Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience 9780773588332

Citation preview

Kingsley Amis

This page intentionally left blank

Kingsley Amis Antimodels and the Audience

Andrew James

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISBN 978-0-7735-4136-8 Legal deposit second quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication James, Andrew, 1968–   Kingsley Amis : antimodels and the audience / Andrew James. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-4136-8   1. Amis, Kingsley – Criticism and interpretation.  2. Artists in literature.  I. Title. PR6001.M6Z68 2013   828’.91409   C2013-900561-7 Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 PART ONE  1946–1969: EXPOSING FLAWS IN ANTIMODELS AND FORMATIVE INFLUENCES 1 Exploring Critical Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels 17 2 Lessons of The Legacy, a Comparison with Wain, and the Development of a Narrative Voice in Lucky Jim 27 3 Defining the Self: Writing Against Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin in That Uncertain Feeling 46 4 Lessons in Storytelling: Graham Greene, Modernism, and I Like It Here 58 5 Experiments in Content: William Empson, Ambiguity, and Take a Girl Like You 75 6 Evelyn Waugh, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Englishness in One Fat Englishman 90 7 Limitations of the Provincial Aesthetic in Amis’s Poetry: Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 106 8 New Reasons to Write: Entertainment and the Inner Audience in The Egyptologists, The Anti-Death League, and I Want It Now 121

vi Contents

PART TWO  1969–1995: TOWARDS RECIPROCITY AND BALANCE 9 Looking into the Artistic Future: The Green Man, Girl, 20, Ending Up, and The Alteration 143 10 Problems with Language and Balance: Jake’s Thing, Stanley and the Women, and Russian Hide-and-Seek 158 11 Resolving Creative Problems: The Old Devils, Difficulties with Girls, The Folks That Live on the Hill, and The Russian Girl 171 12 Final Creative Self-Definitions: You Can’t Do Both and The Biographer’s Moustache 196 Conclusions 210 Notes 217 Bibliography 255 Index 265

Figures



Reproduced courtesy of the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California

1 Page from the manuscript of Difficulties with Girls, AMS 20, p. 3 11 2 Page from the manuscript of Stanley and the Women, AMS 430, p. 25 12 3 Page from the manuscript of The Biographer’s Moustache, AMS 122, p. 111  13 4 Page from the manuscript of The Legacy, AMS 476(3), p. 194  63 5 Page from the manuscript of Stanley and the Women, AMS 70, p. 68 169 6 Page from the manuscript of The Folks That Live on the Hill, AMS 122, p. 59  186 7 Page from the manuscript of The Old Devils, AMS 82, p. 188a 213

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

Without my father, Bill James, and mother, Ann Maclellan, there would be no me and, hence, no book. In one of my fondest childhood memories I am opening the door to my father’s study to find him behind his desk with a book, classical music rising through rings of Borkum Riff tobacco. He gave up his pipe but has retained a love of literature and learning, and I inherited both of the latter passions. I am grateful to my mother for always encouraging me to read and to voice my opinions about literature, and her varied interests have influenced me in countless positive ways. I thank you both, and my stepmother Carolyn Kirkup, for all that you have done for me and my family, and for your ceaseless support. I would also like to thank my brother Matt, who teaches at the University of Victoria, and sister Caroline, now living in Quebec. Family connections become more important as we age, and I am grateful to have loving parents and siblings. In 2007, I was granted a sabbatical by Chikushi Jogakuen University, my employer in Japan, to participate in two research projects at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, with Professor Richard Bradford. I had taken a leave of absence to do the research projects and qualify for the sabbatical, but spent most of my time in Coleraine working madly away on the manuscript. I am indebted to Professor ­Bradford and his wife Amy for assisting my family throughout our stay in C ­ oleraine. Many thanks also go to Dr Andrew Keanie for patiently reading through drafts of the manuscript and advising me to broaden my reading patterns in search of other connections and resonances. Professor Stanley Black provided assistance by finding creative ways to overcome administrative red tape. The input of Professor Z ­ achary Leader, author of the last biography of Kingsley Amis, improved the manuscript immeasurably and taught me a great deal about academic writing.

x Acknowledgments

My wife Keiko supplied the emotional support necessary to complete this project by always urging me to keep at it when I sometimes felt that it might never be completed. During the writing of this book, our four children – Kathryn, Nick, Josh, and Alex – have often asked me what I have been working on and, while I don’t think they ever really grasped the concept of antimodels, their presence has motivated me. This book is really for you. It is invested with my heart and dreams and I hope its life, like each of yours, will be long and interesting. Further thanks go to Keiko for enduring my extended absences for research trips to the Amis archives in the United States and England. My stay at the Huntington Library was made especially enjoyable by a staff member, Juan Gomez, whose wit, knowledge of music, and good humour helped make a month at the library pass with remarkable speed. The staff at all three archives were extremely helpful and patient. I am grateful to Natalie Russell, also at the Huntington, for assisting in the acquisition of the photographic images of manuscript pages which feature on the cover and in the text of this book. The friendship of fellow researcher, Matthew Jenkinson, also helped me to pass many enjoyable breaks between research both in California and at Oxford. While working on this book, I have been employed at Chikushi Jogakuen University on the southwestern island of Kyushu in Japan. The university has been generous in awarding me both the aforementioned sabbatical leave and a large research grant to spend five weeks in the Amis archives. Two of my colleagues, Dale Goble and Tim Honkomp, have been particularly supportive throughout the writing of the book. Good friends are not easy to find, and you are two of the very best. Other academic friends in Japan who have offered invaluable help, encouragement, and advice include Keiko Hirano, Mark Fenwick, Ronan Brown, and Tom Caton. These four friends and I comprise a reading group and at our meetings I have often bored them with talk of Kingsley Amis and this book. They have always indulged me, and our literary discussions have been memorable. The staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press are especially deserving of praise. Kyla Madden is a true professional, who patiently guided me through each phase of the publication process. Many thanks to Ryan Van Huijstee for his role in the book’s production and for his computer expertise. The copy-editor, Lesley Andrassy, has an amazing knack for simplifying, clarifying, and always finding the best wording. The efforts of these three individuals have, without a doubt, improved my book and I offer each my deepest gratitude.



Acknowledgments xi

The Henry E. Huntington Library kindly granted permission to r­eproduce images of manuscript pages for both the cover and the text of this book. Portions of the book were previously published in English­ness Revisited (2009, Cambridge Scholars Press), Life Writing (2010, P ­ algrave Macmillan), Semblance and Signification (2011, John ­Benjamins), and Comparisons, Interactions, and Contestations within/ across Cultures (2012, St. Cyril and St. Methodius ­University Press).

This page intentionally left blank

Kingsley Amis

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Although it has become fashionable to dismiss Kingsley Amis as “a naïve realist who simply assumes the transparency of language and a mindindependent reality” (Baker 2005, 550), he was always concerned with the role of the artist in society and expressed his ever-changing views on this subject through the subtexts of over twenty novels. He did this in three principal ways: through the use of artistic antimodels, or characters connected to art that tell us how not to create; by invoking other writers and formative literary influences to show the superiority of his own methods; and by examining the role of the audience in the creative process. Though his novels are consistently rich and complex, his ideas on art remained somewhat dogmatic until the publication of his first genre experiment, The Green Man (1969); this novel and Ending Up (1974) mark transitional points in his development as an artist. In the novels written after 1970, Amis devotes more time to examining the role of the audience in artistic creation and the relationships of other characters to the antimodels. He also looked at himself as a person and writer with a more critical eye. Artistically the emphasis shifts from self-praise to self-appraisal and this change is evident in the subtext of Ending Up, as Amis ponders the effects of the aging process on his writing. By contrast, his primary concern in the pre-1970 novels often seems to be to compare himself favourably with other writers. The term “artistic antimodel” is borrowed from narratologist Ross Chambers, who has argued convincingly for the occurrence in fiction of “figural embedding,” or “the incorporation into the narrative of a ‘figure’ ... that is representative in some sense of ‘art,’ or of the production and reception of narrative.” The reader must decide “whether a specific embedded feature is a model or an antimodel of the text in question, or something in between” (Chambers 1984, 33). This term will be used

4

Kingsley Amis

broadly to signify any character connected to the production of art, or used by Amis to make an artistic statement. People who are not strictly speaking artists can become antimodels if they make negative contributions to the creative process or earn money from the dissemination of bad art. Thus, in addition to the collection of shamming writers, painters, and musicians who populate Amis’s novels, publishers, academics, shopkeepers, and even pub landlords become antimodels. Amis also reflects on what it means to be a sham in the consideration of crazed or misguided psychiatrists in several novels. Most critics have only seen the antimodels as sources of comic relief, but they serve the valuable purpose of conveying Amis’s thoughts on art and creation. By inverting the characteristics of the antimodels we can not only form a picture of his artistic ideal but also begin to see how that ideal evolves from one novel to the next. For a variety of reasons, which are explained in part one, critics have failed to pay serious attention to the antimodels, even though they feature in almost all of his works as both peripheral characters, such as the pseudo-­academic L.S. Caton in Lucky Jim (1954), and central ones, such as avant-garde composer Sir Roy Vandervane in Girl, 20 (1971) and snobbish bohemian writer Jimmie Fane in The Biog­rapher’s ­Moustache (1995). All of Amis’s novels are analyzed, with the exception of The Riverside ­Villas Murder and Crime of the Century, which are deemed entertainments, to use Graham Greene’s terminology, contributing little to his artistic development. The chronological method is used to show that Amis’s artistic vision does not just change but evolves. He arrives at answers to questions about artistic authenticity, the artist’s role in society, and the part played by the audience in the creative process, then reconsiders or builds upon these answers in successive novels. After the introduction and an exploration of critical misinterpretations in chapter one, the second to sixth chapters focus primarily on single novels; the seventh examines Amis’s poetry; and the final five deal with multiple novels. This arrangement is not arbitrary, but a deliberate response to the artistic content in the first five novels, all of which employ artistic antimodels or invoke formative influences to show by inversion the characteristics of good writing and how to recognize a good writer. Amis considers questions about artistic authenticity from various angles and his arguments are ­complex and original. After his fifth novel, One Fat Englishman (1963), he reopens old artistic debates while also addressing creative obsessions by conducting genre experiments. To minimize repetition and to clarify the connections between novels in the second half of the book, the final four chapters look at

Introduction 5

­ ultiple novels – between two and four – under thematic headings. m Amis’s idea of how one ought to write and his vision of the artist’s role in society evolve from one novel to the next, and to show this evolution the focus of this book is chronological. To help understand my line of argument, the key points are summarized below. In chapter one, the critical tendency to ignore Amis’s artistic achievements is explored at length. Critics have failed to recognize his novels’ rich artistic subtexts for numerous reasons, including his propensity for polarizing readers through commentaries on politics, morality, and the sexes. The roots of antimodels are traced back to Amis’s BLitt thesis, his frequently expressed desire to become a famous writer, and his correspondence with Philip Larkin. The relationship with Larkin is of central importance in the second chapter’s analysis of Lucky Jim (1954), Amis’s celebrated first novel, which was written with Larkin as inner audience and proofreader. Thanks to his friend’s advice, Amis avoided most of the mistakes of his unpublished novel The Legacy (1948). This work is not without merit, though, for it contains flashes of the negative spleen that became the source of his comedy and led to the birth of a recognizably Amisian sardonic narrative voice. Furthermore, many of the linguistic and thematic obsessions that recur in his novels appear in The Legacy for the first time. To demonstrate the uniqueness of Amis’s artistic vision, he is compared to John Wain, an important friend and fellow Movement writer. Attention is given to the sham writer Edwin Froulish in Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) to prove that it is Amis’s conception of artistic balance that distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The early chapters argue that in his first four novels Amis was following the path to literary success plotted in his BLitt thesis. Having written Lucky Jim under Philip Larkin’s tutelage, he achieved immediate popularity and a readership. This led him to separate himself from Larkin, his self-described inner audience, since he believed this to be the normal course of events for commercially successful writers. He would not show Larkin any more manuscript drafts or solicit advice; rather, he distanced himself by satirizing his friend’s profession through the depiction of a bored librarian in That Uncertain Feeling (1955). This novel also contains an attack on Dylan Thomas and modernist pretension, the twin focuses of chapter three. In his next two novels, Amis would write primarily to provoke negative reactions from readers, not to gain approval. The anti-­travelogue, I Like It Here, and the study in ambiguity, Take a Girl Like You, are the subjects of the fourth and fifth chapters. In these works he invokes formative influences Graham Greene and

6

Kingsley Amis

­ illiam Empson to argue for the superiority of his own brand of unsetW tling yet entertaining fiction. The importance of Englishness and competition are explored in chapter six through the controversial One Fat Englishman, whose protagonist Roger Micheldene resembles ­Patrick Standish, the hero of Take a Girl Like You, in his amorality and strong sexual appetite. Micheldene also shows the reader how not to behave in the Amisian world, in which characters are tested for the appropriate use of wit and language under pressure. At this point in his career Amis sensed the need for change. The seventh chapter focuses on his poetry in the 1960s – in particular the poem cycle The Evans Country – and finds that, while he was a skilled, original poet, his vision of the world had become problematic. In the novels that follow One Fat Englishman, Amis conducted genre experiments and employed narrators who did not look or sound like Jim Dixon in order to escape from these self-imposed restraints on artistic growth. In chapter eight it is argued that Amis found another method of evolving in writing for two different ideal readers: Robert Conquest, with whom he collaborated on The Egyptologists (1965), and his second wife ­Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis details the perfection of his love with Howard in The Anti-Death League (1967) and I Want It Now (1968). However the tendency in his early fiction to have his narrators and protagonists stand aside and non-constructively criticize, which is evident in many poems, remains unchanged. Part two begins with an introduction followed by chapter nine’s analysis of four novels concerned with the future. In the ghost story The Green Man (1969), Amis continues the attack on the divine launched in The Anti-Death League, though this time God is allowed to speak for Himself, and the relationship between the protagonist Maurice ­Allington and God proves reciprocal, if imperfect. This novel’s subtext points to Amis’s eagerness to cut ties with publisher Victor Gollancz, who was not enthusiastic about his author’s genre experiments and encouraged him to continue writing popular romantic comedies. Two years later Amis would publish Girl, 20, in which he ponders whether it is better to follow the safe, conservative path in building an artistic reputation or risk losing everything for the sake of experimentation. Hubert Anvil, the castrato singer in the science-fiction novel The Alteration (1976) chooses the former path and Sir Roy Vandervane, the conductor and avant-garde composer in Girl, 20, the latter. In these three novels, Amis ­re-examines the relationship between artist and audience to find that the equation changes once the antimodels become personally involved with the

Introduction 7

­ arrators and protagonists. Ending Up (1974) contains further evidence n that Amis’s artistic vision was evolving. In this novel he imagines himself and other members of his household twenty years on in an apparent study of the horrors of aging. However, the novel provides a fascinating metafictional glimpse of the author’s own career, his recognition of the keys to literary success, and his fears over the erosion of his talents. The fears expressed in Ending Up prove justified in Amis’s next three novels, which are the focus of chapter ten. Jake’s Thing (1978), R ­ ussian Hide-and-Seek (1980), and Stanley and the Women (1984) are all plagued by problems of balance, as Amis allowed personal ­problems and biases against the psychiatric profession, women, and socialism to emerge. Ironically, the flaws in these novels remind us of how well Amis wrote when he maintained perspective and of the importance of language in his fiction. In his next four novels, the focus shifts again, as the role of the artist in society is given serious consideration. In three of these works – The Old Devils (1986), The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990), and The Russian Girl (1992) – complex artistic antimodels become central characters and, while Amis still derives wicked ­pleasure from telling the reader how badly they write, he explores justifications for writing badly. These novels admit the potential for romantic and a­ rtistic happiness, in spite of imperfections. The fourth novel in this chapter, ­Difficulties with Girls (1988), marks the return of P ­ atrick ­Standish, the hero of Take a Girl Like You, to Amis’s fiction. He had never written a sequel before, but in his declining years he tended to r­ e-examine the dogmatic declarations on life and art made earlier in his career. ­Difficulties with Girls also contains valuable metafictional reflections and a commentary on how the publishing industry negatively affects literary quality. The twelfth and final chapter deals with Amis’s last two novels. In You Can’t Do Both (1994) Amis returns to his youth to explain the choices made in determining his path as a writer. In his attack on Wales, we are reminded that when Amis did not strive to maintain artistic balance or check personal biases his fiction suffers. Finally, The Biog­rapher’s Moustache, published in 1995, the final year of Amis’s life, provides ample opportunity to summarize his artistic goals and achievements through the antimodel protagonist Jimmie Fane, the inept biographer G ­ ordon Scott-Thompson, and the invocation of doddering historian Peter ­Quennell. Even if Amis believed until the end of his life that people, language usage, and art were essentially good or bad with little room for differences of opinion, we can see that at some point he conceded that the bad just might be ameliorated. This concession leads him to decide

8

Kingsley Amis

that something should be done about the bad and brings about change in his fictional world and artistic vision. Although a great deal of criticism has been published on Amis, the unpublished letters, personal papers, and original manuscripts in three archival collections have been neglected by most scholars, and nothing has been written on his artistic vision. This book seriously considers the materials in the Henry E. Huntington Library (HEHL) in San M ­ arino, California, the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. In the introduction, the roots of artistic antimodels are traced back to materials contained in the Bodleian: Amis’s failed BLitt thesis (1950), the librettos written for Bruce M ­ ontgomery’s operas, and unpublished letters to ­Larkin and Montgomery. Archival sources show that the success of Lucky Jim was not accidental: Amis had been conducting experiments and thinking deeply about the characteristics of good and bad writing for ten years prior to its publication. In his BLitt thesis, he discussed the path to literary fame at length, not just to deepen our understanding of Victorian literature but because he wanted to know how to become a famous writer. With Larkin’s help, he began developing a unique narrative voice through correspondence, the writing of The Legacy (HEHL) and “Dixon and Christine,” the original title of Lucky Jim (HRC). Alterations and marginalia in the latter two works illuminate his creative process. Furthermore, between 1946 and 1953 Amis wrote once or twice a week to Larkin, and these letters alone would have been sufficient to fill the thousand pages in the volume of Amis’s c­ orrespondence selected and edited by Zachary Leader. Many of the explicitly artistic letters are not included in Leader’s edition and, though they may be of little interest to the general reader, they offer insights into Amis’s reading and writing habits. Correspondence between Amis and the first three members of his inner audience – Larkin, E ­ lizabeth Jane Howard, and Robert C ­ onquest – is referred to throughout this book. When the cited material is available in a published volume, the appropriate page number has been referenced. Unpublished correspondence is identified by the date of the letter and the holding library. While passages from the letters have been transcribed faithfully, they include both deliberate and accidental misspellings. (Sic is not used because in almost all cases Amis was aware of the mistake and either did it on purpose or left it in for humorous purposes. Sic implies the commission of an error of which the author was unaware, or an accidental spelling error. With Amis, it becomes almost impossible to know when his mistakes are true accidents of which he was unaware.)

Introduction 9

In a study of a novelist’s artistic vision, the creative process is of obvious importance, because methods often reflect aims. Amis wanted to entertain the reader in readily comprehensible, clearly plotted novels and his process is correspondingly straightforward. After writing prenovel notes in a notebook or on loose leaf paper, he composed directly on the typewriter. Once he had finished the first draft of a novel, he made corrections in longhand, then typed the fair copy and sent it to the publisher. Though changes in story or plot from the first to second draft are relatively rare, sections are often excised with revisions typed between lines or on the backs of pages. As Amis’s powers began to wane in the late 1980s, revisions and cuts increase. The Old Devils won the Booker Prize, but not before it underwent substantial changes, with the role of the hateful American Welshman Llewelyn Pugh minimized. In The Russian Girl, Amis’s faultless ear for natural dialogue began to fail him, forcing him to rewrite some straightforward conversations several times. In one exchange about the horrors of being married to the neurotic Cordelia, it took Amis four tries before he was satisfied. These pages are included in the manuscript folio, with the same pagination and the addition of small case letters (185a to 185d, for example). In order not to distract the reader’s attention from the main arguments related to the development of Amis’s artistic vision, much of the information about manuscript changes and marginalia is relayed through footnotes. Although it is not possible to ascertain the reason for every textual alteration, collectively the pre-novel notes, draft revisions, marginalia, and correspondence provide evidence of Amis’s awareness of his novels as statements of artistic intent. This book looks at the manuscripts of thirteen novels, including the unpublished Difficulties with Girls (1981) and The Legacy. Many manuscripts are accompanied by revealing prenovel notes. Amis kept detailed notebooks for the early works That Uncertain Feeling, Take a Girl Like You, and One Fat Englishman (HRC); the only other notebook preserved in the archives belongs to The Old ­Devils (HEHL). Loose-leaf notes exist for three additional novels, along with trip diaries and daily planners from 1978 to 1984. The typescript revisions reveal both an artist with serious concern for how the reader will react and a fragile, all-too-human figure at work behind the scenes. He clearly enjoyed upsetting more sensitive readers and, once he recognized the potential to disturb, tended to make characters and scenes more provocative or offensive in the second draft. This tendency is noted in the discussions of Girl, 20 and Stanley and the Women. The care with which Amis composed is apparent in his ­avoidance of r­ epetition. When

10

Kingsley Amis

he found that he had repeated a word twice in one page, he habitually circled the offending words then changed one in the second draft. He was remarkably gifted, blessed with an excellent ear for dialogue, an ingenious sense of humour, and the rare ability to construct intricate yet lucid sentences in the first draft of a novel. In many cases, there are no significant changes from the first draft to the second, and few false starts or rewrites. It is a measure of his extraordinary talents that the only novel he abandoned halfway through, the original Difficulties with Girls, is actually one of his funniest. The novel opens with a description of the accountant Adrian that creates an effective physical impression without ever revealing his physical appearance: He was a catch of a sort by virtue of being a successful, wellthought-of and prosperous chartered accountant, not convertible into anything dynamic or really important or whatever Ann might fancy. Just looking at him a third time led straight to a third bit of mystery, one concerning him alone, and that was how on earth he had managed to become and remain a successful-and-so-on youname-it above the status of roughly dustman, meaning no great disrespect to dustmen. Adrian knew about his appearance. (1982, HEHL, 3) Amis concludes the introduction by describing Adrian’s two yawns, one of which resembles a car horn, the other a sheep. “Few could doubt,” declares the narrator, “he was the noisiest accountant north of somewhere like Manchester” (3). He stopped writing this novel after 130 pages and insisted that it not be published during his lifetime because he feared readers would identify him with its homosexual narrator. Amis’s novels always contain philosophical, social, and artistic statements, and he had grown used to having these statements misinterpreted. He was also supremely confident in his literary skills: “I’m a good enough novelist to fool people into believing I have experienced what I have merely imagined,” he wrote in the ­letter prohibiting publication that accompanies the manuscript. After explaining that some readers would “talk about wish-­fulfilment,” he added at the bottom of the page in long-hand: “In other words they would identify me with Robert [the narrator] as they did with Jim Dixon” (HEHL). In some novels, major cuts and alterations help us to understand the creative questions he grappled with in composition. In The Folks That Live on the Hill he decided to have the antimodel Freddie ­Caldecote

Introduction 11

1 The introduction of the horrid Adrian, a central character in the unpublished novel fragment Difficulties with Girls, bears witness to Amis’s remarkable gift for characterization. He composed directly on the typewriter, interrupting himself to make excisions or additions. Changes that were made later, though before the second (and final) draft, are represented in longhand. When Amis was at the height of his creative powers, the differences between the first draft and published novel were often minimal.

write new poetry rather than recycling something written years earlier. Amis explained in a marginal note: “give him something new to be a failure at” (HEHL, 25). This comes at a time in Amis’s career when he was intrigued by writers who realize their limitations yet continue writing. Occasionally the manuscripts provide glimpses of the man behind the writing, unmasked and frail, burdened by fears, irritations, and domestic troubles. His manuscripts and papers often contain hastily scrawled telephone numbers or appointments, sudden reflections on life, and notes to self. The manuscript of The Old Devils includes numerous handwritten explanations of the intersection of Amis’s life with the novel’s plot and characters. Notations in other novels only hint at biographical sources ­ ifficulties for the fiction. In Stanley and the Women, the hero is having d with his son Steve, who returns home after an extended absence, then

12

Kingsley Amis

2 Amis sometimes wrote notes-to-self during composition. The query at the top of this page – “Is Phil there at all?” – refers to the similarity between the psychiatric problems experienced and treatment received by the fictional Steve Nowell and Amis’s son Philip. The resemblances apparently did not disturb the author enough to merit alternation or repression.

behaves so strangely that he is taken to a psychiatric hospital. Amis experienced similar problems with his eldest son Philip, and at the end of a lengthy discussion between Stanley and his psychiatrist friend Dr Nash about Steve’s condition, Amis typed, “Is Phil there at all?” (HEHL, 111). Perhaps he was wondering how much of Steve had been drawn from Philip, but the meaning is far from transparent. Such speculations may have little place in an academic study of Kingsley Amis’s artistic vision, but they are healthy reminders that Amis lived and loved, experienced loss and pain, and often found life intruding on him as he wrote his novels. The final line of the first draft of The Biographer’s Moustache is followed by this typed addendum: “As given by you, the ‘single fact’ everyone knows about me is wrong. I don’t lodge with my ex-wife and her husband, they lodge with me; the house I live in belongs to me, not them” (HEHL, 194). This is probably the reply he intended to give to someone who had publicly scoffed at or satirized his unusual

Introduction 13

3 It is unclear who was addressed in this defence of Amis’s unorthodox domestic arrangements, but his decision to write these lines just after finishing The Biographer’s Moustache, without even pausing to change sheets of paper, reminds us of the frequent intrusions of life upon art in the world of Kingsley Amis. Perhaps he had hit upon a particularly effective way of wording his defence or, perhaps, an enemy attack rankled, requiring a response immediately after creative demands had been met.

a­ rrangement of living with Hilly and Lord Kilmarnock. Although this book does not defend Kingsley Amis as a person, it is ­concerned with “facts” in the form of neglected textual evidence from his novels and correspondence. These facts have been summoned in defence of his art in the hope that he will at last be given the attention he deserves as a major literary figure.

This page intentionally left blank

PA R T O N E 1946–1969: Exposing Flaws in Antimodels and Formative Influences

This page intentionally left blank

1 Exploring Critical Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels

Amis liked to provoke his enemies and, once provoked, some critics have reacted curiously. Rather than engaging with the author or text, they have cited objectionable opinions in Amis as proof of a deficiency that precludes serious consideration. “That there is a gender divide on Amis’s achievement,” writes Joan Smith, “suggests not so much that he is a bad novelist but that his ability to tell us ‘essential truths’ is limited” (1995, 2). In large part Amis’s refusal to preach and his determination to give both sides their say give his novels an air of ambivalence and lead to criticisms such as Smith’s. To appear ambivalent about men behaving badly towards women does not please female commentators and Amis has also offended some critics, including Richard Jones, by satirizing Welshness. In a review of Memoirs Jones wrote that Amis often seeks to “reveal the falseness, the sheer echoing emptiness of all that put-on” in novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955), but “As a life view [his] vision of the world as empty sham produces its own falseness. It, too, becomes an attitude and gives rise to the negative sheen in all Amis’s fiction” (1992, 176).1 Those who search for answers to moral questions in his life and fiction are invariably disappointed, because for Amis the idea of telling truths to the reader was distasteful. Although he disliked French literature and culture almost as much as he did modernism, he proves to have a great deal in common with writers such as Flaubert, who insisted that literature ought to expose human foibles without preaching for “How stupid and false all works of the imagination are made by preoccupation with morality!” (Flaubert 1854, 94). Similarly Zola saw the novelist’s task as the arrangement of characters in the same way that a scientist sets up an experiment. “In the world of science, an accusation of immorality proves nothing whatsoever. I do not know whether my novel,” Zola said of Therese Raquin, “is immoral, but

18

Kingsley Amis

I admit that I have never gone out of my way to make it more or less chaste” (1868, 24). Though Amis was squeamish about describing sex in his novels, he was famously called a pornographer by F.R. Leavis (Jacobs 1995, 245). Amis wanted to distinguish himself from the modernists, whom he detested, by experimenting in content rather than form while addressing epistemological questions. When T.E. Hulme said, “I object even to the best of the romantics,” he could have been speaking for Amis: “I object still more to the receptive attitude. I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other” (1924, 126). Amis too would try “to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things” (Hulme 1924, 131) in focusing on the story, because he believed that one did not need to prove one’s originality and artistry through self-indulgent formal experiments. Another problem that has led to the rejection of Amis as a serious literary artist is the confusion of the man with his works. The second half of this book demonstrates how the persistent misidentification of Amis’s narrators and protagonists as authorial mouthpieces led to changes in his narrative method. This did little to alter the prejudices of many readers who condemned Amis the writer for the perceived sins of Amis the public figure. This prejudice gained strength with the publication of his salacious Memoirs (1991) and Eric Jacobs’s biography (1995), as many people felt they had spent enough time vicariously with Amis to pass judgment on him and his books.2 Certainly the general public knew a great deal about Amis’s life and views, because he was constantly offering opinions in newspapers and magazines on everything from alcohol to politics. He was as open about these issues as he was about his private life, and the latter seems to have interested some commentators more than his writing. In one of his final interviews, Amis was asked about his drinking habits, antipathy towards his son Martin’s novels, and regrets over leaving his first wife Hilly. The interviewee’s attempts to steer the conversation around to writing, which he called “the most important thing in my life,” generally failed, leading Amis to weakly protest: “People say I drink a lot, but I’d like to say I have written these books too” (Amis 1995, “Curmudgeons,” 27).3 Some of Amis’s opponents grudgingly admit his abilities after identifying and satirizing his weaknesses. Perhaps unconsciously these critics mimic Amis’s own method of listing the things that he dislikes and leaving it up to the reader to determine through inversion what he likes. In a cursory discussion of the novel Stanley and the Women, Blake ­Morrison noted: “The ideas are few, thin and objectionable. But there remains



Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels 19

in him some power – more characterization and mimicry than plot – to entertain those who think very differently from himself” (1984, 8). ­Stuart Wright called it an “uncomfortable and inevitable conclusion that he is in fact a major literary figure” (Wright 1996, 456), a view put more forcefully by D.J. Taylor: As it happens, I don’t care for Amis’s novels. I find them slackly written and intellectually disingenuous, locked into that peculiarly ­English mental world in which cleverness or seriousness is seen as an unforgivable display of bad taste. Yet the fact remains that no discussion of the post-war novel can journey very far without acknowledging Amis’s enormous importance. (1994, xxv) Perhaps the most slanderous confusion of the man with his writings was offered by Terry Eagleton, who described Amis as “a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals” (2007, x). Such a view fails to take into account the fact that “Fiction can be autobiographical in a secondary sense,” as Amis himself suggested in a monograph on Rudyard Kipling. It “can be taken as a record, if not of what the writer experienced, at any rate of what he felt and thought in the process of creation” (1975, 34). This work gives precedence to the creative process over biography in an attempt to do what William H. Pritchard advocated in both the text and title of an essay published in 1995. “Appreciating Kingsley Amis” claims that he has been treated poorly by critics: “if the comedy has recently been underappreciated, the seriousness has never been properly recognized and valued for what it is – a highly intelligent, absolutely distinctive take on life that instructs through hugely pleasing art” (137). Because Amis was such a complex writer, the tendency has been to compartmentalize him by emphasizing one facet of his writing, then applying diminishing labels such as comedian, failed moralist, or political pamphleteer. In its concentration on antimodels and the audience, this book also has an admittedly narrow focus, but the purpose is to enrich, rather than diminish, our understanding of his art. Probably Amis’s satiric disposition made it most natural for him to use negative, rather than positive, artistic models. At Oxford, he perfected the art of parodying revered and canonized writers. He and Philip Larkin called this “horse-pissing,”4 and in a 23 August 1946 letter to his friend he refers to efforts to record new literary satires “in the horsepiss book, inclewding instructions to the bleader, an illustration of the line ‘Alas,

