer's saying to the older writer, ‘It’s not like that anymore. It’s like this.’ The ‘this’ and ‘that’ being the rhythms of thought, the dialect of the tribe. Some people can hang on to it. I think Saul Bellow has a reading on

the state of the world and modern consciousness that 1s undiminished at the age of 85, but that’s awfully rare.”

28. ‘IT. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 784-88. Eliot’s earlier metaphor for artistic creativity is that of a combus-

tion chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide, into which a filament of platinum is introduced. “The mind of the poet,” Eliot writes, “is the shred of platinum”: “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (786). Eliot's ideas should be seen in the historical context of high modernism, which similarly propounded the erasure of subjectivity in direct opposition to prior literary movements. ‘They should also be credited for inspiring F. R. Leavis, whose book Revalution: Tradition and Development (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936) is indebted to Eliot’s dialogue with the past. As chapters 2 and 4 of the present study will clarify, the Amises reacted against the humanistic homogenization of the Leavisite enterprise. See also Martin Amis, “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” Guardian, 1 June 2002: “Left to itself, Leavisism might have ended up with a single text; and that sacred book would have been the collected works of a lone sociopath—D. H. Lawrence. It had all gone wrong: they were supposed to be judging literature, but literature was judging them, and raucously exposing their provinciality and humourlessness. When Leavis died, in 1978, his clerisy collapsed in a Jonestown of odium theologicum. It left nothing behind it.”

, 29. For Kingsley, see Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” interview by Peter Firchow, in The Writer’s Place: Interviews on the Literary Situation in Contempo-

rary Britain, ed. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 38. For Martin, see Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 14, s.v. “Martin Amis.”

30. Of course, the masculinist nature of Bloom’s theory is among its most controversial elements. Bloom includes only one woman— Emily Dickinson — in his hierarchy of strong revisionist poets, a list that also includes through the history of poetry such names as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens.

262 « Notes to pages 21-22 This masculocentrist emphasis has led feminist scholars to propose divergent theories. One of the most influential, Ellen Moers’s Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976), for instance, posits that women writers turned to each other for mutual affirmation and connection rather than competition. Similarly, Annette Kolodny objects to Bloom’s failure to admit gender as a constructive force in influence, substituting instead a “revisionary rereading” of literary inheritance; see Kolodny, “A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985). For more on the feminist response to Bloom, see Elaine Showalter, 4 Literature of Their Own (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). See also Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34 (1972): 18-30; and Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

31. Harold Bloom, 4 Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3, and Poetry and Repression: Revistonism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 101. For more on the intertextual matrix of Bloom’s model, see Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein’s introduction to their Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3-36, as well as Susan Stanford Friedman's essay “Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author” in the same volume, 146-80. See also Lars Ole Sauerberg, Versions of the Past — Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T: 8. Ehot, & R. Leavis, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom (London: Macmillan, 1997), 128-64. 32. Bloom, 4 Map of Misreading, 97. Earlier, Bloom compares the process

to the Lurianic story of creation. “Luria'’s story,” he writes, “has three main stages: Zinzum, Shevirath hakelim, Tikkun. Zimzum is the Creator’s withdrawal or contraction so as to make possible a creation that is not himself. Shevirath hakelim is the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, a vision of creation-ascatastrophe. 7ikkum is restitution or restoration— man’s contribution to God's work” (5). See also his discussion of “election-love” or Covenant-love (53-56), as well as his essay “A Meditation upon Priority,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 705-10.

33- Although I’m not sure whether history will concur, I prefer in the present study to maintain the periodicity conveyed by the term Contemporary (vs. contemporary). As Frederick Karl, David Lodge, and others have explained, the capitalization attempts to preserve, or distinguish, a fixed period in the British novel (roughly 1945-60), in which authors consciously rebelled against the stylistic and structural experimentation that so marked modernist work.

Notes to pages 24-28 « 263 The label also functions more effectively than the popular but widely misleading notion of the “angry young man.” See Frederick Karl, “The Angries: Is There a Protestant in the House?” in 4 Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (New York: Noonday, 1962), 220-37; see also David Lodge, “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,” 74e Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (London: Routledge, 1966), 243-67. Blake Morrison chooses to conflate the two in his classic text The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). For Kingsley’s thoughts on Movement literature, see Kingsley Amis to the editor, Time and Tide, 23 August 1977, in Letters, 137-38. See also Martin Amis, The Information, 232.

34. George Levine, “Realism Reconsidered,” in Essentials in the Theory of

Fiction, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 341. 35. Jerome Meckier, Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism,

and Revaluation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 207, 228, 278-80. This book is the first in Meckier’s informal trilogy, along with Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar’s Pavilion versus Cinderella (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002) and Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’ American Entanglements (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990). 36. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 44. 37. Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). Interested readers will note that Bate'’s work anticipates Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence by three years. See also Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), which claims that generational revaluation commences only when one’s discomfort with a previous generation’s values subsides.

38. Martin Amis, quoted in Susan Morrison, “The Wit and the Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 98. See also Martin Amis, “John Updike,” in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (New York: Harmony, 1994), 51.

39. Kingsley Amis, “Communication and the Victorian Poet,” Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 386. The epigraph to this essay features a passage from William Rossetti that establishes the grounds for Kingsley’s spiritual valuation of

the reader: “Above all ideal personalities with which the poet must learn to identify himself, there is one supremely real which is the most imperative of all; namely, that of his reader. And the practical watchfulness needed for such assimilation is as much a gift and instinct as is the creative grasp of alien character. It is a spiritual contact hardly conscious yet ever renewed, and which must be a part of the very act of production.”

264 e« Notes to pages 33-37

Chapter 1. The Amises on American Literature 1. Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (New York: Summit, 1991), 193; on racism, see 279-94; on the possibility of moving to America, see 193-211. 2. In a1gg8 interview, Martin identified two of his own novels as American: Limes Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense (1991; “sort of an American voice”) and Night Train (1997), which is set in America and is “presented as an American document,” complete with “double quotes after the full-stop and the commas inside, and a capital letter after a colon, and you say things like ‘to’ at

the beginning of a sentence.” See Martin Amis, “The Sadistic Muse,” interview by Laura Miller, ro February 1998, on the Internet at http://dir.salon .com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_toint.html. For “North Atlantic,” see Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis” by Will Self, Mississipp: Review Online, 7 October 1995, at http://orca.st.usm.edu/mrw/1995/o7amis.html. At a 2001 conference on the modern British novel held at the Huntington Library in California, Martin spoke of the possibility of his moving to America when his sons were out of school. He added that there would now be room for him in the American literary pantheon because its strongest feature—the Jewish American novel—was in decline, accelerated by the aging of Saul Bellow and, presumably, Philip Roth. 3. Kingsley Amis, “Sacred Cows,” in The Amis Collection: Selected NonFiction 1954-1990 (London: Penguin, 1990), 18-19. For “elephantiasis,” see Kingsley Amis, Memoirs, 293. For Martin’s comments see “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (New York: Penguin, 1987), 13; and “A Chicago of a Novel,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, 114. On Mailer, see Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis” by Dale Salwak, Contemporary Literature 16, no. 1 (1975): 3-4: “When | read The Naked and the Dead 1 thought wow, look out chaps, here’s somebody on the scale of Dickens or Eliot, better watch him closely. But I needn't have worried, because he’s systematically destroyed his talent by being rather silly... . All this

semi-political rubbish has made Mailer just a hollow shell. 1 can't read him anymore. This is what often happens to American writers; they cease to become writers and become institutions.”

4. Kingsley and Martin Amis, “The Two Amises,” interview by Kevin Byrne, Listener, 15 August 1974, 219-20. The Somerset Maugham Award is granted to the best first novel and provides £500 toward travel abroad. 5. For Kingsley’s comments, see Charles Michener, “Britain's Brat of Letters,” Esquire, January 1987, 110. Kingsley to Philip Larkin, 22 March 1982, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 938-39.

Notes to pages 38-39 = « = 265 6. For Kingsley’s review, see Kingsley Amis, “She Was a Child and I Was a Child,” Spectator, 6 November 1959, reprinted in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 77-85. For Nabokov, see

Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lo/ita,” afterword to Lolita (New York: Random House, 1989), 311-17.

7. On the controversy between Movement literature and Contemporary literature, see note 33 in the introduction of the present study; see also David

Lodge, “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,” in The Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysts of the

English Novel (London: Routledge/New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 243-67, and Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the r9s0s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). While it is true that Kingsley expressed dissatisfaction with the movement label, as he did with most every label, a letter to Larkin conveys his awareness of the poetic upheaval, in opposition to his public remarks elsewhere: “There’s no doubt, you know, we are getting to be a movement.” As Richard Bradford reveals, Kings-

ley privately included only himself and Larkin in this movement. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 14 March 1954, quoted in Richard Bradford, Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (Chester Springs, Penn.: Peter Owen, 2001), 147-50. See also John McDermott, Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 16-19.

8. While Rubin Rabinovitz was not the first scholar to notice a “reaction against experiment” the phrase that he coined has become a convenient term, and his book The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967) is a very good survey of the period. See also Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties (Wendover, England: John Goodchild, 1958); William Van O’Connor, The New University Wits and the End of Modernism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963); and James Gindin, Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962). For “still dies hard,” see Kingsley Amis,

“She Was a Child,” 80. For other movement injunctions besides “rational structure and comprehensible language” see the introduction to Robert Conquest, ed., New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956), which pleads for poetry that is “empirical in its attitude” and “submits to no great systems of theological constructs” (3).

9. In “The Novel No Longer Novel: Writing Fiction after World War Two” in No, Not Bloomsbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 95-107, Bradbury clarifies how German writers belonging to Griippe 47—

Gtinter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Peter Weiss, and Alfred Andersch—sought

266 « Notes to pages 39-42 to mend the schism that had developed within the German language itself, noting its bifurcation into a language used by Nazi officials during the war versus the other, more humanistic language that they wished to recover. Similarly, in Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion,

2002), Martin Amis explains that writers such as Isaac Babel anticipated Griippe 47's preoccupation with silence: “‘I have invented a new genre, said Isaac Babel . . . in 1934: ‘that of silence.’ Babel ceased to be published in 1937; he was arrested in 1939, and shot in 1940” (105).

For Sartre, see his “What Is Literature?” in What Is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). For Steiner, see “The Retreat from the Word,” in Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 77-92. Adorno’s often-mistranslated phrase (“Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist babarisch”) is quoted in Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s (Harmondsworth, England: Pelican, 1972), 276. For Vonnegut, see Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), 171. For Cooper, see “Reflections on Some Aspects of the Experimental Novel,” International Literary Annual 2 (1959): 33. 10. Morrison, T4e Movement, 172; Morrison refers to James Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus. Note too that Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) predates by one year the publication of Pater's Studies in the History of the Renatssance (1873).

11. Kingsley Amis, “She Was a Child,” 82-83. 12. Ibid. 13. For Martin, see “A Chicago of a Novel,” 25. For Kingsley, see “She Was a Child,” 81. 14. For “take that,” see Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis.” In Experience: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2000) Martin calls his father’s review “willfully philistine” (121, n). For “reverse over Lolita,” see Kingsley Amis, “She Was a Child,” 79. For “rigorous dramatic monologue” and “no idea what is going on,” see Martin Amis, “Lolita Reconsidered,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1992, 110-11.

15. For “arched eyebrow,” see Martin Amis, “Lolita Reconsidered,” 110-11.

For Flaubert, see Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, ed. Richard Rumbold (London: Knopf, 1950), 98. For “subtle moral control,” see Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis.” 16. For Nabokov, see his “L’-Envoi,” in Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 382. Martin reviewed this book for the Observer in January 1981; it was reprinted as “Lectures” in The War against Chché, 249-51. Martin’s opening synopsis of Nabokov’s method remains excep-

tional: “You must not ‘identify’ with Stephen Dedalus or Fanny Price; you

Notes to pages 43-45 + 267 must not regard Madame Bovary as a denunciation of the bourgeoisie or Bleak House as an attack on the legal system; you must not ransack novels in search of those bloated topicalities, ‘ideas’. The only things that a good reader needs are imagination, memory, a dictionary and some artistic sense.” He concludes his opening paragraph by quoting Nabokov’s famous edict, “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” (249). 17. See Martin Amis, “Lolita Reconsidered,” 117-19, tog. Martin clarifies that Humbert faces a series of notable deaths, including those of his childhood love; his first wife; his second wife; a friend of his second wife; Charlie Holmes, Lolita’s younger seducer; and Quilty, her older seducer. Of course, the novel will culminate with the deaths of Humbert, Lolita, and Lolita’s daughter. “In a sense,” Martin concludes, “Lo/ita is too great for its own good.” For a brief but helpful discussion of the ways Martin's reading of the novel runs counter or parallel to extant Lo/ita criticism, see Matthew Dessem, “The Artist Manque:

Nabokovian Techniques in Money,” on the Internet at http://martinamis albion.edu/artist.htm. 18. For “riddles with elegant solutions,” see Victoria N. Alexander, “Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov,” Antioch Review 52, no. 4 (1994): 588. The quote is Nabokov’s, not Alexander’s, and runs in full, “I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.” For the discussion of Lolita, see Martin Amis, “Lolita Reconsidered,” 113. The most famous examples of the novel’s internal snares are the name of the character Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov) and the encoding of Lolita’s death in John Ray’s foreword. 19. See Martin Amis, “The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces,” in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (New York: Wil-

liam Morrow, 1980), 82. For “crude and repulsive” and “the only thing that really matters,” see Martin Amis, “Lectures,” in The War against Cliché, 251.

20. Martin Amis, “lhe Sublime and the Ridiculous,” 73, 76, 82. For Nabokov, see his “On a Book Entitled Lo/ita,” 314-15: “For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a

sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” 21. Kingsley Amis, “Communication and the Victorian Poet,” Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 399. For an account of the failure of Kingsley’s dissertation and the unintentional conflict with Lord David Cecil, see Kingsley Amis, Memoirs, 101-6; Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 117-19; and Bradford, Lucky Him, 108-9.

22. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” interview by John Haffenden, in Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), 23. See also Martin

268 . Notes to pages 47-49 Amis, Experience, 121-22, and Martin’s review of Nabokov’s Selected Letters, 1940-1977 (“Letters”) in The War against Cliché (257-60), in which he quotes Nabokov: “For me, ‘style’ is matter” (260). 23. Martin Amis, Experience, 176. The seven essays on Nabokov include the three already mentioned plus reviews of Nabokov’s The Man from the USSR and Other Plays (“Plays”), Selected Letters 1940-1977 (“Letters”), and The Enchanter (“Lolita’s Little Sister”), and Andrew Field’s biography, Nabokov: His Life in Part, allin Thé War against Cliché, 253-56, 257-60, 261-63, and 245-47, respectively. For Bellow, see the two already mentioned plus “Saul Bellow in Chicago,” in The Moronic Inferno, 199-208, and Martin’s reviews of Bellow’s The Actual (“Even Later”) in The War against Cliché, 323-27 and Him with his Foot in His Mouth (“Saul’s December”), Observer, 24 June 1984, 20. 24. Mira Stout, “Down London's Mean Streets,” New York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 35.

25. For the television appearance, see Martin Amis, Experience, 200: “The TV programme we had made together was called ‘Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno.’ It occurred to me that Saul was Saul and I was Moronic. Or bet-

ter say that he had a panoptic view of the modern confusion, and that I was within it, looking out.” For “what really matters,” see Martin Amis, “Buy My Book, Please,” New Yorker, 26 June-3 July 1995, 99. For Diedrick, see Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 6. For “crashing down,” see Matin Amis, “Fathers and Sons,” interview with Saul Bellow, Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1998. See also Elizabeth Grice, “The New Amis,” Daily Telegraph, 133 May 2000.

26. For “resonate more memorably,” see Martin Amis, “Saul Bellow in Chicago,” 200. For “exalted voice,” see Martin Amis, “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” 17. For “high euphony,” see Martin Amis, “The living VSign,” interview with Lewis Jones, Dai/y Telegraph, 26 January 2001. Similar remarks occur in Koba the Dread, where Martin argues that “In the search for decorum, our feelings must have access to the high style” (267). 27. For “dominance of the self,” see Martin Amis, “John Updike,” in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (New York: Harmony, 1994), 51. See also

Martin's review of Don DeLillo’s Mao II (“Thoroughly post-Modern Millennium’) in the Independent, 8 September 1991, where he argues that postmodernism was ‘evolutionary: something a lot of writers everywhere began finding themselves doing at roughly the same time” (29). For “given world,” see “Saul Bellow in Chicago,” 200. 28. Martin Amis, “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” 17. Also compare the character Richard Tull’s comments in The Information (New York: Harmony, 1995), 328: “First, gods. hen demigods. Then epic became tragedy:

Notes to pages 49-56 « 269 failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mer~ cantile dreams. Then it was about you —Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age. And he was saying, Richard was saying: Now what? Literature, for a while, can be about us (nodding resignedly at Gwyn): about writers.” 29. Victoria N. Alexander, “Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov,” Antioch Review 52, no. 4 (1994): 580-90. Alexander is correct to point out that Martin does not unconditionally adopt Bellow’s visionary perspective. Like Nabokov, he seems often to “rescind” his “[a]nswers to big social problems,” laying more stress upon the “fact of fiction” via the postmodern device of authorial involution. However, I think she discredits the degree to which Martin is “quite happy to be characterized as [an] illusionist or artist.” For Martin's comments, see his extended footnote in Experience, 119-20. 30. Martin Amis, “A Chicago of a Novel,” 117, 126. For “enduring mortal pang,” see Martin Amis, “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” 22. 31. Martin Amis, “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno,” 20; in this essay he identifies Bellow’s late phase as beginning with Te Dean’ December (1982). 32. Martin Amis, “Lolita Reconsidered,” 111. For Martin on Bellow, see Martin Amis, “Even Later,” in The War against Cliché, 326. 33- Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis,” 5. 34. Paul Fussell, The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 114, 72. 35. For Kingsley’s remarks, see Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis,” 4. For Martin, see Martin Amis, Experience, 177. 36. For Martin, see Martin Amis, “A Chicago of a Novel,” 114. For Kingsley, see Kingsley Amis, “New Novels,” Spectator, 21 May 1954, 626.