20

Kingsley Amis

alas, that ever love was sinne’ and an annotation of a formerly virgin chapter ‘The world of affairs’” (Amis, Bodleian). Amis targeted writers who failed to entertain or became irritating through long-windedness or the use of language he considered arcane or unnatural.5 The linguistic requirements Amis-as-reader placed on other writers were always subjective and often logically indefensible, but because he prioritized the immediate, personal appeal of literature he felt justified in dismissing both Middle English writers and experimental modernists who operated within idioms that were not his own. “Horse-­pissing” is also part of the process of rebelling against one’s literary ancestors through which young writers must pass. Each of Amis’s parodies is an act of defiance that fits Roland Barthes’s metaphoric description of the text as “that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father” (1976, 3). While his satires are sometimes little more than childish rants, they are invariably redeemed by verbal ingenuity and humour. The satires also prove that nothing was sacred to Amis, who firmly believed in the reader’s right to engage with the text and pass personal judgment on the writer. A further point of interest that emerges in Amis’s Oxford parodies is that he was not just figuratively showing his behind to hateful authors that he could not be bothered to read or had failed to understand. He studied the idioms within which they operated until he understood them well enough to mimic them. In the following criticism of Chaucer, Amis adopts the stiff, halting style of a university lecturer to satirize both author and audience: If I say, that I am of the opinion, that the levels, of his art, anywhere, are all, of the same level, as the level, of the big pipe, that takes away, the waste matter, from a public lavatory, when men, have been there, to let, waste matter, out of holes, in the backs, of their bodies, with their trousers down, which is, what I think, then, I am sure, the man, who teaches me, will, be quite sure, that I am, trying to be funny, and will not, like it, at all, THE SODDING OLD FOOL. (2001, 66)6 Through wordiness and excessive punctuation, Amis recreates a tedious academic analysis of The Canterbury Tales while simultaneously representing the reading experience of a bored undergraduate via a lavatory metaphor. When Amis invokes artistic antimodels in his novels, he repeats this tripartite exposition of hateful artist, deluded audience, and clear-sighted audience member who has been forced to suffer. Although



Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels 21

Amis became known as a champion of literary realism who criticized both modernists and later postmodernists, including his own son ­Martin, for conducting obtuse and self-indulgent experiments, Dominic Head has pointed out that this view of Amis “perpetuate[d] a clumsy and stark opposition that is insensitive to [his] more subtle achievements. Interesting and significant novels are rarely ‘realist’ or ‘experimental’ in any simple sense” (2002, 225). By satirizing canonized writers and rejecting experimental ones, he unintentionally encouraged the view of his own writing as superficial and anti-experimental. Furthermore, his insistence that the primary purpose of fiction is to entertain (Amis 1991, “I’m a great man for tyrannies,” 89) convinced many critics that there was nothing beneath his surface worthy of study. Amis’s obsession with the relationship between writers and their audiences is an important component in his artistic vision that first emerges in his BLitt thesis, “English Non-Dramatic Poetry, 1850–1900, and the ­Victorian Reading Public.” Amis argued that authors who satisfied the audience’s demands made money and the thesis did not merit a pass because it failed to satisfy Amis’s immediate audience, including his snubbed ex-supervisor, Lord David Cecil.7 While most critics who have read the thesis agree that Amis was treated unfairly,8 it has value for researchers because, as Zachary Leader has noted, it “uncover[s] literary precedents for his own practice as a writer” (2006, 254–5). One of the precedents that has not been previously identified is Amis’s preference for conveying his artistic position through negative example. His choice of subject matter is striking since he did not particularly like the Victorian period. It is difficult to understand why he did not select the eighteenth century, which included writers he liked such as Fielding, Richardson, and Defoe, except when one recalls that it is characteristic of Amis to select flawed material to allow him to give vent to frustrations. The aspects of the nineteenth century that most intrigued him were Swinburne’s writings on aberrant sexual behaviour and Morris’s poetic exhibitionism, which are only referred to in passing because they exceed the thematic parameters of the thesis. These themes were not, however, forgotten. He would return to them in That Uncertain Feeling via a poetic poseur, Gareth Probert, and in One Fat Englishman, in which Swinburne’s scandalous notebooks appear. Thus, while the thesis might have succeeded if he had chosen a different literary period, he could not have selected a topic with more personal significance: the problems in the relationships between five late nineteenth-century poets and their audiences. He approached his topic with the understanding

22

Kingsley Amis

that “the writing of poetry is a social act, a communication between one man and another” and was interested in “the process whereby a poet’s work reaches its destined public” (Bodleian, 1951, 1). He envisioned the process in three stages. First, “A poet writes his poetry originally for a small circle of intimate friends, keeping before him as he writes their probable response, and afterwards soliciting their opinion.” This inner circle then recommends the work to others, leading to the formation of “a band of followers who owe allegiance primarily to him rather than to other poets” (1). And, finally, after acquiring inner and intermediate audiences, the successful writer earns a readership, or an outer audience. “This process,” declared Amis, “is taken to be the norm” (2). The most interesting claim in the thesis is, unfortunately, unverifiable. Amis posits that when the ideal relationship between poet and audience is disrupted, the artistic quality of subsequent works suffers. This in turn leads to a decline in book sales and precipitates a reconsideration of the audience’s wants and needs. In other words, the audience’s reaction directly affects how an author will write. Because nineteenth century sales figures were unavailable, Amis relied on estimates of printing impressions and the calculation of page numbers devoted to each author in two key anthologies, failing to consider that the latter might be more indicative of editorial preference than public opinion. Amis is able to tell us that Meredith, with fourteen anthology pages, “places ... fifth in a scale that is headed by Tennyson and Browning” (55), but not much else. Some of the points he makes are of definite interest to someone (like Amis) who hopes to become a famous writer but they have little scholarly value. For example, the reader learns that Dante ­Gabriel Rossetti “was overwhelmingly concerned with the opinions of his associates about his work, and that he was unwilling to publish until a text agreeable to himself and to the others was prepared” because he wrote poetry “with a well-defined inner audience in mind” (17). It is clear that Amis liked Rossetti’s poetry and shared his conviction that the audience’s opinion is important, but he never proves that Rossetti’s concern for the needs of his audience led to changes in content or style. Amis’s tendency to make bold, insupportable declarations did not please Lord David Cecil9 and it reveals him to be better suited to writing fiction than to academic criticism. He concludes the section on Rossetti by saying, “No facts need be added to the foregoing” (35), and begins the subsequent analysis of Meredith by citing a rather dubious source: “A slight quickening of public interest is perceptible from 1890 onwards, and a relative of mine tells me there was another just before the 1914



Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels 23

war” (37). When Amis occasionally contradicts himself, this is less an indication of poor memory than a lack of interest in his project. The fact that Meredith’s wife also wrote poetry leads to the speculation that “in general a poet is disinclined to take other than sentimental notice of what a woman tells him about his verse, unless, like Alice Meynell, she can be regarded as a poet in her own right” (39). However, once Amis begins discussing Lady Trevelyan – a critic and patron of the arts, but not a poet – Meynell is long forgotten. He claims that Trevelyan was “of great service to Swinburne, as he gratefully acknowledged, and that the advice she gave him about the poems she heard was heeded, in the early years at any rate” (95). Thus, while the thesis contributes little to the Victorian poetic critical tradition, it offers insight into the importance Amis placed on the audience’s role in the artistic process. In the concluding section, “The Poets of the Decadence,” he chastises Oscar Wilde for not appreciating his audience, calling his poetry “among the most faded of any written in the nineteenth century [which] go[es] some way towards discrediting the view that communication is not a necessary part of the artistic process.” Wilde, Amis thinks, “looked back to Keats and Rossetti, rather than forward” (123). He faults the decadent poetic movement for “turn[ing] in on itself; that is, its poets tended to form one another’s audiences, and to qualify for being a devotee of poetry one had to write it as well as read it” (127). To turn one’s band of followers into a larger, outer audience – a necessary step in achieving fame – a writer must keep in mind the goal of communication and this is evident throughout Amis’s correspondence with Philip Larkin, who served as his first inner audience.10 Between 1946 and 1953, they exchanged weekly letters and collaborated on numerous projects. Since Amis had not yet acquired an intermediate audience, these collaborations were his only means of getting critical feedback. As soon as he received Larkin’s return letter, Amis knew whether or not he had succeeded in entertaining his ideal reader. He was very much against writing what he called “ivory-tower rubbish” because he had become convinced of the communicative function of literature: “The writer is a man speaking to men. Writing for yourself and your friends is a University phase; the private art is the decadent, antiprogressive art” (11 August 1946, Bodleian).11 This meant widening one’s appeal because “writing for the man in the street is the only decent ambition a man of letters can have these days” (18 May 1947, Bodleian). Although critics would later regard Amis’s genre experiments as proof of his having tired of writing “straight” fiction, his approval of men

24

Kingsley Amis

of letters capable of writing on a variety of subjects is expressed in his thesis. “The Victorian age,” wrote Amis, “differed from its predecessors in producing men who were distinguished, or who made some claim to distinction, in several art-forms. Of the five poets studied at length, not one came before the public simply as a poet” (3). Dabbling in different artistic mediums was initially seen as a means of improving one’s odds of being read. Despite his low opinion of the operatic form and Bruce Montgomery’s detective fiction, Amis would collaborate with him on three librettos. Three years before the performance of The Century’s Crown, the libretto for a 1953 Coronation concert, Amis reported to Larkin: “I had a letter from Bruce the other day: he wants me to do a libretto for a short opera to be put on at the Festival of B. I shall do this if it breaks my cock” (12 November 1950, Bodleian). A strong sense of Amis’s artistic ambition is conveyed in this libretto’s discussion of history and fame: “The shades of those who built our cities,” wrote Amis, perhaps hopefully, “Are awake, are aware / Of us and all we do” (ll. 18, 20–1). His determination to reach an audience in spite of, rather than through, music, is evident in remarks made to Larkin on production problems with the opera Amberley Hall: “Bruce now writes me to say that our opera has turned into a ballad opera, which means spoken dialogue. I am very glad abt. this, since it means that I shall be inventing things for men and ladies to speak out on the London stage, and so they will be audible instead of drowned by a lot of filthy music” (12 March 1951, Bodleian). Amis’s aim in collaborating and showing his work to others was not only to attract attention but to improve. Shortly after submitting his BLitt thesis he told Larkin, “We need a sensible poetical chap to show us what we hope is good, bad etc. I had James M[ichie] doing that for me for a few months + I bet I wrote more, better, than ever before or since” (12 November 1950, Bodleian). Though he considered the inner audience to be of vital importance to an unproven writer, he deemed it less important once one was published. Having secured a readership with Lucky Jim, Amis seems to have felt that it was no longer necessary to collaborate with or consult others, and Larkin would complain bitterly to mutual friends Bruce ­Montgomery and Robert Conquest about Amis’s epistolary silence. In the relationship between the Rossetti brothers outlined in the BLitt thesis, Amis comes to resemble Gabriel, who sent his poetry to ­William. “Gabriel began to write less exclusively for the family circle, but his regard for William’s advice did not diminish. He got William to help



Misinterpretations and the Roots of Antimodels 25

him with the proofs of The early Italian poets, and was very grateful for the notes to the text which William supplied” (Amis, Bodleian, 9–10). Larkin was happy to play William, but less than happy to have his status downgraded from privileged inner audience to follower. After they met in London in 1957 for the first time in almost ten years, Larkin reported to a female friend that they got on “fairly well, but Kingsley has less and less conception of talking to you: you are simply an audience, & the more intelligent the better, since the better you can then appreciate him” (Larkin 1992, 279). The primary factor that led Amis to use artistic antimodels in his fiction was his conviction that the audience’s needs must be considered, and that artists who fail to satisfy those needs deserve ridicule. However, he was also an intensely competitive man whose nature it was, according to son Martin, “to want all the oxygen for himself” (Amis 2007). He never enjoyed playing a passive role, as the following excerpt from a November 1943 letter to Larkin shows. On army leave, he visited London, and confessed: “I hate being taken round to be shown things” (Amis 2001, 6); he then complains of experiencing a “stab of boredom” while being instructed in the use of wireless sets (7). He was irritated when other writers, like the hateful canonized bores and their successors, the antimodels, were praised undeservedly. In November 1946, for example, he felt “inexpressible anger” at hearing from Larkin that Alan Ross had been called a “promising young writer” (2001, 100–1). At this stage in his career, the only criteria for judging literary merit that Amis considered acceptable were those he would outline in his BLitt thesis: to sell lots of books and become anthologized. According to this view, promise is of minimal importance. In addition to being Amis’s closest friend and inner audience, Larkin was also his primary competitor. In July 1948 Amis wrote to announce a temporary setback; he had agreed to write a critical monograph on Graham Greene for Jack Rush at the University of Tucuman: “I had hoped to outdistance you a bit in this writing game, but it seems that because of my good-nature and anxiety to help my friend I shall not after all be doing that” (2001, 173). The Greene project did not prevent him from writing fiction, though, for Amis was still at work on the novel The Legacy. The desire to please his audience – Larkin – is apparent as he wrote in July 1948 that after 25,000 words it seemed “piss-poor”: “No wonder you said it didn’t come up to your expectations” (174). However, in the same letter he also jokingly dedicates the novel “to Philip Larkin, without whose intelligent suggestions and comments this might have been far less of a ... My

26

Kingsley Amis

dear Philip, You have always asked me to write this book, and in a very real sense it is yours” (174). In sum, artistic antimodels originated in Amis’s natural tendency to negatively state his preferences. When he satirized Chaucer he was clarifying his own artistic position and simultaneously pointing out how Chaucer had failed the reader. The logic of “horse-pissing” in part must be that if the reader finds the parody of Beowulf more entertaining than the original then Amis has succeeded where the original author failed. Antimodels in his early fiction do not just represent artistic positions that Amis considered misguided. They also appear as physical manifestations of artists who interact with other characters in a way that reflects the flawed relationship between antimodel and audience. Gareth ­Probert, the figure based on Dylan Thomas in That Uncertain Feeling, makes unfair and irrational demands upon the librarian John Lewis, just as Thomas’s poetry, according to Amis, requires unreasonable leaps of logic and faith from the reader. Thus, we can identify two types of behaviour that qualify as examples of inauthentic artistic behaviour in Amis’s novels: the deliberate cultivation of the appearance of an artist in order to be treated as someone who is special and should not be held to the same standards of behaviour as everyone else; and the creation of bad art. Through an analysis of the inauthenticity of the artistic antimodels in his early fiction, Amis’s creative vision clearly emerges, evolving with each successive novel.

2 Lessons of The Legacy, a Comparison with Wain, and the Development of a Narrative Voice in Lucky Jim t h e l e g ac y

(1948)

Before examining the success of Lucky Jim, a look at the failure of The Legacy will help in understanding the influence exerted by Philip Larkin on Amis’s narrative voice, while highlighting the differences between his writing and that of perhaps the most similar Movement novelist, John Wain. The latter admitted that he would never have written Hurry On Down if not for the example of The Legacy, parts of which Wain read while at Oxford (Wain 1962, 204). Amis worked on The Legacy before and during the composition of his BLitt thesis, and half of the plot concerns his quest to become published, detailing his battle with R.A. Caton, the owner of Fortune Press. The novel also reflects Amis’s concern for moral choices and several personal concerns at the time of composition.1 In relation to the development of his artistic vision, the stark contrast between the relatively balanced but uninteresting narrative perspective in The Legacy and the slanted, sardonic, but highly entertaining viewpoint in Lucky Jim suggests that Amis needed to vent spleen – to state his preferences negatively – to express himself well. Although The Legacy and Lucky Jim are completely different, one often overlooked similarity between them reflects the author’s determination to become a famous writer. In both novels Amis took a temporarily irresolvable situation from his life and resolved it in fiction, and these situations reflect his desire for artistic independence. The first comes near the end of The Legacy, when the protagonist – also called Kingsley Amis – informs his publisher that he will not pay the required twenty pounds to purchase one hundred copies of his own poetry collection (1948, HEHL, 258). In his desperation to see Bright November in

28

Kingsley Amis

print, Amis had accepted similar contractual obligations, and this will be examined more closely in the subsequent discussion of publisher R.A. Caton’s role in Lucky Jim. The second situation concerns Jim Dixon’s departure from the university. Before he is fired, he tells several university colleagues what he really thinks of them and then accepts a more lucrative position as arts patron Gore-Urquhart’s personal assistant. Amis too longed to be free of his teaching obligations so that he could write fulltime, and he would have liked to insult many of his ­co-workers, but in the absence of a fairy godfather or other financial prospects he remained silent (and employed) at Swansea University. Although Amis would criticize romantic poets for depicting both life and love not as it is but as they wished it to be (Amis 1957, 24), the two situations cited above are best understood not as cases of wish-fulfillment2 but as signs of the importance of artistic independence and creative expression. In his BLitt thesis, book sales are used as a measure of literary success, thus to be forced to pay for the publication of one’s own book signifies artistic failure. And while employment as a university lecturer was not quite the same as having an artistic sponsor, Amis did not want to be beholden to the university while he wrote. This is evident in the fact that once Amis was making enough money from book sales, he promptly quit his teaching job. As a young, unproven writer on an insecure footing as a university lecturer, Amis certainly understood the plight of the protagonists in The Legacy and Lucky Jim. The instability of the heroes’ positions is reflected in their repeated failure to express their emotions. When The Legacy’s hero wants to voice his true feelings but cannot, he feels a persistent pain in his throat (1948, 242); something similar will happen to Dixon, who resorts to pantomime and the pulling of faces. The other half of The Legacy deals with, unsurprisingly, a legacy: Kingsley Amis has just been released from army service to finish his education at a commercial college (Amis 1948, 2). Should he join the family firm and marry to his older brother Sidney’s satisfaction before his twenty-fifth birthday, he will inherit thirty thousand pounds. If he does not fulfil these conditions, the money will go to an evangelical society (7). Though nineteen year-old Jane is “a girl of strong good sense” (7), Sidney claims she lacks intelligence and manners (126), and withholds approval. After the brothers fight, Kingsley moves into a boarding house. He almost gives in to Sidney, agreeing to break things off with Jane, but then changes his mind and determines to marry her (226). In the meantime, Kingsley has also become involved with a former girlfriend, Stephanie, of whom his brother approves, and the novel ends in



Lessons of The Legacy 29

uncertainty. Kingsley says that he will not see Jane for the foreseeable future, though he might become more involved with Stephanie. Meanwhile Sidney is now conniving to prevent his sister Mary’s union with Paul ­Whetstone on the grounds that he is not good enough for her, even though Paul and Sidney are friends (272). The novel failed to find a publisher for numerous reasons,3 including its sombre mood, over-writing, and the unclear perspective of the firstperson narrator. These problems were all resolved in Lucky Jim under Philip Larkin’s tutelage, as shall be shown. The analysis of the protagonist’s feelings in The Legacy is often unnatural, as when Kingsley internally remarks, “A highly specialized apprehension moved in me” (10). In other words, he is nervous. Sometimes it is unclear what the author wants to convey beyond his own cleverness. Perhaps the most objectionable phrase in the novel comes when Kingsley says that his “future course of action [is] refracted by otiose agitations” (227). Hand­written additions to the typescript intriguingly indicate that Amis realized improvements were needed, but failed to recognize that he was making the novel worse by adding description. One such example comes at the end of a Kingsley speech to which the author added in pen, “wrapping myself in a heavy cloak of facetiousness” (114). Another serious problem is the absence of a clear narrative perspective. One of Amis’s most remarkable achievements in Lucky Jim was the funnelling of the story through the narrator’s sardonic sensibility, so that almost every observation reflects a particular world view. But in The Legacy passages that do not convey a point of view, such as the following, are numerous: “We passed a cook-house and dining-hall from which came a loud mixture of conversations. Two men stood outside, washing their eating utensils in a large tin bath filled with hot water. One of them, who wore Army spectacles, looked in our direction, shaking the water from his cutlery” (12). The reader can have no idea of the significance of this description, nor of the prolonged attention given to the barking and growling of the dog, Rodney, when Kingsley visits Stephanie and her mother (111). In contrast, Lucky Jim’s narrator always conveys Dixon’s feelings when people stare or dogs bark; we know whether he is irritated or pleased, and this partiality makes the writing come alive. A close reading of The Legacy also reveals the themes, set pieces, and minor obsessions that recur throughout Amis’s fiction. He would often squeeze humour from the unnatural English speech patterns of foreigners, and Max de Jong represents the first character used for this purpose. Among his tortured constructions is, “Are you at being able to

30

Kingsley Amis

come, Kingsley?” (20). Although his speech is contrived and unrealistic, de Jong’s presence suggests the importance of proper language use for Amis, and his recognition of the potential for humour when it is misused. Most of his subsequent novels would feature a climactic interview and Jane alludes to this predilection when she travels by taxi with K ­ ingsley to meet his brother and says, “I can’t help feeling like a candidate for interview” (67). Another of the acid tests for a character’s worth comes in the familiar Amisian pub scene. Characters with authorial validation are always quick to buy a round for their companions while irritants shirk their duty. In listing Jane’s positive attributes, Kingsley tells Sidney that she is “very independent about everything; always buys her round, and so on” (7). At the pub a fortune telling machine at the bar will also inform Kingsley, “It’s your round, chum” (157). The Legacy is not unrelievedly bad; it improves midway with the entrance of Scotsman Jock McClintock.4 Aside from imparting humour and much needed energy, he points to the importance of antimodels for Amis, who best expressed himself when venting spleen, not in maintaining narrative neutrality. McClintock moves into the same boarding house as Kingsley and immediately has a disagreeable meal, which allows the author to delight in describing the horridness of the food along with the Scot’s irritating habits (141). McClintock provides more comic relief in his second appearance via gruffness and unpredictable changes in mood and manner. Immediately after greeting an elderly man in the street, McClintock abuses him (148) and, when he and Kingsley prepare to enter the boarding house, he says in anticipation of breakfast, “Wonder what foul concoction the bag has in store for us this morning” (159). McClintock’s energy is almost wholly negative, yet it allows Amis to entertain the reader while revealing complexities in human behaviour. One such complexity emerges in a plot twist. Mr Masters, an elderly resident of the boarding house who is in ill health, takes Kingsley aside and informs him that his friend McClintock secretly despises him: “He was protesting, as I understood him, against your attempts to claim membership of a class to which, so he said, you do not belong. He called you conceited.” According to Masters, McClintock thinks Kingsley is “affected,” and considers his very name “inexcusable” along with “your attitude of knowingness in conversation, your snobbery towards people better than yourself, and your slowness, as he called it, on the uptake” (203–4). A shocked Kingsley confronts McClintock, who insists that Masters has lied. The old man, says McClintock, behaved similarly in the past to set another friend against him. The scene comes at the end of the novel



Lessons of The Legacy 31

and, with no further evidence forthcoming, the reader is left not knowing who or what to believe. This is the first instance in Amis’s fiction of aporia, a device which has been defined by literary theorists in a variety of ways5 but generally denotes a textual knot that resists untying (Barry 2002, 79). In The Legacy aporia is significant because it signals Amis’s desire to conduct experiments in content; but it can also be problematic, if not inappropriate, since the basic desire for plot resolution requires that this knot be untied. As shall become apparent in subsequent chapters, Amis liked to lead readers down blind alleys and tease with puzzles to show that not everything in fiction or life can be resolved. However, in terms of language and structure, his novels are highly conventional; he always insisted on clarity in both prose and poetry. Another of The Legacy’s fatal flaws is its un-Amisian use of language. While some of the odd locutions, extraneous details, and obtuse turns of phrase are deliberate, most are due to the author’s immaturity. Such problems would not surface in any of his later novels until his final one, The Biographer’s Moustache, in which the decline of his literary powers is evident in the fractured prose and repetition. In considering Amis’s literary style, a brief comparison with John Wain, another key figure in the Movement, clarifies the former’s pre­ eminent interests in language and art. The differences between the two become apparent in their attitudes towards poet and critic William Empson. Wain’s admiration of Empson6 led him to write an appreciative essay, “Ambiguous Gifts: Notes on the Poetry of William Empson,” and a poem of his own entitled “Eighth Type of Ambiguity,” adding love to Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity; Amis’s distaste for Empson is detailed in the chapter on Take a Girl Like You, which is interpreted as a reaction against Empson’s stylistic ambiguities. In Wain’s essay, “an intelligent celebration of the best of Empson” (Haffenden 2006, 352), he declares that a “‘puzzle interest’ is evidently part of the pleasure ­[Empson] gets from all poetry” (1957, 174); Wain exhibits a similar interest in his first novel Hurry on Down, as the hero Charles Lumley periodically utters variations on “And I a twister love what I abhor,” the penultimate line from Empson’s poem “The Beautiful Train.” It is unclear why Lumley is attracted to the line,7 but its repetition must have struck Amis as pretentious. Lumley has as little interest in literature and art as Dixon does, and it would seem incongruous for a young man who has turned his back on a university education, then accepted a series of working-class jobs, to be obsessed with an impenetrable line of poetry. It does help Wain to show off his erudition though. Nick Bentley cites the

32

Kingsley Amis

repetition of Empson’s line as proof that “a modernist attitude to language is also incorporated into the novel itself” (2007, 150), which further complicates the satire of the modernist writer Froulish. In a 6 November 1953 letter to Wain, Amis said that he “thoroughly enjoyed Hurry on Down” and his judicious, respectful assessment reveals both his literary tastes and interest in artistic antimodels: It is very funny in parts and does succeed above all in getting across a grotesque and twisted view of life (which is what I try to do, though it’s not the same view – this is where we’re similar), which is the best part as far as I’m concerned. I enjoyed the Froulish and Rosa bits best, the twister-abhor and Oxford scenes least. I think a few parts are over-written: my only complaint. Glad to hear about your sales. (2001, 341) Amis’s interest in Edwin Froulish is natural, for Wain’s sham writer combines the worst elements of Bertrand Welch, Professor Welch, and L.S. Caton, the antimodels from Lucky Jim. But while Amis uses antimodels to make statements about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of art and to demonstrate his own superiority to his literary ancestors, the role of Froulish for Wain is primarily comic relief. He is a poseur, a horrible writer, and an even worse person, sponging off his prostitute-girlfriend while he is supposed to be writing a novel. Mostly he stays at home and smokes, leaving his dingy lodgings only for weekly pub visits. When he is invited to give a public reading of his unfinished novel, he throws his collar and tie into the fire as a “contrived effect.” The novel begins: “A king ringed with slings, ... a thing without wings but brings strings and sings. Ho, the slow foe! Show me the crow toe I know, a beech root on the beach, fruit of a rich bitch, loot in a ditch, shoot a witch, which foot?” (57). Froulish admits that his novel has neither title nor plot, though the “central situation” involves six people stuck in the lift of a skyscraper (58). The non-reaction of Lumley, who is present at the reading, is significant; indeed, Lumley shares Froulish’s lodgings. While he does not endorse the sham writer’s behaviour, he does not censure it either. His non-reaction is related to his stated social goal: to “put himself beyond the struggle” of the classes and achieve “neutrality” (238). This is never an acceptable goal in the Amisian fictional world. One Fat English­man (1963), for example, insists upon proving one’s worth through competition, and Girl, 20 (1971) condemns the impartiality of the protagonist. However, in Hurry on Down Wain and his ­protagonist tacitly support



Lessons of The Legacy 33

any and all forms of social rebellion, and therefore ­Froulish is only mildly satirized. In their own ways, both the sham writer and Lumley are threatening the status quo. As a way of showing social resistance, bohemianism, which Amis hated, is tolerable for Wain. Lumley arrives at a party to find nine other guests whose “appearance, in general, gave the impression of what is usually known as bohemianism, but without its redeeming features; they looked studiedly theatrical instead of harmlessly eccentric, and gave no impression, en mass [sic], of intelligence or sensitivity” (103). The Amisian view is that art, music, and literature can only ever be good or bad and bohemianism is beyond redemption. Wain laughs at the poseurs in the party scene, but without venom; this is reserved for an amorous homosexual man in grey suede shoes who repeatedly propositions ­Lumley. Wain, unlike Amis, does not take umbrage at either bohemianism or Froulish’s pseudo-modernism because his goal is the realignment of the social, not the literary, order. When Amis wrote to Larkin on 10 July 1955 about Wain’s Living in the Present, he questioned his literary authenticity. He criticizes the novel for “not seeming to be by a writer,” adding: “I hate his business of setting himself up as an expert on working-class life: in this book his cockney humour seems to me a good deal less authentic than say ­Wodehouse’s. All the bad characters look nasty” (Amis 2001, 434). Humphrey ­ Carpenter notes that while his ancestors were working class, “Wain himself had been born, if not with a silver spoon in his mouth, then with plenty of them on display in his parents’ substantial home” (2002, 38). Wain was stuck between two worlds, since he had not, like Larkin and Amis, earned his place at Oxford but he also was not old money, and did not fit in with those students who considered it their birthright to be at Oxford (41). This biographical note helps to explain the repeated references to neutrality in Hurry on Down, but it also makes Wain a dubious champion of the lower-middle class. Artistic authenticity – which entails proving the quality of one’s work while appealing to a commercial audience – becomes one of Amis’s obsessions throughout the 1950s and 1960s. To argue for the authenticity of his own writing, he would employ antimodels to help the reader recognize the differences between Kingsley Amis, the sham artists who act the part of the temperamental artist, and overvalued literary predecessors. Amis strove to entertain the reader unpretentiously, with consummate linguistic control. His concern for art and belief in the superiority of his own writing led him to complain publicly about the critical tendency to link

34

Kingsley Amis

his writing with Wain’s. On 24 January 1958 he sneered at a Times Literary Supplement reviewer’s charge that Wain had “got in first” and that “alleged parallels” in their first three novels showed that Amis had copied Wain. Amis labels the thematic similarities between Lucky Jim and Hurry on Down (“rescue-by-millionaire”), That Uncertain Feeling and Living in the Present (“trouble with the children”), and I Like It Here and Samuel Deronda (“parties and publishers”) “pointless and disingenuous” (Amis 2001, 526). Wain, however, clearly considered being first an accomplishment of which to be proud. In the 1977 foreword to Hurry on Down he states that if there was in fact a Movement then he should be “credited – or blamed, if you will – for having started it” (Wain 1953, xii). Besides the presence of a sham artist, one of the important and revealing similarities between Hurry on Down and Lucky Jim lies in the heroes’ failure to articulate their feelings. In the cases of both Charles Lumley and Jim Dixon, a university education has led to an emotional muddle, as the acquisition of more complex means of articulation seems to inhibit direct or natural communication. In the socially awkward Lumley’s speech, multiple sentences often collapse into single, jumbled units such as “Mind if I come in perhaps cup of tea?” (9). Like Dixon, he struggles to explain his feelings about his job and romantic interests, thus he chooses at times to remain silent about both. In spite of these and other superficial connections – the presence of fairy godfathers, university satire, and tangled emotional relationships with co-workers – the novels and their messages are widely divergent. At various points in Wain’s work, the narrator identifies as Lumley’s goal the shedding of middle-class attributes (26) and the renunciation of class (65), and the novel even features a lengthy set-piece in which the hero delivers a socialist speech on the importance of honest work (163–6). There is very little concern for socio-political problems in Lucky Jim or its successors for, while Wain’s overriding concern is class8 and his hero’s position within the social structure, Amis focuses on the individual and what it means to be a legitimate, successful creative artist. In Memoirs, Wain is portrayed almost as though he were one of the fictional antimodels whose negative characteristics can be used to draw attention to the corresponding positive traits in Amis himself. He characterizes Wain as a writer with “a certain banality of conception and style” who is conceited and rapacious (1991, 42). He recalls meeting him in America in 1958 or 1959 and being advised about his novel-inprogress, “Make it a good one this time, eh?” (43). According to Amis,



Lessons of The Legacy 35

Wain told mutual friends that he kept refusing his invitations to visit him in S­ wansea because he feared Hilly “‘would break down the bedroom door’ to get her hands on him.” After his wife vehemently denied any attraction to Wain, Amis confronted him and was told the remark had been made in jest. “From that moment,” writes Amis, “I considered myself released from any duty to keep to myself what I thought of his books” (44). Amis manages to get in another dig through a radio presenter’s proposed introduction of Wain as “the poor man’s Kingsley Amis,” which resulted in his former friend becoming “stroppy” and threatening to leave the studio (44). The portrait concludes with a slight attributed to Larkin: Isn’t England a marvellous free, open country? Take a fellow like old John Wain, now. No advantages of birth or position or wealth or energy or charm or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now. Where else but in England could a thing like that happen? You know, a few years ago I think he got to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Just imagine. (45)9 As Brian Harrison notes in The History of the University of Oxford, while this institution has a fine tradition of producing writers and nurturing creative and critical talents, Oxonian intellectuals are prone to nasty, public rows, one of which was the battle between Wain and ­Stephen Spender, played out in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, over whether or not the latter was deserving of the poetry professorship (1994, 441). When Amis stated that he disliked Wain’s fictional portrait of Oxford, he was probably objecting to the author’s socialist agenda as it emerges in a university party. Spotted by a fellow graduate in the hospital where he works as an orderly, Lumley is invited to the party. He is first irritated by the landlady, “a forty-ish blonde aspiring wildly to a chic slightly above her own level” (161). Then Wain describes the party-goers, ­Lumley’s undergraduate experience, and the fight between Lumley and the boorish Burge. These events combine to reveal an overriding concern for social competition. People who get above themselves bother the protagonist, and it seems that frustration over his inability to do anything about this situation leads to his decision not to participate in the class struggle. His acceptance of a series of menial jobs as window-washer and delivery driver signifies his refusal to join the middle class, though his education separates him from the working class. Amis’s obsession,

36

Kingsley Amis

however, is not class but pretension, as we shall see in the analysis of Lucky Jim. All of Amis’s protagonists are required to compete and prove their ingenuity in one way or another. In his autobiography, Sprightly Running, Wain would identify the difference between himself and Amis as one of balance. “My vision of life is more extreme than his, both darker and brighter; his work is based on a steadying common sense, a real hatred of imbalance and excess; mine, by comparison, is apocalyptic” (1962, 205). Balance in relation to art is of great importance for Amis. By taking art seriously and going out of his way to reveal shams in his early novels, he fights perceived artistic injustice, and when he introduces ambiguities into his novels he is not just teasing the reader, but insisting that not everything can be known or neatly resolved. lucky jim

(1954)

Few modern novels have been as inventively interpreted as Lucky Jim (1954), which has had different things to say to each succeeding generation of readers.10 Critics tend to agree that Amis and his hero, Jim Dixon, were rebelling against something, though there is less agreement on the target of this rebellion. Dixon is a young, unpolished lecturer at an English red brick university who trades in his neurotic, intellectual girlfriend for a buxom, wholesome one, and his post as history lecturer for “boredom detector” (215), or personal secretary to GoreUrquhart, a wealthy Scotsman living in London. Dixon’s new job will require him to screen the people that Gore-Urquhart might not need to see personally. Dixon is lucky to get the girl and escape academia in the provinces for the excitement of London, and Amis too was lucky, achieving immediate fame with his first published work of fiction. Malcolm Bradbury thought Dixon’s struggle was against “genteel high culture, aestheticism and bohemianism, the hangover of Bloomsbury” (1993, 321). This would be difficult to dispute, for Dixon is clearly bored by all things intellectual. He dismisses the comments of Plato or Rilke on love (72) and Aristotle or I.A. Richards on beauty (107), using “or” in both cases to show that boring writers are all the same, regardless of the era or language in which they write. Humphrey Carpenter has identified a struggle against contemporary morality in Lucky Jim, claiming that the novel is predicated upon an “amoral moral” which states “that you should take care of your own feelings before you consider other people’s” (2002, 72), a view that many critics have found problematic, if



Lessons of The Legacy 37

not ­disturbing.11 A similarly reductive view is the one offered by David Gervais, which argues for Amis as a disseminator of “anti-high brow little Englandism” because he pokes fun at people who misuse the English language. ­Gervais characterizes Amis and John Wain as “pseudo-rebels who were actually engaged in constructing new little myths for a new little England” (1993, 212). When Amis was asked in 1991 whether he considered himself a moralist or an entertainer, he replied, “Both, I think. Unfortunately, if you get the label ‘comic’ hung round your neck, it stops the reader paying attention to the other things you may be doing” (Amis, “I’m a great man for tyrannies,” 89). His determination to resist critical labels is evident in his correspondence, as he is consistent only in his willingness to accept praise. In a 1956 letter to Austin Baker he writes: “I am so glad you enjoyed my books. And let me say at once that your interpretation of them as primarily comedies is most refreshing to me. I certainly intended them to be that a long way before they were anything else.” Amis adds that he is tired of being seen “as a kind of social pamphleteer” (2001 Amis, 459). In the same year, however, he would express gratitude to one Samuel Hynes for seeing the moral seriousness in his fiction: “I am glad you picked on the moral part of my books for comment. English reviewers seem to regard me as either a farcical comedian or a kind of seedy immoralist, or else they wrap me in a cocoon of ‘social comment’ and think I really hate the people I write about” (469). He has also been reductively viewed as a purveyor of “lad-lit” who “provided British readers with a romantic, comic, popular male confessional literature” (Showalter 2002, 24). While there are elements of this genre12 in Amis’s novels, most of the same elements are easily identified in the work of almost any British male novelist writing after the Second World War. Whether or not Amis belongs in this genre is perhaps of less significance than the fact that fitting him into a recognizable genre becomes a justification for not taking him seriously. For Showalter, Amis is just another of the “British lads ... obsessed with class distinctions and divisions. Not gentlemen, but not yobs, they defiantly practise the rituals of the working class while aspiring to something better – better education, better jobs, better women” (2002, 24). In Lucky Jim the three aforementioned themes – bohemianism, morality, and Englishness – are of central importance and they recur throughout Amis’s novels. The endless critical dispute over which dominates arises because so much is going on in his fiction that critics necessarily focus on one theme in order to make sense of him; with issues surrounding morality, language, politics, and

38

Kingsley Amis

relations between the sexes to occupy them, most commentators have never taken the time to consider Amis as an artist. In Lucky Jim the artistic subplot revolves around the shady figure of L.S. Caton, who becomes the vehicle for a discussion of authorship and authenticity. These issues were at the forefront of Amis’s mind because of the inspirational and editorial roles played by Larkin in the novel’s genesis. Though Amis admitted to getting the idea for an academic spoof after visiting Larkin’s Leicester University senior common room in 1946 (Amis 1974, Profile 4, 22),13 he conceived of the plot and Jim Dixon’s future occupation two years later independent of Larkin. In a 20 May 1948 letter to Larkin, he writes: “I think I could make a large sum of money by hiring myself out as a listener to bores: I am better at being told things I do not want to know than anybody else, except you” (Bodleian). And two months later he would muse: “I think a nice plot for a novel wd be abt. a man who has a girl he can’t seduce and a job he wants to get, and somebody like hilary morris seduces the girl and gets the job, which is something desirable and awarded by men shown as sensible. Ehay?” (10 July 1948, Bodleian). Thus, while situations and models for characters may have come from their shared experience and the role of Larkin in the creative process was of great importance, the central situation involving Bertrand Welch, Dixon, Christine Callaghan, and Gore-Urquhart emerged from Amis’s own mind. Larkin was most helpful in convincing Amis to use the manic, bantering tone hitherto reserved for their correspondence. Because this tone was something they shared in private, Amis had some misgivings about turning their letters and jokes into fiction and these feelings are addressed through L.S. Caton, who absconds with Dixon’s article on shipbuilding, then publishes it in Italian translation under his own name. Amis’s authorized biographer, Eric Jacobs, declared that “No donnish or critical exegesis was required to explain the meanings of his fiction; it spoke for itself” (1995, 364), and this type of critical attitude has allowed Amis’s concern for authenticity and the role of antimodels to go unexamined. Before looking at L.S. Caton as an antimodel, though, Amis’s commentary in Lucky Jim on the role of the audience needs explication. Throughout he is critical of pandering to an audience without properly entertaining it, as Margaret Peel’s comment on the painter ­Bertrand Welch suggests: “I thought he was all right when you got him on his own. I think he feels that when he’s got an audience he’s got to play up to it and impress everyone” (46).14 Initially, however, Dixon has no audience and his play-acting and face-pulling serve



Lessons of The Legacy 39

to obscure his identity, not to attract attention. One could even make a case for him as the purest kind of artist, since he derives joy from creation without any thought for public recognition. Clearly he most enjoys the impersonation process and not the goal, because he is undeterred by failure. He makes two prank telephone calls to the Welch home – both of which are seen through – to avoid speaking with Mrs Welch about the destruction of her bed sheets (99) and to get information from Bertrand Welch (190). He then composes an illiterate threatening letter to an irritating colleague, Johns (153), which, like the phone calls, only temporarily works. He writes the letter anticipating Johns’ immediate reaction, and this shows an awareness of the audience: “He could hardly hope, even so, to deceive Johns,” thinks Dixon. “But the letter would at any rate give him a turn and his dig-mates a few moments’ amusement when it was opened, according to his habit, at the breakfast-table and read over cornflakes” (153). When Amis composed wickedly funny letters to ­Larkin, he did not need a large audience either. The pleasure derived from the act of composition and anticipation of the reader’s reaction was sufficient to motivate him to write. In contrast to Dixon’s spontaneous and natural entertaining, several other characters behave in a contrived way that makes them offensive to the audience. Margaret Peel enters the novel in the second chapter to thank Dixon for dealing with her suicide attempt tactfully and, though her gratitude “seemed genuine” (22), the reader’s suspicions are aroused by her unnatural behaviour. Her laugh is compared to “the tinkle of tiny silver bells” (23) and she wears too much make-up, which is inexpertly applied, leaving lipstick visible on her teeth (43).15 At the dance, she is compared to “a great actress demonstrating the economical conveyance of strong emotion” (111), making her the opposite of the feminine, wholesome, and straightforward Christine Callaghan. When Dixon leaves Margaret for Christine, the break is described as “genuine” (249), reminding the reader of the inapplicability of this term to Margaret’s character. If she is intended to represent an inauthentic woman who, when unable to arouse male interest, resorts to a fake suicide attempt, then Ned and Bertrand Welch serve as examples of an inauthentic academic and artist respectively. Ned Welch’s obsession with status and appearance is evident from the novel’s opening page. “No other professor in Great Britain ... set such store by being called Professor,” thinks Dixon (7). Since Welch does not seem to be working very hard, Dixon wonders: “How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in i­talics”

40

Kingsley Amis

(8). He soon discovers the answer, as he is asked “to fill certain gaps in [Welch’s] knowledge of the history of peasant arts and crafts in the country” (173). With Dixon conducting Welch’s research for him at the public library, he is prevented from working on his own Merrie England address, a necessary step in securing his standing at the university. Like his father, Bertrand Welch seeks to advance his career with the minimum of effort. He courts Gore-Urquhart’s niece, Christine Callaghan, in the hopes of becoming the art patron’s private secretary. “I’m at the moment busily grooming myself for the part,” he confesses. “Patronage, you see, patronage: that’s what it’ll be. I’ll answer his letters with one hand and paint with the other” (48). He is, in effect, turning into his father: a pseudo-intellectual who gets others to work for him. Interestingly, authenticity in Lucky Jim is not synonymous with honesty, for it is perfectly acceptable to deceive others provided one does so in an entertaining way. Affectation, however, is a serious crime. Bertrand Welch is intended to appear ridiculous when he snootily announces, “And I happen to like the arts, you sam” (51). Dixon, on the other hand, does not take himself or his profession seriously. The author’s preference for explaining artistic ideas through parody emerges in Dixon’s pranks, which the reader will find far more entertaining than Professor Welch’s monologue on his other son, “the effeminate writing Michel.” Oblivious to Dixon’s lack of interest, “Welch went on talking, his own face the perfect audience for his talk, laughing at its jokes, reflecting its puzzlement or earnestness, responding with tightened lips and narrowed eyes to its more important points” (178). He is symbolic of the worst type of artist, who lacks an audience because he has no understanding of its wants or needs. For Dixon, academia is a tedious game and because he is bored by it he neglects the needs of his students, who comprise his audience. This makes him a bad teacher and places him somewhere in a gray zone between legitimate and illegitimate academics. He characterizes his relationship with students in the following way: “They waste my time and I waste theirs” (214). Academic research is equally uninteresting, and Dixon’s policy is “to read as little as possible of any given book” (16). When he is asked by a colleague, Beesley, if his article on ship-building is good, he replies: “Good God, no. You don’t think I take that sort of stuff seriously, do you?” (33). Dixon is asked to prepare an evening lecture on the subject of “Merrie England” for the College Open Week and although he realizes the success of the lecture could determine his academic future, he takes it with as little seriousness as his ship-building article.



Lessons of The Legacy 41

Unlike Dixon, Amis did take the production of art seriously and he traces his own struggle to find a poetic voice through his hero’s more basic struggle to articulate feelings and ideas. At first, Dixon is unable to do so publicly, and he releases his frustrations through private acts of rebellion that are creative but also futile and childish. One example comes from the weekend at the Welches’ house, when he writes an unflattering message about his host in the steamed bath mirror, employing backwards letters, archaic spelling, and “bum” as the final word (64) – all trademarks of Amis’s correspondence with Larkin in which he would, like Dixon, not infrequently “let loose ... loud and prolonged bray[s] of rage” (5).16 The message is amusing, but since it is not directed at an audience it serves no purpose. As the novel progresses, Dixon’s rebellion becomes less private17 until he has a physical confrontation with Bertrand Welch and is able to tell Margaret, as a prelude to breaking off their relationship, “I’ve had enough of being forced into a false position” (158). The Merrie England lecture at the novel’s end is both a culmination of Amis and Dixon’s journeys towards authenticity and a summary of the different stages in their journeys. The lecture begins with “an excellent imitation of Welch’s preludial blaring sound” (222), which reminds us of Amis’s initial “horse-pissing” stage. Next Dixon speaks in unconscious imitation of the university principal (224), just as Amis unconsciously imitated Auden in his early poetry (Amis 2001, 109), and this inevitably leads one to forget “how to speak ordinarily” (225), as Dixon does. He experiments with a strong northern accent but only succeeds in “infus[ing] his tones with a sarcastic wounding bitterness” (226) which corresponds to the unpublished Amis’s collaborative period and the failure of The Legacy. At the end of the address, Dixon finds his “normal voice” and begins to express his true feelings about the Middle Ages – “The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-­Merrie period in our history” (227) – before losing consciousness. To find his voice, Amis too needed to lose his inhibitions and incorporate the wicked sense of humour that worked so well in private correspondence. Thus, Dixon follows the Amisian path to discovering an original voice and a sympathetic audience. With the exception of Gore-Urquhart, however, Dixon’s audience is wholly unsympathetic. It does not understand him and is incapable of appreciating his humour. To get some sort of reaction from the audience, he speaks against it by mimicking the college principal and Professor Welch. In effect, Amis did the same thing when he ridiculed his own father-in-law and academia in Lucky Jim, thereby defining his audience through a process of ­elimination. ­However, Amis

42

Kingsley Amis

still resembles the socially awkward Dixon in wanting to be liked and appreciated. This is apparent in Dixon’s reaction to M ­ argaret’s unfortunate use of lipstick, which pleased him “more from the implied compliment than from the actual effect” (57). While the novel’s antimodel, L.S. Caton, has traditionally been seen as the elaboration of a joke shared with Larkin, he serves the important function of raising questions about originality and artistic ethics. As antimodel, Caton shows that Amis was concerned about whether or not Lucky Jim would be viewed as an original work of fiction, but also that he was not terribly worried by ethics. Caton’s character and behaviour provide clues as to Amis’s future artistic method, as shall be shown. On a more immediate level there is little doubt that Amis was exacting revenge by transforming his nefarious publisher R.A. Caton into an academic fraud. The real-life Caton kept him in a state of nervous tension for several months by sporadically answering his inquiries into the status of Bright November, Amis’s first poetry collection, and then delaying publication. Although Caton is said to have “done more than any other small publisher to promote poetry during the difficult war years,” with Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Larkin in his stable of poets, he was not an easy man to do business with (Jacobs 1995, 128). As The Legacy recalls, Amis accepted harsh contractual terms requiring the purchase of fifty copies of his own book.18 Caton did not need to place such conditions on young authors – he owned ninety-one houses in Brighton and made a considerable profit by printing soft-porn novels (Jacobs 1995, 129) – but he was a shrewd businessman. He was also notoriously elusive and did not like to answer the telephone (Jacobs 1995, 129), as Amis discovered during a visit to Caton’s office in the fall of 1947. When the phone rang, Caton asked him to answer and “‘tell ’em Mr. Caton’s gone out for a few minutes’” (Amis 2001, 140). Much of this is re-enacted in The Legacy, when the protagonist visits his publisher, who calls him “Ames,” asks when his book will come out and is told immediately, “Well, things are very difficult” (60). The unobtrusive Kingsley, “not wishing to provoke a refusal to publish,” leaves the office with the vague promise that his book will appear at the earliest by the end of March, over three months later (61). Zachary Leader has summarized Caton’s character as “dilatory, inefficient, mean, secretive and doubledealing” (2006, The Life, 189). The standard interpretation of Caton’s role as a fictional character is the one offered by Christopher Hitchens: “Amis took revenge against an editor named Caton by using his name for hateful or shifty parts in his first five books and then killing him off



Lessons of The Legacy 43

in The Anti-Death League” (2002, 107). In truth, only his role in Lucky Jim is of interest, for in each subsequent novel he makes only the briefest of cameo appearances by writing a letter, making a telephone call, or through word of mouth. The first reference to Caton in the book revisits details surrounding the publication of Amis’s poetry collection. After failing to get his article into an established academic journal, Dixon has submitted it to “a new historical review with an international bias” advertised by “that Caton chap” in the Times Literary Supplement, on the rationale that “a new journal can’t very well be bunged up as far ahead” as the older ones (14). Dixon considers his title, “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485,” perfect “in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness” (14). Similarly, Amis submitted poems with which he was not wholly satisfied to R.A. Caton because he wanted to get published as quickly as possible and he was unhappy with the “CORNY [title that] reminds me of Jaybee Priestley” (2001, 131). After Lucky Jim came out, he wrote to Larkin calling his poetry collection “the worst book ever written by a promising young poet” and determined to get his agent to stop Caton from re-advertising the book (Amis 2001, 357).19 The next mention of L.S. Caton in Lucky Jim comes with the news via post that Dixon’s article has been accepted: “Without formality the writer announced that he’d liked the shipbuilding article and proposed to publish it ‘in due course’. He’d be writing again ‘before very long’ and signed himself ‘L.S. Caton’” (30). Dixon rejoices, thinking that “Welch would find it harder to sack him now” (30), but is advised by Beesley to “pin [Caton] down to a date” of publication (32). Matters become urgent when it is discovered that Caton has been appointed Chair of History of Commerce at the University of Tucuman in Argentina. “You’d better get through to him a bit sharpish, before he escapes on the banana-boat,” warns Beesley (171). Caton answers Dixon’s telephone call but refuses to give an approximate publication date. “I’m sorry to hear of your difficulties, Mr. Dickinson,” says Caton, “but I’m afraid things are too difficult here for me to be very seriously concerned about your difficulties. There are plenty of people in your position, you know; I don’t know what I should do if they all started demanding promises from me in this fashion” (194). The conversation ends with a “metallic tapping” and Dixon’s summation: “A rival to Welch had appeared in the field of evasion-technique, verbal division, and in the physical division of the same field this chap had Welch whacked at the

44

Kingsley Amis

start: self-removal to South America was the traditional climax of an evasive career” (194). Dixon is unable to morally condemn Caton’s behaviour because he admires his ability to get ahead without doing real work. The protagonist has resorted to trickery and subterfuge throughout the novel and, when he appropriates the Barclays’ taxi, Christine notes that deceiving others has become a habit. “You’re getting good at this sort of thing aren’t you?” she says and he replies that he “didn’t use to be” (133).20 ­Kenneth Womack has taken a sympathetic view of what he calls the hero’s “goodnatured, outward response to Caton’s thievery,” claiming that it “reveals both his recognition of the academy’s ethically fractured rites of competition and his evolving public self, a persona that no longer relies upon the construction of obnoxious faces to vent his emotions” (2002, 37). This is not entirely true, for Dixon’s mimicry causes Gore-Urquhart to produce “loud skirling laughter” while university staff members continue “staring at him with frozen astonishment and protest” (226). He impresses his future boss as unpretentious and entertaining but not morally pure, for this is a world of “comic justice,” as Patrick Swinden notes, “in which farcical vitality and advanced powers of ridicule are rewarded by material success” (1984, 197). The rogue in Dixon recognizes Caton’s act of plagiarism as “cunning,” and thinks it must be “how people get [department] chairs” (229). It is also a representation of Amis’s guilt over cannibalizing relations and friends in his fiction. Originally he had planned to offer a comic version of Larkin’s relationship to his somewhat neurotic girlfriend Monica Jones with Amis’s own father-in-law cast as Professor Welch (Jacobs 1995, 143). Larkin was dropped, but Jones and Leonard Bardwell survived as models. This leads to an alternative explanation for Dixon’s relative calm at finding Caton has stolen his work. It is a reflection not only of his lack of interest in academia but of Amis’s own inability to condemn the practice of borrowing others’ identities and experiences to further one’s professional career.21 L.S. Caton also indicates to the reader that Amis’s fiction will contain many insoluble puzzles and few essential truths. Postmodern criticism has drawn attention both to aporia and textual lacunas; the latter are defined as “visible hollow[s] or absence[s] relative to a surrounding level of meaning” (Harland 1999, 241). Caton is more absent than present in Lucky Jim and in subsequent novels he only communicates with the protagonists through indirect messages. In the terms delineated by E.M. Forster, Caton is neither flat nor round,22 symbolic of nothing beyond the fact that, as J. Hillis Miller has observed, in literature “a true secret,



Lessons of The Legacy 45

if there is such a thing, cannot ever, by any means, be revealed” (1995, 309). The reader never discovers whether L.S. Caton goes to Argentina of his own volition or whether he is fleeing something. Nor can the degree to which Caton has plagiarized Dixon’s shipbuilding essay be ascertained. Although Dixon has “never learnt any Italian” (229), the narrator declares on his behalf, “after a minute or two,” that Caton’s “article was either a close paraphrase or a translation of Dixon’s original article” (229). If Dixon is as shoddy a detective as he is an academic then his conclusions are suspect. In Amis’s third novel, I Like It Here, he would introduce another poor detective who arrives at a questionable albeit convenient conclusion. Amis’s purpose in both cases is not to undermine the authority of his heroes, but to demonstrate the human capacity for rationalization. One can never know the truth about either Caton or the article because “A true secret is all on the surface,” and “A literary text (and any text may be taken as literary) says what it says. It cannot be forced to say more than it says” (Miller 1995, 309). Leaving reader expectations unfulfilled through indeterminate endings becomes a trademark of Amis’s style. Although he did this rather clumsily in The Legacy, the next chapters will show that indeterminacy in Take a Girl Like You and I Want It Now is both provocative and effective. In Jake’s Thing and The Biographer’s Moustache, Amis will tease readers by describing an inaudible speech, thereby creating a visual effect not unlike the Alfred Hitchcock technique of showing people speaking without sound. Amis teases to underline the fact that we cannot know everything, in denial of the modernist preference for symbols and patterns that point to greater truths. This is precisely the reason that positive artistic models, with the exception of the collaborative novel The Egyptologists, never appear in Amis’s novels. Not coincidentally, the death of L.S. Caton would precipitate a significant artistic change in Amis’s fiction. While Caton symbolizes the shamming academic who deliberately avoids human contact, preferring to maintain distance as he uses others and requests favours, Amis would begin to entangle his protagonists in the lives of the antimodels. He claimed that in killing off the character he was proving himself to be a serious writer,23 but as a vehicle for the exploration of artistic issues, his cameos served little purpose. At this early stage in Amis’s career, however, the introduction of L.S. Caton in Lucky Jim is tantamount to the profession of Amis’s artistic manifesto: ethics are not a serious concern when judging the legitimacy of an artist; there are no truths but anti-truths that help us to move closer to understanding art.

3 Defining the Self: Writing Against Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin in That Uncertain Feeling Amis’s second novel tells the story of a bored librarian with marital trouble. John Lewis applies for the position of sub-librarian even though he dislikes his profession. He becomes involved with Elizabeth ­Gruffydd-Williams, an attractive, wealthy, married woman and patron of the arts who connives to get him the promotion through her husband, an influential library board member. In return, Lewis is expected to provide sexual diversion. After a mock-interview, he is offered the position, which he refuses, quitting the library for a job in coal sales. Amis used the novel to satirize Larkin’s professional world, thereby gaining independence from his inner audience. Though he received valuable editorial advice from Larkin while writing Lucky Jim, he decided not to show him drafts of That Uncertain Feeling and in this decision we can see Amis following the path to literary success delineated in his BLitt thesis. The antimodel in the novel is Gareth Probert, a Welsh poet, playwright, and undeserving recipient of support from arts patrons. Probert was modelled on Dylan Thomas, whose poetry Amis initially liked but whom he later came to view as a sham and a pernicious influence. When one considers Amis’s artistic development, That Uncertain Feeling is an extremely important novel, since he used it to distance himself from two formative influences – Larkin and Thomas – and to further define his artistic position via negative example. While Amis and Larkin had initially been united by jealousy of published and acclaimed writers, the former was suddenly famous while the latter’s career (at least as a fiction writer) had stalled. After writing two novels, Larkin would write no more1 and his jealousy spills over into his correspondence. In October 1953 he complained to Patsy Strang that “On the literary side, all the news seems to be with Kings-



Defining the Self 47

ley – see V.S. Pritchett expounding the virtues of Lucky Jim before the damned thing has even been published!” (Larkin 1992, 212). Three months later, he wrote to Strang again on 21 January 1954, belittling Amis’s artistic achievement: “Apart from being funny, I think [Lucky Jim] is somewhat over-simple” (222). Of course, this is a rather hypocritical remark to make since Larkin had advised Amis to simplify the novel in draft.2 In a 3 February 1954 letter to Robert Conquest, he praised Amis’s critical eye – “I sometimes read a poem over with a tiny Kingsley crying How d’you mean? in my mind at every unclear image and it’s a wonderful aid to improvement” – while downplaying his creativity, noting Lucky Jim’s “general thinness of imagination” (223). His jealousy seems to have peaked in a February 1955 letter to Monica Jones, which includes a prayer against That Uncertain Feeling: “Oh please God, make them return it with a suggestion that he ‘rewrites certain passages.’ Nothing would delight me more. And I refuse to believe that he can write a book on his own – or at least a good book” (quoted in Leader 2006, 313). And yet Amis was probably wise not to show the manuscript of That Uncertain Feeling to Larkin when one considers how he might have reacted to the satiric portrait of a librarian. Larkin had often objected to dialogue attributed to Veronica in “Dixon and Christine,” writing comments such as, “This sentence I find irritating & unconveying” (HRC, 46). If he had not been so blunt, Amis might not have rewritten many awkward passages. However the situation is complicated by the fact that Veronica (who became Margaret) was modelled on Larkin’s girlfriend Monica Jones. At one point Veronica says of her colleague and romantic rival Madeleine, “It’s a pity she’s a bit hammy with the social graces, don’t you think?” prompting Larkin to write, “Do people talk like this? I never hear them” (48). Perhaps no one talked this way about Monica in front of Larkin because they knew of his romantic attachment, and Amis must have recognized that the relationship made it difficult for his friend to objectively view Veronica’s behaviour. Near the end of the manuscript Dixon and Veronica argue in his room and she says many wounding things that were cut from Lucky Jim. After this attack, she offers justifications for her bad behaviour, making her even less sympathetic. In the margin, Larkin wrote: “This speech makes me twist about with boredom” (HRC, 175). The experience with ­Veronica probably alerted Amis as to how Larkin would react to the portrait of a socially inept librarian and convinced him not to show him the manuscript of That Uncertain Feeling.