37. Kingsley Amis, “Sacred Cows,” 17. Kingsley’s earlier remarks occur in the 28 November 1984 and 1 October 1985 letters to Philip Larkin in Lefters, 986-87 and 1004-6, respectively.

38. See Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 18 December 1984, in Lefters, 988-90. For Martin's attribution, see “Fathers and Sons”: “The first novel | wrote where I took my characters out of England to America, Money, felt like a result of reading you and others. The deal was that you stopped worrying about formal concerns and trusted to a voice, which feels like a great risk, but it’s the way forward I believe.” 39. Martin Amis, “Being Serious in the Fifties,” New Statesman, 7 November 1975, 577:

40. For Martin on sexuality, see Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 6. See also Susan Morrison, “The Wit and the Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 101. On misogyny, see Laura L. Doan, “‘Sexy Greedy Js the Late

270 « Notes to pages 57-61 Eighties: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money,” Minnesota Review 34-35 (1990): 69-80, and Shanti Padhi, “Bed and Bedlam: The Hard-Core Extravaganzas of Martin Amis,” PN Review 7 (1981): 42-45. 41. Martin explains all three typologies in his “Philip Roth: No Satisfaction,” in The Moronic Inferno, 43.

42. Morrison, “The Wit and the Fury,” ror. See also Stout, “Mean Streets,” 48. In 1993, Martin admitted that his fictive worlds present “few opportunities for healthy, Lawrentian sex.” Such early novels as The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success, he elaborated, celebrate a “youthful sexual disgust’ that sometimes makes him “reel back from the page.” He attributes this to a youthful writer’s desire to challenge the “political thought police.” See Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis.” 43. Martin Amis, review of Sabbaths Theatre by Philip Roth, in The War against Cliché, 295. See also 294: “It is a hysterical novel about the hysteria of an hysterical man, and it leaves you feeling hysterical” and Martin's review of My Life asa Man by Philip Roth in The War against Cliché, 285: “My Life as a Man begins with two autobiographical short stories, presented as the autobiographical works of an autobiographical novelist, about a young autobiographical writer.”

44. Martin Amis, “Philip Roth: No Satisfaction,” 44-45. 45. Ibid., 47, 49. The Zuckerman novels— named for their hero, the Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman— begin with My Life as a Man (1974), pass through The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and Zuckerman Bound (1985) and conclude with The Counterlife (1986).

46. Martin Amis, review of Sabbath’ Theatre, 296. See also 292: “I am both

ashamed and surprised to say that Roth pulls it off—he makes this murky thing happen on the page... . It is peculiarly repellent, something like a dirty habit of privilege. It is also largely clandestine, and in retreat. Roth did well to hear it, to catch it; but that is how he interprets the world —he /istens to it.” 47. Martin Amis, foreword to The War against Cliché, xv. Martin’s assessment of Mailer is similar to his critique of Roth: an unevenness of presentation resulting from conflict between style and subject. His evaluations of J. G. Ballard parallel his thoughts on William S. Burroughs: both men dramatize the difficulties of being a cult writer. Similar to Roth, they also dramatize the fundamental complexities of experimental prose —an uncertain relationship with the reader and with reality. Ballard’s Cras, for instance, appeared to Martin as a “mournful and hypnotic tour de force, possibly the most extreme example in

modern fiction of how beautifully and lovingly someone can write 70,000 words of vicious nonsense” (ror). Similarly, Burroughs’s novel Te Wild Boys: A

Book of the Dead was labeled a “tour de force of delirious erotic imagery, clipped and sliced like a stream of consciousness shooting-script” (299). In this

Notes tc pages 62-69 « = 271 respect, they approximate the stvlistic mastery that Martin respected in Nabokov and yearned for in Roth. Additionally, they share a propensity for Bellow’s oracular intonations: Martin refers to Ballard’s work as extreme examples of the “apocalyptic-epiphanic mode” (95), and he further defines Burrough’s world as one of “spectral rhetoric, drug withdrawal, urban breakdown, rampant vandalism, and no women” (301). These authors all resembled Roth in their consistent abilities to frustrate Martin's expectations of their work. Coupled with an “antic and feral” tone (303), their “fevered images of sublimity and decay” (106) challenged his tolerance tor experiment and helped reveal his own stylistic preferences. At these moments— much as with his criticism of Roth— Martin's critical retreat exhibited a tendency to lapse into his father’s point of view. In a footnote to Martin’s review of the cinematic version of Crash, he admits to this shared territory: “I see | am quoting my father here. A vocal admirer of early Ballard, Kingsley was decisively turned off by Crash, on moral grounds, and on anti-experimentalist grounds too” (110). For Martin on Ballard and Burroughs, see “J. G. Ballard,” and “William Burroughs” in The War against Cliché, 95-112 and 299-304, respectively. 48. Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis,” 11. For Kingsley’s remarks on Portnoy’s Complaint, see Kingsley Amis, “Waxing Wroth,” Harper’, April 1969, 104-7, reprinted as “In Slightly Different Form” in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 102-8.

49. Kingsley Amis, “In Slightly Different Form,” 107-8. For “It’s a// the tone of voice,” see Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” interview by Peter Firchow, in Firchow, ed., The Writer’s Place: Interviews on the Literary Situation in Contemporary Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1974), 35.

50. Kingsley Amis, “In Slightly Different Form,” 103, 108. For the Arts Council letter, see Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 4 December 1979, in Letters, 878.

51. For Kingsley, see Kingsley Amis, “In Slightly Different Form,” 108. For Martin, see Martin Amis, “Philip Roth: No Satisfaction,” 45.

Chapter 2. The Amises on English Literature 1. For “talent contest,” see Martin Amis, “Before Taste Was Outlawed,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1984, 113. On Martin's tradition, see Susan Morrison, “The Wit and Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 95-102. On Kingsley's tradition, see Kingsley Amis, “The Art of Fiction, LIX,” interview by Michael Barber, Paris Review 16, no. 64 (1975): 39-72. For “A shot rang out,” see Martin Amis, “Buy My Book, Please,” New Yorker, 26 June-3 July 1995, 97.

2. Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?” Spectator, 4 October 1957, reprinted in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions (London:

272 « Notes to pages 71-75 Jonathan Cape, 1970), 13, 14, 16; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 3. See Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (New York: Summit, 1991), 217, 261-70. Kingsley had heard, “authentically and often,” that upon being informed that

Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge, had taken a certain view of the “car-parking problem” Leavis had responded, “Peterhouse can’t expect to be taken seriously about anything now that it’s given a fellowship to a pornographer.” See also Richard Bradford, Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (Chester Springs, Penn.: Peter Owen, 2001), 194-96. For the Leavises, see F. R. and

Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 140-41, and Q. D. Leavis, “The Englishness of the English Novel,” in Co/lected Essays, vol. 1, ed. G. Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 303-27.

4. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 25 February 1946, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 46. See also Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 27 December 1947 (Leéters, 150), in which

he questions Leavis’s readings of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. In her “Plan of a Novel,” Austen poked fun at the romantic reduction of the Gothic and sentimental novel, in which the “good will be unexceptional in every respect” and the bad will be “utterly wicked” as there is “hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them”; in The Works of Jane Austen, vol. 6, Minor Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 428-30. Similarly, in chapter 20 of Northanger Abbey, Austen has the character Henry Tilney parody the Gothic novel, reveling in its comical stretches of imagination and quietly asserting a more moderate presentation of character. 5. For “Mrs Bennetts of us all,” see Martin Amis, “Miss Jane's Prime,” dzlantic Monthly, February 1999, 100. For “thought rhythms,” see Martin Amis, “Jane’s World,” New Yorker, 8 January 1996, 34.

6. For “auras and presences,” see Martin Amis, “Miss Jane's Prime,” 102. For “militant irony,” see Martin Amis, “Jane’s World,” 35. For Levine and Lodge, see George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 24-28,

and David Lodge, After Bahktin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), 26-30. 7. For “rather nasty,” see Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 18 April 1946, in Letters, 57. See also Martin Amis, “Miss Jane's Prime,” 102.

8. James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 126-28. Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness” (1961), in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Oxford: Alden, 1977), 23-32.

Notes to pages 75-79 ~—-273 g. Martin Amis, “Tinkering with Jane,” review of Sandition by Jane Austen and Another Lady, in The War against Cliché, 184. This third, though ad- _ mittedly less important, review of Austen initially appeared in the Odserver in July 1975. In general, the review is unflattering and is epitomized by the best lines in the essay: “Of course, Jane's prose is not nearly as inimitable as Janeites will lead you to believe, and the Collaborator is able to reproduce the tart periodicity of her sentences with a blithe, unselfconscious way—with a minimum of toe-stubbing. .. . If Sanditicn had come down to us in this form, I think it would be regarded as a mildly embarrassing piece of senilia rather than an obvious fake” (183).

10. For “perfectly unknown,” see Charlotte Bronté to W. 5. Williams, 12 April 1850, in Jane Austen, Letters, 3d ed., coll. and ed. Dierdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For Martin's comments, see Martin Amis, “Miss Jane’s Prime,” ro2. 11. Kingsley Amis, The Russian Girl (New York: Penguin, 1995), 4. 12, See Jerome Meckier, “Looking Back at Anger: The Success of a Collapsing Stance,” Dalhousie Review §2, no. 1 (1972): 47-58; and Keith Wilson,

“Jim, Jake and the Years Between: The Will to Stasis in the Contemporary British Novel,” Arte/ 13, no. 1 (1982): 55-69. 13. Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note (New York: Penguin, 1986), 95. In

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), Jerome Meckier proposes that Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens engaged in a pattern of “undoing a competitor by outdoing him at his own game” in such works as Great Expectations, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone.

14. Martin Amis, “Jane’s World,” 31. 15. For “thwarted energy,” see Martin Amis, “Jane’s World, 34. In London Fields the character Keith Talent thinks exactly in Heraclitus’s terms: “Character is destiny. Keith had often been told, by various magistrates, girlfriends and

probation officers, that he had a ‘poor character,’ and he had always fondly owned up to the fact. But did that mean he had a poor destiny?” Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Harmony, 1989), 7.

16. Malcolm Bradbury, “‘No, Not Bloomsbury’: The Comic Fiction of Kingsley Amis,” in No, Not Bloomsbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 206. The scene that furnishes Bradbury his title occurs toward the end of

Lucky Jim, when Jim internalizes his search for the right address in London: “While he explained, he pronounced the names to himself: Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill Gate, Pimlico, Belgrave Square, Wapping, Bloomsbury. No, not Bloomsbury.” See Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Gollancz, 1954),

274. « Notes te pages 80-85 255. John McDermott, introduction to The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990 (London: Penguin, 1990), xi.

17. Kingsley Amis, “Fit to Kill,” Mew Statesman, 22 September 1978, reprinted in The Amis Collection, 69-70. Kingsley Amis, “There’s Something about a Soldier,” Spectator, 8 July 1955, reprinted in The Amis Collection, 72-75. 18. For “invocations of a fanciful past,” see Kingsley Amis, “There’s Some-

thing about a Soldier,” 57. For Kingsley on serialization, see Kingsley Amis, “How I Lived in a Very Big House and Found God,” Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1981, reprinted in The Amis Collection, 83-87, which begins with Kingsley’s comment that the chief explanation for Brideshead’s popularity is “obviously and simply that here we have a whacking, heavily romantic book about nobs.” For “habitual austerities,” see Kingsley Amis, “Waugh’s Warts,” Observer, 28 September 1975, reprinted in The Amis Collection, 79-81. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 8 February 1984, in Letters, 970. See also Kingsley Amis

to Philip Larkin, 8 October 1946, in Letters, 95-96: “I was unable to decide whether the man speaking the story was meant to be bad, or nasty, or wrong, or unwise, but a lot of it. . . is in a sort of neo-Beverly Nichols vein, and the first chapter is just like the first chapter of Merry Christmas at Oxford would be: full of things you hope are good, but know are bad, but put in. ‘He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty that in extreme youth cries aloud for love

and withers at the first cold wind.’ Burps. “The languor of youth (sorry, Youth) — how unique and quintessential it is!’ Burps. ‘I was made free of her narrow loins.’ Burppss. I may have missed the irony, but I cannot believe that a man could write as badly as that for fun. Nay, if it had been QUITE CLEAR that the man was BUGGERING THE BOY’S ARSE and shagged the boy's sis-

ter when he couldnt BUGGER THE BOY’S ARSE any more, I shouldn't mind so much.”

19. Bradbury, ““No, Not Bloomsbury,” 205-6. 20. James Wolcott, “Kingsley’s Ransom,” New Yorker, 30 October 1995, 53. 21. For Bradbuzy on Amis and Waugh, see “No, Not Bloomsbury,” 206-9. For “cult of elegance,” see Martin Green, The English Novel in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1984), 138. 22. See the first of Martin’s three short essays from the early 1980s collected under the title “Mailer: The Avenger and the Bitch” in The Morontc Inferno and Other Visits to America (New York: Penguin, 1987), 6off, in which he remarks that Mailer’s works suffer from the “novelist’s fatal disease: ideas.” 23. Martin Amis, Experience:.A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 138.

24. Martin Amis, Einsteins Monsters (New York: Vintage, 1990), 13. Martin’s words echo his earlier remarks about how literature derives from conflicting perspectives of reality. See “Buy My Book, Please,” New Yorker, 26 June

Notes to pages 86-88 6 —-275 1995, 97, in which Martin argues that younger writers always send older writers an “unwelcome message, reminding them that “it’s not like that anymore. It’s like this.”

25. Martin Amis, “Waugh’s Mag. Op.; Wodehouse’s Sunset,” in The War against Cliché, 201-4.

26. Martin Amis, Money, 41. For “bourgeois lexicon,” see Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis” by Will Self, Misszsstppz Review Online, 7 October 1995, at http://orca.st.usm.edu/mrw/1995/o7amis. html. For the Brideshead review, see “Waugh's Mag. Op.,” 203. 27. For “inner audience,” see Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 19 June 1946, in Letters, 73. In a 1950 missive, he is even more declarative: “You are my ‘inner

audience, my watcher in Spanish, the reader over my shoulder, my oftenmentioned Jack, and a good deal more!” Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 27 August 1950, in Letters, 247. For “bloody disgrace” see Kingsley Amis to John McDermott, 27 May 1993, in Lef¢fers, 1125. See also Kingsley’s review in the Spectator, 3 April 1993, where he lambastes Motion for his presumptive morality. In a review of Thwaite’s edition of the Collected Poems entitled “The Coventry Chaucer,” Kingsley similarly lamented the formation of political tides that would eventually subsume the work of his friend. “People will hope, without much confidence,” Kingsley wrote, that Larkin “somehow failed to foresee the cloudburst of fatuity that would descend on his work once he was in no position to object”; in The Amis Collection, 218. For a discussion of the critical backlash, see also Dale Salwak, “Philip Larkin—An American View,” Biography 21, no. 2 (1998): 195-205.

For the eulogy, see appendix F in Letters, 1152-53. In his introduction to the

second edition of Ji// (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), Larkin recalled Kingsley’s celebrated gift for mimicry. Informed that Kingsley was a “hell of a _ good man” because he “shoots guns,” the confused Larkin got a firsthand demonstration when Bruce Montgomery, a fellow schoolmate and writer, pretended to shoot Kingsley. “[Kingsley’s] reaction was immediate,” Larkin explained. “Clutching his chest in a rictus of agony, he threw one arm up against the archway and began slowly crumpling downwards, fingers scoring the stonework. Just as he was about to collapse on the piled-up laundry, however . . . he righted himself and trotted over to us. ‘I’ve been working on this,’ he said, as soon as introductions were completed. ‘Listen. This is when youre firing in a ravine. ... And this when you're firing in a ravine and the bullet ricochets off a rock.’” Larkin concluded, “For the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own” (14-15). Kingsley’s initial response to the publication of Ji// had been equally amusing; referring to one of Kingsley’s letters, Lar-

kin noted that his friend liked the novel, but claimed its “binding reminded

276 « Notes to pages 89-92 him of Signal Training: Telegraphy and Telephony, or possibly Ciceronis Orationes,” and that he had later seen a copy in a shop “in Coventry Street between Naked and Unashamed and High-Heeled Yvonne” (19). 28. Kingsley Amis, Memoirs, 58. This chapter is a slightly revised version of

the retrospective “Oxford and After” that Kingsley contributed to Anthony Thwaite, ed., Larkin at Sixty (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). 29. Kingsley Amis, “A Poet for Our Time,” in The Amis Collection, 213. 30. For “little fleeting puzzles,” see Kingsley Amis, “Collected Larkin,” in The Amis Collection, 215. For “night-owl test,” see Kingsley Amis, “A Poet for Our Time,” 211. Kingsley mentions only a few poets besides Larkin who could pass this test: John Betjeman; some of the work of Robert Graves; A. E. Housman; Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Horatius; the early work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and early R. S. Thomas. For other examples see Kingsley Amis, The Amis Anthology: A Personal Collection of Verse (London: Arena, 1989) and The Pleasure of Poetry: From His Daily Mirror Column (London: Cassell, 1990). 31. Kingsley Amius, “A Poet for Our Time,” 213. Philip Larkin, “Letter to

a Friend about Girls,” in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 122-23.

32. Philip Larkin, “I Remember, I Remember,” 81-82, and “Dockery and Son,” 152-52, in Collected Poems.

33. See Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 15 March 1947, in Lef¢ers, 117-18.

For Orwell, see “Inside the Whale,” in 4 Collection of Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954): 215-56.

34. For Martin on 4 Girl in Winter, see Martin Amis, “The Beginning: Larval Larkin,” in The War against Cliché, 149-51. While this is less important than Martin's other essays on Larkin, the most significant paragraph is the following: “[A Girl in Winter] is a far more enigmatic book than Jz//; and it is also, somehow, far less of a nove/. Haltingly paced and erratically written, Ji// is at least integrally thought out—its minor characters are assimilated, its questions resolved, its themes dispatched. In 4 Girl in Winter the fictional accessories melt to nothing in the glare of the heroine's solipsism. The minor figures are, strictly, mere walk-ons, liable to be shrugged off as soon as they cease to stimulate Katherine’s introspection; and the moral oppositions of the novel loom and flicker with similar caprice. But these aren't criticisms — they are clues. The answer is, of course, that Larkin is already becoming less of a novelist and more of a poet” (150). For “Reference Back,” see Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, 106. For “triumphantly comic self-pity,” see Kingsley Amis, “A Poet for Our Time,” 213. 35. On Larkin's involvement with Lucky Jim, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 80-90; Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 141-50; and Janice Rossen, “Philip Larkin and Lucky Jim,” Journal of

Notes to pages 94-102, « = 277 Modern Literature 22, no. t (1998): 157-74. For the passages here, see Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling (London: Gollancz, 1955), 247, and Take a Girl Like You (1960; London: Penguin, 1975), 317.