48

Kingsley Amis

Another reason for Amis not to consult his friend is that he had already learned most of what Larkin had to teach him. As the ­manuscript of “Dixon and Christine” progressed, fewer objections were made against unnatural dialogue and in the final hundred pages Larkin’s editorial remarks are negligible. And yet the text of That Uncertain Feeling points to Amis’s own lingering concerns over his ability to write solo. In a sense, the uncertainty in the title may refer not only to Lewis’s feelings about his marriage and job, but to Amis’s creative abilities. He admitted as much in a letter to Larkin in which he called his second novel “disastrously short” at 65,000 words and lamented the necessity of “filthy descriptive padding” as “a sure ticket for beng borng. Nobody will like it as much as LJ. Doubleday’s won’t take it, I’m certain. Drying up, see?” (29 December 1953, Bodleian). In the text, artistic uncertainty is conveyed through a shamming narrator. Though some critics have argued that Amis never resorted to the modernist trick of using unreliable narrators (McDermott 1989, 51) and pointed to John Lewis’s honesty and morality (Salwak 1992, 91),3 he is Amis’s “most unreliable narrator” because he “offer[s] us the facts as he wants to see them” (Bradford 1989, 74). Jonathan Culler defines unreliable narrators as ones that “provide enough information about situations and clues about their own biases to make us doubt their interpretations of events, or [give the reader] reasons to doubt that the narrator shares the same values as the author” (1997, 88). This is clearly the case in That Uncertain Feeling, as the author does not slant the narrative in Lewis’s favour, as he did for Jim Dixon, but compiles insinuations against him. Patrick Swinden has argued that Amis undermines Lewis by having him act against his nature. When Lewis hides in the broom closet and impersonates a plumber at the Gruffydd-Williamses’ house, Swinden calls this “psychologically quite implausible” because “Amis has made it so deliberately. He has gone out of his way to divert our attention from Lewis as a comprehensible, motive-driven human being, to the sequence of events into which he has been precipitated by the controlling whim of his creator” (181). In spite of professional similarities, Larkin bears no more resemblance to Lewis than he does to Jim Dixon, for he was a confirmed bachelor, conscientious librarian, and active poet. And yet the negative depiction of the library world must have rankled. After Larkin read the novel, Amis would try to soothe him by emphasizing that Lewis’s problem lay not in his world but in his own character. Critics had exaggerated the working-­class elements in the novel, he insisted, failing to realize that while Welsh society “might be pretty dull (as it must have appeared



Defining the Self 49

to a chap like Lewis) there were quite a few funny things there” (15 September 1955, Bodleian). There is little doubt, though, that Lewis’s most ­pressing ­problem is professional boredom. In the opening scene, he is weary of his job and says of an exchange with a library patron, “I was used to this sort of thing, as indeed to every sort that could go on here.” His gaze is “slightly filmed by afternoon drowsiness” and his voice “lack[s] tone” (1955, 7), an extraordinarily detached and negative selfassessment from a first-person narrator. While Lewis’s tendency to overdescribe may be attributed in part to Amis’s lack of literary polish – a problem that plagued The Legacy and that Larkin flagged in Lucky Jim – deliberate word choice leads us to form an unfavourable impression of Lewis. He speaks “woodenly” (35), twists his face “into a shameful and ridiculous ogle” (54), and has “a small coughing-fit ... as a laughsubstitute,” which is “a minute still cowardly evasion” (70). Lewis’s subsequent rationalizations make his behaviour appear even worse. We are told that he speaks “woodenly” while ogling Elizabeth GruffyddWilliams because he is uncomfortable in the presence of an attractive woman and the forced cough is evidence of his discomfort in pubs; neither of these characteristics is positive in Amis’s masculine world. One of the few comic scenes Amis envisioned in his pre-novel notes involved Lewis going to great lengths to avoid paying for his round; as explained in the previous chapter’s analysis of The Legacy, characters in Amis’s fiction who do not have authorial endorsement generally shirk their rounds. Amis’s pre-novel notes clearly show that he wanted to write a serious novel. “Humour to be kept to a minimum,” he reminded himself, planning to introduce comedy only in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters to “increase the horror” (HRC, 7). The majority of the horror stems from Lewis’s selfish hypocrisy, though the reader experiences another type of attendant horror when an author exposes his protagonist’s weaknesses. In stark contrast to the assiduously sympathetic presentation of Jim Dixon’s side of the story in Lucky Jim, it often seems that Amis wants the reader to distinguish between John Lewis and the narrator. When Elizabeth excuses herself to powder her nose at the dance bar, pushing through the crowd ­“unhesitatingly and energetically,” Lewis internally comments, “She’s done this before, I thought” (83), which reminds us that it is Lewis and not Amis who is doing the thinking. Although Lewis readily admits to bad behaviour when it is inconsequential, his failure to reflect in important situations is particularly damning. After he and ­Elizabeth are rescued from drunks by the likeable rogue Ken Davies,

50

Kingsley Amis

Lewis’s appreciation is brushed aside: “Ah, let it ride,” says Davies. “You’ll do the same for me some day” (91). Later, masquerading as a Welshwoman, Lewis is rescued from a besotted labourer by Davies’s father and the narrator’s debt to the family is described as “sizeable.” Lewis vows: “One of these days I would try to repay it” (137). When he is soon presented with an opportunity to do so, he inexplicably balks and abandons the drunk and injured Ken Davies in the street. He then returns to stand over him and reflects: “It was funny to see him like this, lying so low after the conquests, glories and triumphs of the dancehall” (234). Though Lewis eventually does help Davies, this has not been his first instinct, and we are reminded of his malicious nature by Mrs Davies who, after thanking him, says that she “shan’t forget” what he has done for her son (239). As Gerard Genette has noted, “pretending to show is pretending to be silent” (1980, 166) and in this novel Amis pretends to let Lewis tell his story while leading readers to form a negative opinion of him. Although John Lewis was not the ideal Amisian hero, he helped Amis to gain independence from his inner audience by becoming the vehicle for satirizing Larkin’s character and profession. When Lewis finds himself sexually objectifying Elizabeth in the opening scene at the library, he remembers that as a librarian he is “superior to things like sex. Oh, and money too, of course” (15). Like Larkin, Lewis too would like to rise in the library for financial reasons. On 13 November 1954, while Amis was at work on the final draft of That Uncertain Feeling, he wrote to wish his friend luck in getting the position of chief librarian at Hull (Amis 2001, 412). Larkin received the promotion and reported to Patsy Strang on 7 December 1954 feeling “very ambiguous about the whole business” because of the increased workload he would have to assume. He admits, however: “the cash is welcome” (Larkin 1992, 232)4. Ultimately, Lewis refuses the promotion because he feels he has not earned it, and perhaps this was a reflection of Amis’s lingering irritation over rumours that ­Larkin had co-authored Lucky Jim. He may have felt that such rumours diminished his achievement and decided to show his independence by writing a darker novel in a different narrative voice. The other literary influence from whom Amis was distancing himself in That Uncertain Feeling was Dylan Thomas, the model for the artistic antimodel Gareth Probert. In his BLitt thesis, he had argued that artists incapable of making a living necessarily adapted their art to suit the audience or they changed professions. However, in the twentieth century the advent of the Arts Council5 combined with a wave of cultural nos-



Defining the Self 51

talgia, allowing writers like Dylan Thomas to flourish. The roots of the Amisian idea that struggling artists should struggle alone are found both in That Uncertain Feeling and in Lucky Jim’s treatment of education. In post-war Great Britain, an increasing number of indifferent young people were entering red-brick universities and Amis lamented the fall of academic standards.6 He felt justified in speaking out against government intervention in education and the arts because he had received no support and still made money with Lucky Jim. In the absence of a patron or government grant, he had also endured the humiliation of having to purchase fifty copies of his poetry collection Bright November just to ensure its publication. He was also a member of the workforce, gainfully employed as a university lecturer. Thus, while Amis suggested through Jim Dixon that it was acceptable to get by on luck, he thought it best to rely on one’s own merits, as John Lewis discovers in That Uncertain Feeling. Aesthetically speaking, Amis’s stance is best understood as provincial, for his attacks on Gareth Probert reveal him to be “primarily concerned with the values of his own cultural society, and ... largely indifferent to what lies beyond the world that he knows at first-hand” (Press 1963, 91). This is how John Press defined the provincial aesthetic, of which he considered Amis and Larkin practitioners. In his role as foil, antagonizing the protagonist and luring him out from his comfortable but unnatural profession, Gareth Probert resembles L.S. Caton in Lucky Jim.7 The reader does not mourn for Dixon when his shipbuilding article is misappropriated, since the incident merely hastens his inevitable departure from the academy. Similarly, Lewis’s confrontation with Probert makes him realize that he does not belong on the fringes of high Welsh society hobnobbing with shamming artists. Their battle is hard to take seriously since Lewis has even less interest in literature than Dixon did in academic research. Probert’s insignificance as a character is evident in the fact that his removal from the novel would leave the story essentially unaltered: the bored librarian would still be lessthan-enthusiastic about the library, art, Welsh culture, and matrimony. He does advance the plot, however, by serving as the vehicle for Lewis’s meeting with Elizabeth. As a version of Dylan Thomas, Probert enables the author to distill creative irritations into a single concrete figure8 and, by the process of inversion, allows the reader to construct an image of the ideal poet-artist. Amis’s poetic sensibility is charged with negativism, thus the library, like medieval history in Lucky Jim, is viewed as the manifestation of stasis and death. Discussing Amis’s poetry, Nicholas Poburko notes that “The

52

Kingsley Amis

only things with any force or bite are the things rejected, trite as they are” (1999, 147), which links him with other Movement writers whose negativism has been defined as “a response, sometimes ­predictable but in other ways searching and intelligent, to the intellectual and political culture of the [second world] war” (Woodring 1994, 578).9 Amis’s critique of Dylan Thomas indicates his artistic absolutism – in particular the idea that good and bad art are always discernible to men and women of sense – and this is a trademark of his early fiction. He was not, however, absolutist about morality or human behaviour. While his protagonists are frequently questioned for bad behaviour and let off when they weakly promise to do better,10 the antimodels’ errors are considered inexcusable and they are never given second chances. The first novel in which Amis’s artistic intransigence begins to weaken is Girl, 20, published in 1971. Until this point any artist of whom he disapproved would be ridiculed and shunned while adulterers and rogues were shown the errors of their ways and encouraged to correct their behaviour. The same tendency is evident in Amis’s critical writing. In 1955 he would write a negative review of the Evelyn Waugh novel Officers and Gentlemen simply because the satire was too mild: A ruder way of putting this would be to say that Mr. Waugh is unwilling – I cannot believe that he is unable – to chance his arm and have a go and lay us in the aisles. The reason is not far to seek. If one is really going to satirise army life, in all its confusion and arbitrariness, then sooner or later one has got to start satirising the army itself, which contains in its nature confusion and arbitrariness just as much as order and custom. Mr. Waugh’s attitude to the army is much too serious to permit that. (Amis 1955, 372) Waugh’s brand of satirical comedy influenced Amis strongly, as the subsequent examination of the 1963 novel One Fat Englishman will argue. Precisely because Amis thought that Waugh had written better novels than Officers and Gentlemen, he could not forgive him for failing to meet the same standard. Though he was capable of doing better, he had failed. Therefore, in That Uncertain Feeling, while John Lewis is let off after pathetically promising to “keep trying not to be immoral, and then to keep trying might turn into a habit” (240), Gareth Probert and his art are condemned. This is a function both of the high standard to which Amis held artists and his determination to efface Thomas’s poetic influ-



Defining the Self 53

ence. Amis’s early admiration for Thomas emerges in the collaborative novel fragment “Who Else is Rank” in which a “smeared” copy of The Map of Love lies on the bed of the Amis character, Francis Archer, who calls the poet “smashing” (HEHL). Less than two years after composing this scene, Amis would write the following in a 9 January 1947 letter to Larkin: Talking of words, I think I have traced the nastiness of my early words to the influence of Mister Dylan Thos. Nay: influences are good if they are good influences, like Auden and you less recently, but if they are SODDING LOUSY influences, like that of Mr. thos, then they are bad, years, years. I have got to the stage now with mr toss that I have only reached with Chaucer and Dryden, not even with Milton, that of VIOLENTLY WISHING that the man WERE IN FRONT OF ME, so that I could be DEMONIACALLY RUDE to him. (Amis 2001, 109) He held Thomas responsible for delaying his artistic development and he would bear a grudge for the rest of his life.11 In 1948 Amis heard “that crazy Welch fellow” give a poetry reading and claimed that the only pleasure to be derived from the reading was produced by accidental humour. “I was seized by that laugh several times,” he reported to L ­ arkin: “The poems seemed like the back of my body to me” (29 ­September, Bodleian). The attack on Thomas/Probert in That Uncertain Feeling is focused on cultural ignorance, the cultivation of an eccentric artistic appearance, and faulty logic. After discovering that Probert is planning a book of poems on “an adolescent’s discovery of the meaning of Wales” (38), Lewis remembers his schoolmate being awarded nought for Welsh in the School Certificate. Such a result, in that language, means an almost psychotic ignorance. It’s standard practice, of course, with writers of Probert’s allegiance to pretend to be wild valley babblers, woaded with pit-dirt and sheep-shit, thinking in Welsh the whole time and obsessed by terrible beauty, etc., but in fact they tend to come from comfortable middle-class homes, have a good urban education, never go near a lay preacher and couldn’t even order a pint in Welsh, falling back, as Probert had done earlier in the evening, on things like the Welsh for big Jesus. (And don’t tell me they can think in Welsh without knowing the language. Ever tried thinking in Bantu?). (49)

54

Kingsley Amis

The Welsh poetic champion Probert who cannot speak his native language at least looks the part of the artist. His mouth possesses the “mobility of a partly-collapsed inner-tube,” and his hair sticks up “horizontally” from his head in “inorganic shelves” (38). Amis’s tendency to judge the Welsh against his decidedly English standards is explored later in the discussions of The Old Devils and You Can’t Do Both, but in this case his determination not to let Probert have things both ways does make sense. Even if he is a Welsh poet, since he writes in English he ought to use the language with precision and propriety. Probert complains about the library’s failure to “disgorge some books” on traditional Welsh costumes, which leads Lewis to inwardly remark on “the nonEnglishness, the air of being literally translated from the Welsh, of some of these linguistic forms” (44). When Probert maintains that it is a librarian’s duty to help people find the books that they might want but have yet to discover (44), Lewis tells him to listen to and answer “facts,” to which Probert counters: “Oh, facts. Fellows like you can always trot out facts of one sort or another. You’re so bogged down in your facts you’ve forgotten how to think” (45). “There’s nothing to beat an attack on facts for making me angry,” Lewis replies. “Yes, I know, you prefer feelings, don’t you?” (45).12 The final attack on Thomas is for wilful eccentricity, something that Amis identified as a characteristic of shamming artists through Bertrand Welch’s boorish behaviour. Karl Miller has called Amis a “critic of rudeness” who believed that “Poets shouldn’t suppose that they’re allowed to be rude just because they’re poets” (1998, 37), an assertion that may surprise those familiar with Amis’s abrasive public persona in the 1990s. As an artistic code of behaviour, though, it is supported by the scene in which Lewis is asked by Gruffydd-Williams if “being a poet entitles [Probert] to be a bit different from other people.” Lewis replies on Amis’s behalf, “On the contrary” (46). Amis’s hatred for Dylan Thomas may have increased during the composition of his BLitt thesis. Instead of winning a band of followers, Thomas had simply fooled part of the audience by “using his verbal alchemy to dress up a trite idea in language designed to prevent people from seng how trite it is” (Amis 2001, 123). Probert’s play The Martyr includes the following cryptic passage: “But Bowen bach, they buried you at batlight in a dead winter. Deep, deep they buried you under the woman’s hair of grass, you and your wound, the night Menna Pugh’s fancy man from Tenby gave her four rum-and-peps and a packet of twenty and showed her the seaman’s way, and never a thought for you, poor little Bowen” (112).



Defining the Self 55

When Bowen Thomas, the central character, “talk[s] a mouthful of grass under the still hornbeam” (112) – skilfully manipulates language to say nothing – Lewis leaves the performance.13 This is the proper way for an audience to react to an artist who has failed to entertain it, and a similar scene is enacted in the late period novel Russian Hide-andSeek. Although Elizabeth wants to stay to show her support for local art, Lewis, like Amis, thinks that “a stiff dose of discouraging could do nothing but good to that ranting alcoholic grenadier” (113).14 While Gareth Probert is rejected as an illegitimate artist who deceives the audience,15 one must remember that Amis considered deception and subterfuge perfectly acceptable in non-artistic forums. When Lewis puts on a thick Welsh accent to impersonate a repairman, then dresses as a Welshwoman (131), his behaviour may be inauthentic but in Amis’s view it is an appropriate satire of the revival of Welsh tradition in the 1950s. Good-natured subterfuge and the playing of pranks are not only acceptable but recommended as survival techniques for the socially awkward; for artists, on the other hand, trickery is never tolerable. The same contradiction will arise in Amis’s third novel in a way that was surely intended to recall That Uncertain Feeling. The protagonist, who has inherited the name “Bowen” – Garnet Bowen – only pretends to write, and he has accepted the task of confirming the identity of a writer who claims to be the reclusive modernist Wulfstan Strether. Since Amis considered modernism hateful, any discussion of authenticity becomes moot, and this makes the detection of a sham by a sham oddly appropriate, as I argue in the next chapter. One final point of interest in relation to Dylan Thomas relates to Amis’s disdain for Welsh nationalism. Although he listed nationalism in his notes as one of the novel’s few comedic sources and he ridiculed it in private correspondence, he still seems to have expected readers to believe that his periodic attacks on Thomas were in defence of the Welsh. In 1991 he would explain his antipathy towards Thomas as being “partly a feeling of indignation on behalf of the Welsh. I think they’ve been – still are – traduced by what Thomas wrote about Wales. He let them down, made monkeys out of them to some extent ... distorting, caricaturing, music hall bullshit” (“I’m a great man for tyrannies,” 89). Richard Jones, in reviewing Amis’s Memoirs, refused to accept Amis in the role of Welsh defender: “Because the Welsh were easier to get on with than the ­English Amis stayed in Swansea for 12 years, and he uses Swansea to put down Cambridge University. The conversation was better and involved occasional references to books” (1992, 177). In private, of course, Amis’s

56

Kingsley Amis

attitude was quite different. After moving to Swansea on 22 November 1949, he told Larkin: “You are lucky where you are: you have no Welch cultural nationalism to endure” (Bodleian). Though irritations are often exaggerated into hatred for Larkin’s amusement, the evaluations are invariably negative. In a 7 March 1950 letter he declares: I think Welsh humans are ill for looking and for hearing, nearly all the time. And how do you find Wales, Mr. Amis? I find it in the same way as I find a serrated turd bobbing like a seal in a cascading lavatory-­pan, when I lift up the lid of the device. And what do you think of Swansea University, Mr. Amis? I think it’s a very tawdry picture, in a very tawdry frame. Does that answer your question? (Bodleian) In conclusion, the portrait of Dylan Thomas in That Uncertain Feeling is best understood as an artistic statement. An indifference to the poetry and traditions of other civilizations is given as one of the characteristics of a provincial poet, and Amis’s distaste for Thomas reminds us of the criticisms he made of The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. When he read, he was irritated by linguistic barriers to comprehension; he recognized that Thomas too had chosen a different mode of poetic communication from his own and was not always easy to understand. In one of his first recorded references to Thomas, Amis wrote to Larkin on 2 December 1946 to disparage a radio broadcast that he had not even heard: “How horrible it must of ben, hering Mr. Thos. Doesn’t he know how unwisely he talks? I think I will write to the beebee sea, telling them to find a new way of talking from that way of talking” (2001, 103). Although he rejected Thomas for his perceived modernist experimentation, Amis too was conducting experiments in his fiction. He unsettles the reader by undermining John Lewis’s narrative and offering a questionable moral conclusion, while Thomas’s poetry is unsettling because he “bring[s] to a crisis his relation with language” (Barthes 1976, 14). Amis’s deceptive simplicity of style has led many readers to overlook his experiments in content. His novels fit Roland Barthes’s concept of the blissful: they are rooted in the present, easily swallowed, though harder to digest. Barthes claimed that texts of pleasure receive the most critical attention because pleasure is the most easily recognized state. We remember it and hope to experience it again. Bliss, however, always seems new or unique (1976, 14). John Lewis’s role in That Uncertain Feeling, at least in part, is to show that the narrative voice is an “authorial persona” and not the



Defining the Self 57

author in person (Barry 2002, 234). Amis would make a similar point in Memoirs: “the chronicler [is] not ... the same person as the doer” (1991, 204). Perhaps it was instinct and not intention that led him to distance himself from Larkin by offering an unflattering portrayal of his friend’s profession, but his next four novels would continue the trend of provoking reactions from readers, rather than satisfying their desires.

4 Lessons in Storytelling: Graham Greene, Modernism, and I Like It Here

After the publication of That Uncertain Feeling, Amis was disturbed by rumours of Larkin claiming to be his co-author. “Don’t know why you want to take that attitude about what you call your ‘own contribution,’” wrote Amis on 15 September 1955 in regard to some of the book’s conversations and library scenes.1 “We writers have got to take our material where we find it, you know” (Bodleian). In the same letter, Amis refers to a John Wain “fantasy” that Larkin wrote Amis’s books as “probably based on your having idly mentioned that a few Jim cracks were your doing (I’m not forgetting that more than a few cracks was your doing). Then he tells it back to you, as it were, in typically exaggerated form.” In spite of this disagreement, Larkin remained Amis’s ideal reader; the sense of humour in his novels remains identical to the one found in letters to Larkin, with whom he continued to correspond regularly. Amis wrote much of his third novel with Larkin in mind, sending him his impressions of Portugal before turning them into the book’s central incidents. Once he began composing, Amis requested the temporary return of his letters to aid memory (26 July 1956, Bodleian), then sent Larkin what he estimated to be one-tenth of the novel and asked for “a non-punchpulling verdict.” The novel would, Amis admitted, feature several ­Larkin “cracks” as well (8 March 1957, Bodleian). However, I Like It Here (1958) is wholly concerned with Amis’s life and thoughts, indicating that he had taken another step towards literary independence. Once Amis had left Oxford, when he was not writing for Larkin he was generally writing about Graham Greene. Almost two years of research on Greene had not resulted in a critical publication, but it provided half of the story for I Like It Here. Having defined his brand of poetics in negative relation to Dylan Thomas in That Uncertain Feeling, Amis turned to Greene to clarify his position on storytelling. Amis liked



Lessons in Storytelling 59

and respected Greene, but there are important differences in the ways that they entertain the reader, which Amis showed by using Greene as the partial model for expatriate novelist Wulfstan Strether. He invokes Greene referentially throughout the novel to distinguish his own writing on the basis of humour, mood, and linguistic control. Perhaps the most significant development in relation to Amis’s artistic vision is his modified view of the inauthentic artist, as he allows that bad artists can be good people. Amis called his book “slipshod” and “lopsided” (1975, “Interview,” 10), and most critics agreed.2 The terms of the Somerset Maugham Award, which Amis received in March 1955 for Lucky Jim, required him to spend three months abroad (Jacobs 1995, 199–200). The desire to quickly publish another novel combined with a lack of material to suggest the interweaving of his Portuguese experiences with a vast, unused store of knowledge on Greene. The result is a novel that is more metafiction than travelogue. When he returned from Portugal he would write to Maugham to express his appreciation: “until I actually went there, ‘abroad’ was a thing I thought I didn’t much care for. But Portugal at any rate turned out to be such good fun that I mean to go on going there as often as I can” (Amis 2001, 456). Indeed, he would travel to America, Denmark, and Greece in the same decade, and these visits would provide the setting and characters for the novels One Fat Englishman (1962) and I Want It Now (1968). Amis’s fear of abroad is best viewed as a further manifestation of his poetic provincialism and not xenophobia. In one of the final notebooks kept before his death, he briefly reconsidered the “complex reasons for travel angst” and decided they were the determination not to “screw up,” be cheated, or “make [a] fool of [one]self” (HEHL). This is an apt summary of the insecurities of both John Lewis and Jim Dixon, who dread embarrassing themselves publicly by singing madrigals and mingling with high society. In the 1995 notebook, Amis adds that there is “something fraudulent abt all travel writing. The subj is not the avowed one but the writer, who is supposed to be bound by fact but can v does fabricate.” He concludes: “Trav[el] writing too easy” (HEHL). Forty years earlier he had offered the same opinions in a letter to the Spectator written from Portugal in defence of his article, “Is the Travel-Book Dead?” “I have never been to Spain in my life, not even in an Anglican bus,” writes Amis in reference to criticism of his article. “One of the chief things which keep me away is what British lovers of Spain say about it” (Amis 2001, 430). He concludes: “I’m not grumpy about furrin parts, only about people being silly about them, and that the furrin part I’m in now

60

Kingsley Amis

seems good-oh so far” (431). Amis would make the same argument for his fictional treatment of Portugal as an anti-travelogue in a 1961 interview: “In I Like It Here people thought I was attacking Europe, but I was attacking the people who like it” (50).3 Thus, determined not to write an expatriate novel in praise of abroad but equally determined to produce another novel without delay – even if this meant using autobiography “with a kind of mystery story rather perfunctorily imposed on that” (Amis 1975, “Interview,” 10) – he wrote an anti-travel novel. The importance of publishing soon is evidenced both by the serialization of I Like It Here in Punch from 9 October to 4 December 1957 (Amis 2001, 512) and by his anger at publication delays. He complained to Victor Gollancz, “I finished that damned thing against time, forgoing the revision I should have liked to give it,” and calls him “a perfect louse to have put off publication till 13th January [1958]” (Amis 2001, 521).4 Though Amis lacked material for his third novel, he wanted to maintain an established creative pattern. In a 1974 interview he explained: “That Uncertain Feeling was already well over half way there when Jim was still in production: a procedure I’ve stuck to since. Always have another one going. Then, if the current one gets hammered, you’ve got something in reserve” (22). The obvious parallels between the situations of protagonist Garnet Bowen and author Kingsley Amis make Bowen a champion of provincialism. He does not go abroad of his own volition but, like the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, is sent. The telegraph offer of a trip to Portugal with which the novel opens is called “the deportation order” (5); in a letter to Larkin on 28 March 1955, Amis used the same wording: “And now this deportation order from the Somerset Maugham Trust; forced to go abroad, bloody forced mun” (Bodleian). Though Bowen does not wish to leave England because “I like it here, you see” (12), he is convinced of Portugal’s merits by his publisher Bennie Hyman, who says, “An uncle of mine went there a year or two ago and was pissed all the time on about ten bob a day” (13).5 Officially, Bowen has been asked to unravel a literary mystery. Hiscock, the employee at Hyman’s publishing agency who dealt with the reclusive modernist writer Wulfstan Strether, has died, but not before destroying all of his Strether papers out of respect for the author’s wish to keep his identity “dark” (16). The agency has received a new manuscript for a 120,000 word novel called One Word More by a man claiming to be Strether. It supposedly reads like “bad Strether” (16), and a personal interview in Portugal or “a letter from Hiscock or a bit of fan-mail” is required to verify the



Lessons in Storytelling 61

manuscript’s authenticity (18). Hyman calls the investigation “just the thing for [Bowen]” because of his “sham-detecting lark” (19). The representation of Bowen as sham-detector betrays Amis’s original plan to write a sequel to Lucky Jim, as Eric Jacobs confirmed in his biography.6 Bowen visits the person claiming to be Strether, whom the publishing agency refers to as “Buckmaster,” after “one of those corset and jockstrap shops” (38), until his identity is confirmed. Though he fails to find any conclusive evidence, Bowen gives the aging expatriate the benefit of the doubt because he is both a generous host and cocksure (201). When Bowen returns to England, he informs Hyman that Buckmaster must be Strether because of his arrogant insistence that he is a better writer than Henry Fielding.7 Hyman remains skeptical: “Well, it all sounds rather fine-spun to me. I think you made up your mind you liked the old boy, even if he did bore you and put on this I’m-great-you-see act. And anyhow you were his guest. So you looked round for reasons for thinking he was what he claimed to be” (201). Hyman’s objections were echoed by most reviewers, who found the novel’s plot weak and the arguments against abroad and modernism unconvincing. Amis, like Bowen, had rushed through the process, stretching his material thin to achieve his desired result. It is not surprising then that the novel has only been deemed a success when it is viewed as a work of metafiction denigrating high culture. Robert H. Hopkins was one of the first critics to see it as a cohesive “aesthetic satire” targeting F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition and the Angry Young Men (1966, 63). David Lodge went further, characterizing it as “not so much turned outwards upon the world as inward upon literary art and ­ orman upon the literary artist himself” (repr. in Bell 1998, 54). While N Macleod reinforced Lodge’s reading of I Like It Here as a “reflexive novel” primarily concerned with “its own and its author’s standing with readers and critics” and “a general sense of the author’s awareness of other writers and other styles” (1985, 204), he was the first critic to recognize connections to Graham Greene’s The Third Man, references to which are embedded throughout. However, Macleod is overly imaginative in claiming that I Like It Here is told by “a plagiarist,” an indication that the author was “disowning the narrator and his literary standards” (1985, 205). He posits that the narrator is both a symbolic representation of the “third man” standing between author and reader, and a version of Amis’s first publisher, for “who else but L.S. Caton could fill so perfectly and so resourcefully the role of a shamming, plagiarist narrator, trying to pass the whole thing off as genuine creative work but at

62

Kingsley Amis

the same time keeping his own presence and identity hidden?” (214). In fact, there is no textual proof of the narrator’s identity because he does not exist as a character. He cannot be considered a plagiarist, then, let alone L.S. Caton: he is merely a narrator who has inherited some of John Lewis’s unreliability. Like Amis, Bowen is an authority on Greene who has occasionally delivered public lectures on him. Because of Greene’s prolificacy, these lectures must be constantly updated, and Bowen wishes he “would die soon so that his lecture on him would not keep on having to have things added to it every eighteen months or so” (22). “The new Graham Greene, like most of the old Graham Greenes, was about abroad. Extraordinary how the region kept coming up” (22).8 This point is also of interest, for though Amis was not terribly interested in abroad, he wanted to know how to manipulate it as a literary topic. This was something that Greene had perfected. More importantly, Amis uses Greene to define his own variety of realism, which is unpretentious and entertaining. A common feature of Greene’s work is “the strict subordination of mood to story” (Hayman 1976, 26) and perhaps in response Amis wrote a novel with a dominant mood that focuses on language at the expense of plot. As a storyteller, Amis has sometimes been criticized for his sexually orthodox story lines that focus on the meetings of young men and women, offering a “simple and not a sophisticated gratification, in terms of plot” (Green 1984, 142). However, the pleasure derived from language is in itself one of Amis’s goals, and this is easily forgotten when one focuses on plot. In a letter to Larkin dated 9 November 1948, Amis reports that he is halfway through his monograph on Greene and that “the trouble with the man is that he has no sense of humour.” This is unfortunate because “if he had a sense of humour ... he’d be able to avert those awful bursts of derisive laughter that tickle the reader’s tongue: ‘Virtue tempted him like a sin.’” One of Amis’s strengths as a novelist was his ability to learn from his mistakes, and he knew that The Legacy’s greatest flaw was its excessive seriousness. Upon re-reading the manuscript, Amis realized that he had given an Air Force motorcyclist a “blank military gaze,” prompting him to add in the margin, “Grgr?” (HEHL, 68). Amis might have been reminding himself not to be too serious, or possibly he had identified accidental humour in giving a member of the military a military gaze. In The King’s English Amis would offer Greene and Anthony Burgess as two examples of “British writers who write in affected or unnatural modes and styles.” “One longs to bawl instructions to come off it,” says



Lessons in Storytelling 63

4 While he was writing The Legacy, Amis was also at work on a Graham Greene monograph. The handwritten addition, “Grgr,” in the left margin suggests that Amis had identified Greene’s influence on his writing in the accidental comedy inherent in a soldier’s “blank military gaze.” Amis considered Greene’s seriousness excessive and had begun identifying the same flaw in The Legacy, though he had not yet learned to implement the wicked sense of humour employed to great effect in his correspondence with Larkin.

Amis. “Both seem to me to write in non-English ways, though not in American ways: both are mannerists” (Amis 1996, 11). The most obvious difference between Amis and Greene lies in their senses of humour. While Amis used language and narrative perspective to comic effect, humour in Greene’s novels generally springs from an ironic situation. Amis cited “the old-Downhamian scene with Wilson & Harris” in The Heart of the Matter as “intentionally funny” (Amis 2001, 189). In this scene, Wilson, the new arrival in the African colony, reluctantly participates in a cockroach killing contest: To and fro across the room they padded, weaving their lights, smashing down their shoes, occasionally losing their heads and pursuing wildly into corners: the lust of the hunt touched Wilson’s imagination. At first their manner to each other was “sporting”: they would

64

Kingsley Amis

call out, “Good shot” or “Hard luck”, but once they met together against the wainscot over the same cockroach when the score was even, and their tempers became frayed. (1948, 73) An argument ensues over whether a cockroach hit by Wilson died before or after falling down the drain in the sink. Following a rules debate, he departs angrily, returning the next morning to apologize because he fears the loss of his only friend (74). The scene is amusing because both the characters and the author treat the contest with disproportionate gravity and it serves as a perfect illustration of how excessive seriousness can be both a strength and a weakness in Greene. Characters are not prejudged, as they are in Amis; instead, they reveal themselves so that the reader may pass judgment. This is a strength, but when Greene becomes too serious, as Wilson and Harris do, he may appear unintentionally ridiculous because he fails to laugh at himself. A second fundamental difference between Amis and Greene is that, to prove a point, Amis would imaginatively embellish on fact. His imagination was, like Greene’s seriousness, a creative strength, which occasionally led to trouble in his non-fiction. In the preface to The King’s English, Amis cites H.W. Fowler, the author of an authoritative English usage guide, as his model, then announces that their methods differ. Whereas Fowler “reprinted hundreds of real examples of real miscues,” giving his work “authoritativeness,” Amis argues that “‘a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example,’ and what the editor has fabricated9 may make up in concentration and aptness for what it fails to include” (ix). In other words, the reader will occasionally have to take Amis’s unsubstantiated claims on faith. In Memoirs, Amis compares his creative method with that of Anthony Powell, whose novels he considers “more like life, in a way more realistic, than its components.” Because Amis does not rely on the strict transference of real incidents into literature, he considers himself “a more literary novelist than Tony” (1991, 153). As proof, he cites two incidents. While working on Girl, 20, he asked his son Martin to describe a trendy dance club, since he had never personally visited one. In direct contradiction of what Martin reported, he created a dance club with delicious food. He explains that he did this for “a little artistic reason, feeling it would have been too dull and predictable to make the food as nasty as everything else there.” This is contrasted with Powell’s inclusion of realistic details such as the cardreading scenes in his novels, because the public was “very keen on that sort of stuff at the time in question” (1991, 153). While Amis considered



Lessons in Storytelling 65

it the first responsibility of a novelist to entertain the reader, he did not feel compelled to satisfy his or her expectations. A comparison of the narrative techniques in I Like It Here and The Third Man reveals that the authors’ feelings on fabrication and imagination affect the way that they tell their stories. Calloway, John Lewis, and Garnet Bowen all offer slanted versions, but Greene’s narrator’s deviations from the truth stem from erring imagination while Amis’s narrators are merely selfish and lazy. Like Wilson in The Heart of the Matter, who becomes over-excited by the “lust of the hunt,” Calloway begins to see events and people in a convenient but inaccurate way, as he grows excited by his pursuit of Harry Lime. One’s imaginative abilities must be exercised carefully so as not to be led astray in Greene. As entries in both The King’s English and Memoirs show, Amis was never terribly concerned with limiting himself to the facts and, where Greene stresses the proper use of imagination, Amis emphasizes wit and linguistic precision. A minor character in Greene’s novel serves to inform the reader of his preferred method of story-telling. After the death of Koch, Harry Lime’s neighbour and a witness to the “third man,” a small boy’s accurate summary of events is dismissed by his father as fiction: “The child has such an imagination. Maybe he will be a writer when he grows up” (77). This is imagination in Greene’s sense of the word, not the errant sense of ­Calloway and Wilson. The boy’s eye for detail – he notices blood inside the dead man’s apartment and correctly identifies Martins as the foreigner wanted by police – is Greene’s careful eye for the oft-overlooked. Calloway’s narrative is undermined by his own prejudices and imagination. Like Bowen, he is a shoddy detective and an unreliable recorder. The reader’s suspicions ought to be aroused by the disclaimer he offers at the beginning of the novel: “I haven’t invented a line of dialogue, though I can’t vouch for Martins’ memory” (12). He slyly apologizes for his lack of skill as a storyteller, weakly explaining that “there are too many ‘ifs’ in my style of writing, for it is my profession to balance possibilities” (64). It is actually his treatment of factual content that makes his story problematic. He takes liberties with dialogue by imaginatively recreating the behaviour of Russian, British, American, and French soldiers at the time of Anna Schmidt’s detention, and gives a stereotyped depiction of national characteristics. He claims that “There was always a conflict in Rollo Martins – between the absurd Christian name and the sturdy Dutch (four generations back) surname. Rollo looked at every woman that passed, and Martins renounced them forever. I don’t know which one of them wrote the Westerns” (15). He will remind the reader

66

Kingsley Amis

of this supposed schism in relating an episode of which he has only second-hand knowledge: “‘Can I stay a little?’ he asked with a gentleness that was more Martins than Rollo” (71). Thus, the perceived conflict in ­Martins’s personality is a product of Calloway’s imagination, just as problems with the narrative are due not to lack of skill but to the tendency to embellish. Content is always more important for Greene than form, and he satirizes modernism through Rollo Martins’s defence of Zane Grey (84) and self-proclaimed ignorance of James Joyce. “Only a great writer could have taken so arrogant, so original a line” remarks Calloway, and many of the literary snobs in the audience, similarly convinced, make a note of Grey’s name (84). Of course, Martins is far from great, but he helps to prove the point that one must not overlook the obvious because of an obsession with formal complexities and innovations. In authenticating Buckmaster’s identity, Garnet Bowen invokes the same line of reasoning as Calloway, a point overlooked by critics such as Norman Macleod. In speaking of Henry Fielding, Buckmaster declares: “much as I reverence this assured master of the picaresque I am unable to consider him my equal” (186),10 a remark that Bowen thinks so arrogant that it could only have been made by someone convinced of his own greatness. The difference in Greene’s and Amis’s narrative techniques begins, then, with their interpretations of literary realism. Raymond ­Tallis has argued that “Narration, in short, inevitably distorts reality, and so-called realistic fiction, which conceals the extent to which a story is a construct upon, rather than a representation of, reality is, therefore, a confidence trick” (1988, 21). The fact that the narrative act necessitates distortion should liberate the novelist, for “there is no reason why a non-classical realism should not represent realistically a character who is neither unified nor consistent” (68). While Amis appears comfortable with what Tallis labels the “incoherence of the self” (71), Greene does not and he wants the reader to know when the story is not being told straight. G.S. Fraser has measured Amis’s artistry against John Wain’s and judged it superior, concluding that Amis “is much more the novelist born. There is in the born novelist’s presentation of his world and his characters a discreetness, a hesitation about final judgements, a sense of something held in reserve, which Amis has and Wain lacks” (1964, 174). Although ­Fraser considered I Like It Here a failure in comparison with Amis’s first two novels, much of the point of the novel is that final judgments are not permitted and Amis goes to great lengths to prevent the reader from drawing convenient conclusions about either Bowen or his story.



Lessons in Storytelling 67

The artistic antimodel in I Like It Here, Buckmaster, is of great importance because he foreshadows the more lenient stance Amis would take on shamming artists in his post-1970 novels. Bowen likes ­Buckmaster personally and wants to believe he is Strether even if his novel is awful. While John Lewis insisted that bad artists make for bad company and he was eager to put Gareth Probert in the wrong, Buckmaster is full of charm. The idea of a young, disinterested literary critic interviewing a revered author stemmed from Amis’s proposed visit to Greene in October 1948. He had written to ask permission for an interview and Greene replied that he was “very complimented.” “His signature,” reported Amis, “is one of the nastiest I have ever seen: meagre and dried up” (27 October, Bodleian). For unspecified reasons the interview never took place and Amis’s feelings towards his subject became fractious over the next several months. He would begin to look at Greene’s work more critically and become irritated by the “sheeplike” behaviour of the hero in The Heart of the Matter, asking, “Why doesn’t Scobie just dash his foot into his wife’s fat arse instead of committing mortal sin?” (2 November 1948, Bodleian). By February of the following year he was bored by his project, and admitted that “there are some things in that book I already don’t want to be reminded of” (14 ­February 1949, Bodleian). Even after he had given up on both payment for and publication of the monograph, ambivalence tinged with irritation emerges in subsequent discussions of Greene. On 27 January 1950 he told Larkin that he had seen the screen version of The Third Man and “thought it good, better than you did I think.” But he disliked “The Schmidt part” because of “filthy feminine stupidity masquerading as sensitivity” and found “The plot had as many holes in it as usual with old Grgr” (27 January 1950, Bodleian). In the portrayal of Buckmaster-Strether, then, Amis channelled his conflicting feelings towards Greene, a writer he initially admired and enjoyed, and to whom he had devoted a great deal of time. As antimodel, Buckmaster becomes the vehicle for a discussion of how a creative artist ought to spend his or her time. Amis doubtless felt that the time he spent working on the monograph had been time wasted. In retrospect, his feeling that it would have been better to create than to critique is reflected in Bowen’s decision to end the Buckmaster investigation and concentrate on fictionalizing his own life experiences. Through the mystery of ­Wulfstan Strether’s identity, Amis’s insecurities as a writer and growing disdain for critical judgments are apparent. On 7 September 1955 he wrote to Robert Conquest thanking him for his positive remarks about That Uncertain Feeling, adding that he thought the reviewers had been

68

Kingsley Amis

very decent on the whole, but all this “vulgar” stuff makes me wonder where they live and where they go on their free evenings. I liked best the chap in the Evening News who thought Lewis was “an outrageously common little bounder” and yet declared that this didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of the book. Nothing like being broadminded, eh? (Amis 2001, 452) He was bothered by reviewers who withheld positive judgments11 in part because of his strong belief in authorial intention and the existence of correct critical interpretations. In I Like It Here he engages in a debate over the validity of critical judgments and, at the end of Bowen’s investigation, finds them invalid. This is not a new stance, for Amis had sneered at academic criticism in Lucky Jim. But he goes further in his third novel, inviting readers and critics to disagree in order to gauge responses to his work. In the novels that follow Amis would continue to issue rejoinders and provocations to the critical and literary establishments, proving his sensitivity to critical judgments and desire to engage opponents in fruitful discussion. Through the literary mystery of I Like It Here Amis asks how we can know that someone is a creative writer. If temperament is the measure for authenticity then, Bowen jokes, his own irritability at the niggling practicalities of life “went to prove that he was an artist” (180). Amis held the temperamental artist in disdain, and invited readers to join him in laughing at the pretentious, unconventional behaviour of Bertrand Welch and Gareth Probert. The solution that is ultimately offered to the problem of verifying artistic authenticity is to define oneself through the act of writing. For most of the novel, Bowen is a playwright in name only, for he is creatively blocked. On hearing the news of the impending trip to Portugal, his wife says, “It will be lovely, won’t it? ... All that sun. And you getting some real work done” (8). Bowen’s play does not progress and at first the only work he does is related to the investigation of Buckmaster’s identity. The reader is made to consider the creative merit of this investigation when Buckmaster asks Bowen if he rates highly “the calling of the literary critic or reviewer” (157). Without waiting for a reply, the novelist declares: “All criticism, in my view, even that which we call creative, is an activity of a lower order than creative work in the more usual sense, and we see the relevance of that view when we apply it to criticism of the living” (158). The multiple meanings suggested by the title I Like It Here point to both Amis’s defiant provincialism and his determination to write from



Lessons in Storytelling 69

personal experience. His dismissal of critics reveals him to be a participant in what Simon Frith and Jon Savage have called the “old English sport” of “Bashing snobbish intellectuals,” or provincial poetics by a different name: “Intellectual-bashing has always rested on a bluff defensiveness about the commonness of common life, on a celebration of small horizons and smaller ambitions which ill conceals its own uneasy violence” (1993, 109). Amis’s own life could hardly be considered common or working class, though he experienced moderate poverty in the years leading up to Lucky Jim’s publication.12 When one considers the frequency with which he visited London to meet with other writers and intellectuals, provincialism becomes a philosophically indefensible position. The reservations expressed about abroad do seem to be an expression of “cultivated Philistinism,” as Rubin Rabinovitz has argued, for “He is too obviously cultured to hate culture that much; one suspects his sincerity” (52). But Amis enjoyed irritating others with his blatantly limited horizons, shrinking ambitions, and defensive anti-­intellectualism. Doubtless his desire to satirize the privileged classes led him to give his hero “lower-middle-class envy” of their ability to travel (23). When Bowen’s wife warns him that he “can’t live on [his] prejudices [about abroad] for ever,” he replies, “Oh yes I can. Of course, I know envy’s tied up a lot with the way we feel about it” (30). He has absolutely no interest in architecture (41) – an important theme that will be returned to in the chapter on poetry – ridicules foreigners because of the way they speak English (46–7), and is bored by sightseeing (123). On the other hand, he enjoys drinking, finds a near-death experience on the back of a motorcycle exhilarating (140–1), and listens with delight to Harry ­Bannion’s performance of “Charge of the Light Brigade” (135). All of the above thoughts, feelings, and experiences are Amis’s own, expressed in letters to Larkin and Conquest between July and September 1955 (Amis 2001, 431–55), and they have their roots in his refusal to take high culture seriously. The title I Like It Here is both a restatement of the provincial aesthetic and an indication that Amis had decided to examine himself through his art. It signifies an acceptance of the self and the space it inhabits at the present moment, a distinction that has been critically overlooked. Lucky Jim began as a novel about Philip Larkin; That Uncertain Feeling was supposed to feature a very different, un-Amisian hero who would not drink and had no interest in literature or academia; and I Like It Here almost marked the return of Jim Dixon to fiction. Instead, Amis wrote about himself, exaggerating his biases and irritations. The

70

Kingsley Amis

­ ajority of the protagonists in subsequent Amis novels are also recogm nizable (albeit negative) distortions of the author with some connection to the arts or literature. Through the title, the Amisian way of writing and living is affirmed. This important artistic decision again invites comparison with Graham Greene’s creative method. In his search for artistic material, Bowen feels “A powerful, useless thrill” at the news of the murder of a Finnish fishing boat captain by his own crew. The boat has been impounded and the captain’s father is stuck in Lisbon aboard the deserted vessel. “Here was a marvellous story for someone,” thinks Bowen, “but not, unfortunately, for him. Only a rather worse or much older writer than himself could tackle it satisfactorily. W. Somerset Maugham (on grounds of age, not lack of merit) was the kind of chap” (145). The story is rejected because it has no personal s­ignificance for Bowen and this is one of the most important creative messages contained in I Like It Here: that Amis had decided to tell his own stories, and not those of others. The message is reinforced only pages later, as the narrator relates the circumstances around Bowen’s move from the home of the Anglo-Portuguese Oates to the Northern Irishman Bannion’s chalet: “It had all been a noteworthy foray into the horrendo-comic, but then, as before, you could probably run into something just as noteworthy, and just as remote from your ordinary life, at five minutes’ march from Bowen’s parents’ house in Llansamlet, nr. Swansea, Glam. It would be harder to write about, that was all” (148). Writers incapable of revealing the human condition in their natural surroundings travelled abroad, kept a journal, and turned it into a book13 or, like Anthony Powell, they fictionalized their diaries every few years. Amis is further distinguished from Graham Greene in his emphasis upon mood as the dominant fictional element. Bowen initially misdiagnoses his creative difficulties, and thinks that to write another play he needs “a bloody theme. But they didn’t grow on trees, did they?” (11). Once in Portugal he considers dramatizing his own story and the F ­ innish fishing boat saga, but rejects both in favour of a mood. He destroys the draft of his play Teach Him a Lesson, determining instead to write “about a man who was forced by circumstances to do the very thing he most disliked the thought of doing and found out afterwards that he was exactly the same man as he was before. Nobody, nobody at all, was going to hear anything about it until it was finished” (207). The mood of coercion and the struggle to do what one wants rather than what others want are both common in Amis’s fiction. Mood is frequently conveyed at the expense of plot, and sometimes the presentation of a distasteful



Lessons in Storytelling 71

mood would anger readers. The novel Jake’s Thing effectively and overwhelmingly conveys a sense of being fed up with women. When Amis was told that a female reader had tried to burn the book, he said that he was not surprised because “people are very disposed to believe, if a generalisation emerges from a book ... that that is the author’s last word on the subject, his considered, unchangeable attitude in his life.” This was not the case, Amis maintained, for what “most writers are doing, if they have any luck, is to hit off, we hope successfully, a thought or mood that most people have some of the time – that’s all” (Amis 1979, 262). The dramatic material Bowen considers after arriving in Portugal would perhaps best be classified as a set of themes rather than moods; it does not, however, consist of stories. The first two themes elaborated below had already been used by Amis in Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling: “The only trouble was that he had so little to write about: the nefariousness of persons who made a living out of culture ... the difficulties of married life ... the momentous scope and variety of ways of being horrible worked out over the years by his mother-in-law” (62). The third theme becomes part of the sub-plot of I Like It Here, as Bowen obsesses about his mother-in-law throughout. Nastiness, the mood of Bowen’s play, which he ultimately abandons, dominates Amis’s fifth novel, One Fat Englishman. We are told that the play, Teach Him a Lesson, concerns “a nasty man ... and the nasty practical joke played on him by his nasty friends with nasty consequences” (107). To show that the third element in Amis’s narrative style – linguistic control – is still more significant than the story, he offers two parodies of modernism in I Like It Here. The excerpt from Strether’s latest novel, One Word More, reveals the negative effects of verbal repetition, something that Amis disliked intensely and was careful to avoid, while the plot summary of an earlier work, This Rough Magic, gives precedence to the way the story is told over the story itself. In his own language guide, Amis would call unintentional repetition “the most pernicious of errors,” claiming that there is “no clearer sign of a writer who is incompetent, lazy, hurried, preoccupied, demoralised” (1996, ­247–8). This was something Amis scrupulously avoided and only becomes a problem in his final novel, as his ability to self-edit had weakened. The first sentence in Strether’s One Word More exceeds one hundred words and contains most of the examples of “harmful repetition” in The King’s English. These include rhyme, the employment of similar vowel sounds to create virtual rhymes, excessive alliteration, the overuse of verse-like rhythms and words ending in the same form (such as “y” or “ly”), and

72

Kingsley Amis

the r­ecurrence of favourite words (249). One of Amis’s greatest irritations was the abuse of the hyphen. In his usage guide he offers two pages of negative examples before declaring: “omit the hyphen whenever possible” (104). The writer of One Word More inverts these rules and principles. Three hyphenated adjectives appear in the first sentence: “grey-green,” “comma-shaped,” and “open-flung.” Midway through the sentence, the opening phrase, “It was with a sense,” recurs as “it was with such a sense” (110). The convoluted writing style obscures the mundane nature of the exchange between Frescobaldi and Yelisaveta. The conversation, begun by Frescobaldi, is presented below without narrative interruption: “Do you come here often?” “What a strange question.” “You’re waiting–” “For nobody that you know.” “How can you be so sure?” (111–12) Yelisaveta does not reply, and Frescobaldi offers two final remarks: “You’ll know me again” and “What is it that, my dear, would seem to be, now, the matter?” (112). Whether Amis intended to echo the plot of I Like It Here in One Word More is unclear, but similarities between the two show how linguistic precision, or the lack thereof, can affect a work. A summary of I Like It Here might go something like this: Bowen ventures to a strange country where he waits for a man to reveal his identity; though Bowen thinks he recognizes him as a horrid modernist, he cannot be sure; and the “matter,” or problem, is that the verification of Strether’s identity and manuscript are beyond Bowen’s abilities. Behind the ornate style and circuitous locutions in One Word More lies an uninspiring romance and Bowen’s reaction is to put down the book and say to the narrator, “You go out of your way to tell us how” rather than showing what the characters have understood and seen (112). He objects to the multitude of phrases lacking “clarity, common sense, emotional decency and general morality” (112) and compares the use of imagery to jelly: “it was soft, it set easily, and it shook whenever anyone went near it” (113). The romance of Frescobaldi and Yelisaveta also invites a comparison with Henry Fielding, who is praised in I Like It Here as “the only non-contemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and whole-hearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologised for or excused on the grounds of changing taste” (185). Amis



Lessons in Storytelling 73

valued Fielding’s wit, irony, his concern “not to bore the reader, to keep the narrative going along,” and, appropriately in light of the excerpt from One Word More, his treatment of romance: “he was great enough to transcend the conventional love story current at his time – well, not transcend exactly, but to write very well and understandably and very deeply within that set of conventions, and I can’t think of any other writer who could do that” (Amis 1975, “Interview,” 11). Fielding’s work is remarkable precisely because he worked within the romantic tradition, which is much harder, Amis thinks, than breaching conventions and writing in an experimental manner. Earlier in I Like It Here, Bowen provides a plot summary of another Strether novel, This Rough Magic, and the verbal repetition reminds us of Amis’s second novel: Those involved were an old painter who was doing a lot of wondering about whether he ought to stop painting now that he considered he was getting much worse at painting, his wife who was frequently described as passionate without it being revealed what she was passionate about or at, and a young man with doe-like eyes who was hanging round the other pair. There was much uncertainty as to whether the young man was interested in the wife or the husband and, if the latter, as to exactly what his focus of interest was. It was uncertain whether this uncertainty existed in the mind of the painter (through whose eyes the action, what there was of it, was viewed) or in that of the young man, or perhaps – the evidence was piling up that way – in that of the author. The first two chapters had been enlivened by the presence of a successful actor, whose person, dress, demeanour, habits, house, father and grandfather had all been conscientiously described, and who now, after talking a good deal about the theatre (that at any rate, Bowen reflected, was well observed), had disappeared from the story, never to return, as far as could be judged from a quick look through the pages that remained. (43–4) The repetition of “uncertainty” invites a comparison between the plot of This Rough Magic and That Uncertain Feeling and, though the two works are not parallels, the numerous points in common suggest that Amis wants the reader to realize that a good story told badly becomes unrecognizable. John Lewis, like the old painter, wonders whether or not to continue in his present occupation; and though his wife is said to have once been attractive, she appears mostly argumentative and tired.14 The

74

Kingsley Amis

person who hangs around the couple is Elizabeth Gruffydd-­Williams, who initially expresses the desire to see Jean Lewis, her former classmate, but proves more interested in the husband. The focus of her interest in Lewis is uncertain. At first she wants his help with library research, then she seeks him out for sexual diversion, though it is unclear (at least to Lewis) why she wants to get him the promotion. The early chapters in Amis’s novel are also enlivened by the presence of a hateful artist – a playwright rather than a painter – whose demeanour and habits are conscientiously depicted, though Gareth Probert’s role diminishes after his play is staged. If one were to compile a recipe for a novel through key plot components, one would have to conclude that Wulfstan Strether and Kingsley Amis followed the same recipe. The difference between That Uncertain Feeling and This Rough Magic, however, is evident in the reader’s reaction, for after summarizing Strether’s novel, “Bowen yawned” (44). Even if I Like It Here was not Amis’s best novel, it clearly shows the importance of antimodels and formative literary influences in his early fiction. The reader learns a great deal about Amis’s fictional methods and ideals, if not about Portugal, through its discussion of modernism and authenticity. Although Bowen admits that bad artists are not always or inevitably bad people, this concession would not bring about change in the Amisian world for another ten years. Buckmaster, like Gareth Probert, the Welches, and L.S. Caton, is little more than a caricature. Amis is still not interested in creating a relationship – however temporary – between Bowen and Buckmaster. Officially, Bowen has been sent to observe and pass judgment and this situation reflects Amis’s position on how to deal with antimodels. Once Amis decides to entangle his characters and narrators in the lives of the antimodels, in the novels after The Green Man, the creation of reciprocal responsibilities leads to the broadening of his artistic vision.

5 Experiments in Content: William Empson, Ambiguity, and Take a Girl Like You

The dominant theme or mood of Amis’s fourth novel is not seduction, as many critics have thought, but coercion, as outlined in I Like It Here. This time it is a woman who is forced to do the thing that she least wants, only to find that she is unchanged: even being raped by Patrick Standish cannot change Jenny Bunn’s essential goodness and innocence. She is attractive, moral, and virginal and has moved from an industrial city in the north of England to a country town near London to work at an infants’ school. Standish teaches Latin at the local public school and the fatal flaw in his character is well-described by his flatmate, the dry and boring Graham McClintock: “For a man who hates women as much as you seem to do, you spend a good deal of time in their company. I must say I can’t help wondering just why” (1960, 80). Jenny is put on trial throughout the novel, with every significant male character trying to get her in bed; and, as Neil McEwan has suggested, her failure to find a protector may be an indication that in 1960s England “even British decency could no longer be relied on” (1981, 83). When one considers the novel as part of Amis’s artistic development, it becomes a treatise on the proper use of intuition as a logical extension of the argument against Graham Greene’s mistrust of imagination. Neither faith nor reason can help Jenny, but intuition can, and her refusal to trust in it contributes to her troubles. Amis’s fourth novel is devoid of antimodels, which is in itself indicative of his determination to find alternative methods of conveying artistic attitudes. In Take a Girl Like You he employs a distasteful protagonist and an unsatisfying ending as a challenge to William Empson, another of the formative influences that Amis felt he had outgrown. Empson revelled in stylistic and linguistic ­ambiguity. Reading poetry becomes akin to cracking a code; and while his tenets empowered critics, they

76

Kingsley Amis

also made literary interpretation hopelessly subjective, if not altogether arbitrary. Amis responds to Empson’s brand of criticism by introducing ambiguous characters and situations in a form that remains clear and deceptively simple. From the Empsonian perspective, moral ambiguities are problematic because they pre-empt the passage of moral judgment on the work itself. Amis’s motivation for writing fiction was changing. He was no longer writing exclusively for Larkin’s approval, but to provoke a reaction from his outer audience. Some commentators felt that the success of Lucky Jim had been an anomaly, and that he was incapable of sustaining the high level of artistry, popular appeal, and social relevance achieved by his first novel.1 In fact, Amis claimed in an interview with Dale Salwak that his goal in writing Take a Girl Like You had not been to show that he was a “profound or earnest” writer, but a “serious” one (in Bell 1998, 273). Most of the characters in the novel are recognizable variations on earlier types, and they represent authorial obsessions and blind spots that recur throughout his fiction. While some critics have offered Take a Girl Like You as proof that the Amisian world had turned Hobbesian (Bergonzi 1970, 165) or overtly aggressive (Leader 2006, 8), the alterations he made to recurring character types suggest a deep concern for the motives behind human behaviour. Most of the characters are distasteful, not necessarily because his vision had darkened, but because of the pleasure he derived from portraying negative characters and venting spleen. Apparently innocent laddish behaviour becomes cunning malice in Take a Girl Like You because Amis takes the time to develop his characters and consider why they act the way that they do. With the notable exception of Jenny Bunn, the motives of most of the cast members are suspicious, self-serving, or both. Jenny is not merely a recreation of the beautiful virginal type that first appeared in Lucky Jim but, as Clive James has said, “the fully articulated version of Christine” (2007, “Public Account,” 3), with her own voice and dreams. Martha ­Thompson’s character is also well-developed, though overwhelmingly negative, as she inherits Margaret Peel’s neuroticism and Mrs Welch’s lack of humour. Dixon’s primary reason for hating Mrs Welch – aside from her prudishness – was not because she was malicious but because she very inconveniently saw through him and held him responsible for his actions. Similarly, Margaret Peel’s hysterics were counterbalanced by an intelligent, perceptive nature. In contrast, Martha Thompson is consistently unjust (particularly in her dealings with Jenny) and shrewd, rather than smart. When Standish says, “you know how it is,” in r­ eference to work



Experiments in Content 77

preventing him from calling on the Thompsons socially, she replies, “Yes, I know how it is all right” (107), insinuating that she understands that Standish considers her husband a bore to be avoided. Julian Ormerod represents another complex variation on a previous type: the wealthy benefactor. Amis admitted to liking Ormerod because he is “entirely his own man, not preyed upon by anxieties” (Amis 1998, 270). In a journal Amis kept while visiting Copenhagen in 1960, he made notes on what would become his next novel, One Fat Englishman, with a single retrospective commentary on the work he had just finished, Take a Girl Like You: “Ormerod didn’t break the rules. He just understood them better than anyone else” (HEHL, 27). Even without this justification for his roguish behaviour, anyone acquainted with Amis’s previous novels would recognize that the author is naturally disposed to like Ormerod because of his generosity and the size of the drinks he pours. His role is, however, complicated because he advertises himself as Jenny’s protector, then fails in the role, and proves to be more con artist than manof-the-world. His most admirable trait is perhaps his self-assuredness, which contrasts with Standish’s constant worrying about his hair falling out (239) and occasional panic attacks (273). Even if Ormerod does at times grow “tiresome,” like Bannion, the party favourite in I Like It Here (Coleman 1960, 445), he gets by on bluff, making him not unlike Jim Dixon. Ormerod, however, would have us believe that he is another Gore-Urquhart, as he tells Jenny at their first meeting: “Anybody under my protection gets nothing but the best, as they come to realise in the fullness of time” (43). He not only fails as her protector, providing ­Standish with the opportunity to rape her at his party, but goes no further than to rebuke Standish for a lack of “fairness” (307).2 The reader will recognize stock Amisian comedic scenes throughout the novel, though again the nasty motives of characters invite more serious consideration. The twisting of English names by foreign students at Garnet Bowen’s talk on Graham Greene in I Like It Here was amusing, if parochial, but Jenny’s father’s anti-Semitic humour is simply distasteful. He habitually turns her boyfriends into German Jews. Insisting that he “personally ha[s] nothing against the Jews” and overriding her protests, he says, “You can tell by his name, lass. Schtundisch. German Jew. And you told me his mother’s in the clothing business. The Jews run that, it’s well known. Not that I’m prejudiced against ’em, mind. But it stands to reason. Schtundisch” (177). It is appropriate, then, for him to receive personal approval from Patrick Standish, whom Amis described as his “most unpleasant” character (Amis 1998, 270), s­imply because

78

Kingsley Amis

they are united in their hatred of those who avoid paying their round. This standard of miserliness is easily met by Dick Thompson who, in addition to trying to drink as much as possible for free (179), burns his matches “at one end of the strip of sandpaper” (47). The comic possibilities inherent in a child’s view of the world are depicted once again through the children in Jenny’s class at the infants’ school. “What sort of box can’t you get into?” asks one of the children in a logic-defying exchange (29) that recalls Garnet Bowen’s discussion with his sons about tigers and whales. The children are no longer innocent irritants though. Jenny’s student Michael possesses cruel calculation, and she thinks he “would be a terrible one for the women when he grew up” because he is “incapable of noticing opposition. There seemed to be nothing to be done about it” (30). In his pre-novel notes, Amis wrote, “J sees P=Michl Primrose” (HRC) which, when considered together with her thoughts on Michael, suggests that she knows Standish will eventually have his way and take her virginity. The only harmless recurring character never makes a physical appearance, but announces in a letter to Standish’s headmaster “that he had recently returned from an academic appointment in the Argentine, had been preparing a talk on the educational institutions of that region, and would be available for its delivery ‘in due course.’ He would be writing again ‘before very long’ and signed himself ‘L.S. Caton’” (140). When asked for his opinion by the headmaster, ­Standish offers a categorical “no.” Ironically, though Caton may be a bore and a cheat, he is one of the few characters who inspires easy laughter and does not threaten Jenny Bunn. Some critics have viewed Take a Girl Like You as a parody of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, thus providing a convenient explanation for the novel’s disturbing courtship and unsatisfactory conclusion. There is neither primary nor secondary evidence to support this view,3 and the novel only coheres when it is removed from the romance genre and seen as two stories in one, in which the dual protagonists thwart each other’s desire for completion. Were it not for its problematic ending, one might call Take a Girl Like You a tale of trickery. In his study of folktales, Vladimir Propp explained that this type of story focuses on a villain’s “attempts to deceive his victim in order to take possession of him or of his belongings.” Deception may be carried out through verbal persuasion, magical or chemical means, and coercion (1928, 29–30). Standish uses all three methods to try to get Jenny to sleep with him, as he attacks her ideas with cunning and logic, plies her with alcohol, and physically overpowers her. However, in a traditional tale of trickery, Standish would not



Experiments in Content 79

succeed, and the fact that he does makes Amis appear a whimsical, if not wantonly cruel, storyteller. Critics who consider Jenny Bunn’s seduction the novel’s principal plotline have questioned Amis’s purpose.4 A better explanation for the novel’s unhappy ending is provided by another of Propp’s folktale functions, called a “lack.” This theme involves a person who requires a particular item to become complete. The lack may be human, such as a marriage partner, or a magical or material object (35), and it is complicated by characters’ variable motivations, which “often add to a tale a completely distinctive, vivid coloring” because they are “the most inconstant and unstable elements of the tale” (75). Under the heading “motivations,” Propp elaborates further on this theme in a way that applies to the situations of both Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish: An initial shortage or lack represents a situation. One can imagine that, prior to the beginning of the action, the situation has lasted for years. But the moment comes when the dispatcher or searcher suddenly realizes that something is lacking, and this moment is dependent upon a motivation causing dispatch ... or an immediate search. (76) Jenny’s motivation in moving to the south of England is boredom with the constraints of northern provincial life. She is also eager to forget a failed romance and she makes Dick Thompson’s boarding house her “base for a new life” (13). Standish seems to provide the diversion she is seeking, but he is not particularly interested in love. He recognizes that something is lacking in his sexual relationships with his headmaster’s sixteen year-old daughter, Sheila, and the verbose poseur Anna Le Page. Once he and Jenny meet, it becomes apparent that neither is willing to change his or her nature to satisfy the other’s lack. She has no desire to share in his bohemian lifestyle of jazz, alcohol, and free sex, and this is all that he has to offer. She would be content with provincial life as a homemaker with children, though this has little attraction for him. Therefore, a happy ending is impossible unless one partner changes his or her character. Jenny would be fulfilled if Standish became an oldfashioned romantic or at least stopped having affairs; on the other hand, his happiness is contingent on her playing the part of the virgin-whore. Before Amis wrote Difficulties with Girls (1988), the sequel to Take a Girl Like You, he predicted that Standish would marry Jenny, then “bugger off” (Amis 1974, 24). Even though he stays with Jenny, little changes in their relationship in the second novel, with each pretending that he