36. Martin Amis, “Don Juan in Hull,” Mew Yorker, 12 July 1993, 74. For Diedrick, see Understanding Martin Amis, 126-27. 37. Kingsley Amis, Memoirs, 59-61. 38. Martin Amis, “Don Juan in Hull,” 79, 81, 82. 39. Ibid., 78. 40. Martin Amis, quoted in Susan Morrison, “Wit and Fury,” 98. 41. For “inexorably self-conscious,” see Martin Amis, “Don Juan in Hull,”

82. For “desolate and inhospitable,” see Martin Amis, “Philip Larkin 1922-1985,” in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (New York: Harmony, 1994), 201.

42. See Martin Amis, Expertence, 243fn, where he specifies that the episode occurs on page 292, line 33, of the British paperback and page 271, line 3, of

the American. Starting a bit earlier, the American edition reads, ““[here’s a thing we can do together. A place on Fifth Avenue. You go in, right? Ambrosia on the rocks with a twist. The Queen of Sheba takes you to her boudoir and with a combination of head and hand gives you the biggest hard-on you ever had. You ever saw. You look down and you think, Whose dick is this? You look up, and the panels of the ceiling fold back. And guess what.’

‘A ton of shit comes down on you.’” | Chapter 3. The Amises on Comedy 1. See Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 3 March 1953, and Kingsley Amis to Hilary Rubinstein, 15 April 1953, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 310-12 and 314, respectively. Note too

that Man of Feeling was a second, tentative title for Lucky Jim, as letters to Philip Larkin (11 August and 6 November 1952) establish; see Letters, 288-90 and 297-98. For an account of Philip Larkin’s role as the ideal reader for Kingsley’s novel, and the manuscript revisions he encouraged, see Richard Bradford, Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (Chester Springs, Penn.: Peter Owen, 2001), 80-99; Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 141-50; and Janice Rossen, “Philip Larkin and Lucky Jim,” Journal of Modern Literature 22, no. 1 (1998): 157-74. As Jacobs reports, Double.day had issued a money-back offer to readers who did not find the novel hilarious; see A Biography, 161. On the Hitchcock/Bernstein options, see various correspondence to Hilary Rubinstein in Kingsley’s Lefters, 402-8. 2. Gollancz received the novel in mid-April 1953. On 26 April, John Wain

read the bed-burning scene on BBC radio. Although Hilary Rubinstein

278 .« Notes to pages 103-105 | wanted to see the novel published by Christmas 1953, Victor Gollancz opted to defer publication until January, a slow publication month, when new authors

would not have to compete for reviewers’ attentions. This was one of Gollancz’s more common publishing maneuvers, as was the company’s small initial releases and more frequent subsequent reprintings, often limited in number to one or two thousand copies. For a full account of the novel’s publication his-

tory, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 78, 99, and Jacobs, A Biography, 154-59. Of course, Lucky Jim was Kingsley’s first published novel. As Dale Salwak discusses

in Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist (Lanham, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1992), Kingsley began work on the manuscript for Who Else Is Rank? during World War II, writing with a coauthor, E. Frank Coles. Another earlier manuscript, titled The Legacy, was completed in 1948-49. It was never published and currently resides at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Kingsley poses interesting questions about “first” novels that are actually second novels in a 14 July 1967 letter to a “Mr Heppner,” in Le¢ters, 681-82. Sean O’Faolain, “New Novels,” Odserver, 29 January 1954; Walter Allen, “New Novels,” New Statesman and Society, 30 January 1954, 137; John Betjeman, “Amusing Story of Life at a Provincial University,” Dazly Telegraph, 5 February 1954; Anthony Powell, “Booking Office,” Punch, 3 February 1954, 188; and Edmund Fuller, “Academic Intrigues,” New York Times Book Review, 31 January

1954, 20. For more on the reception of Lucky Jim, consult Jack Benoit Gohn, Kingsley Amis: A Checklist (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1976), and Dale Salwak, Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978). 3. L. E. Sissman, “Miss, Near Miss, Hit,” Mew Yorker, 24 June 1974, 185. Peter S. Prescott, “Love’s Highway,” Newsweek, 6 May 1974, 78.

4. Forasummary of the Lord Cecil-Kingsley Amis conflict, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 108-9, as well as Kingsley Amis to Dale Salwak, 18 January 1990, in Letters, 1085. Kingsley’s original and revised dissertation proposals can also be found in Le¢ters, 199 and 202. Uhe manuscript of Kingsley’s thesis, including Lord Cecil’s objections, is located at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the

University of Texas, Austin. For “university material,” see Charles Michener, “Britain’s Brat of Letters,” Esquire, January 1987, 110. Kingsley admitted that Martin had read “nothing but science fiction” until he was fifteen or sixteen, until his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, single-handedly introduced him to literature. 5. Prescott, “Love’s Highway,” 78. Elizabeth Jane Howard received the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1951 for her first novel, Te Beautiful Visit (1950).

6. J. B. Priestley, “Thoughts in the Wilderness,” New Statesman and Society, 26 June 1954, 825-26; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically.

Notes to pages 106-108 « 279 7. See George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in George Orwell: A Collection of Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), 215-56. 8. For William Van O’Connor, see his “Iwo Types of ‘Heroes’ in Post-War

British Fiction,” PMLA 77, no. 1 (1962): 170. For Leslie Fiedler, see his “The Un-angry Young Men: America’s Post-war Generation,” Encounter 10 (1958): 3-12. For V. S. Pritchett, see his “These Writers Couldn't Care Less,” New York Times Book Review, 28 April 1957, 1, 38. For Stephen Spender, see both his “Moderns and Contemporaries,” Listener, 11 October 1962, and The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963). g. Snow noted that Kingsley’s characters should be seen instead as “presentday guardians of the puritan conscience, enraged by humbug, unrealistically shocked by the compromises and jobberies of the ordinary worldly life.” See C. P. Snow, “Mr Maugham and Lucky Jim,” Sunday Times, 8 January 1956. For Kingsley’s views on Maugham, see Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 10, 21 August 1950, and Kingsley Amis to W. Somerset Maugham, 28 November 1955, in Letters, 243 and 456, respectively.

10. Numerous letters attest to Kingsley’s dissatisfaction with the “angry young man” label. See especially Kingsley Amis to the editor of the Encounter, November 1968, and Kingsley Amis to Mademoiselle $. M. Haimart, 7 December 1972, in Letters, 704-7 and 745-48, respectively. 11. By far the best article to discuss Lucky Jim in the context of the picaresque is Angela Hague, “Picaresque Structure and the Angry Young Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 32, no. 2 (1986): 209-20. In it Hague draws upon the work of Richard Bjornson’s The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction, Alexander’ Blackburn’s The Myth of the Picaro, and Claudio Guillén’s “Toward a

Definition of the Picaresque” to argue that Amis’s novel can be seen in the light of Spanish traditions. I agree with Hague that Jim Dixon functions in much the same way as Bjornson theorizes conversos, “marginal men” who were “subject to intense scorn and suspicion, forced into a marginal position within

the world, and react[ed] to persecution in a number of characteristic ways, among them the cultivation of irony” (211-12). Importantly, all of these critics identify that picaresque fiction flourishes during a time of social transformation and upheaval. 12. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (New York: Viking, 1958), 163, 189; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 13. See Brigid Brophy, “Lucky Jim,” in Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, 1966), 217-22. For his rejoinders, see Kingsley Amis, “My Kind of Comedy,” The Twentieth Century 170 (1961): 50, in which he clarifies that he wanted “to annoy Mozart lovers, not denigrate Mozart,” and also “Rondo for My Funeral,” Sunday Times, 1 July 1973, reprinted in The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction, 1954-1990 (London: Penguin, 1990),

280 + Notes to pages 109-41 388, in which he noted that Mozart was, for him, “the greatest composer, the greatest artist.” Another passage from this same article betrays Kingsley’s frustration at such critical misappraisals: “Many years ago, a character in a novel of mine was irritated to hear somebody singing something by ‘filthy Mozart’. He had a hangover at the time, and the singer was an enemy of his, and authors are allowed to dramatise attitudes they do not share, and anything on the lines of ‘filthy Pavel Josef Vejvanovsky’ would lack bite, but some people have been dull

enough to think that that was my sentiment. Aargh! Odvzous/y, in such a context, you invoke the artist you most admire” (386). Finally, in a 1964 letter to Andor Foldes, Kingsley congratulates the Hungarian pianist for correctly deducing the “filthy Mozart” tune as Beethoven’s C Major, for which, Kingsley added, he'd always had “the highest respect... . The series from 449 through 491 has appealed to me for years as the finest thing in all music (despite Dixon's views on the composer in question)”; see Kingsley Amis to Andor Foldes, 26 May 1964, in Letters, 646-47.

14. Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis” by Dale Salwak, Contemporary Literature 16, no. 1 (1975): 8. For “largely invented,” see Kingsley Amis, “My Kind of Comedy,” 47. 15. On the genesis of the novel, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 80; Jacobs, 4 Bi-

ography, 143; and Rossen, “Philip Larkin and Lucky Jim,” 157-58. Kingsley Amis, “Real and Made-up People,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1973, 847-48, reprinted in The Amis Collection, 3-7. As letters to Hilary Rubinstein make clear, Kingsley was worried about colleagues misinterpreting the novel's setting. See especially the letter of 6 May 1953 (Letters, 319-20), in which Kings-

ley jokingly requests that a disclaimer to the extent of “in particular, the University College depicted, together with its members, must be clearly understood as having no connexion whatever with any such institution in real life.” See also Kingsley’s response to questions from Rubinstein’s lawyers about the provenance of the characters and setting, 23 June 1953, in Letters, 324-25. Bradford also relates the comic antagonisms that Lucky Jim inflamed at Swansea in Lucky Him, 112-15.

16. Clive James, “Profile 4: Kingsley Amis,” New Review, July 1974, 22. Kingsley comments upon class and Lucky Jim in numerous letters; possibly the most enlightening is Kingsley Amis to Harry Ritchie, 24 July 1986, in Letters, 1026-29.

17. David Lodge, “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,” in The Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (London: Routledge, 1966), 255.

18. See Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

Notes to pages 112-117, « ~—281

19. Bradford notes that Dixon’s words counterbalance F. R. Leavis’s literary/cultural nostalgia, as propounded in such works as Revaluation: Tradttion and Development in the English Novel and The Great Tradition: George Ehsot,

Henry James, Joseph Conrad. Compare Jim’s words with this selection from Leavis's journal Scrutiny: “he strength of English belongs to the very spirit of

the language—the spirit that was formed when the English people who formed it were predominantly rural. ... And how much richer the /:fe was in the old, predominantly rural order than in the modern suburban world. .. . When one adds that speech in the old order was a popularly cultivated art, that people talked . . . instead of reading or listening to the wireless, it becomes plain that the promise of regeneration by American slang, popular city idiom, or invention of transition cosmopolitans is a flimsy consolation for our loss.” F. R. Leavis, quoted in Bradford, Lucky Him, tog-u. 20. The first of these voices is that of Welch, and the second is that of the principal. ‘Trying to gain control over himself, Jim next assumes an “exaggerated northern accent” and then finally abandons all imitations, braying like an “unusually fanatic nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate communist”; Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, 230. 21. Eliot Fremont-Smith, review of The Rachel Papers, New York, 29 April 1974, 76; Pearl K. Bell, “A Surfeit of Sex,” New Leader, 13 May 1974; Clive Jordon, Encounter, February 1974, 61, 64; and Peter Ackroyd, “Highway of Good Intentions,” Spectator, 24 November 1973, 674. 22. Bell, “A Surfeit of Sex,” 19-20. 23. Peter Prince, review of The Rachel Papers, New Statesman, 16 November 1973, 744. In Experience, Martin responds to this charge, calling Prince's efforts “the worst review that came my way” (34). 24. For Karl Miller, see “Gothic Guesswork,” New York Review of Books, 18 July 1974, 26. Regarding the plagiarism, Martin identified whole sentences,

not just phrases, that Epstein had stolen from The Rachel Papers, concluding that Epstein “wasn't influenced” by the novel, but “had it flattened out beside his typewriter.” See Martin Amis, “A Tale of Two Novels,” Odserver, 19 October 1980. [The following week, Epstein responded to Martin's article, admitting the theft and vowing to amend the manuscript in subsequent editions. When the second edition was released, Martin was dismayed to note many of the same problems. For the response, see Jacob Epstein’s letter to Martin Amis, Observer, 26 October 1980. Susan Heller Anderson recounted the exchange for Americans in “New Novelist Is Called a Plagiarist,” New York Times, 21 October 1980, and “Writer Apologizes for Plagiarism,” New York Times, 28 October 1980. See also Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the

282 « Notes to pages 118-122 Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989). Like

Martin, Epstein also comes from a distinguished literary family. At the time, his father was vice president of Random House, and his mother then worked as an editor for the New York Times Book Review.

25. For Martin on anxiety, see Michener, “Britain’s Brat,” 110. For “natural indolence,” see 1990 Current Biography Yearbook, ed. Charles Moritz (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1990), 20, quoted in James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 5. For Martin

on his father, see Experience, 22-23. To Elizabeth Grice, Martin also commented, “I felt in an eerie way that my relationship with Kingsley began when ] was seventeen and invited him upstairs to look at my books. . .. Complaining

a bit, he scaled the three floors to the top of the house. We had a brief chat about Graham Greene. | have always looked at that moment as when I suddenly became worth talking to”; see Elizabeth Grice, “The New Amis,” Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2000.

26. In a 2000 interview Howard noted that “Kingsley was very nice about my writing but if [ had put it first as he put his, there would have been trouble. It was an accepted thing that he was a famous writer and | was an also-ran, as it were. ... | minded it when we went to stay with people who would have a pile of books in the hall for him to sign and [he would] never mention that | wrote. I'd find that quite wounding.” See Elizabeth Jane Howard, “I Didn't Know I Was Going to Incur such Hatred over the Years,” interview by Corinna Honan, Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2000. Jacobs, 4 Biography, 265ff, notes how nightly readings of the day's work between Kingsley and Howard created the appearance, if not the feeling, of an informal writer’s workshop. Kingsley even wrote a few bits of her novel After Julius; she repaid the favor during the composition of One Fat Englishman. Zachary Leader identifies the specific passages of composition in his footnotes to Kingsley’s 3 September 1963 letter to Robert Conquest, in Lefters, 641. 27. Kingsley and Martin Amis, “The Two Amises,” interview by Kevin Byrne, Listener, 15 August 1974.

28. Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers (New York: Vintage, 1992), 7; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 29. Grice, “The New Amis.” On the divorce, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 247ff, and Jacobs, A Biography, 26off. Asked by Charles Michener to comment on how he felt about his father after the divorce, Martin related that he and his brother missed him a great deal, “even though he had always been sort of remote, always in his study basically”; see Michener, “Britain's Brat,” 111. 30. Bradford, Lucky Him, 247. On Martin’s controversial dental reparations, see Jonathan Wilson, “A Very English Story,” New Yorker, 6 March 6, 1995, 96-106.

Notes to pages 125-13I « ~—-283

31. Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 22ff. Bruce Stovel, “Traditional Comedy and the Comic Mask in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim,” English Studies in Canada 4, no. 1 (1978): 7off.

32. Blake Morrison, review ot The Rachel Papers, Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 1975, 277. See also Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amtis, 28, which clarifies that Charles Highway consciously seeks out the comedy of the grotesque: “I had begun to explore the literary grotesque, in particular the writings of Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, to find a world full of bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which I was always trying to invest my life.” 33- Stovel, “Traditional Comedy,” 70. Applying Frye’s model to Lucky Jim, one sees that Jim Dixon and Christine Callaghan rebel against the constricting

environment of the Welches that threatens to subsume them. Jim is also a charmingly effective comic everyman whose words and deeds garner the sympathy of the reader. Ultimately, these young lovers succeed in triumphing over the absurdities of the mechanized world that curtails them. Graced by luck and ingenuity, Jim gets the job in London not because he has the qualifications — “for this or any other work” — but because he has no disqualifications, which is “much rarer” (238). He triumphs over the mechanized absurdities of the external world and the self-imposed limitations of his internal thoughts. 34. For “breakdown of genre,” see Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” interview by John Haffenden, in Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), 10. For Martin on Austen and Dickens, see Susan Morrison, “The Wit and the Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 96-97. For “deflate fear with laughter,” see Mira Stout, “Down London's Mean Streets,” New York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 48. For his remarks on Lo/ita, see Martin Amis, “Lolita Reconsidered,” A¢/antic Monthly, September 1992, 119. 35. Kingsley Amis to Theo Richmond, g January 1986, in Letters, 1019. See also Jacobs, A Biography, 276-77. Bradford perceives the episode less lightly,

noting that Martin was frequently angered by Kingsley’s propensity toward selfishness, especially when opposed to Elizabeth Jane Howard's selflessness. It was Howard who returned Martin to a regimen of studying that enabled him to pass his examinations, arranging for him to spend a year at a “crammer’” in

Brighton (Sussex Tutors) run by a friend of hers. Eventually, Martin would score five O-levels and three A-levels. Bradford notes that Kingsley’s participation was distant and removed: “The fact that his son was sitting the Oxford entrance examination had slipped his mind”; see Bradford, Lucky Him, 247. 36. Martin Amis, Experience, 309. See also Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 15: “A voice of moral and religious certainty can be heard behind the masks of Swift’s personae” (and Kingsley’s, by extension); “the critical tones that filter through [Martin] Amis’s characters register contingent rather than definitive moral judgments.”

284 « Notes to pages 134-139

Chapter 4. The Amises on Satire 1. Kingsley and Martin Amis, “The Two Amises,” interview by Kevin Byrne, Listener, 15 August 1974.

2. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 19 April 1969, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 713-14.

3. See Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 300-307, and Richard Bradford, Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (Chester Springs, Penn.: Peter Owen, 2001), 300. Also see Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 189-92, which cites the final lines of Lewis's poem. 4. Lucy Partington’s disappearance and murder are two of the most formative experiences in Martin’s life. Emotionally, they dominate Experience. For Martin’s remarks, see Elizabeth Grice, “The New Amis,” Dazly Telegraph, 13 May 2000. 5. Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” interview by Dale Salwak, in Salwak,

Interviews with Britains Angry Young Men (San Bernadino, Calif.: Borgo, 1984), 32.

6. Martin Amis, Experience, 349. Lemmons features also in Kingsley’s Girl, 20, and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Odd Girl Out. Comically, the Amises and their home were featured in a national press advertisement for wallpaper (“Very Sanderson, Very Amis”). See Ian Woodward, “A Lovely Couple,” Womans Journal, June 1976, 19-21.

7. For Martin’s comments on the Old Forge, see Experience, 270-71. For

more of her memories of Lemmons, see Elizabeth Jane Howard, “I Didn't Know I Was Going to Incur such Hatred over the Years,” interview by Corinna Honan, Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2000. In a 12 May 1982 letter to Robert Conquest, Kingsley strives to refute Jane’s claims, noting that his youngest child was eighteen by 1972; in Letters, 945. As Bradford notes, permissive attitudes about sex and drugs had been a common feature in Amis households. Recalling Martin’s comments about the family residences at the Grove and Glanmor Road, Bradford states that the children were treated “as participants in what

seemed then like an ongoing adult party,” including one Christmas when Martin’s presents included a pack of cigarettes, Martin was nine at the time. Later, during the years at Lemmons, Sally and Philip suffered both personally and professionally from problems with drugs and alcohol. Bradford, Lucky Him, 131, 267.

8. See Matthew Hodgart, review of Ending Up, New York Review of Books, 20 March 1975, 32-33.

g. See Roger Sale, “Fooling Around, and Serious Business,” Hudson Review 27, no. 4 (1974-75): 626-27, and Charles Nicol, “A Brittle Pencil,” National

Notes to pages 139-145. 6 ~—-285

Review, 14 March 1975, 296-97. Sale argues that the characters “exist only so Amis can wound them, and when he tires of the fun he just kills them off with casual carelessness.” Nicol suggests that Amis’s ending is “tidy” but unconvincing and attributes its tolerated acceptance to “the current denatured state of the British novel.” 10. Hodgart, review of Ending Up, 33. For A. Robert Lee, see “Learning What to Expect: Amis’s Fiction in the ’7os,” in Essays on the Contemporary British Novel, ed. Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim (Miinchen: Max Hueber Verlag, 1986), 56. For “double satire” see Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); and Merritt Moseley, Understanding Kingsley Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993). 11. Kingsley Amis, Ending Up (London: Penguin, 1987), 48; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 12. James Price, review of Dead Babies by Martin Amis, Encounter, February 1976, 68.

13. Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” interview by Dale Salwak, 33. 14. James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 37.

15. Martin Amis, quoted in Susan Morrison, “The Wit and Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 99.

16. Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” interview by Peter Firchow, in The Writers Place: Interviews on the Literary Situation in Contemporary Britain, ed. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 34. 17. Kingsley Amis, “Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously,” New York Times Book Review, 7 July 1957, 1, 13; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. Comically, a 1957 letter to Larkin gives no indication of the essay’s eventual brilliance. It also gives good indication of the self-conscious posturing of Kingsley’s epistolary persona: “Am tring [szc] to do 1200 words for the New York Times Book Review on satire, two hundred doll-arse they will pay, mun. But don't know whether I can manage it. Satire? I don’t know anything about bloody satire. Don’t want to, neether.” Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 7 January 1957, 1n Letters, 499-500. 18. Kingsley Amis, “Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously,” 13. At this point in the essay, Kingsley’s sweeping agenda assumes full form as he surveys some of the preeminent satirists of the past. For Kingsley, Fielding’s reemergent satiric form represented an “almost explicit rejection” of the examples of Aldous Hux-

ley and Evelyn Waugh, for example. Both men, he argued, eventually rejected satire, one in favor of “mysticism and belles-lettres” (Huxley), the other in exchange for “threnodies upon the decline and fall of the English aristocracy” (Waugh). Though elsewhere Kingsley confessed grudging respect for Huxley

286 . Notes to pages 146-147 and unqualified praise for Waugh, in this essay he argued that the contemporary scene eluded their depictions, that their mode had become outdated: “[TJheir

world,” he claimed simply, “is not our world.” Similarly, when read against Fielding, Dickens appeared to Kingsley to be “remote, naive, almost primitive, certainly anti-realist and the virtuoso of a mode of humor that stifles action.” 19. Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here (London: Penguin, 1968), 185. The novel is among Kingsley’s least favorites, owing mostly to its thinly veiled autobiographical matrix. The terms of the Somerset Maugham Award, which Kingsley won for Lucky Jim, mandated that funds be applied to travel abroad. In a comic letter to Larkin, Kingsley called it a “deportation order.” Like Garrett Bowen, Kingsley chose Portugal as the locus of his expatriation. Hed eventually conclude, “The most important thing about Portugal as of now is... that | shall be leaving it soon and coming home.” Kingsley Amis to Victor Gollancz, 7 September 1955, in Lefters, 452. For more extended discussions of Kingsley’s debt to Fielding, see David Lodge, “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,” Critical Quarterly 5 (1963): 335-54, and Robert H.

Hopkins, “The Satire of Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here,” Critique 8, no. 3 (1966): 62-70. On Kingsley’s hidden rivalry with Leavis, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 109-11. Kingsley had, of course, read Leavis as a student and was not pleased that Henry Fielding, his comic master, was denied a place in Leavis’s “Great Tradition.” 20. Socialism and the Intellectuals was originally published in London in 1957 by the Fabian Society as its Tract 304. “This is not a very romantic sounding programme,” Kingsley continued. “In fact, it’s not a program at all. ‘That is precisely what I like about it.” For his comments on Declaration, see Kingsley Amis, quoted in Tom Maschler, introduction to Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 8-9. Declaration contains essays by Lindsay Anderson, Stuart Holroyd, Bill Hopkins, Doris Lessing, John Osborne, Ken-

neth Tynan, John Wain, and Colin Wilson. For “dismal self-advertising,” which Maschler omitted, see Kenneth Allsop, T4e Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties, 2d ed. (Wendover, England: John Goodchild, 1985), 59 n. Also see Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 15 October 1957 (Letters, 513), which reads, “And Christ, what about this Declaration thing then? He’s [Maschler] not an angry young man, you sam [sic], so he gets together with them all to say he isn’t. Ho hum. Ho, hum.” For Lessing’s rejoinder, see Maschler, ed., Declaration, 199. 21. See Henry Fielding, pretace to Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin

(1742; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 10, which is justly celebrated as a model for realist precepts. In it, Fielding proclaimed the verisimilitude of his novel, stating that “Life everywhere furnishes the accurate

Notes to pages 148-150 « ~—-287

Observer with the Ridiculous” and that “every thing is copied from the Book of Nature” (5). He thus asserted a mimetic theory of art, which necessitated (and justified) the introduction of dark vices into the work, for which Fielding both apologized and excused himself, noting simply that it is “difficult to pursue a Series of human Actions and keep clear from them” (10). In this respect, Fielding’s words veered toward a pragmatic theory of art, the second hallmark of the realistic mode: he signified a clear and present concern for the effects of his work upon his audience, a point that was not lost on Kingsley, who praised him for his narrative drive and his lack of ostentation. Asked by Michael Barber to specify one thing he liked about Fielding, Kingsley replied simply, “Apart from his wit, and I think, attractive, though sometimes heavy irony, he seems to be very concerned not to bore the reader, to keep the narrative going along.” See Kingsley Amis, “The Art of Fiction LIX,” interview by Michael Barber, Paris Review 16, no. 64 (1975): 49. For “gesture on the side of reason,” see Kingsley Amis, “Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously,” 1. 22. For “enriching process” and “agenda and program,” see Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” interview by John Haffenden, in Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), 24, 15. For “stimulate and entertain,” see Allsop, The Angry Decade, 71. In interviews with Will Self and Susan Morrison,

Martin cites Wolfe's prescription; the percentages he gives, however, vary— 80/20 in Self, and 65/35 in Morrison. See Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis” by Will Self, Mississippi Review Online, 7 October 1995, at http://orca.st.usm.edu/mrw/1995/o7amis.html; and Morrison, “Wit and Fury,” 97. For “fatal disease,” see Martin Amis, “Norman Mailer,” in The Morontc Inferno and Other Visits to America (New York: Penguin, 1987), 60; for “emphasis of reading,” see Morrison, “Wit and Fury,” roz. 23. See Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis.” 24. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 18-19, 22.

25. Jack Gohn, “The Novels of Kingsley Amis” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1975), 43, quoted in Dale Salwak, Kingsley Amis: Modern Nov-

elist (Lanham, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1992), 57. For Martin on Leavis, see Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 4. For Auden and Michaelangelo, see Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis.” 26. See especially “Martin Amis: Hate Him or Rate Him,” Independent, 7 May 2000; and ‘Terence Blacker, “Depressing Entry into the World of Porn City,” Independent, 14 December 2001. For a particularly misinformed piece, see “John Pilger Takes on Martin Amis,” New Statesman, 17 June 2002; the article is a reaction to Martin's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks

on the United States. See Martin Amis, “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,” New Statesman, 1 June 2002.

288 . Notes to pages 150-153 27. See Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 7, and Angela Neustatter, “Amis and Connolly— The Best-Seller Boys,” Cosmopolitan, August 1978, 71-72. 28. Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 33. For the review of Bakhtin’s study, see “Many Voices,” Times Literary Supplement, 29 March 1974, 346. Martin's review of Roth’s The Breast appeared in the Observer, 25 March 1973,

36. Roth's first attempt at Menippean satire produced The Great American Novel (New York: Holt, 1973).

29. Diedrick also notes that Amis stages dialogues between his characters that loosely resemble the conversations in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew. In both works, one character propounds moral relativism while another opposes such hedonistic indulgences, trying to register the humanist values that have

become outmoded. Diedrick concludes that Marvel is “a late-twentiethcentury embodiment of the same presumptuous and reductive rationalism that satire has traditionally opposed.” See Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 34-35. For the narrator’s comments, see Martin Amis, Dead Babies (New York: Vintage 1991), 146-47; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 30. Some of the Menippean satires Frye specifically lists include Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (“the greatest

Menippean satire in English before Swift”), Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (“perfect Menippean satires”) and Te Water Babies, Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter

Point, Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations, Jonathan Swift's Gulhvers Travels, and Voltaire’s Candide. Frye further explains that Menippean

satire differs from romance in that it is not primarily concerned with the exploits of heroes but relies on the “free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature.” Similarly, the form differs from picaresque fiction in that it presents its fictional world in “terms of a single intellectual pattern” whereas picaresque fiction seems more concerned with the “actual structure of society.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 308-10. 31. Both Frye and Bakhtin point to Socratic dialogue as a father of Menip-

pean satire. However, Bakhtin is quick to note that the mode is not simply a product of its disintegration; rather, the roots of Menippean satire “reach directly back into carnivalistic folklore, whose definitive influence is even more significant than that of the Socratic dialogue.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’ Poetics (1929; Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973), 92.

32. Ibid., 94-96, 103-11. In the course of his discussion, Bakhtin substitutes the more general word menippea for the more cumbersome phrase Menippean satire. Other scholars struggle with the label as well. Northrup Frye notes that Menippean satires are often called Varronian, after the Roman writer Varro. In

Notes to pages 154-163» 289 Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iwolsky (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), Bakhtin cites Lucian’s forms of Menippean satire, prompting Douglas Duncan to suggest, in Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), that the term Luctanic satire may be an appropriate substitute for Menippean satire. Toward the end of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye, too, seems eager to abandon the phrase, admitting a preference for the classical term anatomy, popularized by Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. 33. See Hodgart, review of Ending Up, 20, 33. For the negative reception of Ending Up, see Charles Nicol, “A Brittle Pencil,” National Review, 14 March 1975, 296-97; Roger Sale, “Fooling Around,” 626-27; L. E. Sissman, “Miss, Near Miss, Hit,” New Yorker, 21 October 1974, 185-88; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, review of Ending Up, Yale Review 65, no. 3 (1975): 59.

34. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 11. On Keith's role as a Christ figure, see Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 35-36, which argues that the “weekend orgy of sex, drugs, and depravity” that comprises the novel is a “kind of infernal parody of the Last Supper, with presiding host Quentin Villiers ultimately revealed [as| the Antichrist.” He further notes that that Villiers’s name linguistically conjures both vi//ain and evil, and briefly discusses Keith's torture as a parody of the crucifixion. 35. Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note (New York: Penguin, 1986), 305, 229. Readers familiar with Martin’s career will note the clever allusion: Martin's first nonfiction publication—an assessment of the famous video game —was titled Invasion of the Space Invaders (London: Hutchinson; Millbrae, Calif: Celestial Arts, 1982.)

36. Both Amises have spoken about the narrative benefits of portraying ugly characters. In his Paris Review interview, Kingsley refers to the “Two Nations of the attractive and the unattractive.” Martin similarly admits to polarizing characters, “pity[ing] the plain” who function at a “conspicuous disadvantage.” See Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 12. For Kingsley, see Kingsley Amis, “The Art of Fiction LIX,” 52.

37. James Diedrick reads the novel as a satiric farewell to Martin’s own generation, an exorcism of selfishness and despair, the unfortunate leftovers of the self-indulgent sixties. If Martin sought in The Rachel Papers to “exorcise his father’s generation,” Diedrick asserts, then in Dead Babies, “he enacts a similar ritual on his own.” See Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 40.

~ Chapter 5. The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism 1. In Experience: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 99, Martin comments upon Kingsley’s paternal glee in this coincidence. Overhearing a comment by Hylan Booker, the godfather of Martin’s son Louis, that he had

290 « Notes to pages 166-168 purchased Martin’s novel and his “daddy’s book too,” Kingsley added, “That sentence will only get said once in the history of the world.” 2. See John McDermott, “Kingsley and the Women,” Critical Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1985): 66, and Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 206-27. See also Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time (New York: Dutton, 1964), 282.

3. As numerous critics have noted, Take a Girl ike You is a modern updating of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. As in Richardson's novel, Kingsley’s protagonist, Patrick Standish, consummates his relationship with Jenny Bunn, his hounded lover, through rape, while she is intoxicated at a party. In Kingsley’s pre-sexual revolution, pre-politically correct days, Jenny responds not with litigation or public exposure, but with acceptance and complicity.

4. Kingsley Amis, Jakes Thing (London: Penguin, 1979), 286. See also Elizabeth Jane Howard, “I Didn’t Know I Was Going to Incur such Hatred over the Years,” interview by Corinna Honan, Dazly Telegraph, 16 May 2000: “At the end of one of his novels, [Kingsley] has a great diatribe about women. A lot of those things he says about women, he lobbed at me from time to time. He lost his libido and he said that I deeply resented that. In a curious way, that wasn't what I minded. I minded not being liked, a feeling of dislike and resentment that was so simmering about the place.” On Kingsley’s loss of libido, see Richard Bradford, Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (Chester Springs, Penn.: Peter Owen, 2001), 303-16.

5. Malcolm Bradbury “‘No, Not Bloomsbury’: The Comic Fiction of Kingsley Amis,” in No, Not Bloomsbury (New York: Columbia University Press,

1988), 215. On Jake as a latter generation Jim Dixon, see Keith Wilson, “Jim, Jake and the Years Between: The Will to Stasis in the Contemporary British Novel,” Ariel 13, no. 1 (1982): 55-69. Kingsley himself clarified the connection in a 25 April 1985 letter to John McDermott: “One tiny point: ‘Jake Richardson’ is a deliberate reformulation of ‘Jim Dixon”; see The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed.

Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 997. For Martin, see Experience, 29-30: “My objection is simpler than that: I can feel Dad’s thumb upon the scales. ... He was keeping score with women, and with Jane.”

6. McDermott reveals that in a radio interview given during the early stages of the novel’s composition, Kingsley remarked that his working title, Stanley and the Women, couldn't “really remain’ because the book was more about madness. See McDermott, dn English Moralist, 219. 7. Jonathan Yardley, review of Stanley and the Women, Washington Post Book World, 1 September 1985, 3; Val Hennessy, 4 Little Light Fiction (London:

Futura, 1989), 203; Christopher Hitchens, “American Notes,” Times Literary

Notes to pages 169-172,» ~=—-291

Supplement, 16 November 1984, 1310. For Jonathan Clowes, see Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 325. 8. For Kingsley, see Contemporary Authors, New Revision series vol. 54, s.v.

“Kingsley Amis.” For Burgess, see the unnamed review in the Odserver, reprinted in Homage to Qwert Yuiop (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 514-16. Kingsley’s aggressive intentions with the novel shine forth in his 8 February 1984 letter to Philip Larkin (Lefters, 969): “And by the way it’s not another JT [ Jake’s Thing] by any means. None of the sentimental mollycoddling that women get in that. This [S¢an/ey] has moments of definite hostility. It’s an inexhaustible subject.” See also Kingsley’s letter to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, 5 August 1984 (Letters, 981-82): “I HATE to find fault with such a friendly mention as Sebastian Faulks’s last week, but please, my novel, ‘Stanley and the Women’

does not argue that ‘all women are mad.’ No, as a leading character puts it, ‘they’re all too monstrously, sickeningly, ¢errifyingly sane.’ Not that it makes a lot of difference to those at the receiving end, admittedly. Or to a feminist.”

g. According to Bradford and Jacobs, Kingsley swore off sexual partners and the prospect of remarriage after the divorce from Howard, the effects of which can be seen in his poem “Senex,” which laments the absence of the “lash / At which I used to snort and snivel.” See Bradford, Lucky Him, 303-16, and Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 328ff. 10. For “vehicles for self-criticism,” see Kingsley Amis, “Real and Madeup People,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1973, reprinted in The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction, 1954-1990 (London: Penguin, 1990), 5. In Expertence, 228-29, Martin comments at length upon his father’s essay, agreeing that “The truth is that you can’t put real people into a novel, because a novel, if it is alive, will inexorably distort them, will tug them all out of shape, to fulfill its own designs.” For the connections between Howard and the characters Nowell and Susan, see Bradford, Lucky Him, 349-53, and Jacobs, A Biography, 317-21. For “closing down a whole dimension,” see Martin Amis, Experience, 28.