80

Kingsley Amis

or she is content with an untenable situation. The apparent ambivalence of Take a Girl Like You dissolves not when the story is viewed differently, but when it is seen as a completely different story of two competing lacks. Since neither Jenny Bunn nor Patrick Standish is capable of supplying the other’s needs, their romance degenerates into a contest of wills, played out through competing ideas. It has been suggested that Amis’s bias against literary stylists stemmed from his conviction “that writers who must resort to style do so on account of a weakness, usually a poverty of ideas” (Rabinovitch 1967, 39). As if to prove the point, Amis filled Take a Girl Like You with ideas, one of which is the persistent view of Jenny as a malleable object rather than an independent person. After Dick Thompson begins to make passes, she admits: “the fact had to be faced that he was getting ideas about her,” though “Ideas about her ... were liable to be got by any man she might nowadays meet” (101). Each of the three central characters becomes a manifestation of an artistic idea that is developed to such a degree that antimodels become superfluous. Two situations in the novel hint at opportunities for the introduction of antimodels, though. Without much enthusiasm, Standish assists in a dramatic production at his school (68), an event that Amis chose not to treat in detail, doubtless because of the use of stage plays as the artistic backdrop for his previous two novels. Anna Le Page, meanwhile, works at an art shop and her description of an artistic friend sounds familiar: “He dresses up a little as an artist. Like all of you, he’s on the defensive about questions of art; he can’t quite be natural, he can’t regard art as a normal thing, as a mode of life like any other, no more curious than being a roadmender or a worker in the drains. It’s strange that he paints so well” (89). Instead of introducing a successor to Bertrand Welch or another reluctant participant in a dramatic production, Amis conveys artistic ideas and attitudes through his central characters. At times this battle of ideas seems rather unnatural not only to the reader but to the characters themselves, as Jenny notes that “she and Anna, but especially Anna, seemed as if they were taking part in a TV play” (95). Standish admits to having been irritated by Anna because of “all that talk, you see. I don’t mind the girls having ideas of their own, but I do like being allowed to keep mine” (77).5 This is in part a repetition of Amis’s bias against dramatic, emotional women, which first emerged in the portrayal of Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim, but it is also an attack on pseudooriginality. Though Jenny at first thinks that Anna “certainly looked as if she had a whole set of original ideas about, well, life in general” (90),



Experiments in Content 81

her originality is a pose, and the bohemian Frenchwoman proves to be from Guernsey. After Anna is unmasked, she remarks: “Playing a part’s the only thing left these days, it shows you won’t deal with society in the way it wants you to. But I’ve got sick of this one. It was too much effort; I had to be on my guard all the time ... I’ll try something less demanding for my next one” (302). Jenny’s idea is to live her own story, not one scripted by others. During an evening with Graham McClintock, who is “the sort who told you things,” she is subjected to a long socialist diatribe against privilege. His analysis of “the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive” (170) is cogent, but it is not her story and she resents its imposition on her. The story that she has imagined for herself involves life in a house with servants and suits of armour, which McClintock spoils slightly by referring to the economic plight of the serving class (167–8).6 The exchange is reminiscent of Garnet Bowen’s rejection of the marooned fishing boat story as creative material because it is not his story. McClintock’s ideas have no personal relevance for Jenny, and this is far more important for Amis than struggling to remain informed of political, social, or artistic trends. Her ideas are (like Amis’s approach to the novel) logical and structurally sound, but out of fashion. She refuses to engage in premarital sex because she has “different ideas,” one of which is to “find one chap and stick to him right from the start. See, I’m just not cut out for – going to bed with people” (92). While Patrick Standish will insist that he differs from Jenny in that his ideas are all his own (62), he is in fact a self-serving r­ omantic. In the essay “The Poet and the Dreamer,” Amis criticized John Keats and the romantics for trying too hard to live the stereotypical poetic life: Keats can be read without a glossary and he believed simply in Beauty. This immediacy of appeal is reinforced by the straightforwardly romantic subject matter of the verse and by the engaging personality, tragic life and high aspirations of the poet; nobody, it seems unmistakable, was ever more of a poet than Keats. (1970, 21) Amis finds Keats tolerable when he writes about himself, “not a Delphic simulacrum of himself, and has something to say about human existence, not a wish-fulfilling caricature of it” (24).7 It is acceptable in Amis’s world to dream, but not in a way that distorts reality. Standish’s vision of Jenny is pernicious because it is romanticized wish-fulfillment: “You’re absolutely wonderful. Every bit of you goes so well with all the other

82

Kingsley Amis

bits, and the bits are all so good in themselves” (39). And further: “Whoever had put together the nape of her neck, the angle of her jaw, her ears, etc. had taken more trouble over the job and used better materials than usual” (158). In comparing Jenny to Anna, he calls his new love “The best-looking character I’ve ever been out with” (40), which makes the reader aware that the romance is more imaginative than real. “These ideas of yours,” he will tell her when they argue over sex, were “Jolly sound in 1880 and everything” (159). Paradoxically, this supports her case because sound ideas do not go in and out of fashion. Standish’s idea of love is defective because it has been constructed not from experience or honest emotion but from poetic fancy. His relationship with Jenny becomes a book within the book, as the literary metaphors indicate. Realizing that he has created an unreal image of her, she asks, “Do you write all this stuff out beforehand and learn it off, or does it just come naturally and you make it up as you go along?” (40). In answer to his laughable claim to have been “waiting for years” for her, she offers a literary analogy: “Yes, I can tell you haven’t been out much. As soon as I saw you I said to myself, there’s a lad who spends every evening curled up with a good book” (41). Initially she says that she has read about romantic lovers like Standish in books (58), but eventually she succumbs to the spell of romanticism, as she comes to believe “that the things you read about being in love were not exaggerated or silly as she had once suspected, but quite literally true” (184). To make the reader aware that it is not just the influence of Jenny that awakens the Keatsian romantic in Standish, the literary references are extended to his other relations with women. Thus he will awaken after a night with the hedonistic Joan8 feeling “like an old book: spine defective, covers dull, slight foxing, fly missing, rather shaken copy” (226). Just as Garnet Bowen was convinced that he knew all about abroad before he had left home, Standish thinks he understands love because he has read about it,9 and he will try to get Jenny to accept his romantic vision by changing her reading material. These long volumes on love were “very hard to find your place in,” she finds, but they explained that “you had no chance at all with any of it unless you were sensitive and warm and proud and naturally aristocratic and heavy and dark (especially that), and not much a chance even then” (185). Discarding the books, Jenny continues to read love and people intuitively, and her intuition is generally correct. As this extended metaphor suggests, Amis was decidedly anti-romantic and he provides the antidote to Keats in his poem cycle The Evans Country, which is analysed in chapter seven.



Experiments in Content 83

The ending of Take a Girl Like You has drawn a great deal of critical attention because it is unhappily happy, but it provides a lesson in the proper use of intuition. Throughout the novel, Jenny’s stubborn refusal to follow her natural instincts leads to trouble. In spite of the clarity with which Amis expounds this point, critics have found fault with a book that seems to promise comic unity then fails to deliver. As David Lodge explained, “when comedy raises issues which it cannot resolve, or cannot resolve without strain, it leaves a sour aftertaste, a lingering echo of discords” (in Bell 1998, 53). Standish behaves badly and, though he is mildly penitent, his misdeeds – raping Jenny and shooting Dick ­Thompson in the buttocks – go unpunished, and he still gets the girl. On the other hand, Jenny’s only reward for virtue and altruism is Standish and an invitation to become Ormerod’s mistress. Without a protector, she must defend her own honour. The explanation for her failure to do so is found not in the darkening of Amis’s comic world, but in her refusal to trust intuition. On several occasions she intuits danger then convinces herself that these warning signals are the product of her erring imagination. Long before Anna Le Page is revealed as a poseur, “It crossed Jenny’s mind that it was funny how Anna never used any French words mixed in with her conversation in the way that French people were meant to.” Intuition is defeated by clumsy logic, as she decides that the absence of French words “must just go to show how long Anna had been living over here” (115). The pattern is repeated throughout the novel. While Clive James has seen Jenny’s problem as goodness, it is actually her ability to rationalize. When one senses a threat, one ought to flee, as John Lewis does at the end of That Uncertain Feeling. Jenny does not, and it is by sheer luck that she escapes being raped by a stranger at Ormerod’s party: “She did not feel worried,” reports the narrator, “because she was sure that any moment he would realise she was not particularly enjoying herself and stop” (305). The man is drunk and only stops when Graham McClintock intervenes. The situation recurs at the party, when Standish begins to make love to her, though this time there is no one to save her: What he did was off by itself and nothing to do with her. All the same, she wanted him to stop, but her movements were all the wrong ones for that and he was kissing her too much for her to try to tell him. She thought he would stop anyway as soon as he realised how much off on his own he was. But he did not, and did not stop, so she put her arms round him and tried to be with him, only there was no way of doing it and nothing to feel. (306)

84

Kingsley Amis

Viewed in this way, as indictments of reason and reminders to trust instinct, the unsatisfying conclusions to both That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You become both plausible and powerful. Another of the reasons that Amis did not employ an antimodel in this novel was his preoccupation with a major narrative innovation: the use of a female narrator. Take a Girl Like You is told from the perspectives of both Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish, though not in strict alternation. Most critics have agreed that the narrative technique is “remarkably even-handed” because of its assiduous presentation of Jenny’s point of view10 (Bell 1998, 6), but Amis continues to make awkward attempts to guide the reader that suggest that silencing the sardonic Amisian voice was a difficult task. The alliance between the narrator and Jenny Bunn features occasional inconsistencies, as the author seems to forget the limitations on Jenny Bunn’s perspective and indulge what Paul Fussell has called “the essayistic impulse” (1994, 48). While the introduction of a new narrator is a clear attempt to escape the limitations of the male sardonic sensibility, the narrative voice remains distinctly Amisian. Jenny’s attack on Standish for putting words into her mouth could also refer to the narrator’s inexpert representation of her mental state: “You’re a great one for knowing what people mean better than they do themselves, aren’t you? Why can’t you let them mean what they say? And do you always mean what you say?” (154). Amis’s itch to relay Standish’s feelings in Jenny’s chapters often gives the reader an uncomfortable sense of being encouraged to form a particular opinion.11 Judgments that in previous novels were relayed by the sardonic narrator, who naturally sympathizes with someone of a similar sensibility, must be conveyed through Jenny (18). Therefore, when Standish accepts Dick Thompson’s invitation to the pub only to hear Jenny decline, we are told that “Jenny saw Patrick Standish shut his eyes and pass his hand over his brow as if a bad headache had suddenly got him” (18). For Amis, what Jenny sees is less important than that the reader appreciate Standish’s loathing of Dick Thompson, whose company is only tolerable if it is to Standish’s sexual advantage.12 In his first three novels, Amis rarely missed the opportunity to satirize bores and it became one of his trademarks, but since Jenny is quite tolerant of bores he was forced to compromise objectivity in order to communicate satiric impressions through her eyes rather than her mind. Regardless of whether one views Take a Girl Like You as a dark comedy, a tale of lacks, or something else entirely, it is remarkable for its ambiguity, which Amis uses to challenge readers to accept a book that



Experiments in Content 85

unsettles rather than satisfies. At this stage in Amis’s career as a novelist he was targeting the comfortable sort of reader who prefers to stand outside the text and pass moral judgement on characters and events without being implicated. By the 1970s, with his artistic vision evolving, Amis would begin to place other characters in close personal relationships with the antimodels to show that no one is permitted to be a bystander in life or art; he would also implicate himself, and begin to measure himself as a person and writer. When Amis wrote Take a Girl Like You with its deliberate moral ambiguities he was breaking away from another formative influence, William Empson, who had exerted a strong hold over Amis at Oxford but, like Dylan Thomas, was re-evaluated and found to be a pernicious influence.13 In a 1987 review of Argufying, a collection of Empson’s non-fiction, Amis dimly recalls “The feeling of ­illumination [Seven Types of Ambiguity] gave,” but confesses that this feeling “is hard to recapture now, or even to find charitable reasons for” (52). He says he was drawn to Empson because he was not a stuffy old don like C.S. Lewis but “exciting,” “hardly more than an undergraduate, a Cambridge man, an expert on psychology and new stuff like that, a pioneer.” His book was not too scholarly, “with no rotten old romances and epics to wade through,” which meant that the Amisian reading prerequisite of immediate comprehensibility was met. Another reason for Empson’s criticism to appeal to the Oxonian Amis is its hierarchical ranking of poetry. Amis, of course, would attempt to do the same thing in his BLitt thesis. ­Empson stirred his imagination to such an extent that he stole a copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity from the Oxford library; forty years later he wondered if it had been worth it, criticizing Empson for not “giv[ing] the reader much to bite on” and for “rais[ing] all manner of problems and put[ting] them down again unsolved.” In hindsight, Amis thought that Empson’s criticism lacked “purpose and direction” and was “unbelievably arid and unenlightening” (52). He was willing to allow that ­Empson’s analysis of Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner identifies “rightly neglected factors,” but this results, paradoxically, in “more difficulties in the way of fathoming that enigmatic poem.” In conclusion, Amis advises critics to limit themselves to clarifying textual meaning “by glossing the hard words and explaining the references,” much as C.S. Lewis did for his students; if one wishes to understand a particular literary work more deeply, one is advised to read it again instead of seeking help in critical tomes (53). In part, then, Amis’s review reaffirms the argument of I Like It Here – better a second-rank creative artist than a first-rank critic – while showing the desire to unveil writers who are undeservedly praised.

86

Kingsley Amis

Two major points of aesthetic contrast between Amis and E ­ mpson – their conceptions of beauty and ambiguity – are apparent in both the text of Take a Girl Like You and comments by Empson on Amis’s writing and the function of poetry. For Empson ambiguity refers to “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language” (1930, 1), something Amis would not find objectionable. However, he insists that ambiguity can only be discussed in relation to poetry that one likes: you must rely on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good; if it fails you cannot know its object; and it would be trivial to explain why it had failed at something it was not trying to achieve. Of course, it may succeed in doing something that you understand and hate, and you may then explain your hatred; but all you can explain about the poem is its success. (7–8) This insistence upon the discovery of “beautiful” ambiguities (235) makes it obvious that Empson would have trouble appreciating Amis’s problematic characters and morally ambivalent content. In a 1963 essay on Dylan Thomas, Empson abruptly dismisses Amis, echoing David Holbrook’s assessment of the poem “A Dream of Fair Women” as being “in rather bad taste even if the last two verses draw some moral which I miss (but then it may be lack of virility which makes me uneasy in brothels)” (1963, 399). To say that a poem is in bad taste is an acceptable personal, not critical assessment. The aforementioned poem does precisely what Zachary Leader has claimed Patrick Standish does in the first half of Take a Girl Like You: it “draw[s] readers in, setting them up” (2006, The Life, 444). Empson refuses to be drawn even though the poem is complex and worthy of analysis. It asks how one distinguishes between dream and reality in desire. As the sixth stanza explains, all the previous talk in the poem of being wanted by women and welcomed by their fathers and brothers is not just a dream “because, though good / And beautiful, it is also true, and hence / Is rarely understood” (Amis 1979, Collected Poems, ll. 37–9). The type of ambiguity that Empson preferred was not the Amisian variety, based on content, but that found in the poetry of Thomas. “The critics agree with hardly a dissenting voice,” wrote Empson in 1947, “that Dylan Thomas is a splendid poet, but it is unusual for anyone to undertake to say what he means, as I am doing here” (1987, 383). ­Empson then praises the “extra meanings” in Thomas:



Experiments in Content 87

They are being put in all the time, as part of the style, and a reader gets used to picking them up casually. The fundamental ideas which Dylan Thomas is expressing in his rich technique are, I think, rather few, and the same explanations would do again and again. So you can enjoy one of the poems and form an opinion about it without making up your mind on the meaning of all the details. (1987, 383) Although Thomas’s poetry often “defies analysis” (391), Empson sees impenetrability as critically empowering in that it allows for multiple interpretations. He would not have experienced the same thrill when confronted by Amis’s defiant, disagreeable truths, which do not require the reader to assemble meaning but impose moments of self-reflection. It is not what Amis means, but how the reader feels about those meanings that is perhaps most important. Most of Empson’s poetry analysis focuses on the clarification of ambiguous passages, thus he offers especial praise for Thomas’s “early obscure ones” (392). In “A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire, of a Child in London,” he considers the significance of religious references: “The general theme is that Dylan Thomas at death, no less than the burned girl, must be absorbed into the Nature from which further life may mysteriously be born. The terms perhaps seem Jewish rather than Christian, but I think he is remembering the Welsh Nonconformist preachers he heard as a boy” (385). This type of commentary can be objected to for numerous reasons, including the confusion of narrator and author, which has led one contemporary critic to say of Empson, along with New Critics such as Wellek, Wimsatt, Burke, and Brooks: “once potent figures all, how sad a barrel of dead mackerel they now seem” (Epstein 2006, 19). Or, to quote Amis’s review of Argufying: Empson could think of all sorts of ingenious shades and possibilities of meaning that did seem a tiny bit unlikely to have been anywhere in the poet’s mind at the time. These days you might be more inclined to call most of his suggestions absurd or manifestly beside the point. (Amis 1991, 53) Holbrook’s diatribe against Amis, which spawned Empson’s comment about brothels, may be taken as a representative measure of the critical resistance to Amis’s experiments in content. At numerous points in Amis’s novels the reader can never know for certain what has happened ­ istinction or what has been said, and Jacques Derrida, in discussing the d

88

Kingsley Amis

between revelation and revealability, offers a clarification of aporia that helps in understanding its relevance to Amis. Aporia “for me,” said ­Derrida, “doesn’t mean simply paralysis. No way. On the contrary, it’s the condition of proceeding, of making a decision, of going forward. The aporia is not simply a negative step” (Hart and Sherwood 2005, 43). And so in Amis’s ­narratives progress is never contingent on the resolution of aporia. One must go forward anyway. This was first shown through Jim Dixon, who leaves the academic world without resolving the issue of the appropriation of his shipbuilding article. John Lewis too leaves his knot untouched by fleeing the library so that he will not have to address questions of nepotism and sexual misbehaviour. Although ­Garnet Bowen is still uncertain about Buckmaster’s identity, he delivers a conveniently affirmative verdict so as to be free to pursue new creative options. Thus, Amis made a habit, both in his fiction and poetry, of denying the reader traditional satisfactions, one of which was moral closure, and this disturbed critics such as Empson and Holbrook. In Llareggub Revisited: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry, Holbrook surveyed contemporary poetry and found it lacking moral seriousness. “Modern poetry since T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets yields few satisfactions, of the kind we know we may get from Keats or Chaucer,” he lamented (1962, 15). The defeat of Jenny Bunn’s ideas is not only unsatisfying, but could be seen as a function of the author’s lack of moral seriousness, as ­Holbrook shows in his remarks on “A Dream of Fair Women”: This poem belongs to the now recognizable Lucky Jim mode – the “frank” exposure of the writer-as-his-own-hero, who comes pathetically short of coping with things. This is the basis of Kingsley Amis’s humour. But while we suppose we are sharing an acute analysis of the hero’s shortcomings, we are, in fact, taking part in a gross selfdeception, for the whole poem here (as with the novels) is actually a piece of sentimental special pleading for the writer’s fantasy indulgences. (1962, 29) The poem is treated as a work of distasteful exhibitionism, lacking in artistic subtlety. Furthermore, Holbrook adopts a position of moral superiority in stating that the poem implies “that the general run of humanity would prefer a wild promiscuity rather than seek love – this is ‘true,’” while the rest of humanity have given up on love as too difficult “and compensate for boredom ... by actually behaving as the herowriter does in his dream.” He labels this “a new frank cynicism: certainly



Experiments in Content 89

it will release us from the guilt we feel at getting it both ways in Amis’s novels, both enjoying the hard-bitten delineation of sex, and feeling it ‘cynically’ exposed, at the same time” (30). The critical contradiction is clear: H ­ olbrook and Empson allow poets to have it both ways in terms of style, symbol, and meaning, but not moral content. Some critics reacted negatively to Take a Girl Like You because they suspected that Amis was not experimenting at all but revelling in bad behaviour. Hermione Lee refused to give serious consideration to the Standish and Bunn novels, claiming that their author had only been tolerated for so long because of the English weakness for the elderly, particularly “train robbers, venal politicians, failed dictators, bad actors” or, perhaps, curmudgeonly writers: This kind of fond veneration seems to me misplaced. For one thing, [Amis] has a tremendously strong and vicious set of teeth and very high savage comic spirits, so he should not be taken for granted. For another, his comedy (now more than ever) is not affable. It is desperate. To reread him feels to me more like a life sentence than a long friendship. (in Bell 1998, 300) The critical pattern of refusing to engage with Amis’s texts, then challenging him on personal or moral grounds, as Lee does, became common in the 1970s.14 Some have simply been confused by the ambiguities in Take a Girl Like You, most notably Malcolm Bradbury, who initially praised it as Amis’s “most balanced book morally” (in Bell 1998, 70), then changed his mind and decided it was “morally strange and ambiguous” five years later (1993, 323). On a critical level, the novel may be “a brilliant and important failure” (McEwan 1981, 83) because it foreshadows the literary establishment’s refusal to allow him his dualities and ambiguities, for novels written within a recognizable tradition that subvert that tradition are simply deemed unfair. However, we can see that critics were becoming confused because they no longer knew how to classify Amis. While he was continuing to write entertaining, realist novels that satirize bohemian or modernist attitudes, these works share the modernist obsession with art and anticipate the postmodern interest in paradoxes and ambiguity.

6 Evelyn Waugh, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Englishness in One Fat Englishman

In One Fat Englishman (1963) Amis was perhaps less interested in presenting a consistent moral world than he was in examining the ways in which people from different social classes and countries use the English language. During his tenure as creative writing lecturer at Princeton in 1958–59 he delivered a series of lectures on science fiction, later organized into New Maps of Hell (1960), a book that offers insight into the author’s state of mind at the time of composition. Amis explains that he prefers science fiction to fantasy because the former “maintains a respect for fact or presumptive fact” while the latter “makes a point of flouting these” (17). Roger Micheldene, the malevolent protagonist of One Fat Englishman, is horrid but not fantastic. He is an experiment designed to show what becomes of a man who makes no attempt to curb his impulses and appetites and, in his flouting of conventional morality, recalls the discussion of Zola and Flaubert earlier in this book. Amis was drawn to science fiction in part because he felt it allowed the reader “to doff that mental and moral best behaviour with which we feel we have to treat George Eliot and James and Faulkner, and frolic like badly brought-up children among the mobile jellyfishes and unstable atomic piles” (1960, 115). The perceived amorality of One Fat Englishman1 has perhaps distracted attention from the novel’s ongoing discussion of Englishness, through which Amis expresses his views on both communication and social competition. He does this primarily through the introduction of numerous artistic antimodels in the form of publishers, writers, and academics, and by invoking Charles Algernon ­Swinburne referentially in the same way as William Empson and Graham Greene were invoked in previous novels. Amis was sufficiently intrigued by Swinburne to devote a chapter of his BLitt thesis to him, and the source of this intrigue becomes clear in One Fat Englishman. Perhaps u ­ nknowingly, Amis was beginning



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 91

to resemble Swinburne by stirring up controversy to attract attention and increase book sales. The greatest barrier to appreciating One Fat Englishman has been the hero, Roger Micheldene, an upper-class British publisher who offers a skewed perspective that is both disturbing and amusing. He has come to America for three ostensible purposes: to recover his brother-in-law’s manuscript from the publisher Strode Atkins; to examine the manuscript of a young American writer, Irving Macher, and assess its value for his publishing house; and to attempt the renewal of a one-sided romance with the beautiful but married Helene Bang. Superficially, he fails to achieve his goals because of fatal personality flaws – primarily sloth, wrath, and lust – and this failure has contributed to critical confusion over Amis’s own intentions. Micheldene is too lazy to approach Atkins about the manuscript, immediately makes an enemy of Macher, and obesity combines with existential wrath to disqualify him as an appropriate romantic partner for Helene Bang. But an overlooked factor in Micheldene’s downfall is his Englishness, a discussion of which launches the novel. The hero debates the nationality of Danish-­American Helene Bang with Joe Derlanger, and when Derlanger asks whether the issue is of any importance, Micheldene replies: “Don’t you think that sort of thing always matters terribly?” (7). Even though Helene has lived in America for many years and speaks English fluently, Micheldene ignores her communicative ability and prioritizes birth and rank since he is a member of the English privileged class. He clings to stereotypes and prejudices that confirm his own cultural superiority; thus, when Derlanger expresses doubts about the accuracy of information about America provided by popular media, Micheldene insists that “it’s an introduction, anyway” (8), suggesting that there is no need to uncover deeper truths. As an introduction to Roger Micheldene, this discussion serves as a warning about the reliability of his linguistic and cultural broadsides. The title reminds us that he is only one Englishman, not a national representative, and we ought to be suspicious of his interpretation of events. Richard Bradford has noted the unsettling effect of the narrator’s confirmation of Micheldene’s “view of himself and the rest of the world as united in the pursuit of lust, greed, and self-­promotion” (1998, 19) and although there is no discernible distance between the protagonist and Amis’s third-person narrator,2 this does not mean that Micheldene’s opinions and actions have authorial endorsement. Numerous critics have suspected as much, and Amis’s own admission that he liked aspects of Micheldene’s personality has contributed to this

92

Kingsley Amis

­misreading.3 It is Micheldene’s account that needs to be viewed with skepticism, not authorial intentions. Amis’s first four novels, with the exception of Take a Girl Like You, featured artistic antimodels through whom he voiced irritations and prejudices, and also provided comic relief. In One Fat Englishman several characters connected with art, academia, and publishing serve as antimodels and they show in a variety of ways how bad artists fail to satisfy the needs of their audience. Irving Macher represents a type of writer, perhaps more common in America than in England in the 1950s, such as Henry Miller or Philip Roth, who deliberately shocked the delicate sensibilities of some readers while titillating those of others through provocative or controversial sexual material. Though still an undergraduate, Macher has written a clever, malicious social satire of the blind called Blinkie Heaven. Amis did not look favourably on Jewish-American novelists4 and this bias probably emerges in Macher’s negative depiction. His comedic use of the blind, offensively referred to as “blinkies,” points to Macher’s own metaphoric blindness, since he persecutes others even though he belongs to a historically persecuted group. He baits the reader into confirming the truth of racial slurs, as the following admission suggests: “My parents have money and I like and admire them for it. It used to bother me a little, knowing so much of it was around and hearing about it all the time, but not any more. Money’s good” (19–20). Thus, Macher challenges the reader to accept the fact that some Jews actually do like money.5 His intention of forcing Micheldene to behave in a natural, unscripted manner would be acceptable if he had not written a novel intended as “pure offensiveness” (32). In other words, he fails to live up to his own standard of behaving in an unpremeditated manner because both his actions and art are carefully calculated to achieve an effect. A further reason to suspect that Amis would not have approved of Macher as an artist is that he had strongly rejected the telling of others’ stories in his previous two novels. Not every fiction writer is compelled to use life experience, but Amis makes us question the personal relevance of a satire of the blind by a wealthy Jewish American. The second important antimodel in the novel is Mollie Atkins, who manages a crafts shop. Amis did not have a high opinion of folk art, and his objections are voiced through the description of her character and shop. In his BLitt thesis, Amis argued that the law of supply and demand dictates that some artists will make money while poor sales will force others to alter their product or find another profession. For this reason he found R.A. Caton’s proposal that he purchase copies of his own



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 93

book so disturbing, and even imagined himself refusing the proposal in The Legacy: he wanted to be a genuine artist, not a (self) subsidized one. However, in reality sponsors allow some artists to continue producing bad art. Mollie hates her husband, the Anglophile Strode Atkins, but stays with him because “I need to use money and I have no money and I have no trade or skill” (77). Not surprisingly, her shop is a commercial failure and the following description of its interior recalls Jim Dixon’s diatribe against Merrie England. Micheldene peers in [the shop] past racks of hairy neckties and asymmetrical stands of shoes and sandals too ugly not to be hand-made. Glass and pottery rejects of various sizes and uncertain function stood on triangular shelves. Here and there on the rush mats that covered parts of the floor were groups of wrought-iron vessels in which the very industrious or the very apathetic might one day boil water or even make a soup. (68) Art that is neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing serves no purpose for Amis, and the simple claim to being handmade should not be an invitation to overlook flaws in content or composition. The novel also features three academic antimodels, each of whom fails to apply the lessons of higher education to personal communication. In its simplest terms, this means that they have never learned how to communicate properly. Ernst Bang, a North Germanic philologist and the husband of Helene, is a convincing speaker with negligible listening skills who talks over (rather than to) his conversation partners. Joe Derlanger is an English professor who is unable to verbally express his frustrations, so he resorts to destroying physical objects. And Strode Atkins has dedicated his life to analyzing aspects of English culture and language about which no one else cares. Each of these academics shows that art becomes meaningless when the needs of the audience are ignored, thereby confirming the central point of Amis’s BLitt thesis: the importance of effective and appropriate communication. Amis’s feelings towards Swinburne’s work and character are complicated, and the references to him in One Fat Englishman suggest that while he was intrigued by the poet’s capacity for creating controversy, he was also perhaps still oblivious to the Swinburnian tendencies in his own character. In his BLitt thesis Amis seems both attracted to ­Swinburne’s repeated violations of Victorian propriety and repelled by his theatrical self-promotion. “Reputed immorality,” Amis wrote, “was not [in the

94

Kingsley Amis

nineteenth century] the almost unqualified benefit to sales that it is today” (1950, 93), and over ten years later he would take advantage of the public’s increasing hunger for sexual scandal by writing about an immoral Englishman who tries to sell Swinburne’s lascivious notebooks. Parallels between the writing careers of Amis and Swinburne also help to explain the latter’s presence in One Fat Englishman. While Lucky Jim had instantly secured a large, young readership for Amis – not unlike Swinburne’s “steady recruitment of young readers” from among university freshmen noted in the thesis (108) – an overabundance of sexual content, effectively limited Swinburne’s appeal to the outer audience. In spite of the inclusion of questionable moral content Swinburne maintained a “large and constantly renewed intermediate audience” (93) which Amis called “sectarian appeal” (70), a trend that resulted in “a continuous variation between enthusiasm and hostility in ... successive critical receptions” (110). Amis too had become sectarian, disqualified from winning the consistent approval of a wider audience by his tendency to provoke and disturb. Amis had also been critical of Swinburne’s exhibitionism, noting in the thesis that those who attended private poetry readings were treated “as listeners to a performance, not consultants for comment and advice” (77). He deemed this “showing off” because “it was not the courting of praise which motivated [Swinburne], simply a desire to hold the floor” (101). Ironically, some accounts of Amis’s behaviour at readings suggest that he too was capable of exhibitionism and this has led to skepticism over Paul Fussell’s rather generous interpretation of him as an “anti-egotist” (1994). William Pritchard recalled Amis reacting to his introduction at a symposium by swinging “his clasped hands above him like a heavyweight acknowledging the crowd” (1995, 138) and Janice Rossen compared him to a fighter who “perceives, imagines, or creates enemies everywhere and thinks instinctively in terms of competition” (1998, 9). A further point of comparison between Amis and Swinburne is found in the composition of One Fat Englishman. Amis read the novel in draft to Elizabeth Jane Howard, solicited advice, and incorporated a scene she wrote in which Mollie Atkins makes love with Micheldene (Leader 2006, 518). Though Swinburne tended to send his poetry to the printer without having it proofread, he too accepted the criticisms of an influential female reader, Lady Trevelyan (Amis 1950, 95).6 The most important connection between the two writers, however, lies in the use of salacious material for financial profit. Joe Derlanger first tells Micheldene that Strode Atkins has come into the possession of ­Swinburne’s notebooks “Not very legally,” and that three people