11. Kingsley Amis, Stanley and the Women (New York: Summit, 1985), 246-47; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 12. Asked whether Kingsley valued her contributions as a writer, Howard said that he “was very nice about my writing but if I had put if first as he put his, there would have been trouble. It was an accepted thing that he was a famous writer and I was an also-ran, as it were.” See Howard, “Such Hatred.” Similar remarks can be found in Elizabeth Jane Howard, “Life with Mr Amis and Other Tales,” interview with Naim Attallah, Odserver Magazine, 31 October 1993, 34740. 13. See also Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 3, 5 December 1983, in Letters,

964: “I also quite seriously fear [the novel] will get me murdered by feminists.

292 « Notes to pages 174-175 ‘The root of all the trouble is we want to fuck them’ &c.” See also Howard, “Such Hatred”: “ Kingsley thought of women as being f—able or decorative and after that, he hadn't much use for them, really. That made him very diffcult to live with, because few of us remain just those two things all our lives.” For “mood-clichés” see Martin Amis, “Don Juan in Hull,” New Yorker, 12 July 1993, 79-

14. Martin Amis, Experience, 310. Marilyn Butler, “Women and the Novel,” London Review of Books, 7-20 June 1984, 7-8.

15. Martin Amis, quoted in Susan Heller Anderson, “New Novelist Is Called a Plagiarist,” New York Times, 21 October 1980. See also Martin Amis, “The Living V-Sign,” interview by Lewis Jones, Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2001, in which Martin is quoted criticizing Dead Babies: “It’s a horribly transparent diagram of my earlier influences, shamelessly in the spirit of Burroughs and Ballard, and a ridiculous mixture of Dickens and Nabokov, all completely out of control.”

16. In an interview by Jean W. Ross cited in Contemporary Authors, New Revision series vol. 27, s.v. “Martin Amis,” 23, Martin remarked that throughout the first two drafts of the novel John Self was named John Sleep. Martin then considered the name John Street before settling on Self. The analog for Self’s name is most likely Nabokovian, a derivative from John Shade in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. However, Self’s distinctively charged voice stems from Saul Bellow. As Martin explained shortly after Money’s release, “I learned from Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King that you can have a great dolt of a character who says completely realistic things like, “hanks, Prince. I wish you all kinds of luck with your rain ceremony, but I think right after lunch my man and I had better blow,’ after a beautifully long, complicated paragraph about all his warring responses and yearnings.” Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” interview by John Haffenden, in Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (New York: Methuen, 1985), 8. Similarly, Brian Finney notes that early in Money, a producer offers Self a “Rain King cocktail”; see Finney, “What’s Amis in Contemporary British Fiction? Martin Amis’s Money and Time’ Arrow,” on the Internet at http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Amisr.html. 17. lan Hamilton, “Martin and Martina,” London Review of Books, 20 September-3 October 1984, 3; David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 24; Karl Miller, Dowbles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 411; and Jonathan Yardley, “The Comic Madness of Martin Amis,” Washington Post, 24 March 1985.

18. Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note (New York: Penguin, 1986), 28; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically.

Notes to pages 176-180 6 ~—- 293

19. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 5. 20. Ibid., 11-12. In Experience, 331 n., Martin remarks that his most direct reference to Stanley and the Women occurs in his novel Success (1978) with the tributary character Stanley Veale. On narrative doubling, see James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 93-99, and Miller, Doubles, 411-14.

21. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 11. The earliest references to the Martin Amis character in Money confirm this ironic perversity. Twice, Self men-

tions that a writer lives near him in London, and that he “gives him the creeps” (42, 71). This writer, he notes, “stops and stares at me. His face is cramped and incredulous —also knowing, with a smirk of collusion in his bent smile” (71).

22. See Martin Amis, interview by James Naughtie, Book Club, Radio 4, 5 August 2001. See also Susan Morrison, “The Wit and Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 101-2, in which Martin claims that his first three novels are “prefeminist” and Money is his feminist text. Similarly, in a 2000 interview Martin says that he and Ian McEwan are two of the most feminist writers of his generation and that he may be an “outright gynocrat.” See Martin Amis, “Amis on Amis,” interview by Claudia FitzHerbert, Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2001.

23. Sara Mills, “Working with Sexism: What Can Feminist Text Analysis Do?” in Twentteth-Century Fiction: From Text to Context, ed. Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber (London: Routledge, 1995), 214-17. The Shan Wareing article Mills draws upon is “Women in Fiction: Stylistic Modes of Reclamation,” Parlance 2, no. 2 (1990): 72-85, which examines the common tendency for writers to portray women as weak and passive in sexual situations but strong elsewhere. 24. The three-sided relationship of John Self, Martina Twain, and Selina Street arguably paved the way for the triptych of Nicola Six, Keith Talent, and Guy Clinch in London Fields. In Money, Selina Street attempts to prey upon John Self while Martina Twain attempts to save him. In London Fields, however, the pattern 1s inverted: Keith Talent undervalues and preys upon Nicola, whereas Guy overvalues and wants to save her. London Fields is declaratively more feminist than Money, however, in that Nicola is strong and in control of all perspectives. Self, by contrast, is weak and rarely in control. Speaking to James Naughtie, Martin praised Nicola Six for satirizing “male illusions—the

romantic illusions of Guy and the socio-sexual illusions of Keith, . . . She makes continuous chumps of all the men, including the narrator.” See Martin Amis, Book C/ud interview.

25. Morrison, “Wit and Fury,” rot.

294. e« Notes to pages 181-1853 26. See Laura Doan, “‘Sexy Greedy Js the Late Eighties’: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money,” Minnesota Review 34-35 (1990): 69-80; and Robert Martinez, “The Satirical Theater of the Female Body: The Role of Women in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Money: A Suicide Note,” available on the Internet at http://martinamis calbion.edu/martinezi1.htm. Similarly, Martin Cropper finds a proclivity in Martin’s early novels to portray women as vulnerable, especially to male violence. About Money and London Fields, he concludes, “Crucially, Selina Street and Nicola Six are tokenistic, sketchy, upmarket Barbie dolls.” See Cropper, “The Sisyphean Treadmill of Anguish,” Daily Telegraph, 31 August 1996. 27. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1981; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). To Baudrillard, the “real” is defined in terms of the media that generates it. Given Self’s immersion in the image-based worlds of television and cinema, his reality similarly lacks a third dimension. In America (1986), Baudrillard similarly comments upon the disappearance of meaning and the exhaustion of postmodern existence, including the end of history and subjectivity. See also Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, 83-89, which annotates the extent to which Martina attempts to instruct or humanize Self with intellectual ideals. For Tamas Bényei, see “Allegory and Allegoresis in Money,” The Proceedings of the First Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English, vol. 1 (Debrecen, Hungary: Institute of English and American Studies, 1995), 182-87. 28. Adam Mars-Jones, Venus Envy: On the WOMB and the BOMB (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), 33. 29. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) and “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Hal Foster, ed. Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1985). In Understanding Martin Amis, Diedrick draws upon Jameson’s work to theorize the “fetishistic rapture” that animates Self’s celebratory rhetoric, describing the novel's satire of “commodity fetishism.” For “terror of ignorance,” see Susan Morrison, “Wit and Fury,” 1o1. For mirror effects, see Martinez, “Satirical ‘Vheater,” which posits Martin’s use of female characters and female bodies as “textual landscapes and symbolic mirrors”: “The absence of consciousness in Amis’s female characters becomes a necessary textual vacancy that his male misogynists inhabit in order to establish his post-lapsarian view of modern sexuality.” 30. Mars-Jones, On the WOMB and the BOMB, 18. For more on the allegorical matrix of Money, see Bényei, “Allegory and Allegoresis,’ which argues that Self dramatizes the impossibility of allegory in Amis’s postmodern envi-

ronment. Noting that Self functions “as a kind of contemporary Everyman, inhabiting the empirical level of the allegory,” Bényei complicates simple

Notes to pages 184-188 295 formulations by contending that the empirical level is problematic in Money: “reality 1s unreal . . . everything (and everybody) becomes a sign, or rather, a palimpsest for changing signs. ... Even the body becomes an entity on which the signs of always already present codes are being endlessly inscribed. There is simply no longer any empirical self to be allegorized” (185). 31. Kingsley Amis to Robert Conquest, 9 March 1981, in Lefters, 915-16; sce also Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 3, 5 December 1983 (Le¢ters, 965), which elaborates, “Yes Craig Raine is a fucking fool. Terrible poet too. All that Martian bullshit.” See also H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, vol. 2 (1934), 495, quoted in Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), 196. 32. At the heart of both Stanley and the Women and Money lies a fractured fa-

milial relationship. Although both Amises depict familial conflict as a threat to established order, signifying metaphysical isolation, they disagree about its effects. In Kingsley’s novel, such conflict is initially destructive, then finally ameliorative. In Martin’s work, however, the conflict remains wholly destructive, a reminder of past rejections. In the whole of Martin's oeuvre, one 1s hard-pressed to identify more than a few supportive parent-child relationships. When parents do appear, they are usually portrayed as imposing and destructive, antagonizing characters either through direct presence (as in The Rachel Papers and Money) or through conspicuous absence (as in Dead Babies, Other People, and Success). Often, parents are guilty of crimes against innocence. Only in Martin's later fiction — London Fields, The Information, and Night Train for example — does one begin to notice a reverse, protective urge, an attempt to rescue youth from the destructive behavior of older characters, to protect innocence. 33. See the z990 Current Biography Yearbook, ed. Charles Moritz (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1990), 20, s.v. “Martin Amis.” For comments on Martin’s early novels, see Claude Rawson, “The Behaviour of Reviewers and Their Response to Martin Amis’s Novel, Other People,” London Review of Books, 7-20 May 1981, 19-22.

34. Borrowing the phrase from Roland Barthes in S/Z, David Lodge remarks‘ that a “classic realist text” exhibits signs of a structure that is coherent and causal and a style that is urbane and “homogenous,” freed from binding fates and systems, whether natural or economic; see Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990). In The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 14, George Levine argues in favor of realism’s social emphasis. Equating the terms moral realism and social realism, he asserts that realist texts seek to establish steadfast “fictional communities,” positing stabilities of language and meaning that contrast the contingency facing individuals in real time.

296 « Notes to pages 189-196 35. See chapter 3, note 24 of the present study for an account of this incident. 36. These are the primary criteria defined by George Levine in The Realistic Imagination. Lodge proposes a related list in After Bakhtin, arguing that realism’s basic conventions are “coherence and causality of narrative structure, autonomy of self in presentation of character, and a readable homogeneity and urbanity of style” (26). 37- Catherine Bernard, “Dismembering/Remembering Mimesis: Martin

Amis, Graham Swift,” in British Postmodern Fiction, ed. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 144. Writing about Time’ Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense (1991), Richard Menke similarly concludes that Martin occupies “an uneasy middle ground between mimesis and diegesis, between representation from within the action and commentary from without” (“Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’ Arrow, Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 4 [1998]: 960). Amy J. Elias, “Metamimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism,” in D’haen and Bertens, eds., British Postmodern Fiction, 9-10. Martin Amis, “Before Taste Was Outlawed,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1984, 113-14. In 1979, five years before Money and Stanley and the Women appeared, Lyo-

tard proclaimed that the “postmodern condition” could be described as one in which synthesizing forms and patterns—his “great” or “meta-narratives” — had become exhausted, losing their organizing powers. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (1979; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Similarly, in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1967, John Barth had written of the desuetude of inclusive formal structures, their degradation and assimilation by postmodern literary maneuvers. 38. Mira Stout, “Down London's Mean Streets,” New York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 35. Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 8, 16. 39. See Bradbury, No, Not Bloomsbury, 39. 40. For “shagged-out force,” see Martin Amis, “Martin Amis,” 5. For “fatal to the novel,” see Charles Michener, “Britain’s Brat of Letters,” Esquire, Janu-

ary 1987, 110. Compare Martin’s interview with Claudia FitzHerbert: when asked why Kingsley took a “more human view” of women, Martin responded, “that’s because we write in different genres. He was much more of a social realist. My world is more cartoonish than his.” See Martin Amis, “Amis on Amis.”

41. Byatt and Levine argue that parodic revisioning has always been a necessary component of realistic imaginings. Byatt notes that novelists have always attempted to reform the novel by questioning conventions from within

Notes to pages1g6-201 « 297 the novel itself; see A. S. Byatt, “People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to ‘Realism’

and ‘Experiment’ in English Postwar Fiction,” in The Contemporary English Novel, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 19-42. Io Levine, realism is a literary mode in flux, composed of multiple, competing forms, a pluralism of “realisms”; see George Levine, “Realism Reconsidered,” in Essentials in the Theory of Fiction, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 336-49. 42. Martin Amis, Money, 113, 264, 354, 361. Earlier in the novel, Self contemplates whether he may be infected by “some new mad cow disease that makes you wonder whether you're real all the time, that makes your life feel like a trick, an act, a joke” (61). Later he conveys that he is “tired of being watched and not knowing it . . . tired of all these absences” (129).

43. Martin’s apology harks back to an earlier conversation with Self, in which he considered whether there exists a “moral philosophy of fiction,” asking Self, ““When I create a character and put him or her through certain ordeals, what am I up to—morally? Am I accountable?” (241). At another point Martina Twain—whom Martin calls elsewhere the “‘second joker in the pack’”

(345) comments upon the sympathetic position of Self as the “‘reluctant narrator—the sad, unwitting narrator,” who exhibits the pathos and “‘helplessness of being watched, and not knowing’” (126).

Chapter 6. The Amises on Love, Death, and Children 1. According to policy, the Bodleian Library would not allow access to Kingsley’s letters while he was alive. For an explanation of Kingsley’s assistance in procuring the letters for Eric Jacobs to use in the preparation of his Kingsley Amis: A Biography, see Kingsley Amis to David Vaisey, 19 July 1994, in The Let-

ters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 1131-32. For more extensive coverage, see Eric Jacobs, “The Authorized Biographer,” in The Literary Biography, ed. Dale Salwak (London: Macmillan; lowa City: University of lowa Press, 1996), 130-36.

2. Zachary Leader, introduction to Kingsley Amis, Lefters, xiv. Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 243 n; subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 3. Martin Amis, Experience, 354; compare his Night Train (New York: Harmony, 1997), 33: “The chemistry of death is busy with her, changing her from alkaline to acid.” 4. See Martin Amis, Experience, 117: “I feel the lure of some immense generalisation about probity and prose. But the fit reader, the ideal reader, regards

a writer’s life as just an interesting extra. On good days, when you have the sense that you are a mere instrument of the work you were sent here to do, this

298 «» Notes to pages 202-205 is what a writer’s life actually feels like: an interesting extra. And there is no value correlation between the life and the work. Some writers will be relieved to hear this said.” On the critical reception of Experience, see Stephen Moss, “Experience by Martin Amis,” Guardian, 5 June 2000, and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “What Kingsley Can Teach Martin,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2000, 110-18.

5. For Hitchens, see “Kingsley Amis and ‘Little Shit’ Martin,” 741s Is London, 8 May 2000; compare also James Wood, “The Young Turk,” Guardian, 20 May 2000: “Amis did not really collapse so much as die into middle age. Innocence had been vandalised.” Martin devotes a full chapter of Experience to the diaries conflict, accusing Jacobs of coming “lurching and bucking and blundering” into “our china shop of familial sensitivities” (373). Jacobs’s own treatment of the controversy appeared as “Dear Martin, Yours Eric” in the 11 May 2000 edition of the Zizmes. Jacobs published his diary entries in three installments of the London Sunday Times—entries that the family had explicitly asked him not to publish. The paper’s action caused Martin to resign as the book reviews editor.

6. Martin Amis, “No More Illusions,” interview by Alexander Laurence and Kathleen McGee, n.d., on the Internet at http://www.altx-com/interviews/ martin-amis.html.

7. Martin Amis, “The Prose and Cons of Martin Amis,” interview by Graham Fuller, Interview 25, no. 5 (1995), on the Internet at http://martinamis -albion.edu/fuller.htm.

8. For Wood, see “The Young Turk.” For Walsh, see “Father and Son Reunion, Independent, 31 March 2000. For cri de coeur, see Martin Amis, “No More Illusions”: “This novel is a cri de coeur rather than a way of indirection like some Postmodern novels. This is direct and straight me”; compare also Martin's Experience, where he posits that “what everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel but a memoir. We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience — so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed.” g. Martin Amis, “Vidal's Mirror,” in Te War against Chché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 282; see also 279: “Vidal now takes cognizance of the human heart, and reveals that he has one.” Compare also Martin's review of William S. Burroughs’s novel Queer: “Retroactively the book humanizes Burroughs’s work. An impossibility to which one never resigns oneself: this is as good a reason for writing as any” (304). Numerous profiles and interviews of Martin after the release of Experience confirm the surprise that accompanied the memoir, but an especially illuminative profile is Elizabeth Grice, “The New Amis,” Daily Telegraph, 133 May 2000.

Notes to pages 206-217, « +=. 299 10. Martin Amis, “Letters,” review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Selected Letters, 1940-1977, 1n The War against Cliché, 257. Martin Amis, quoted in “Martin Amis: How Is John Self (from Money) Doing in 2001?” Independent, 14 December 2001. 11. Kingsley Amis to Robert Conquest, 5 January 1989, in Letters, 1078.

12. See Grice, “The New Amis,” as well as Martin Amis, “The Sadistic Muse,” interview by Laura Miller, 10 February 1998, on the Internet at http://dir.salon.com/books/int/1998/o02/cov_si_toint.html. 13. For Martin’s remarks on the unconscious, see Expertence, 280, 80, and 218 n. Compare Martin’s comments in Grice, “he New Amis”: “My unconscious owes [Lucy Partington] a great deal. She is a figure behind my novels, just as Delilah is. ‘To some extent, the book is a gift from her, which I have only realised since finishing.” Compare also Martin Amis, “The Sadistic Muse”: “The unconscious decides a lot of this stuff. You never write something because you are interested in the subject. You write something because it is given you to write.” Also see “The Sadistic Muse” for a discussion of the molestations. 14. Martin Amis, Experience, 186. Martin’s footnote to this passage is also significant: in an early letter to Elizabeth Jane Howard, Kingsley recounts how he silenced a party in Cambridge in the early 1960s. Everyone was sharing sto-

ries of things that had disappointed them. Passing, surprisingly, on travel, work, and children, Kingsley suggested “love.” 15. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 27 August 1981, in Le¢ters, 926-27. In Expertence, 311-13, Martin recounts the dinner over which the arrangement was negotiated and notes that the suggestion did not come from the Kilmarnocks. He also remarks that he never expected the arrangement to last longer than six months, much less the fifteen years that it did. 16. See Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 27 August 1981: “Anyhow, the day

this [living arrangement] was decided on I started a new novel, and the day they came, yesterday as I said, I got the plot of same sorted out”; in Letters, 927. 17. Martin Amis, Experience, 104 n. 18. Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils (New York: Summit, 1987), 25; subse-

quent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. For the review see David Lodge, “Closing Times,” New York Review of Books, 26 March 1987, 15-17.

19. Barbara Everett, “Philistines,” London Review of Books, 2 April 1987, 3. The novel was noted as distressing in Lodge, “Closing Times,” 17, and in Michiko Kakutani, “The Old Devils,” New York Times, 25 February 1987. 20. William H. Pritchard, “Amis Behavin’,” New York Review of Books, 22 March 1987, 14. at. Anthony Burgess, “Ending Up in Wales,” Odserver, 14 September 1986,

27. For more on the relationship between The Old Devils and Wales, see Jill

300 « Notes to pages 218-223 Farringdon, “When You Come Home Again to Wales,” The Anglo-Welsh Review (1987): 86-92. Although they met while Kingsley was a student at Oxford, the Amises moved to Swansea, Wales, when Kingsley took his first teaching job; Hilly also gave birth to their children there. 22. For The Old Devils see Everett, “Philistines,” 5; John Bayley, “Pushing On,” London Review of Books, 18 September 1986, 12; and John McDermott, Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 241.

23. ‘In Memoriam W.R.A.” first appeared in Kingsley Amis, 4 Look Round the Estate (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 31. 24. For James Wood, this passage epitomizes the book’s polyphonous tonal

voices, contrasting Martin’s more poetic formulations with a “flatter, harder prose”: “What is so moving is the rightful selfishness of those dates: [Martin] does not write ‘since 1922’, which would be Kingsley’s birthdate, but ‘since 1949, which is his own—for his is the reality that now matters.” See Wood, “The Young Turk.” 25. Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 10 August 1950, and Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 17 November 1985, in Letters, 243 and 1013, respectively. 26. See “Fathers and Sons,” Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1998, in which Mar-

tin and Bellow discuss agnosticism and the afterlife. See also Martin Amis, “Amis on Amis,” interview with Claudia FitzHerbert, Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2001.

27. For “At the birth of your child,” see Martin Amis, Experience, 365. Ironically, this comment stands in stark contrast to Kingsley and Larkin’s selfstylizations in the letters, where they played with antichildren poses. “It is the single-minded intensity,’ Kingsley wrote to Larkin in 1948, “even more than the brutish self-interest, of babies’ crying that angers me most; it is as if they feared that by omitting to yell for a second or two, they might be deprived of

a drop of milk” (quoted in Experience, 333). Larkin’s letters are even more forthright, Martin explains: “‘Children are very horrible, aren't they? Selfish, noisy, cruel little brutes.’ As a child himself, [Larkin] has said, he thought he hated everybody: “but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.’ I take this to be self-stylisation. Both intellectually and emotionally null, the anti-child position is only good for a joke or two. Kingsley used to occupy it a bit, as we shall learn. But, he never aspired to the genuine artistic venom of Larkin’s ‘children, with their shallow, violent eyes’” (243-44). On parent-

hood see Susan Morrison, “The Wit and Fury of Martin Amis,” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 102, and Mira Stout, “Down London’s Mean Streets” Mew York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 36. See also Martin Amis, “She Is the

Smiliest, Most Playful of Babies,” interview by Valerie Grove, Times (London), 7 April 1997.

Notes to pages 223-232, 6 301 28. See Martin Amis, Experience, 361: “My life, it seems to me, is ridiculously shapeless. | know what makes a good narrative, and lives don't have much of that— pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness. It is often the case that a Life, at least to start with, will resemble a success story; but the only shape that /ife dependably exhibits is that of tragedy— minus all the grand stuff about nemesis, fortune’s wheel, and the fatal flaw. Tragedy follows the line of the mouth on the tragic mask (and the equivalent is true of comedy). You rise to the crest and then you curve down to a further point along the same latitude. That’s the only shape lives usually have — and, again, forget about coherence of imagery and the Uniting Theme.”

Conclusion 1. For studies on Kingsley, see Robert H. Bell, ed., Critical Essays on Kingsley Amts (New York: Macmillan, 1998); Richard Bradford, Kingsley Amis (London: Edward Arnold, 1989); Paul Fussell, The Anti-Egoist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Philip Gardner, Kingsley Amis (Boston: Twayne, 1981); William E. Laskowski, Kingsley Amis (London: Twayne, 1998); John McDermott, Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Merritt Moseley, Understanding Kingsley Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); and Dale Salwak, Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991) and Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist (Lanham, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1992).

For studies on Martin, see John Baxter, Martin Amis (London: Twayne, 1999); John Dern, Martians, Monsters and Madonna: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); and Nicolas Tredell, The Fiction of Martin Amis (Duxford, England: Icon, 2000). 2. Kingsley Amis, “Writing for a TV Series,” in The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990 (London: Penguin, 1990), 30. David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 102,

and “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,” in Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English

Novel: (London: Routledge; New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 243-68.

3. See Martin Amis, “Thoroughly Post-modern Millenium,” review of Mao II by Don DeLillo, Independent, 8 September 1991, 29. 4. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 10; see also his “Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing,” in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986), 53-79.

302 « Notes to pages 233-237 5. James Wolcott, “Kingsley’s Ransom,” New Yorker, 30 October 1995, 57.

Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995) also records the extent to which Kingsley disliked solitude, as does Kingsley Amis to Robert Conquest, 20 February 1981, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 913. Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” Yale Review 49 (1959): 271. Kingsley’s au-

thorial voice verged so fully upon prophecy in Russian Hide and Seek that it prompted Margaret Thatcher to tell him, “Can’t you do any better than that? Get yourself another crystal ball!” See Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (New York: Summit, 1991), 318.

6. One may interestingly conjecture about the provenance of the reversetime phenomena in Times Arrow. Martin acknowledges some sources, including Robert Jay Lifton’s Te Nazi Doctors and Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved, and Moments of Reprieve in the book’s afterword. However, one of Kingsley’s letters to Philip Larkin (18 September 1979, in Letters, 874) makes reference to the same phenomenon. Certainly, it is not illogical to think the Amises discussed the thematic and stylistic ramifications of such a structural device. Maya Slater also points out that Time’s Arrow adopts the challenge posed by Nabokov in Look at the Harlequins! “Nobody can imag-

ine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible,” she notes. Slater also identifies other analogues such as Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, Lewis Carroll’s Sy/vie and Bruno, and Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphee. See Maya Slater, “Problems When Time Moves Backwards,” English: The Journal of the English Association 42, no. 173 (1993): 1417§2.

7. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002) positions Martin in high prophet mode, as history itself assumes center stage. This is not the narrative of history in any localized, postmodern way; rather, it is a history of psychology and of fact. The whole book can be seen as an emotional and intellectual corrective, or as a settling of scores, not only with Kingsley’s politics but also with Christopher Hitchens and with the twentieth century itself, or at least its greatest lacuna. 8. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 14, s.v. “Martin Amis.” g. See especially Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, 8, where he leverages Con-

quest against Kingsley: ““Uhe excuses which can be advanced are irrational,’ writes Conquest in The Great Terror. The world was offered a choice between two realities; and the young Kingsley, in common with the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere, chose the wrong reality.” 10. Martin Amis, “Thoroughly Post-modern Millenium,” 29. 11. See Linda Hutcheon, “The Pasttime of Past Time,” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, 2d ed.

Notes to pages 238-244 « 303 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 474-95; A Poetics of Postmodernism. Ffistory, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988); and The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989). See also Martin Amis, “Martin

Amis,” interview with John Haffenden, in Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), 11.

12, Martin Amis, “Survivors of the Cold War,” review of Underworld by Don DeLillo, New York Times Book Review, 5 October 1997, 17. Andrew Marr, “Death of the Novel,” Guardian, May 27, 2001. The Samuel Johnson Prize is England's biggest nonfiction award and competes with the Orange Prize. Marr laments that “the tricks of the novel, in rhythm, setting, authorial intervention and characterisation, have been better learned by new generations of historians and biographers than by novelists.” For his response see Jason Cowley, “Blame It on Amis, Barnes and McEwan,” New Statesman, 4 June 2001. Cowley quotes V. 8. Naipaul’s remark, “There was a time when fiction provided discoveries about the nature of society, about states, which gave those works of fiction a validity above the narrative element. ... No longer.”

13. See James Wood, “Martin Amis: The English Imprisonment,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 186-99. Chiefly, Wood argues that although Martin was one of the few writers of his generation to free English fiction from the “failures of language” that marked preceding generations, his stylistic achievements have also functioned as a prison, depriving his work of emotional depth. “But Amis has reimprisoned himself in the English burlesque,” Wood notes. “He does not speak to his reader; we are not swayed by his creations. And it is this same comic voice, which appears so emancipatory, that is actually gagging its creator. . . . His burlesque smothers gravity, his knowingness seals feeling. In particular, his novels are deprived of true struggle, because his characters struggle only with situations, and not really with themselves” (198). 14. Kingsley Amis, “Kingsley Amis,” interview with Dale Salwak, in Salwak, Interviews with Britain’ Angry Young Men (San Bernadino, Calif.: Borgo, 1984), 39. Lodge, Crossroads, 109. 15. Lodge, Crossroads, 110.

16. Martin Amis, quoted in Mira Stout, “Down London’s Mean Streets,” New York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 48. 17. Jerome Meckier, Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism,

and Revaluation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 279, 208ff. 18. Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Harmony, 1989), 76. 19. See D. J. Taylor, “The Back Half—Will They Survive?” New Statesman, 22 May 2001. Kingsley thought similar things had ruined the careers of James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and J. D. Salinger, among others: “This is

304 « Notes to pages 245-248 what often happens to American writers; they cease to become writers and become institutions. Too successful, too much money and something happens to them.” See Kingsley Amis, “An Interview with Kingsley Amis” by Dale Salwak, Contemporary Literature 16, no. 1 (1975): 4.

20. See Martin Cropper, “The Sisyphean Treadmill of Anguish,” Daz/y Telegraph, 31 August 1996. See also similar remarks in Wood, “The English Imprisonment,” 198.

21. Martin Amis, “The Prose and Cons of Martin Amis,” interview by Graham Fuller, Interview 25, no. 5 (1995) on the Internet at http://martinamis albion.edu/fuller.htm. For DeLillo, see Martin Amis, “Survivors of the Cold War,” 17.

22. On the relationship between nuclear war and paternity, see Martin Amis, “Thinkability,” in Einstein's Monsters (New York: Vintage, 1990). One of the most controversial paragraphs appears early, as Martin explains his concept of paternal duty during nuclear war: “I shall be obliged . . . to retrace that long

mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-mile-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then—God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive —I must find my wife and children and I must kill them” (4). Later, Kingsley and Martin contemplate the future through the lens of children, finding common ground in the promise of youth. In passages such as these, Adam Mars-Jones contends, the Amises use children as a “liberating construction,” allowing the free expression of emotion through a process of ideological deflection. See Mars-Jones, Venus Envy: On the WOMB and the BOMB (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), 9.

23. Martin Amis, “A Chicago of a Novel,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, 120.

24. Martin Amis, “An Interview with Martin Amis” by Will Self, Mississippi Review Online, 7 October 1995, at http://orca.st.usm.edu/mrw/1995/ ozamis.html. 25. See especially Virginia Woolf, 4 Room of Ones Own (London: Hogarth, 1929) and Three Guineas (London: Hogarth, 1938). Woolf has been criti-

cized, most famously by Elaine Showalter, for endorsing a passive withdrawal from gender politics. However, Toril Moi provides an improvement on

Showalter’s critique, asserting that Woolf did not crave a balance between masculinity and femininity but rather a complete dispersal of sexual typologies. In other words, Woolf rejected fixed definitions of gender in favor of antiessentialist reconstructions. [he best work to employ Woolf’s ideas of androgyny is her semiautobiographical novel 7o The Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1927). For Showalter, see 4 Literature of Their Own (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). For Moi, see Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985).

Notes to pages 248-251 « 305 26. Natasha Walter, “The Gender Benders,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), 1 December 1997. See also Lucretia Stewart, “The Gender Benders,” Guardian Unlimited, 24 January 2000. 27. Martin Amis, interview by David Aaronovitch, Booked, Channel Four Television, 1998; quoted in Stuart Kerr, “Like Father like Son? The Fiction of

Kingsley and Martin Amis,” on the Internet at http://martinamis.albion .edu/kerri.htm. See also Martin Amis, “The Sadistic Muse,” interview by Laura Miller, 10 February 1998, on the Internet at http://dir.salon.com/books/ int/1998/02/ cov_si_toint.html. 28. See Suzan Harrison, Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, anda Influence (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 10. For Eliot, see Lars Ole Sauerberg, Versions of the Past — Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of I: 8. Eltot, F R. Leavis, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 169. 29. Elizabeth Jane Howard, “I Didn’t Know I Was Going to Incur such Hatred over the Years,” interview by Corinna Honan, Daz/y Telegraph, 16 May 2000. James Wood, “The English Imprisonment,” 189-90.

BLANK PAGE

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The Green Man. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970.

Hows Your Glass? A Quizzical Look at Drinks and Drinking. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1984. 397

308 3. «© Bibhiography I Like It Here. London: Gollancz, 1958; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958; London: Penguin, 1968. I Want It Now. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. Jake’s Thing. London: Hutchinson, 1978; New York: Viking, 1978; London: Penguin, 1979. The James Bond Dossier. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965; New York: New American Library, 196s. The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage. London: Harper Collins, 1997. The Letters of Kingsley Amis. Edited by Zachary Leader. London: Harper Collins, 2000; New York: Miramax, 2001. Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz, 1954; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954; New York: Viking, 1958.

Memoirs. London: Hutchinson, 1991; New York: Summit, 1991. Mr. Barrett's Secret and Other Stories. London: Hutchinson, 1993. My Enemy’s Enemy. London: Gollancz, 1963; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960; London: Gollancz, 1961. The Old Devils. London: Hutchinson, 1986; New York: Summit, 1987. One Fat Englishman. London: Gollancz, 1963; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964. The Pleasure of Poetry: From His Daily Mirror Column. London: Cassell, 1990. The Riverside Villas Murders. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Rudyard Kipling and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975; New York: Scribners, 1976. The Russtan Girl. London: Hutchinson, 1992; New York. Penguin, 1995. Russian Hide and Seek. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Socialism and the Intellectuals. London: Fabian Society, 1957. Stanley and the Women. London: Hutchinson, 1984; New York: Summit, 1985. Take a Girl like You. London: Gollancz, 1960; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961; London: Penguin, 1975.

That Uncertain Feeling. London: Gollancz, 1955; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.

What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. You Can't Do Both. London: Hutchinson, 1994. Articles and Reviews

“Collected Larkin.” Review of Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin. Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 1988. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 214-16. “Communication and the Victorian Poet.” Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 386-99. “The Coventry Chaucer.” Review of Philip Larkin 1922-1985: A Tribute, edited

Bibhography « 309 by George Hartley. Sunday Telegraph, 29 May 1988. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 216-18.

“Crouchback’s Regress.” Review of Unconditional Surrender, by Evelyn Waugh. Spectator, 27 October 1961. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 75-79. “Dead Ringers.” Review of Waugh on Women, by Jacqueline McDonnell. O6server, 9 February 1986. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 81-83. “Fit to Kall.” Review of Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. New Statesman, 22 September 1978. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 69-72. “How I Lived in a Very Big House and Found God.” Review of Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1981. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 83-87. “Larkin Misrepresented.” Review of Philip Larkin and English Poetry, by Terry Whalen. Independent, 13 December 1986. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 219-23.

“Laughter’s to Be Taken Seriously.” New York Times Book Review, 7 July 1957, I, 13.

“My Kind of Comedy.” Twentieth Century 170 (1961): 46-50.

“Oxford and After.” In Larkin at Sixty, edited by Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. “A Poet for Our Time.” Review of High Windows, by Philip Larkin. Odserver, 2 June 1974. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 211-14. “Real and Made-up People.” Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1973. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 3-8. “A Rueful Shrug at Life.” Review of The Young British Poets, edited by Jeremy Robson. Observer, 133 June 1971. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 166-68. “Sacred 'Cows.” N.d. In The Amis Collection, 17-19. “She Was a Child and I Was a Child.” Review of Lo/ita, by Viadimir Nabokov. Spectator, 6 November 1959. Reprinted in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 77-85. “There's Something about a Soldier.” Review of Officers and Gentlemen, by Evelyn Waugh. Spectator, 8 July 1955. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 72-75. “Waugh’s Warts.” Review of Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, by Christopher Sykes. Observer, 28 September 1975. Reprinted in The Amis Collection, 79-81.

“Waxing Wroth.” Harper’, April 1969. Reprinted as “In Slightly Different Form’ in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 102-8.

“What Became of Jane Austen?” Spectator, 4 October 1957. Reprinted in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 13-17.

Interviews

Amis, Kingsley. “The Art of Fiction LIX: Kingsley Amis.” Interview by Michael Barber. Paris Review 16, no. 64 (1975): 39-72.