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 95

in ­England have claimed them as the property of different libraries: “Strode’s supposed to be waiting for them to cool off so that he can push them to some fellow who likes that type of stuff. You know, whipping and the rest of it” (47). Later Micheldene gains entry to Atkins’s office, discovers the notebooks,7 and, after reading that Watts received three lashes and Swinburne fifty, “was certain that while the contents of the notebook might not be the best of Swinburne, or the most creditable of ­Swinburne, or even the most rewardingly discreditable of ­Swinburne, they were ­Swinburne. As such they demanded to be removed from American hands. Their other demands could be gone into in due course” (160). Micheldene’s motivation is of course not the recovery of British intellectual property but personal profit and, over twenty years later, Amis followed his protagonist’s example by selling his own manuscripts and personal papers to an American library.8 A probable source for these fictional Swinburne notebooks is the publishing history of L ­ esbia ­Brandon, a novel written between 1875 and 1877, which was suppressed until 1952 (Henderson 1974, 95).9 Amis was certainly aware of ­Lesbia ­Brandon, citing it in his thesis as evidence of an “immaturity of mind” which does not feel the need to communicate. “Nothing, indeed,” remarks Amis, “dates more quickly or mortally” (1950, 103). Aside from Swinburne’s failure to communicate with his audience, his invocation in One Fat Englishman has relevance to Amis’s development as a writer because it marks the first literary expression of his interest in homosexuality. He was intrigued by deviant sexual behaviour and, in a 1974 review of a Swinburne biography, expressed doubts about “serious omissions involv[ing] Swinburne’s sexual life. Were those birchings ever more than a token or a game? Was he on homosexual terms with Richard ­Burton or was he not? Above all, what were his precise relations with his sadistic cousin, Mary Gordon, and how and why were they broken off?” (1991, The Amis Collection, 193). As proof of Swinburne’s homosexuality, Jean Overton Fuller has pointed to his correspondence with the painter Simeon Solomon, who expressed mock-horror at Swinburne’s epistolary description of “whipped and quivering posteriors,” and jokingly claimed to have been innocent until they met. Fuller concludes: “the conviction was borne in on me that their sexual perversion, and that of their friends, was related to the floggings they had received at school, and that they were not therefore wholly responsible for their peculiarity” (1968, 178). Swinburne’s presence in One Fat Englishman, then, serves as a reminder of Amis’s twin obsessions with provoking the audience and

96

Kingsley Amis

representing alternative points of view. He would not introduce his first homosexual character until Captain Max Hunter in The Anti-Death League, his seventh novel, though he had considered using one in That Uncertain Feeling. In that novel’s notes, Amis described a “homosexual hotel manager who reveals self in conversation though not to [Lewis]. A sidelong glance indicating he likes [Lewis]. No more” (HRC). This idea was abandoned, as was the original Difficulties with Girls, an ambitious novel attempted in the 1980s with a homosexual narrator.10 The inclusion of Swinburne in Amis’s fifth novel may have been prompted by his acquaintance with Colin Howard, a homosexual who was Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brother. In 2007, when Amis was posthumously accused by Terry Eagleton of being a misogynist and homophobe, Colin Howard wrote to his defence: “For someone to glibly call Kingsley homophobic and racist incensed me. It is just lazy nonsense” (in Cockcroft 2007).11 Both gay and lesbian characters would appear in many of Amis’s late novels, and they are often more sympathetically portrayed than their heterosexual counterparts. While Amis invokes Swinburne to ponder his own position on moral issues and the author’s relationship with the audience, textual allusions to Evelyn Waugh in One Fat Englishman more directly concern tone and content. Though they never met, Waugh privately sneered at Amis. He considered the Angry Young Men to be boorish representatives of the clamouring lower-middle class, as this 15 July 1955 letter to Christopher Sykes indicates: “I have a theory about the modern Teddy-boy school of novelist & critic – [John] Wain, [Kingsley] Ames, [sic] etc. It is that they all read English Literature for schools and so take against it, while good critics & writers read as a treat and a relaxation from Latin & Greek” (Waugh 1980, 445). Less than a year later, in an 11 January 1956 letter to Nancy ­Mitford, he had amended the spelling of Amis’s name but not his opinion of its owner: “glad you have not heard of Mr. Kingsley Amis. Not a worthy man” (1980, 457). With this fundamental antipathy in mind, it would seem difficult to dispute Douglas Lane Patey’s contention that when Waugh listed jazz as one of his four irritations in the autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold he was satirizing Amis and Larkin (1998, 321). However, the sentence preceding this catalogue creates a significant connection between Amis and Waugh. Pinfold’s “strongest tastes were negative,” writes Waugh (1957, 11), and as the portrait of Roger Micheldene once again proves, so were Amis’s. The overwhelming atmosphere of negativity in the novel has troubled critics who had



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 97

reservations about comic novels that were not much fun. David Lodge, for example, admitted to not having known what to make of One Fat Englishman in 1963 because he had not enjoyed it, “and enjoyment was very much at the heart of my interest in Amis’s earlier fiction” (2002, 37). Amis was not only venting spleen, as he had done in his satiric epistolary exchanges with Larkin, but writing a deliberately Waughian satire. While there have been dubious suggestions that Amis borrowed from Waugh in writing the ending to One Fat Englishman,12 the most obvious debt to him is in Micheldene’s mantra – “Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in” (35) – which inverts a line from Officers and Gentlemen: “Enclosing every thin man there’s a fat man demanding elbow room” (1955, 145). Amis reviewed this novel and was critical of the lack of bite in Waugh’s comedy at a time when his own satire was becoming harsher with each novel. Roger Micheldene’s vision is essentially a parody of Waugh at his vitriolic worst, and the tone of the novel is aptly summarized in a description in A Handful of Dust of the behaviour of domesticated foxes. They “lived in pairs,” writes Waugh, and “some were moderately tame but it was unwise to rely upon them” because of their tendency to bite (1934, 308). In the aforementioned review, Amis describes the typical Waughian hero in a way that foreshadows the snuff-taking, lapsed Catholic Micheldene: “At odds with the modern world, longing for the certainties of a past age which are preserved chiefly in the public school, bitterly romantic or ... neo-Jacobite” (1955, 373). An additional component in Micheldene’s character is the relentless pursuit of sensual pleasure, which Amis depicts sympathetically, if not positively. This too is hinted at in his evaluation of Guy Crouchback as “really a terrible fellow” due to a lack of “the unpleasant vigour” of characters such as Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited and Tony Last (1955, 373). Vigour, incidentally, was a characteristic that Amis himself was renowned for possessing.13 A fundamental difference between Waugh and Amis becomes apparent when one compares Roger Micheldene with the heroes in Waugh’s novels. While Micheldene’s aggression draws him into society in search of sparring partners, the misanthropy of Waugh’s snobbish heroes makes them seek out solitude. The solitary life becomes the only viable means of coping, for, as explained in Put Out More Flags, “one man alone could go freely anywhere on the earth’s surface; multiply him, put him in a drove and by each addition of his fellows you subtract something that is of value, make him so much less a man.” Waugh rationalized this as a by-product of “the crazy mathematics of war” (1942, 220) but it stems

98

Kingsley Amis

from the fundamentally snobbish belief that he and his heroes are better than everyone else. Thus, while Amis and Waugh were united by the tendency to express their preferences negatively, which included highlighting human folly, Amis did not lament the waning influence of the English aristocracy. As an ambitious member of the lower-middle class, he saw this development as cause for celebration. In Decline and Fall, the imprisoned protagonist expresses the “growing conviction that there was something radically inapplicable about this whole code of readymade honour” (1928, 163). Though the code no longer applies, characters such as Guy Crouchback cling to it. Before eviction from his rooms, he is warned against trusting in the goodness of others: “You treat everyone as if he were a gentleman. That officer was definitely not” (1955, 25). Amis was dismayed by Waugh’s portrayal of Crouchback, and said that he was unable to see him “as a man trying in vain to find a place for himself in a great battle of our time” because he refuses to work. “What about all those jobs in the ranks of, say, Signals or the RASC? Unthinkable, naturally,” writes Amis, referring to his own military service in ­Signals (1961, 421). Thus, he composed One Fat Englishman with one eye on Waugh, depicting a snob who refuses to engage with his peers and is put on metaphoric trial in America to answer the charge of enjoying undeserved privilege. When one considers the textual significance of Englishness, the novel may be seen as an extended trial of Roger Micheldene’s character according to his ability to manipulate the English language correctly and appropriately. In a letter of 6 December 1962, Amis reported that he was “going to comb Daniel Defoe’s ‘True-born Englishman’ for a possible quote” to use as the title for what would become One Fat Englishman (2001, 610–1). He seems not to have found anything appropriate, though the reason he had settled on Defoe becomes clear in the poem’s text. True-born Englishmen do not exist, Defoe claims: For Englishmen to boast of Generation, Cancels their Knowledge, and lampoons the Nation. A True-Born Englishman’s a Contradiction, In Speech an irony, in Fact a Fiction. (ll. 370–3) Defoe rebukes the English for associating vices with rival nations: “Rage rules the Portuguese; and Fraud the Scotch: Revenge the Pole; and Avarice the Dutch” (ll. 143–4). Although the English are descended from marauders and invaders – “From the most Scoundrel Race that



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 99

ever liv’d” (l. 236) – they have forgotten their humble origins and, after describing the English breed, Defoe satirizes the English temperament, claiming that “Manners make the Man” (l. 430). He then insists that people be judged by their actions and not their lineage: What is’t to us, what Ancestors we had? If Good, what better? Or what worse, if Bad? Examples are for Imitation set, Yet all men follow Virtue with Regret. (ll. 1205–8) If, as Defoe claims, “‘Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great” (l. 1216), then Roger Micheldene is the antithesis of greatness, devoid of virtues and an expert in vice: “Of the seven deadly sins,” says Amis’s narrator, “Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger” (10). However, Amis’s concept of Englishness differs from Defoe’s in its concentration on language. In The King’s English, the guide to English usage containing many of Amis’s personal irritations and obsessions, one particular entry, “berks and wankers,” emphasizes the importance of discriminating language use. He labels and passes judgement on “two types of person whose linguistic habits [most people] deplore if not abhor.” First, the berks are described as “careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin” (23). Wankers, on the other hand, “are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-­precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin” (23). It would appear that the fate of the English language can only be entrusted to people like Amis himself: discriminating Everymen who “try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious,” which is “healthy for them and the language” (23).14 Among the many defenders and interpreters of Englishness, Amis is remarkable for his emphasis on appropriate language use. He might, for example, have agreed with the basic political argument for Englishness advanced by George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English: “The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not in

100

Kingsley Amis

the House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden” (1941, 96).15 Amis too thought that the autonomy of the public schools ought to be abolished and educational institutions should be filled with “State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability” (79). But he has more in common with the hedonists Orwell criticizes than the socialist revolutionaries destined to bring “the real England to the surface” (96). “During the past twenty years,” Orwell laments, “the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm” (88). This is always the concern of Amis’s early heroes, who divide their time between sniggering and trying to get more than their fair share. Amis’s advocacy of a code of individualism has been labelled a “meritocracy” (Head 2002, 52; Bradbury 1993, 320), the “real motor” of which “is not, after all, a desire to level the playing field but a desire to prove one’s superior worth” (English 1994, 136). Randall Stevenson too has pointed out that there is little political idealism in early Amis, for at the end of most novels the meritocratic hero “turns out [not] to have been interested in changing society, but only his own place in it” (2004, 402). Thus, when Orwell concludes his treatise on the future of his country by stating, “I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward” (96), Amis might have added the qualification that he believed in the individual Englishman’s right to go forward, should he prove himself linguistically capable. The other key component in Amis’s version of Englishness is competition. Language is used not only to measure one’s social worth but as a weapon to do battle with berks, wankers, and other foes. Russell ­Fraser, who met Amis at Vanderbilt University in the late 1950s, recalled that “America’s slovenly way with words got his goat. Often touchy, never ‘aggravated,’ he would show you the door if you advertised ‘disinterest’ when all you were was bored. His insistence on getting things straight verged on pedantry, setting his rational side against the provincial one” (1996, 4). Amis could become combative over minor language points, as evidenced by a 1975 discussion of Ian M. Ball’s study of varieties of English. Amis attacked Ball for oversimplifying the distinctions between British-English and American-English and failing to explain the role of other national variations. He noted some of Ball’s minor, yet egregious, ­ ngland but textual errors, claiming that one does not carry a biro in E



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 101

has one on one’s person, and a “blower” is not, strictly speaking, a telephone, except in the phrase “on the blower.” In conclusion, he accuses Ball of quibbling for contrasting the American phrase “I’d better leave now” with the English “I’d best leave now.” Amis calls this “Nonsense; and even if it weren’t, what of it?” (41). He does not evaluate Ball any more than, in his BLitt thesis, he evaluates Victorian poets. In both cases, he engages in fault-finding and explains his own preferences through negative example. All his life Amis thrived on competition and two months before his own death admitted to feeling sad at the passing of friends because “When someone dies you can no longer have it out with them” (1995, “Curmudgeons,” 3). With such a strong emphasis on language and Englishness in One Fat Englishman it is not difficult to see the novel as an extended linguistic and communicative trial of Roger Micheldene. While the protagonist attempts to take advantage of his inherited social position, Amis challenges the validity of privilege. Jim Dixon’s Merrie England speech and John Lewis’s job interview are also linguistic tests of the worthiness of the heroes to rise in society. The authorial message in the first two novels is the same as that of One Fat Englishman: the ability to manipulate language in competition determines the company one keeps. Those who fail to live up to the Amisian linguistic code will find themselves surrounded by berks and wankers. As noted earlier, Amis admitted to liking Roger Micheldene and his reasons for doing so were doubtless connected to wit and intellect. Eric Jacobs described Micheldene as “odious” (1995, 229) and Amis agreed that he was “awful” but asked the reader to give him serious consideration “without condoning anything that he does” because he did not consider him beyond redemption (1973, 276). Since he is good at manipulating language and naturally competitive, he still has hope, and in the novel Amis offers him three chances to prove himself through linguistic games. The first is a variation on charades called simply “The Game,” in which one player leaves the room while the others choose an adverb, such as “lecherously” or “disinterestedly.” When the player returns, he or she instructs the others to “Go polish that mirror or light a cigarette or wind your watch in the way indicated” (37), and the process is repeated until the word is correctly guessed. Micheldene’s word is “Britishly,” and his final instruction to Helene Bang is to “Make love to that standard lamp like it” (40). When she gives the lamp shade a “single peck,” the others laugh and Micheldene surrenders. Upon hearing the answer, he becomes offended and quits. His host, Joe Derlanger, protests: “This is supposed to be a game, for Christ’s sake. What are you

102

Kingsley Amis

trying to prove?” (41). His word choice is significant, for it is Amis who is proving the hero’s unworthiness of enjoying privilege. The second test is also a game – Scrabble – and it ends, like the first, in a breach of rules. Micheldene’s opponent is the Bangs’ ten-year old son Arthur who, by pure luck, draws better letters and builds a substantial lead. Helene describes the game as an “ordeal” for the Englishman, suggesting that it is more trial than leisurely pastime. His attempt to “resign” is met by his opponent’s insistence that he must “play right through.” The end comes when Micheldene challenges the validity of “niter,” which Arthur intends as the spelling of “one-nighter.” Luckily for Arthur, the word is listed in the American-English dictionary as “potassium nitrate.” Micheldene insists that the word is spelled “nitre” in British-English and that it should not be accepted because Arthur had intended a different, invalid word. The challenge is not recognized and Micheldene responds by overturning the board with his knee (60–1), then refusing to continue. The third trial is initiated by Irving Macher, the merits of whose novel Micheldene has come to America to test. Macher deliberately antagonizes him throughout by luring away his weekend date, Helene Bang, and having his accomplice Suzanne Klein seduce him then bite his chest. One of the pranks played on Micheldene by Macher becomes the third trial, the outcome of which serves as definitive proof that he is unworthy of rising to the top of Amis’s meritocratic world. This trial is initiated by the theft of Micheldene’s lecture notes, replaced by Macher with a comic book. When the hero finds his notes missing, he cancels the lecture. The English department head, Maynard Parrish, tries to convince him to change his mind, praising him as “one of the most articulate and verbally resourceful” people he has met: “Surely it cannot be beyond the powers of one such as you to improvise” (89).16 Although ­Micheldene is articulate and resourceful, he is burdened by wankerish pride and the false belief that membership in the privileged classes excuses him from competing. Amis tries him on the basis of his abilities, rather than his background, and the verdict is delivered through Irving Macher: “It isn’t your nationality we don’t like, it’s you” (168). The difference between Amis’s form of Englishness and the models advanced by Defoe and Orwell is that one need not be a virtuous member of the political left to survive in the Amisian world. One’s actions – selfless or otherwise – are not especially important, provided one is articulate and willing to endure. Micheldene is, therefore, proven to be a wanker by inappropriate use of language and repeated communicative failures. When he is licensed to



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 103

use his linguistic skills in battle he refuses to compete while on other noncompetitive occasions he gives offence or creates ill-will by attempting to gain an advantage on perceived enemies. The reader is made aware of Micheldene’s communicative difficulties through the use of legalese. At a party in Greenwich Village, he is rebuffed by a woman who “had pleaded lesbianism” (66); he interprets a receptionist’s cool demeanour as proof of American sexual insecurity: “They thought that because you spoke like an Englishman, you must be homosexual, which only testified to their deep doubts of their own masculinity. It was true that this girl was a girl, not a man, but the principle held” (69); and when Helene Bang refuses his advances, he “judg[es] her excuses beneath his attention” (56). The use of “plead,” “testify,” and “judge” in conjunction with sexual rebuffs suggests both that a romantic encounter with one as obese as Micheldene would be a trial for his partner and that he bullies women into going to bed with him because he lacks charm. Many of his communicative and linguistic failures are due to his unnecessary antagonizing of others. Conversations turn into competitions in which he attempts to score points (56). This becomes an odd defensive strategy; thus, in an argument with Macher, he thinks that he has “scored” a point (86), while an embarrassing exchange with Mollie Atkins “put[s] him a couple of points down conversationally” (76). In Micheldene’s defence, he is not the only character suffering from communicative problems. Most of the people in the novel have trouble expressing their feelings or do so inappropriately. The Bangs talk over each other (15, 16, 93); Joe Derlanger destroys inanimate objects, including his own car, out of inexpressible frustration (134); and Strode Atkins, the innocuous but irritatingly verbose Anglophile, subscribes to a policy that the competitive Amis could never abide: “I make a rule that if I’m involved in any ... unpleasantness then I apologise afterwards. It’s nearly always been my fault anyway and if it wasn’t, what the hell? Better somebody apologises than nobody” (132). The linguist Ernst Bang says that “Language is before anything else the great social instrument” (147), thereby expressing the novel’s central communicative irony. One wonders, though, if Bang’s own inability to manipulate this instrument has led his highly attractive wife to sleep with disagreeable men like Micheldene and Macher. The introduction of Amis’s first wanker-as-hero also invites a revisiting of his first two novels to measure the protagonists against the code of Englishness. Both Jim Dixon and John Lewis pass their linguistic tests, and their prize is the opportunity at a better job or girlfriend. Roger

104

Kingsley Amis

Micheldene, on the other hand, fails to accomplish his professional and romantic goals in America, but he escapes material punishment. Though his rejection by Helene Bang is a chastening of sorts, which reduces him to tears aboard ship, he recovers almost immediately and manages to work himself into a “Rage at the non-arrival of his whisky” (171). His disappointment at failing to retrieve his brother-in-law’s manuscript and to procure Macher’s novel for his publishing house is similarly mitigated by the appropriation of the lucrative Swinburne notebooks (171). Micheldene’s true punishment, then, like Dixon’s and Lewis’s rewards, is linguistic. On ship he is met for the second time by the Purser, “an outstandingly horrible man,” and this reunion leads to the ominous reflection that “it was good to be among one’s own people again” (170). Next Strode Atkins enters Micheldene’s cabin and he too, like the Purser and Micheldene, is obsessed with status. Atkins’ inability to discriminate between the trivial and the significant irritates Micheldene in the same way that Ian M. Ball would irritate Amis in 1975. Matters of pronunciation and ancestry intrigue Atkins: “I love English people and English things so much it almost disgusts me. Disgusts a lot of other guys too, I can tell you. But I seem to keep right on doing it for some reason or other” (26).17 He offers tedious monologues on language, and claims that his own ancestry can be traced back to the British historical figure Thomas Atkins (26) and a valley in West Virginia “in which pure eighteenth-­century English is spoken” (27). Micheldene is bored by Atkins in part because he refuses to believe that any American could be his social equal. One of the characteristics of wankers, as defined by Amis, is their claim to belong to a higher social class than they actually do. ­Micheldene even makes a class distinction between himself and his own father, who attained upper-class status through the fortune he amassed “flogging ... bloody awful crockery and glassware.” Possessing wealth without cultural polish, he became indolent, believing that “Doing anything was what the lower classes did. So was caring about anything” (124). The son justifies his own snobbery as a reaction against his father, which has led him to appreciate the arts, fine wine and cuisine, and snuff. Thus, the companionship of the loquacious Atkins, who prizes lineage, serves as a reminder to Micheldene of his own humble roots. The linguistic nature of his punishment is further emphasized by the fact that Atkins’ appearance on ship renders him temporarily “beyond speech. Nor was this required of him for some time” (171). One Fat Englishman, therefore, shows the importance of Englishness in Amis’s fictional world. He drew on Waugh’s comic tradition to



Englishness in One Fat Englishman 105

make predictions that Waugh himself must have dreaded. In particular, he foreshadows a critically competitive society in which communicative ability is prized over class privilege and insists that class should not exempt Roger Micheldene from being tested by his peers. Amis was clearly bothered by class and envious of privilege, but he also derived joy from creative language use and in One Fat Englishman shows how it can be empowering. While Micheldene recognizes the power of language and is capable of rising to the top of Amis’s linguistic meritocracy, he refuses to submit to the trials posed by his peers, and his misuse of language determines his fate. When Amis composed his fifth novel, he drew on disparate sources to make his own contribution to the ongoing debate on Englishness. Defoe and Waugh interested him because of their different conceptions of language and what it means to be English, while Swinburne’s shunning of conservative morality in a sense accords with the suspension of moral judgments that attracted Amis to science fiction. He returned to the discussion of the audience conducted in his BLitt thesis and drew upon both Defoe and Waugh to satirize what he perceived to be mistaken views of Englishness. Although Roger Micheldene seems to believe that he inhabits an alternative reality in which anything is permitted, he finds himself judged against a linguistic and communicative code – the code of Englishness.

7 Limitations of the Provincial Aesthetic in Amis’s Poetry: Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country While Amis was writing That Uncertain Feeling, the article by J.D. Scott in the Spectator proclaiming the birth of The Movement appeared. Movement writers were broadly seen as reacting against Dylan Thomas’s “rich (and not infrequently inflated) volubility” and Eliot’s Europeanism (Poburko 1999, 147). Scott referred to the stance of eight writers, including Amis, as “bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility about ‘the writer and society’” (1954, 399). After reading the article, Amis wrote to Larkin to call it “a load of bullshit,” though “Useful to a point” (Amis 2001, 405). Although British writer Andrew Sinclair has said of post-Second World War Britain that “There was a failure of morals and of caring, but not of dreaming” (1994, 21), in Amis’s poetic world, as in that of other Movement writers, the dream is denied. Refusing either to look forward at a fanciful dream or glorify the literary and cultural past, Amis’s poetic stance is firmly rooted in the present. When Amis’s A Look Round the Estate: Poems 1957–1967 appeared, it showcased his talents as a poet while pointing to two problematic tendencies in his writing. First, in the eleven poem sequence known as The Evans Country he gleefully disturbs the reader through the central character’s amorality. Amis had played the part of moral provocateur before in Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman, but Dai Evans, the sexual predator of unknown occupation who inhabits The Evans Country, is quite different from Patrick Standish and Roger Micheldene. He lacks charm, wit, and any suggestion of a more serious social agenda to elevate him above the level of sordid philanderer. Although Amis offers an artistic commentary of sorts in the depiction of Swansea’s ­architecture



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 107

and ­critique of romanticism, the poems are bleak. Amis tells us that the natural and manmade worlds are ugly, Evans’s activities are correspondingly dirty, and nothing can be done about either situation. The second problem relates to Amis’s tendency to place his narrators outside the work as witnesses, rather than participants, who find fault without providing any concrete solutions for improvement. At least eight of the other poems in A Look Round the Estate use painting, music, and literature (or literary creation) as the lens for viewing the world, and in these artistic poems the reader becomes aware of the poet watching but not participating, as he identifies ironies, contradictions, and areas of concern. While Amis would hesitate to pass moral judgment on social – and especially sexual – relations in any of the novels written in the forty years that passed between the publication of Lucky Jim and The Biographer’s Moustache, he was always dogmatic about art, as the discussions of both painting and poetry in his first two novels clearly show. In the 1970s this dogmatism would lead him to bring his first-person narrators into the action, and force them to do more than simply criticize. After all, if art can only be good or bad, when one recognizes the bad then something ought to be done about it. Christopher Hitchens explains Amis’s artistic intransigence in the following terms: The word “good,” in all its variations ... was almost all that this man of immense vocabulary required as a shorthand critical tool. I don’t know whether the concept hailed from the “Newspeak” dictionary in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the choices range from “plusgood” to “doubleplusungood,” but “bloody good” from Kingsley was authoritatively affirmative, “good” was really pretty good, “some good” wasn’t at all bad, “no good” was applied very scathingly indeed and a three-sentence six-word pronouncement which I heard him render upon Graham Greene’s then-latest novel The Human Factor (“Absolutely no. Bloody good. AT ALL!”) was conclusive. (2010, 163) In Amis’s poetry, ethical judgments are generally withheld but he always maintained that art, like experience, can only ever be good or bad. Thus, a recurring theme is the pursuit of pleasure. He expressed this rather crudely in an unpublished poem written in 1950, which is prefaced by the sentence, “Here is a list of the things I have understood”: i There are only two sorts of things, bad and good. ii When he gets the good, a man ought to be glad.

108

iii iv v vi vii

Kingsley Amis

When he gets the bad, a man ought to be sad. Some of the good are joking, smoking, soaking, And (if you will permit the expression) poking. In a bad place these are absent, or even banned. In a good place they are frequent, or ready to hand. And I want as much of them as I can stand. (HEHL)

Dai Evans is clearly a believer in the Amisian mantra that good things make a man glad, but the effectiveness of the poetry is diminished by the lack of accountability of protagonist and narrator. Artistic balance, which would become of key importance in Amis’s fiction in the 1970s, is conspicuously absent. Amis’s provincial poetics were leading him into an artistic corner from which he could only escape b­y humanizing the artistic antimodels, implicating his narrators in events, and giving serious consideration to the audience’s role in the creative process. Amis’s poetry mirrors his prose in the absence of formal experimentation and the use of provocative content to advance controversial views. That he intended the poems to be more than mere entertainments is apparent in a 21 May 1967 letter to Larkin in which he says he is “in fine fettle,” having “just put together a book of beautiful poetry (A Look round the Estate) to show that I am full of integrity after all” (Amis 2001, 680).1 The majority of the poems are formally traditional, often written in quatrains, and follow strict rhyming and metrical schemes. And yet, to use John Press’s terminology, they are perhaps best defined as provincial, rather than traditional. While the key concepts in provincialism are also found in definitions of the Movement, Amis’s attraction to the provincial aesthetic is doubtless connected to his desire for fame. As we saw previously in the discussion of “horse-pissing,” implicit in his attacks on the literature and literary ideas of the past is an argument for the superiority of Amis’s own writing. In the early poem ­“Beowulf” he recalled his lack of interest in medieval literature by satirizing the academic study of literature with so little impact for people of his generation. “Someone has told us this man was a hero.  / Must we then reproduce his paradigms,  / Trace out his rambling regress to his forbears,” he demands (1979, ­Collected Poems, ll. 13–15). Just as the artistic subtext of That Uncertain Feeling contains an attack on modernism and, specifically, Dylan Thomas, many of the poems in A Look Round the Estate target Keatsian romanticism, which was so effectively satirized through Patrick Standish’s wooing of Jenny Bunn in Take a Girl Like You. The attack is launched in the first poem, “An



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 109

Ever-Fixed Mark,” which recalls two varieties of homosexual love at a private boys’ school. Sex, or the idea of “using somebody for pleasure” (1967, l. 11), is favoured by the sportsman Buck, while Ralph the romantic prefers “Letters three times a week, / Sonnet-sequences, Sunday walks” (ll. 20–1). Once they reach adulthood, the equation becomes more complicated: These days, for a quid pro quo, Ralph’s chum is all for romance; Buck’s playmates, family men, Eye a Boy Scout now and then. Sex stops when you pull up your pants, Love never lets you go. (ll. 25–30) Perhaps disappointment in love has forced Ralph to enter into commercial exchanges with partners willing to simulate romance, but his situation seems far more sordid than that of Buck, who is now content to look without touching. The poem leads to a depressing contemplation of the interplay between love, sex, and romance. Most of the subsequent poems also point to the hollowness of ideals and, though they are complex and intelligent, they are rarely hopeful. Shrugging off the influences of Thomas, Empson, and Auden, in the 1950s, Amis began to write a very different kind of poetry in which he incorporated the sardonic voice cultivated with Larkin and used in Lucky Jim. In the 1957 essay “The Poet and the Dreamer,” previously discussed in relation to Take a Girl Like You, Amis insisted that poetry must be personal and must comment on life as one finds it, not as one wishes it to be. Clive James astutely calls the essay “a fine example of the critical attack that brings out every virtue” (2007, Cultural Amnesia, 348) for it tells us more about Amis’s literary ideals than it does about Keats’ poetic flaws. James insists that Keats must have possessed “a solid inner artistic confidence” to write the Odes and, in spite of Amis’s contrary assessment, “There is no good reason to believe that he would not have gone on developing” (350). Amis declared that Keats would not have because their poetic voices and messages differed markedly, and in the 1960s he was incapable of accepting artistic difference.2 The 1956 poem “Against Romanticism” aptly summarizes Amis’s objections to romantic idealizations of life. He argues, via a traveller in comfortable surroundings with “an ingrown taste for anarchy” (1979, Collected Poems, l. 20), that complications in life are largely of our own

110

Kingsley Amis

making. The traveller’s urge to make “grand meaning” leads to the desire “to build a better time and place” (l. 23). It would be preferable, though, “if images were plain,  / Warnings clearly said” (ll.  27–28) and in the third and final stanza Amis outlines his poetic platform. “Let us at least make visions that we need” (l.  32), he begins, and “Let mine be pallid” (l. 33). In the remaining fourteen lines, he elaborates on this decidedly negative vision. He sees “Buildings free from all grime of history / The people total strangers, the grass cut, / Not long” (ll. 36–38) and a “voluble swooning wilderness,” in which the “green” is “not parched or soured by frantic suns” (ll.  38–39). The grass is not “trampled by the drivelling unicorn” (l. 41), and the sky is “clean of officious birds” (l. 42). He concludes: Let there be a path leading out of sight, And its other end a temperate zone: Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot. (ll. 44–47) Zachary Leader has called Amis’s attack on romanticism a “corrective, an attempt to restore balance,” and “a counterweight to, not a negation of, the tendencies against which it kicks” (2006, The Life, 409). However, the bleakness of the world is notable, as it is in The Evans Country, set in a “thinly disguised Swansea” called Aberdarcy (Leader 2006, The Life, 242). The Evans Country first appeared in 1962 as a six poem sequence and was expanded to eleven poems in 1967. Eric Jacobs notes the unattractiveness of Swansea when Amis moved there in 1949: “Swansea itself was drab, like most of the rest of the country at the time, not yet able to put behind it the depredations of the war. Its main square was crossed by a Bailey bridge above a bomb crater. Rebuilding was not complete until the 1950s” (1995, 133–4). The eleven poems highlight the activities of Dai Evans; throughout the natural landscape and buildings are pallid, though the poems’ contents are not. Evans has liaisons with five women in the sequence, returning home to his wife in the final poem after “A fearsome thrash with Mrs No-Holds-barred / (Whose husband’s in his surgery till 7)” (ll. 22–3). To those readers with ­Empsonian tendencies who might censure Evans, Amis issues the same challenge – “What about you?” – in the first (l. 20) and last poems (l. 32). He played a similar game in That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You by garnering the reader’s sympathies for John Lewis and Patrick Standish through their wit and good humour before having them misbehave, and