310 «3 «©— Bibhhography

_______. “An Interview with Kingsley Amis” by Dale Salwak. Contemporary Literature 16, no. 1 (1975): 1-18.

_____. “Kingsley Amis.” Interview by Peter Firchow. In The Writers Place. Interviews on the Literary Situation in Contemporary Britain. Edited by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974. 15-38. ______. “Kingsley Amis.” Interview by Dale Salwak. In Interviews with Britains Angry Young Men. Edited by Dale Salwak. San Bernadino, Calif.: Borgo, 1984. 13-40.

Amis, Kingsley and Martin Amis, “The Two Amises.” Interview by Kevin Byrne. Listener, 15 August 1974. Articles, Books, and Sections of Books about Kingsley Amis

Allen, Walter. Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time. New York: Dutton, 1964. Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties. 2nd ed. London: Owen, 1964. Bell, Robert H., ed. Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis. New York: Macmillan, 1998.

Bradford, Richard. Kingsley Amis. London: Edward Arnold, 1989. ______. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. Chester Springs, Penn.: Peter Owen, 2001. Bradbury, Malcolm. “‘No, Not Bloomsbury’: The Comic Fiction of Kingsley Amis.” In No, Not Bloomsbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 201-18.

Chase, Richard. “Is There a Middle Way in Culture? Clifton Fadiman and the Middlebrow.” Commentary 20, no.1 (1955): 57-63.

____. “Middlebrow England: The Novels of Kingsley Amis.” Commentary 22 (1956): 263-69.

Farringdon, Jill. “When You Come Home Again to Wales.” The Anglo-Welsh Review 86 (1987): 87-92. Fussell, Paul. The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Gindin, James. “Kingsley Amis’s Funny Novels.” In Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962. 34-50. Gohn, Jack Benoit. Kingsley Amis: A Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1976.

_____. “The Novels of Kingsley Amis.” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1975.

Bibhography . 311 Green, Martin. “Kingsley Amis: The Protest against Protest.” In The English Novel in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1984. 133-67.

Hewison, Robert. In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War 1945-60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Hopkins, Robert H. “The Satire of Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here.” Critique 8, no. 3 (1966): 62-70. Howard, Elizabeth Jane. “I Didn't Know I Was Going to Incur such Hatred over the Years.” Interview by Corinna Honan. Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2000. Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis: Biography. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995.

____.. “The Authorized Biographer.” In The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Edited by Dale Salwak. London: Macmillan; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. 130-36.

Karl, Frederick R. “The Angries: Is There a Protestant in the House?” In 4 Readers Guide to the Contemporary English Novel. New York: Noonday, 1962. 220-37.

Laskowski, William E. Kingsley Amis. London: [wayne, 1998. Lee, A. Robert. “Learning What to Expect: Amis’s Fiction in the ’7os.” In Essays on the Contemporary British Novel. Edited by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1986. 47-65. Lobb, Edward. “The Dead Father: Notes on Literary Influence.” Studies in the Humanittes 13, no. 2 (1986): 67-80. Lodge, David. “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis.” In Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. London: Routledge, 1966. 243-67.

MacLeod, Norman. “A Trip to Greeneland: The Plagiarizing Narrator of Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here.” Studies in the Novel 17, no. 2 (1985): 203-17. Maschler, Tom, ed. Declaration. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958. McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. _____. “Kingsley and the Women.” Critical Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1985): 65-71. McEwan, Neil. “Kingsley Amis.” In The Survival of the Novel: British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981. 78-97.

Meckier, Jerome. “Looking Back at Anger: The Success of a Collapsing Stance.” Dalhouste Review 52, no. 1 (1972): 47-58. Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Prose of the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Kingsley Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

O’Connor, William Van. The New University Wits and the End of Modernism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. 75-102.

312 « «©Bibhography ______. “Two ‘Types of ‘Heroes’ in Post-War British Fiction.” PMLA 77 (1962): 168-74.

Priestley, J. B. “Thoughts in the Wilderness: The Newest Novels.” New Statesman and Society, 26 June 1954, 825-36.

Pritchett, V. S. “These Writers Couldn’t Care Less.” New York Times Book Review, 28 April 1957, 1, 38-39.

Rabinovitz, Rubin. “Kingsley Amis.” In The Reaction against Experiment: A Study of the English Novel, 1950-1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. 38-63. Rossen, Janice. “Philip Larkin and Lucky Jim.” Journal of Modern Literature 22, no. I (1998): 157-74.

Salwak, Dale. “Discovering Kingsley Amis.” In The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Edited by Dale Salwak. London: Macmillan; lowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. 80-85. ____.. Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

___.. Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist. Lanham, Md.: Barnes and Noble, 1992.

Salwak, Dale, ed. Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Stevenson, Randall. The British Novel since the Thirties: An Introduction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. 123-31. Stovel, Bruce. “Traditional Comedy and the Comic Mask in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.” English Studies in Canada 4, no. 1 (1978): 69-80. Swinden, Patrick. “Kingsley Amis.” In The English Novel of History and Society, 1940-1980. London, Macmillan, 1984. 180-209.

Wilson, Keith. “Jim, Jake and the Years Between: The Will to Stasis in the Contemporary British Novel.” Arie/13, no. 1 (1982): 55-69. Wolcott, James. “Kingsley’s Ransom.” New Yorker, 30 October 1995, 52-57.

Martin Amis Books

Dead Babies. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975; New York: Random House, 1975; New York: Vintage, 1991.

Einsteins Monsters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987; New York: Random House, 1987; New York: Vintage, 1990.

Experience: A Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000; New York: Hyperion, 2000.

Heavy Water and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998; New York: Vintage, 1999.

Bibliography + 33 The Information. London: HarperCollins, 1995; New York: Harmony, 1995. Invasion of the Space Invaders. London: Hutchinson, 1982; Millbrae, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1982.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002; New York: Hyperion, 2002. London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989; New York: Harmony, 1989. Money: A Suicide Note. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984; New York: Viking, 1985; New York: Penguin, 1986. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986; New York: Viking, 1987; New York: Penguin, 1987. Night Train. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997; New York: Harmony, 1997. Other People: A Mystery Story. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981; New York: V1king, 1981; New York: Vintage, 1994. The Rachel Papers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973; New York: Knopf, 1974; New York: Vintage, 1992. Success. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978; New York: Harmony, 1987; New York: Vintage, 1991. Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offense. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991, New York: Harmony, 1991. Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993; New York: Harmony, 1994.

The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001; New York: Hyperion, 2001. Articles and Reviews

“Before Taste Was Outlawed.” Review of Diversity and Depth in Fiction, by Angus Wilson. Atlantic Monthly, May 1984, 112-14. “Being Serious in the Fifties.” Review of Reading Myself and Others, by Philip

Roth and Mountains and Caverns, by Alan Sillitoe. New Statesman, 7 November 1975, 577-78.

“The Beginning: Larval Larkin.” Review of 4 Girl in Winter, by Philip Larkin. New York Times Book Review, December 1976. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 149-5. “The Bottom Line.” Review of The Man from the USSR and Other Plays, by Vladimir Nabokov. Observer, 24 February 1985. Reprinted as “Plays” in The War against Cliché, 253-56. “Buy My Book, Please.” New Yorker, 26 June 1995, 96-99. “A Chicago of a Novel.” Review of The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, 114-26. “Don Juan in Hull.” New Yorker, 12 July 1993, 74-82.

314. « Bibliography “Even Later.” Review of The Actual, by Saul Bellow. Observer, August 1997. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 323-27.

“Found in Jerusalem.” Review of The Counterlife, by Philip Roth. Atlantic Monthly, February 1987. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 289-93. “Jane’s World.” New Yorker, 8 January 1996, 31-35. “John Updike.” In Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions, 47-59.

“The Latest Bad News.” Review of More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow. Observer, 25 October 1987.

“Lectures.” Review of Lectures on Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov. Odserver, January 1981. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 249-51. “Letters.” Review of Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977, by Vladimir Nabokov. Independent on Sunday, February 1990. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 257-60. “Life.” Review of Nabokov: His Life in Part, by Andrew Field. Odserver, August 1977. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 245-47.

“Lolita Reconsidered.” Review of Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. Ad/antic Monthly, September 1992, 109-20. “Lolita’s Little Sister.” Review of The Enchanter, by Vladimir Nabokov. Odserver, January 1987. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 261-63. “Miss Jane’s Prime.” Review of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Atlantic Monthly, February 1990, 100-102. “More Die of Heartbreak.” Review of More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow. In Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions, 132-54. “Philip Larkin, 1922-1985.” In Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions, 201-7.

“Philip Roth and the Self.” Review of My Life as a Man, by Philip Roth. New Statesman, November 1974. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 285-87. “Philip Roth: No Satisfaction.” In The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 33-42.

Review of Sabbath’ Theatre, by Philip Roth. Sunday Times, September 1995. Reprinted in 74e War against Cliché, 294-97. Review of Zuckerman Unbound, by Philip Roth. Odserver, August 1981. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 287-89. “Saul’s December.” Review of Him with His Foot in His Mouth, by Saul Bellow. Observer, 24 June 1984, 20. “Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno.” In The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 17-24. “Saul Bellow in Chicago.” In The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 199-208.

“The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces.” In Vladimir

Bibhography « 315 Nabokov: A Tribute. Edited by Peter Quennell. New York: William Morrow, 1980. 73-87.

“Survivors of the Cold War.” Review of Underworld, by Don DeLillo. New York Times Book Review, 5 October 1997, 17.

“Teacher's Pet.” Review of Ulysses, by James Joyce. Atlantic Monthly, September 1986. Reprinted as “The War against Cliché” in The War against Cliché, 441-46. “Thankless Tasker.” Review of Letters in Criticism, by F. R. Leavis, edited by John Tasker. New Statesman, 31 May 1974, 774-75.

“Thoroughly Post-modern Millenium.” Review of Mao IT, by Don DeLillo. Independent, 8 September 1991, 29. “Tinkering with Jane.” Review of Sandition: A Novel by Jane Austen and Another Lady. Observer, 20 July 1975, 23. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 183-85. “Vidal’s Mirror.” Review of Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal. Sunday Times, 22 October 1995, 7. Reprinted in The War against Cliché, 279-83. “Waugh’s Mag. Op.; Wodehouse’s Sunset.” Review of Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. In The War against Cliché, 201-4. Interviews and Profiles

Amis, Kingsley and Martin Amis. “Ihe Two Amises.” Interview by Kevin Byrne. Listener, 15 August 1974.

Amis, Martin. “Amis on Amis.” Interview by Claudia FitzHerbert. Dai/y Telegraph, 12 November 2001. ______.”Fathers and Sons.” Interview by Saul Bellow. Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1998.

_______. Interview with Martin Amis. By James Naughtie. BBC Book Club. 5 August 2001. ______. “An Interview with Martin Amis.” By Will Self. Misszssipp1 Review

Online, 7 October 1995. On the Internet at http://orca.st-usm.edu/mrw/ 1995/o7amis.html. _____. “The Living V-Sign.” Interview by Lewis Jones. Daz/y Telegraph, 26 January 2001.

_____.. “Martin Amis.” Interview by John Haffenden. In John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 1985. 1-24. ______.. “No More Illusions.” Interview by Alexander Laurence and Kathleen

McGee. N.d. On the Internet at http://www.altx.com/interviews/martin .amis.html. ______. “The Prose and Cons of Martin Amis.” Interview by Graham Fuller.

Interview 25, no. 5 (1995). On the Internet at http://martinamis.albion .edu/fuller.htm.

316 «386 «= Bibliography

—______. “The Sadistic Muse.” Interview by Laura Miller. ro February 1998. On the Internet at http://dir.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si _toint.html. _____. “Theories on the History of Bitching.” Interview by Andrew Billen. Evening Standard, 30 September 1998.

____. “There Is a Kind of Mean-Spiritedness of Which I Am the Focus.” Interview by James Cowly. Times (London), 4 August 1997.

_____. “What I Miss Is Ringing Kingsley to Check on a Language Point.” Interview by Valerie Grove. Times (London), 8 March 1996. Cropper, Martin. “The Sisyphean Treadmill of Anguish.” Daily Telegraph, 31 August 1996. Grice, Elizabeth. “The New Amis.” Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2000. James, Clive. “N. V. Rampart Meets Martin Amis.” London Review of Books, 18-31 October 1984, 14.

Kaplan, James. “Tennis with Amis.” New York, 29 May 1995, 37-42. Michener, Charles. “Britain’s Brat of Letters.” Esquire, January 1987, 108-11.

Morrison, Susan. “The Wit and The Fury of Martin Amis.” Rolling Stone, 17 May 1990, 95-102.

Stout, Mira. “Down London’s Mean Streets.” New York Times Magazine, 4 February 1990, 32-36, 48. Wilson, Jonathan. “A Very English Story.” Mew Yorker (6 March 1995): 96-106. Articles, Books, and Sections of Books about Martin Amis

Alexander, Victoria N. “Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov.” Antioch Review 52, no. 4 (1994): 580-90.

Anderson, Susan Heller. “New Novelist Is Called a Plagiarist.” Mew York Times, 21 October 1980. Baxter, John. Martin Amis. London: Twayne, 1999. Bényei, Tamas. “Allegory and Allegoresis in Martin Amis’s Money.” In The Proceedings of the First Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English.

Vol. 1. Debrecen, Hungary: Institute of English and American Studies, 1995. 182-87. On the Internet at http://martinamis.albion.edu/allegory.htm. Bernard, Catherine. “Dismembering Mimesis: Martin Amis, Graham Swift.” In British Postmodern Fiction. Edited by Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 121-44. Davies, Caroline. “Biographer and Son Clash over Diary on Amis.” Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1996.

Dern, John. Martians, Monsters and Madonna: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Bibhography .« 317 Doan, Laura L. “‘Sexy Greedy Js the Late Eighties’: Power Systems in Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money.” Minnesota Review 34-35 (1990): 69-80. Elias, Amy J. “Meta-mimesis? The Problem of British Postmodern Realism.” In British Postmodern Fiction. Edited by Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 9-31.

Finney, Brian. “Narrative and Narrated Homicide in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields.” Critique 37 (1995): 3-15.

______. “What’s Amis in Contemporary British Fiction? Martin Amis’s Money and Time’ Arrow.” N.d. On the Internet at http://www.csulb.edu/ ~bhfinney/Amisr.html.

Kerr, Stuart. “Like Father like Son? The Fiction of Kingsley and Martin Amis.” On the Internet at http://martinamis.albion.edu/kerr1.htm. Leader, Zachary, ed. On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989.

Mars-Jones, Adam. Venus Envy: On the WOMB and the BOMB. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Martinez, Robert. “The Satirical Theater of the Female Body: The Role of Women in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Money: A Sut-

cide Note.” On the Internet at http://martinamis.albion.edu/martinezi.htm. Menke, Richard. “Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’ Arrow.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 4 (1998): 959-80. On the Internet at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction _studies/vo44/44.4menke.html. Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Mills, Sara. “Working with Sexism: What Can Feminist Text Analysis Do?” In Twentieth-Century Fiction: From Text to Context. Edited by Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber. London: Routledge, 1995. 206-19. Nash, John. “Fiction May Be a Legal Paternity: Martin Amis’s The Information.” English 45 (1996): 213-25.

Padhi, Shanti. “Bed and Bedlam: The Hard-Core Extravaganzas of Martin Amis.” PN Review 7 (1981): 42-45.

Todd, Richard. “The Intrusive Author in British Postmodernist Fiction: The Cases of Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis.” In Exploring Postmodernism: Selected Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism at the Eleventh International Comparative Literature Congress, Paris, 20-24 August 1985. Edited

by Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1987. 123-37.

318 3. Bibliography Tredell, Nicolas. The Fiction of Martin Amis. Duxford: Icon, 2000. Wood, James. “Little Big Man.” Review of The Information, by Martin Amis. The New Republic, 14 August 1995, 28-34.

______. “Martin Amis: The English Imprisonment.” In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief: London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. 186-99. ____.. “The Young Turk.” Review of Experience, by Martin Amis. Guardian, 20 May 2000.

Selected Critical Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin.

Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

_____. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 1929. Translated by R. Wm. Rotsel. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973. ______. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968. Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Atlantic Monthly, August 1967,

27-31. }

17-22.

____.. “The Literature of Replenishment.” Atlantic Monthly, January 1980, Baudrillard, Jean. America. 1986. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.

______. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. ‘Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. ____.. The Situation of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1970. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 1924. Bloom, Harold. The Anxtety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

______.. A Map of Misreading. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

______.. “A Meditation upon Priority.” In The Critical Tradition. Edited by David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. 705-10. ______. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. Cecil, Lord David. Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935. Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein, eds. Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Bibhography +» 319 Cooper, William. “Reflections on Some Aspects of the Experimental Novel.” International Literary Annual 2 (1959): 29-36. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and Individual Talent.” 1917. In Critical Theory since Plato. Edited by Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 784-88.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1ggr. Harrison, Suzan. Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. 1971. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Howe, Florence. “Introduction: T. $. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and the Future of “Tradition.” In Tradition and the Talents of Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Hutcheon, Linda. “The Pasttime of Past Time.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Edited by Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. 2d ed. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. 474-95. ______.. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

—___.. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster. London: Pluto, 198s. _____.. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Larkin, Philip. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. Edited by Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992. Leavis, F. R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in the English Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, 1936. Leavis, Q. D. “The Englishness of the English Novel.” Collected Essays. Edited by G. Singh. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 303-27. Lee, Alison. Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: Enghsh Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. _____—. “Realism Reconsidered.” Essentials in the Theory of Fiction. Edited by

Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988. 336-48.

Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.

320 6 «©©Bibhography —______.. “Lucky Jim Revisited.” In The Practice of Writing. London: Penguin, 1997. 85-97.

—______.. The Novelist at the Crossroads. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971.

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BLANK PAGE

Index

The Actual (Bellow), 51 163, 194, 197-98, 199-201, 205-8, 223-

Adorno, Theodor, 39 26, 229-32, 249-53; and Roth, 55, 61The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow), 63; and satire, 53, 79-81, 108, 142-47,

35 47 50, 53-54, 247 158-61, 163, 172-73; and sex, 40, 61-62,

Allen, Walter, 102 214; and sexism, 163-74, 208-10, 228; The Alteration (K. Amis), 184, 229 and style, 27-28, 36-38, 40-41, 52-54, The Amis Collection (K. Amis), 79, 88 62-63, 82; on tradition, 20, 66-67, 71; Amis, Kingsley: and American literature, and United States, 33-34; and Waugh, 30, 33-36; and Austen, 68-73, 92; and 79-82, 90, 93 Bellow, 52-55, 186; and class conflict, Amis, Martin: and American literature, 105-10; and comedy, 80, 82, 1or~2, 125, 30, 33-36; and Austen, 73-79, 235; and 166-67, 208-9; and death, 8, 15, go, Bellow, 46-52, 220~22, 232, 235, 242, 135, 199-201, 204, 221, 223, 224-26; 247; and children, 218-19, 222-24, 226, and fame, 8, 12, 14, 17, 27, 102, 162; 235, 246; and comedy, 83, 122, 125-28, and feminism, 163-68; and Fielding, 130-31; divorce, 121, 202; and fame, 7, 27, 49, 67, 71, 82, 109, 126, 144-48, 12, 14, 162, 219; and feminism, 164-65, 232-33; and H. Bardwell/Kilmarnock, 174-76, 179-83, 248; and Larkin, 937, 121, 208-13, 215-18; and Howard, 7, 98, 242; and literary families, 3-4, 104, II, 16, 104, 118, 121, 135-37, 167, 169-71, IIQ, 219, 227; marriages, 15, 202, 218,

206, 208-10; and Larkin, 10, 14, 55, 246; methods of characterization, 5688-93, IOI, 10g, 199, 213-15; and 57, 75~78, 134, 136-38, 140-42, 156-59, Leavises, 66, 67, 70-71, 78, 112, 146, 174-83, 189-97, 232-34, 247-51, mid149, 225, 232; and literary families, 3- life crisis, 15, 201-8; and Nabokov, 414, 104, 119, 219, 227; methods of char- 46, 156, 189, 205, 232; politics, 12-13,

acterization, 76, 136-40, 153-56, 168- 83-85, 95, 245-46; and postmodern73, 184-88, 211-17, 232-33; and mod- ism, 27, 183-97, 228-29, 232-36, 239, ernism, 27, 35, 38, 111, 187; and Move- 242, 244, 252-53; relationship with ment, 22, 38-40, 45, 115; and Nabokov, K. Amis, 7-11, 14, 16-17, 27-29, 63-65, 36-38, 40-41, 54-55, 169, 186; poetry 85, 97-98, 102-3, 117-18, 120-21, 129of, 11, 218; politics, 10, 12-13, 81, 85, 32, 134, 160-61, 163, 167, 169-70, 173209, 228; and realism, 27-28, 35, 183- 74, 194, 197-98, 199-201, 205-8, 211, QI, 197-98, 228-29, 232-33, 239, 242, 218-19, 223-26, 229-32, 249-53; and 252-53; relationship with M. Amis, Roth, 55-61, 151; and satire, 74, 117, 7-11, 14, 16-17, 27-29, 63-65, 85, 97-98, 142, 147-53, 158-61; and sex, 56-58, 73, 102-3, 117-18, 120-21, 129-32, 160-61, 207, 246; and sexism, 164-65, 174-81; 323

324 « Index Amis, Martin (continued) Booker Prize, 4, 15, 23, 175, 210, 245 and style, 27-28, 36, 41-46, 48-52, Boulting, John and Roy, ror~2 56-60, 86-87, 96, 124, 247-51; on tra- Bradbury, Malcolm, 5, 39, 79, 81-82, 167,

dition, 20, 66-67; and United States, 186, 240 34, 235; and Waugh, 82-88 Bradford, Richard, 88, 112, 121, 122, 169 Amis, Philip, 7, 93, 121, 135, 137, 218 Braine, John, 107

Amis, Sally, 7, 135, 218 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 80, 83, The Anti-Death League (K. Amis), 200, 85-86

233 Bronté, Charlotte, 75, 119

Arnold, Matthew, 19, 54, 76, 88 Brophy, Brigid, 108-9

Auden, W. H., 34, 149 Burgess, Anthony, 63, 168, 217 Austen, Jane, 66-67, 80-83, 128, 235; in- Butler, Samuel, 144, 147 fluence on Amises, 68-79, 92, 97-98; Byatt, A. S., 3, 196, 240-41 Mansfield Park, 68-70, 72, 80, 86;

Pride and Prejudice, 73-75, 77; San- Carter, Angela, 239, 242

dition, 75 Cecil, Lord David, 103 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 177

Bahktin, Mikhail, 147-53, 250 Cixous, Héléne, 248

Ballard, J. G., 61, 67 Clowes, Jonathan, 168 Banville, John, 239-40 Collins, Wilkie, 24, 242-43, 245 Bardwell, Hilary, 121. See a/so Kilmar- Colonel Sun (K. Amis, as R. Markham),

nock, Lady Hilary 184, 229

Barnes, Julian, 15, 28, 202, 239-40 Conquest, Robert, 10, 14, 184, 206, 236

Barth, John, 5, 191, 192 Conrad, Joseph, 178 Barthes, Roland, 236 contemporary literature, 22, 26, 38 Baudrillard, Jean, 181, 237 Cooper, William, 39 Beckett, Samuel, 192, 233

Bell, Pearl K., 115-16 Day Lewis, Cecil, 135 Bellow, Saul, 9, 17, 30, 33, 60, 73, 186, 207, Dead Babies (M. Amis), 132, 133-34, 138,

232, 235, 242; influence on Amises, 149, 162, 178; characterization in, 14046-55, 59, 234; relationship with 42, 154, 156-61; and Menippean satire,

M. Amis, 46-48, 220-22, 225-26; 149-53; provenance of, 135-37 The Actual, 51, The Adventures of Declaration (Maschler), 146 Augie March, 35, 47, 50; 537545 247 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 79-80, 83-84

Bényei, Tamas, 181 DeLillo, Don, 28; Mao I, 236, 243;

Bergonzi, Bernard, 5 Underworld, 238, 243, 246 Bergson, Henri, 72, 126; influence upon Dickens, Charles, 24, 66, 82, 128, 148; and

Lucky Jim, Wt, 113-15, 125 literary rivals, 24-25, 230, 242-43, 245 Bernard, Catherine, 191 Diedrick, James, 4, 15, 75, 94, 125, 141,

Bernstein, Sidney, 102 151, 181

Betjeman, John, 102 Doan, Laura, 181 The Biographer’s Moustache (K. Amis), 76 Drabble, Margaret, 3, 240 Bloom, Harold, 19-22, 23, 25-26, 29, 117- Dryden, John, 144, 147 18, 119, 122, 198, 229-30, 250, 252 Dumas, Alexandre, 4, 219

Index « 325 Einstein’ Monsters (M. Amis), 13, 83, 85, Hamilton, Ian, 174, 175

95, 182, 183, 237, 244-45 A Handful of Dust (Waugh), 80, 83

Elias, Amy J., 191 Hardy, Thomas, 88

Eliot, George, 24, 27 Heavy Water and Other Stories (M. Amis), Eliot, T. S., 19-21, 23, 29, 54, 66, 67, 88, 202, 245

III, 114, 235, 250 Hemingway, Ernest, 164 Ending Up (K. Amis), 133-34, 162, 212, Heraclitus, 78, 142 213, 216; characterization in, 137-40, Hitchcock, Alfred, 102 153-56; and Horatian satire, 142, 158- Hitchens, Christopher, 168, 201

60; provenance of, 135-37 Hodgart, Matthew, 138-39, 154

Epstein, Jacob, 117, 189 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 88 Experience (M. Amis), 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 16, Housman, A. E., 88 46, 49, 93, 120, 228, 236, 243, 246; ar- Howard, Elizabeth Jane, m1, 16, 104, 121;

tistic form of, 204-6, 220, 244, 247; on on M. Amis, 185, 250; marriage to Bellow, 220-22, 225-26; on children, K. Amis, 7, 118, 135-37, 167, 169-71,

222-23; on novels of K. Amis, 131, 206, 208-9 210-12; on Partington disappearance, § How’ Your Glass? (K. Amis), 109

202-4, 206-7, 214; on relationship Hutcheon, Linda, 236-37 with K. Amis, 53, 85, 94, 97, 118, 199- Huxley, Aldous, 34, 79 201, 206-8, 214, 217-20, 224-26, 250 I Like It Here (K. Amis), 72, 76, 145-

Fielding, Henry, 27, 49, 67, 71, 82, 109, 46, 149 127; influence on K. Amis, 144-48, The Information (M. Amis), 84, 93, 151,

232-33 202-5, 251; and controversy, 14-16,

Firchow, Peter, 142 245; literary rivalry in, 17, 22; and Flaubert, Gustave, 42, 47, 50 realism, 229, 250

76, 220 189

The Folks that Live on the Hill (K. Amis), Invasion of the Space Invaders (M. Amis),

Ford, Ford Madox, 3 Ishiguru, Kazuo, 28, 239-40, 242 Forster, E. M., 45

Freeley, Maureen, 220, 226 Jacobs, Eric, 10, 14, 15, 88, 92, 119, 121, 169,

Frye, Northrop, 127, 149, 152 202, 204, 220, 224 Fussell, Paul, 5, 52 Jake's Thing (K. Amis), 76, 81, 178, 208-9, 212, 213, 216, 244; sexism in, 164-68,

genealogical dissent, 6, 18, 97, 198 179, 214 A Girlin Winter (Larkin), 91 Jakobson, Roman, 232

Gohn, Jack, 149 Jameson, Fredric, 182 Golding, William, 63 Jill (Larkin), 88 Gollancz, Victor, ro1 Johnson, B. S., 192

Greene, Graham, 203 Joyce, James, 27, 38, 47, 232 The Green Man (K. Amis), 184, 229 Kavanagh, Pat, 15, 202

Haffenden, John, 156, 177, 193 Kilmarnock, Lady Hilary, 7, 208-13, 215-

Hagan, Andrew, 206 18. See also Bardwell, Hilary

326 « Index Kilmarnock, Lord Alistair Boyd, 7, 210- 104-15, 173; genesis of, 109-10; and

12, 215 Larkin, 92, 101-2; and The Rachel

The King’s English (KK. Amis), 122 Papers, 115-32 Koba the Dread (M. Amis), 12, 13, 85, 202, Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 191 228; as quarrel with K. Amis, 235-36,

243-44, 250 Mailer, Norman, 34, 35, 55, 164 Mansfield Park (Austen), 68-70, 72,

Larkin, Philip, 37, 71, 164, 210; friendship 80, 86 with K. Amis, 10-11, 14, 16, 55, 81,101, Mao II (DeLillo), 236, 243 135, 199, 220; influence on Amises, Mars-Jones, Adam, 16, 181-83 87-98, 213-15, 242; and Lucky Jim, 92, Maschler, Tom, 146

109-10; and Movement, 38; poetry Maugham, Somerset, 106-8

of, 89-91; and reputation, 87-98, McDermott, John, 79 204, 225; A Girl in Winter, 91; Jill, 88; McHale, Brian, 232-33

Selected Letters of, 88, 199 Meckier, Jerome, 19, 23-26, 27, 29, 77,

Lawrence, D. H., 27, 34, 38, 58, 62, 111, 242-43

112, 164 Memoirs (K. Amis), 33, 88, 89, 204

Leader, Zachary, 88, 137, 199-200 Midnight's Children (Rushdie), 239 Leavis, F. R., 54, 66, 67, 71, 78, 112, 146, Miller, Karl, 117, 175

149, 225, 232 Millet, Kate, 248

Leavis, Q. D., 70-71, 78 Mills, Sara, 179-81 Lectures on Literature (Nabokov), 42, 44 The Missing (Hagan), 206

Lessing, Doris, 63, 128, 146 Money (M. Amis), 83, 150-51, 161, 2333 Letters of Kingsley Amis, 13, 199-200, characterization in, 9, 77-78, 84, 157,

206, 221 176-79, 182, 195-96, 208, 249; and

Levine, George, 19, 23-26, 27, 29, 74, feminism, 174, 179-81; and postmod-

IgI, 196 ernism, 162-63, 185, 189-98, 247; rep-

Lively, Penelope, 240-41 utation of, 23, 202-3, 244-45; reLodge, David, 5, 74; on K. Amis, 38, 76, sponse to, 54, 97, 174-75, 194; and 212, 229; on Lucky Jim, 0-1, 113, sexism, 56, 164-65, 175~76, 181 126-27; on M. Amis, 174, 191; as Montgomery, Bruce, 16 novelist, 240-41; Nice Work, 241 The Moronic Inferno (M. Amis) 34, 56,

Lolita (Nabokov), 36-38, 40-46, 51, 53; 200, 236, 244 58, 59, 60, 63, 128, 169, 177 Morrison, Blake, 39, 127 London Fields (M. Amis), 83, 96, 151,200, | Moseley, Merritt, 15 202, 203, 222, 237, 243, 244, 247; and Motion, Andrew, 88 apocalyptic fear, 85, 182, 233, 235-36, Murdoch, Iris, 3, 75, 145, 233 245; characterization in, 56, 78, 86, 179-80, 182, 208; and feminism, 179- Nabokov, Vladimir, 16, 30, 59; influence

80, 182 on Amises, 33, 37-46, 49-52, 54, 60-

Lucky Jim (K. Amis), 5, 16, 70, 72, 76, 62, 73, 75, 128, 148, 156, 186, 189, 232; 101-2, 116, 119, 122-26, 130-32, 133} Lectures on Literature, 42, 44; Lolita, characterization in, 53, 110-15, 123-26, 36-38, 40-46, 51, 53, 58, 59, 60, 63, 128, 165-66, 172, 214; and controversy, 71, 169, 177; Speak, Memory, 205

Index . 327 Nice Work (Lodge), 241 and Money, 189-97; and Stanley and Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39, 77 the Women, 162-63, 183-89 Night Train (M. Amis), 151, 200, 201, Rossen, Janice, 92

202, 222, 235, 245-51 Roth, Philip, 30, 77, 78, 115, 151; influence on Amises, 55-64; and Zuckerman

The Old Devils (K. Amis), 92, 200, 219, novels, 59-60; Portnoys Complaint,

220, 222, 226, 244-45, 247; and 56-63, 166; Sabbath’ Theatre, 58 Booker Prize, 4, 15, 23; and Kilmar- Rubinstein, Hilary, ror nocks, 211-13, 216-18; and Larkin, Rushdie, Salman, 28, 34, 235; Midnight’

213-15 Children, 239

On Drink (K. Amis), 109 The Russian Girl (K. Amis), 76, 220 One Fat Englishman (K. Amis), 76, 166 Russian Hide and Seek (K. Amis), 184,

Orwell, George, 91, 106 209, 233 Other People (M. Amis), 14, 84, 184, 222,

233, 247 Sabbath’s Theatre (Roth), 58

Oxford University, 5, 10, 45, 88, 101, 103, Salinger, J. D., 34

106, 117, 122, 129-30, 213 Salwak, Dale, 52, 62, 109, 136 Sandition (Austen), 75

Palimpsest (Vidal), 205-6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 39 Partington, Lucy, 15, 135, 200, 202, 204, satire, 142-53, 59-61

207, 223-24 Scholes, Robert, 9, 184-85, 191

Pater, Walter, 38, 39 Seale, Delilah, 202, 223-24, 246

Pope, Alexander, 144 Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 88, 199 Portnoy’ Complaint (Roth), 56-63, 166 Self, Will, 41, 239, 247 postmodernism, 27-28, 35-36, 162-63, Snow, C. P., 63, 107 228-29, 232-42, 252-53; and Money, Socialism and the Intellectuals (K. Amis),

176-77, 183-85, 189-97; and Stanley 146

and the Women, 183-89 Somerset Maugham Award, 5, 35, 103,

Pound, Ezra, 88, 109, 111, 183 104, 116, 120

Powell, Anthony, 67, 102 Spark, Muriel, 240 Prescott, Peter, 103, 104 Speak, Memory (Nabokov), 205 Pride and Prejudtce (Austen), 73-75, 77 Spender, Stephen, 106

Priestley, J. B., 105-7, 108 Stanley and the Women (K. Amis), 9, 81,

Pritchett, V. S., 106 161, 175, 208-9, 211, 213, 244; characterization in, 167-74, 185-89; and

Rabelais, Francois, 177 Howard, 169, 171; and realism, 162The Rachel Papers (M. Amis), 5, 133, 151; 63, 183-89, 192, 193, 197-98; and sex229; characterization in, 120-26, 129- ism, 162-74, 176, 179, 212, 216 31, 178; reception of, 102-4, 115~17, Steiner, George, 39 120, 189; as response to Lucky Jim, Sterne, Laurence, 177 115-32; style of, 123-24, 127-28 Success (M. Amis), 83, 84, 151, 178

Raine, Craig, 13, 184 Swift, Graham, 28, 242; Waterland, realism, 9, 23-27, 35, 177, 197-98, 228-29, 239-40 232-42, 252-53; and Bellow, 46-55; owift, Jonathan, 134, 141, 144-45, 147, 148

328 eS Index Take a Girl Like You (K. Amis), 92, 166 The War against Cliché (M. Amis), 61

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 77, 124 Waterland (G. Swift), 239-40 That Uncertain Feeling (K. Amis), 72, 76, Waugh, Evelyn, 4, 25, 27, 66, 104, 141; influ-

92, 166 ence on Amises, 78-88, 90, 93, 97-98;

Thomas, Dylan, 38 Brideshead Revisited, 80, 83, 85-86; DeThomas, Edward, 88 cline and Fall, 79-80, 83-84; A Handful Time’ Arrow (M. Amis), 4, 84, 132, 151, of Dust, 80, 83; Vile Bodies, 80, 83

222, 233, 235) 244-45, 247, 250 Wells, H. G., 184 West, Frederick, 15, 136, 202, 206

Underworld (DeLillo), 238, 243, 246 What Became of Jane Austen? (K. Amis), 61, 68

Vidal, Gore, 205-6 Wilson, Angus, 67, 71, 191 Vile Bodies (Waugh), 80, 83 Winterson, Jeannette, 239-40 Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excur- Wodehouse, P. G., 27, 66, 82, 102

sions (M. Amis), 34, 245 Wolfe, Tom, 147

Vonnegut, Kurt, 39 Wood, James, 204, 235, 238, 251 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 27, 38, 232, 248 Wain, John, 145, 186

Walsh, John, 204-5 Yeats, W. B., 76, 88