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 111

make the reader feel tricked, if not betrayed. The difference in The Evans Country is that the protagonist, like the surrounding landscape, is neither attractive nor charming. Amis revels in the architectural ugliness of Swansea, as Evans does in smut. In the opening poem, “Aberdarcy: the Main Square,” the poet declares: “The journal of some bunch of architects / Named this the worst town centre they could find” (ll. 13–14); and this is the site of Evans’s first rendezvous: By the new Boots, a tool-chest with flagpoles Glued on, and flanges, and a dirty great Baronial doorway, and things like port-holes, Evans met Mrs Rhys on their first date. (ll. 1–4) In the third stanza, the poet recalls Evans and Mrs Rhys returning from “that lousy weekend in Porthcawl” (l. 12) when “he dropped her beside the grimy hunk / Of castle” (ll. 9–10). To readers tempted to sneer at Swansea and Evans, Amis asks in the fourth stanza: “But how disparage what so well reflects  / Permanent tendencies of heart and mind?” (ll. 15–16). The use of the word “permanent” reflects, as did the essay on Keats, that while Amis’s world is not necessarily static, he does not anticipate change for the better. Once again, the use of the bleak urban landscape to comment on Evans’s situation reveals the poet’s provincialism. All traces of the past – cultural or otherwise – are effaced throughout The Evans Country. References to the Parthenon in “Aldport (Mystery Tour)” and D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in “Aberdarcy: the Chaucer Road” are immediately undercut by hurried sexual encounters. The only thing of consequence to Evans and, perhaps by extension, Amis as poet, is the here and now. The drab urban landscape of Swansea is invoked in a curious way in the opening poem: “All love demands a witness: something ‘there’ / Which it yet makes part of itself” (ll. 17–18). The reader too is placed in the role of witness, given access to Evans’s thoughts and actions but prohibited from passing judgment. In “Welch Ferry, West Side,” Evans’s alienation from nature mirrors Amis’s from the romantics. The description of the industrial landscape in the first five lines is as unflattering as that of Aberdarcy Main Square: The narrow channel where the tankers crawl And void their cargo into the pipelines, Encloses, with the railway track that runs

112

Kingsley Amis

Down to the tinplate works, a chunk of hill, And here sometimes a pony browses. (ll. 1–5) This is the backdrop for Evans’ rendezvous with Miss Jones. After it has ended, “all the smog had lifted, and more stars / Than he knew what to do with filled the sky” (ll. 16–17). Though the view prompts him to “mutter,” “Looks beautiful tonight” (l. 20), he then raised his voice: Eurwen, get moving, do. You think I want to hang round here all night? Free over the week-end, are you? I’m not; I’m boozing with the boys on Saturday, Sunday’s the club ... All right, then – never. (ll. 21–5) In essence, each poem inverts the principles of romantic love poetry. Evans does not work in concert with nature and the seasons but, as in the four-line poem “Aldport (Mystery Tour),” struggles against it: Hearing how tourists, dazed with reverence, Look through sunglasses at the Parthenon, Dai thought of that cold night outside the Gents When he touched Dilys up with his gloves on. While the winter cold in this poem prevents Evans from freely indulging his sexual urges, nature has “got all the cards” (l. 13) in “St. Asaph’s.” In summer, the leaves of a chestnut tree impede Evans’ view of schoolgirls, while the girls’ thick coats render the barren branches meaningless in winter. In the final quatrain, the narrator offers encouragement to Evans: “you still know the bloody leaf / From bole or blossom, dancer from the dance,” so there is “Hope for you yet, then” (ll. 15–16). By advising him to use his cunning to work around nature, the narrative voice proves to be in collusion with Evans, just as it often is with the protagonists in Amis’s early novels. When nature is not an impediment to sexual pleasure, it is a nonfactor. “Llansili Beach” opens with Evans relaxing on the sand. “Inside a minute / A two-piece with a fair lot in it / Rolls up between him and the sea” (ll. 5–7). Predictably, Evans turns his attention from the ocean to the woman. He proceeds to offer her a cigarette because “No heartfelt gaze’ll satisfy / A real romantic like our Dai; / Wouldn’t be natural for a bloke” (ll. 17–19). Amis’s satirical use of “romantic” suggests that



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 113

poets like Keats were no different from Evans in their sexual appetites, though their ability to imaginatively depict love disguises animal desire. Evans behaves naturally, meaning that he is true to his nature and wholly uninhibited, when he ogles women through his glasses “four-eyed and unashamed” (l. 15), and propositions women with increasing frequency to compensate for his diminishing “visual range” (l. 22). The title of the poem sequence offers further evidence of Amis’s antiromantic agenda. The Evans country refers to the establishments and locales that he frequents to indulge his pleasures – his sexual hunting grounds – and subsequent word choice reinforces the idea of hero as predator, while reminding us that his behaviour is instinctive and therefore natural. In the sequence’s opening poem, the narrator recalls the time Evans “slunk” back from a weekend away (l. 11); in “Langwell,” he retreats to his “den” (l. 21); he pushes his glasses onto his “snout” (l. 10) in “Llansili Beach”; and in the final poem, he is “In like a whippet” (l. 21) for his “fearsome [adulterous] thrash” (l. 22). At other times, instead of accentuating Evans’ wolfish behaviour, Amis depicts him as a human hunter. In “St. Asaph’s” Evans looks out the window at schoolgirls but “A chestnut tree stands in [his] line of sight” (l. 1). He then “squints” (l. 4) and “spot[s] / Bunches of overcoats quite clear” (ll. 9–10). Critics have viewed Amis’s poetic achievement in The Evans Country from various perspectives. William Pritchard thinks that Amis moves beyond satire and “acts instead as a true witness to love, even Evans’s love, by measuring, thus celebrating it in verse” (1994, 79). Jacobs considered the poems a record, if not a celebration, of the drabness of post-war Swansea (1995, 133), while Ian Hamilton calls the poems “a group of bawdy cameos set in a philistine, lower-middle class South Wales” (12). Zachary Leader places the achievement on a more personal level, as the reader is enticed to enter the world of Dai Evans, and “lower[ed] by the experience” (2006, The Life, 243). Amis apologist John McDermott defended him against Donald Davie,3 who criticized Amis for “refus[ing] to answer questions that need answering” and for the “wretchedly badly written” poems in The Evans Country (1973, 70). Davie, thought McDermott, “misses the expressive intention of what is contrived to appear clumsy in the sequence” (1989, 264). Davie did acknowledge the value of Amis’s other poetry, particularly in its political exploration of the nature of authority (1973, 84).4 But it is not surprising that he should view The Evans Country unfavourably. Both his poetry and criticism are imbued with a strong moral sense and he frequently “invoke[s] the civilising power of urbanity,” as John

114

Kingsley Amis

Lucas notes (2006, 7). Other critics, such as Nicholas Poburko, have been troubled by the thematic focus on rejection in The Evans Country. Evans has little time for social conventions, treating both accepted beauty and romantic love with irony. Thus, his favourite buxom candidate for Miss Glamorgan finishes last, love letters are burned, and each tryst seems to obliterate the one that came before. In discussing “Against Romanticism,” Poburko labels Amis’s poetic stance immature: “There is something adolescent, maybe perverse, in his desire to be strangers with everyone, to walk off, isolated,” noting the “fundamental hopelessness” of the situation (2). The suspicions of Press, Poburko, and Davie that Amis was being disingenuous in celebrating low culture are perhaps well-founded. Press felt equally uneasy about an earlier poem “A Song of Experience,” featuring another version of Dai Evans. The critic disliked the proposition that this poem’s commercial traveller, with his rat-like sexuality, is a surer guide to sexual relationships and to the nature of women than Blake, Lawrence, and Yeats; and that life, as represented by the traveller, is somehow more real than the fantasies of art or the romantic day-dreams of Juliet. Amis’s pose as a bluff, straightforward chap who has cleared his mind of cant is revealed here as a shoddy masquerade unworthy of his intelligence and of his sensibility. (95) The above deserves more serious consideration than the moral objections voiced by Empson and Holbrook cited earlier though, in Amis’s defence, he, like Evans, does not pretend to have answers to teleological questions. What may be seen as moral ambivalence can also be interpreted as maintaining curiosity about all manifestations of human nature. In the final poem in The Evans Country, the protagonist leaves the Bay View, a bar, and “starts reflecting / How much in life he’s never going to know: / All it must mean to really love a woman” (17–19). This reflection leads to the thrash twenty minutes later with the dentist’s wife before he returns to greet his own spouse. Evans has no answers to questions about the nature of love. His lifestyle is his response. And while Amis is suspicious of those, like Keats, who appear to offer answers, he does not necessarily glorify the sexual conquests of his protagonists. Dai Evans’s success with women is continually undercut by the fact that he never appears either happy or content. Similarly, the narrator has no need to criticize the lifestyle of the “dark-eyed traveller” (Amis 1979,



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 115

Collected Poems, l. 2) in “A Song of Experience,” for the truth of what he has accomplished through all of his sexual experience is emphasized by the poem’s final line, in which he “stow[s] his case of samples in the boot” (l.  33). He has sampled widely, but that is all.  When comparing the traveller’s amorous experiences with those of Blake, ­Lawrence, and Yeats in literature, Amis’s wording reminds us he has not experienced love but something so ephemeral as to be almost meaningless: “The inaccessible he laid a hand on, / The heated he refreshed, the cold he warmed” (ll.  13–14). Through these lines, the reader understands that his effect on his lovers is more physical than emotional, and he fades from each woman’s memory with the speed and permanence of the impression of his hands on their skin. One must understand that Amis’s views of life and love had not fundamentally changed in the twenty years that preceded the publication of A Look Round the Estate, but his method of presenting them had. There are great similarities between The Evans Country and a libretto Amis wrote for a Bruce Montgomery opera, Amberley Hall, in 1950, which explores the tripartite relationship between “a lady, her husband and her aspiring lover” (Amis 1991, Memoirs, 74). In the opening stanza, the lover Frederick announces: “Love, said the poets, gives the answer / To all the questions of the dreamer.” He goes on to speak of the emptiness of physical love in a way that encapsulates the spirit of Amis’s Swansea poetry of the 1950s and 1960s: A hunter now of love, rough-riding Full tilt across a neighbour’s holding, Like any hunter, checked by nothing Until the prey is caught, I rode love down, and, the chase ended, Dry-mouthed with hunger, lay and feasted; Then, surfeited, sat up and wondered Where was the truth I sought. (1950, Bodleian, 22) Dai Evans too waxes philosophical after his “thrash” at the end of The Evans Country. Amberley Hall’s second stanza reveals another way of ­ hyllis looking at the relationship between love and the physical world. P asks if love will be able to find her in such a mundane place as “these muffled rooms, above / Terraces thick with weeds,” and answers: “Yes, for Love makes a palace rise / Out of chill p ­ overty, / And in it brings to lovers’ eyes / The form they long to see” (21).

116

Kingsley Amis

Passion is not squelched by poor town planning, and tawdry buildings do not have a reductive effect on love. Surely one of the central points in The Evans Country is that lovers see what they wish to see, in both their partners and their surroundings, and Dai Evans would behave the same way even if the setting changed from Swansea to London. However it is difficult to reconcile “the cool, sardonic mocker of academic stuffiness” in Amis’s fiction and poetry “with the serious teacher of literature struggling against all that debases learning and flatters ignorance” in his pamphleteering (Press 1963, 96). William Pritchard noted another contradiction in Amis’s “chaste and impersonal” delivery (1994, 77) when he read provocative, confrontational poetry. In the eight overtly artistic poems in A Look Round the Estate, Amis’s preference for standing outside the work and observing the world is often apparent. In “The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment,” human existence is evaluated as if it were a “great work” appearing in serial form (l. 1), authored by the Christian God. The narrator, or “this reviewer” (l. 46), passes the following judgment: “the work’s ‘greatness’ is no more than size,  / While the shaping mind, and all that that implies,  / Is on a trivial scale” (ll.  19–21). Two poems consider the attraction of science fiction. The first, called simply “Science Fiction,” wonders whether people do not, perhaps, read the genre because of “the impulse to meet face to face / Our vice and folly shaped into a thing” (ll. 2–3). Things are always changing in science fiction, as in life, though not for the better. The poem concludes: But climates and geographies soon change, Spawning mutations none can quell With Silver sword or necromancer’s ring, Worse than their sires, of wider range, And much more durable. (ll. 14–18) The conclusion drawn by “L’Invitation au Voyage” is that while the wonders of the deep sea may seem appealing, they become tiresome after a while, and cannot compete with the wonder of sex. After detailing all of the intellectual attractions of the ocean research voyage, the narrator says, “Thanks, Captain Nemo, this is always what / I think I want” (ll.  19–20), and confesses that should a single mermaid pass his window he would call for the long-boat and abandon the expedition. The poem is somewhat disingenuous because it presents a false dilemma. Amis himself never had to make a choice between writing and women;



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 117

he was always able to enjoy both. But its hedonistic tone matches that of The Evans Country. “On a Portrait of Mme Rimsky-Korsakov” is also problematic, though for a different reason. As the poet looks at a portrait of the great composer’s wife he imagines her Serene, not as a prize for conflict won. But mark of never having had to fight. Needing no mind, because too beautiful, She sat embodying her unconcern For all charades of love or symbolism. (ll. 1–5) While the beautiful wife is having her portrait painted, her husband is busy working and, after comparing her beauty favourably with that of the famed Oxford model Jane Morris, Amis concludes: “The Snow Maiden and the rest of the stuff / Attain the permanence of print, wax, and / Footnotes in treatises on orchestration” (ll. 14–16). Perhaps the message is that without doing anything but sitting still, Nadezhda Purgold, the wife of Rimsky-Korsakov, attained artistic immortal­ ity. This conclusion can only be reached by ignoring the fact that she was an accomplished musician in her own right, first learning piano from Mussorgsky’s teacher, then studying composition at the St Petersburg Conservatory (Mussorgsky 1947, 106). One can appreciate Amis’s point – that the power exerted by great physical beauty can make art seem insignificant – but in order to make the situation fit the argument Nadezhda Purgold is metamorphosed into a mindless woman with no concern for art. “A Chromatic Passing-Note” offers another jaded commentary on romanticism, as the narrator recalls sneering at the clarinet part in Franck’s Symphony in D Minor in his youth, then realizing some time later that the motif “went to show that real love was found / At the far end of the right country lane” (ll.  5–6). Amis’s objections to Franck’s music resemble those made to Keats’ poetry, for he thinks that the composer offered “buffer only, syrup, crutch” (l. 11), instead of “a preview of  / The world, action in art, a paradigm” (ll.  8–9). While he “got a laugh” at age fifteen for his musical appraisal of “That slimy tune” (l. 1), the poet now realizes: “‘Slimy’ was a snarl of disappointment” (l. 12). The poem is highly effective in showing how one’s reaction to a piece of music can change over time. It also shows Amis, or the narrative voice, rejecting another artist – like Dylan Thomas and William Empson – for

118

Kingsley Amis

leading him astray in his youth. Though this type of unilateral attack on artistic predecessors clarifies Amis’s own literary goals, it was becoming repetitious by the end of the 1960s, and this in part explains why he would write some novels that do not deal directly with art while others become radically different genre experiments. Not long after the publication of A Look Round the Estate Amis would create his first positive artistic model in the collaborative novel The Egyptologists, as shall be examined, and this signals a rethinking of the role of art and artists in society. Another problematic aspect in several poems is the passivity with which poet and narrator view the world. “New Approach Needed” criticizes Jesus Christ for not staying around long enough to experience love, marriage, and fatherhood. He was therefore nothing more than a “royal tourist” (l. 20), and not a “resident witness” (l. 19). Amis’s use of the term “witness” is revealing, for the contrast underscores the importance of having direct knowledge; and yet a witness differs from a participant in the level of his or her engagement. In other poems in the collection, such as “Coming of Age,” the narrator never seems fully engaged with his fellows, with his efforts to appear at ease socially making him a “spiritual secret agent” (l. 2) or a “spy.” A.E. Housman, a poet Amis revered,5 is invoked in “A.E.H.” to convey the image of the poet as recorder of death and heroism, “who, unbloodied, / Weeps with fury, not from pain” (ll. 7–8). One cannot help but be struck by the incongruity of Amis criticizing Christ for his second-hand knowledge of the world while in so many of his poems the narrator places a deliberate distance between himself and the world. While problems in Amis’s artistic vision become evident in his poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, one ought not to overlook his literary achievements. In The Evans Country he used the provincial aesthetic to anticipate something like what would become known as postmodernism. When the poet observes the ugliness of his flawed world he generally withholds moral comment. In fact, he often delights in ugliness, as the depictions of the natural world and architecture clearly indicate.6 Although the significance of architecture for Amis has received scant critical attention, his writing career began and ended with commentaries on ugly buildings. His collaborative novel fragment, “Who Else Is Rank,” begins thus: “The house was large with sharp corners like a box of child’s bricks. There was a one-sided portico with glass to which no architect had ever given his consent” (HEHL). In 1995, the last year of his life, Amis wrote an essay/letter to the president of The Royal Institute of



Witnesses, Moral Provocateurs, and The Evans Country 119

British Architects in which he recalled a conversation with an institute member. Amis launches his letter with surprising bluntness: I would blow up this building as thoroughly and noisily as possible, in protest not at its design but at its occupants, whom I would allow a bare minimum of warning before the detonation. During an irritatingly lavish and convivial dinner there some time ago, one of them countered my attack on his profession by first eliciting my hearty agreement that at most only one new novel in a hundred was worth reading, and then asking rhetorically why I should expect new buildings to be any different. (HEHL) Amis replied that architects do not possess “the artist’s blessed ability to destroy his mistakes utterly and forthwith” (HEHL). Architectural mistakes, unfortunately, remain in our lives much longer than literary ones. Amis advocates an ironic celebration of architectural ugliness for the same reasons that the postmodern text Learning from Las Vegas argues against the modern architectural preference for “revolutionary, utopian, and puristic” principles: because one must accept “existing conditions,” even if they are aesthetically distasteful (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1972, 1). Dai Evans not only accepts his environment, but makes it his accomplice. At the beginning of Learning from Las Vegas, the authors announce: “Just as an analysis of the structure of a Gothic cathedral need not include a debate on the morality of medieval religion, so Las Vegas’s values are not questioned here” (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1). Connections can be made without drawing moral conclusions. Thus, where the hero awaits his lover, the buildings are “dirty” and “grimy” in The Evans Country’s opening poem; “Tall hotels ablaze with neon” in “Brynbwrla” (l. 15) hold more interest for Evans than the chapel; and a beauty contest, in which Evans’s view of female beauty is revealed as the minority one, is held in the Casino Ballroom in “Maunders.” Even if the content of this poetry sequence is sordid, and the disappointingly unambitious architecture in post-war Swansea matches Evans’s lack of romantic idealism, the poems are never slackly or carelessly written. Brian Shaffer has noted the “solid architecture” of Lucky Jim’s plot in the analogy made between Dixon’s relationship with ­Margaret and his connection to the university (2006, 44), and similar thematic parallels and careful, suggestive word choice exist in the best of Amis’s poetry.

120

Kingsley Amis

While his concern for artful creation is evident in The Evans Country, a strong interest in the social role of the artist and the connections between writers, artists, musicians, and the general public does not emerge until the novel Girl, 20 (1971). This interest is absent from most of his early poetry, as he criticizes the surrounding world but never conceives of himself as a participant capable of instigating change. When W.S. Merwin reviewed Amis’s A Case of Samples he admitted to finding something off-putting in both the serious and the comic pieces. The poems of “generalized intellectual statement,” writes Merwin, “sometimes sound to me like a reedy clergyman expounding calculus; they attempt Empson’s intellectual weight and complexity without displaying his power of mind and his ability to haunt one with experience.” He identifies “a tendency to be tricksy” in the comic poems, though “for the most part they are enviable: hard, delightful and as funny on the third reading as on the first” (Merwin 1957, 33). This assessment is fair, and it can also be applied to novels such as One Fat Englishman and Take a Girl Like You. For critics and readers sympathetic to Amis’s type of writing, this “tricksy” tendency may be a positive attribute; indeed, Paul Fussell claims that Amis’s early poetry is inferior to his later work because it lacks the “mocking, self-critical sardonic ‘What About You?’ vein” (170). In sum, Amis’s best poetry, marked by several of the poems in A Look Round the Estate, resembles his early fiction in its provincialism, sardonic tone, and tendency to non-constructively criticize. This is not surprising, since Philip Larkin’s influence had led Amis to develop this narrative voice. As a poet, Larkin too was primarily provincial in outlook and, as Amis’s ideal reader, he had encouraged his friend to use the bantering, humorous tone of his letters as a narrative device. He also told Amis to “sod up the romantic business actively,” which Zachary Leader interpreted to mean that he should make Lucky Jim “more like a romance, with proper dragons and witches” (Leader 2006, “I Want More Than My Share,” 13). This Amis did, and he followed the formula with great success in his first five novels, but to widen his artistic vision he needed change. In the next three novels, beginning with The Egyptologists, he would write for two new ideal readers, Robert Conquest and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and the influence exerted by both is revealed in the artistic subtexts.

8 New Reasons to Write: Entertainment and the Inner Audience in The Egyptologists, The Anti-Death League, and I Want It Now the egyptologists

(1965)

Through this novel, Amis discovered the possibilities of writing less serious literature for financial gain and without concern for the work’s literary status. The book is “an entertainment,” to borrow Graham Greene’s terminology;1 John McDermott agreed, characterizing the novel as “light-hearted” and “not principally concerned with serious moral discussion” (1989, 182). This perhaps explains why one of Amis’s more ardent defenders, Dale Salwak, ignored The Egyptologists, calling it “light, crassly commercial, and of little consequence to the Amis canon,” notable for the absence of “Amisian touches” (1992, 142). Zachary Leader also thought that the frequent failed attempts at comedy result in a “book [that] does its authors no favours” (2006, The Life, 539). Although most of The Egyptologists was written by Robert Conquest, with Amis adding the plot, several female characters, and a television scene,2 it is significant in relation to the development of antimodels, for it is perhaps the only novel in which a positive artistic model appears. Furthermore, if That Uncertain Feeling was in part an attempt to separate Amis’s creative world from Larkin’s, The Egyptologists represents a personal distancing from Larkin and the two would correspond with decreasing frequency. The principal themes in the novel were of more interest to Conquest than to Larkin, indicating that the latter had been supplanted as Amis’s ideal reader. The Egyptologists is unique in Amis’s literary oeuvre for the presence of an artistic model that represents the positive side of academia. Dr Pearson uses logic to pierce the facade of the Metropolitan Egyptological Society, yet is defeated in a televised debate with the phony

122

Kingsley Amis

­ rofessor Asimov in such a way that Amis, who had just resigned from P his own teaching post at Cambridge University, succeeds in showing that (even legitimate) academic knowledge is less compelling than imagination. The production of art does not feature in the plot and there are no antimodels in the novel, though L.S. Caton’s name is used for a projected lecture at the Egyptological Society. A closer look at Caton’s invocation in The Egyptologists also suggests that for Amis the friendship with Conquest had at least temporarily supplanted the one with Larkin in terms of personal and creative significance. The chapter entitled “Their Finest Hour,” which features the televised Egyptology debate, was Amis’s primary contribution to the novel and through it he considers antimodels from a slightly different perspective. Because the Egyptological Society is only an elaborate cover for adulterers, Article 3 of its bylaws states that “No member shall have voluntary contact with any person known to possess any genuine Egyptological knowledge” (34). The members want their wives to think they are conducting learned discussions while they drink and carouse with other women; thus, the infiltration of legitimate Egyptologists into the society is feared because of their potential for revealing the society as fraudulent. The artistic model, Dr Pearson of London University, is a professional Egyptologist and, aside from his youth, which appears incongruous with his occupational gravity, there is little to hold against him. The seriousness with which he approaches Egyptology is evidenced by the change in his expression from “slightly resentful boredom to flatly unbelieving fury” when the television presenter launches the debate by mentioning Elizabeth Taylor’s “spectacular film” Cleopatra. He possesses a representatively Amisian sensibility, for he is intelligent, irritated by foolishness, and has an acerbic sense of humour. Significantly, he has inherited none of the negative traits of the antimodels in Amis’s previous novels. The way in which he debunks a theory advanced by Mordle even recalls Jim Dixon’s rejection of Merrie England. The only Society member “hooked on Ancient Egypt,” Mordle has been sneaking into the Society’s offices at night to do research (146), but his grasp of Egyptology is tenuous at best. Mordle begins to suggest that the racial roots of Egyptology lie in Africa rather than the Middle East until Pearson interrupts: “‘Oh, that old rubbish,’ he said in a gentle but penetrating voice. ‘That was all cleared up by about 1900. You’re like someone fiercely maintaining that heavier-than-air flight is possible’” (176). Pearson’s wit and sarcasm are the author’s, which tells us that Amis’s allegiances to high art and entertainment were split. He had left Cambridge and renounced academia,



New Reasons to Write 123

but continued to take artistic creation in all its forms seriously. While he clearly respects Pearson’s intelligence and derives pleasure from having him pierce the bluff and fallacious arguments of the adulterers who pass as Egyptologists – for Amis too enjoyed unmasking pretenders and, indeed, considered it necessary in order to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate artists – he also liked to indulge the laddish tendency of ridiculing overly serious writers and academics. The television discussion is a carefully orchestrated, farcical deception that hints at a shift in Amis away from meritocratic principles towards the endorsement of idiosyncratic individualism. On the surface, the scene is a recognizable set piece. In his first two novels, Amis had Jim Dixon go to great trouble to cover up singed bed sheets and John Lewis hide in a broom closet, impersonate a plumber, and dress up as a Welshwoman to escape from the Gruffydd-Williamses’ house. Dixon fears the discovery of the bed sheets will jeopardize his chances of securing a permanent post at the university. He wants to make a good impression, or at least stay out of trouble, during the musical weekend, and suspects that a drunk who smokes in bed in his professor’s home will probably not be rewarded with a contract extension. Lewis’s deception is also the product of professional anxiety. If caught in the Gruffydd-Williamses’ house alone with the master’s wife, he fears that any chance of a library promotion will disappear. Both Dixon’s and Lewis’s fears are exaggerated. They have been having a bit of fun and gone too far, but it would be best if they dealt with their situations honestly. Instead they panic, and the reader understands that their fear is the product of youth and a lack of social polish. In contrast to these bumbling young heroes, the amateur Egyptologists are veterans in deception. Their attempts at subterfuge are designed to preserve the status quo, not to facilitate change. They are neither underdogs nor meritocrats, but comfortable married members of the uppermiddle class determined to enjoy more than is their sexual due. Through the televised Egyptology discussion, Amis places the reader in the awk­ issatisfaction with both sides and, ward position of experiencing mild d therefore, being unable to support either. Pearson is a genuine scholar who recognizes that the Egyptological Society is a sham and he is allowed several jokes at its expense. If the reader is tempted to censure the Society members for their pride and lack of forethought, he or she may also feel a thrill at the idea of bluster stymieing a pompous academic on national television. Ultimately, Pearson fails to gain the reader’s sympathies because he does not seem to be much fun. Amis effectively leads the

124

Kingsley Amis

reader towards the conclusion that, when the pleasure derived from the acquisition of arcane knowledge is compared with the pleasure of illicit sex, it is hard to imagine anyone preferring the former to the latter. However, the Society’s victory over Pearson is hollow because Amis could never wholly endorse the defeat of common sense and learning. He is ambivalent in artistic matters, as the figure of L.S. Caton shows. Although Caton always avoids sanction, he also never gets what he wants. John Lewis refuses his request for books on South America; ­Patrick Standish vetoes his petition to speak; and, in The Anti-Death League, he is killed before he can deliver a lecture. Evasion tactics are, after all, little more than entertaining diversions or, in Caton’s case, stays of execution. Similarly, the extreme measure of introducing a distinguished (but phony) expert in Egyptology helps to postpone defeat, as Professor Asimov of the University of Krakow offers the names of leading researchers unknown to Pearson and circumvents any attempts by the genuine Egyptologist to offer counter-arguments. The plot is ingenious, and it works because the audience is ignorant of the subject, Egyptology, and unable to tell the difference between legitimate and fake academics. However the inevitable post-broadcast confirmation that Asimov does not exist will spawn questions about the Society’s legitimacy. Since the attraction of unwanted publicity would only force the members to find even more ingenious methods of fooling their wives and an already suspicious general public, they agree to disband. Amis had speculated in his BLitt thesis that once a writer becomes accomplished he or she no longer needs an inner audience. This was merely speculation, and until the mid-1960s his lingering concern for the reaction of Larkin and literary critics is apparent in the pattern he formed of embedding references to art or literature in an entertaining story. The Egyptologists, however, was principally an entertainment and, aside from the chapter headings – quotations from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – concern for art is negligible. Amis was not trying to prove anything artistically in the novel except that he thought academics ought to enjoy life a little more. While Philip Gardner has called the novel a “sympathetic joke at the expense of the whole ‘clubman’ mentality” (1981, 133), it can also be seen as a joke intended to exclude Larkin from Amis’s inner circle. Larkin was not a clubman, and he was a confirmed bachelor. Speculations on the Communist threat, discussions of science fiction, and the deception of one’s wife were all pursuits that interested Amis and Conquest much more than they did Larkin.



New Reasons to Write 125

The puller of faces who is subject to fits of social embarrassment and is uncomfortable around attractive women – a figure with whom Larkin could relate – is conspicuously absent from the Egyptological Society, a group of serial adulterers united “in the cause of virism” (165). ­Zachary Leader notes that two of the novel’s central characters, the Society’s secretary and treasurer, seem to have been based on Conquest and Amis respectively, and that Larkin, in his correspondence, expressed an awareness of the resemblance (2006, The Life, 539). When it is announced early in the novel that the program for 21 May will feature Professor L. Stone Caton (43), the reader does not yet understand that no actual papers are delivered at the Society’s meetings, which makes it retrospectively amusing that government security officials suspect the Society and Caton of participating in a Russian plutonium plot (44). There is no firm evidence to show who introduced Caton into The Egyptologists, though it was probably Conquest, since the character is first mentioned in an early section that Amis did not write. Caton’s role is symbolically significant and ironic because the joke on publisher R.A. Caton that was shared between Amis and Larkin has been co-opted by Conquest-Amis, who drew on Conquest’s expertise in Sovietology to create Caton’s role in the novel. While the world shared by Amis and Larkin was typified by explosive verbal humour and creative jealousy towards each other and writers thought to be enjoying undue popularity, Amis’s friendship with Conquest revolved primarily around sexual and political conspiracy. It was precisely because Amis’s private behaviour in the late 1950s and early 1960s was reprehensible that he needed a friend like Conquest to act as an accomplice. Amis borrowed his London apartments for not infrequent affairs and even had his friend write letters and make phone calls to provide him with alibis.3 ­Conquest’s single attempt to draw Larkin into the world of sexual conspiracy through a practical joke failed miserably, as Amis recounted in Memoirs. Amis himself had been victimized by Conquest once, receiving orders for an army posting in Malaya. This gave him a “nasty turn,” though Larkin’s suffering was considerably longer and greater when Conquest sent him “A letter on government paper, as from the Vice Squad, Scotland Yard,” summoning him to testify in an obscenity trial. “No decision,” recalled Amis, “had been taken as to whether to prosecute Larkin as well,” presumably for the poet’s collection of pornography. The incident is amusing and perhaps distorted in Amis’s remembrance,4 but Larkin’s reaction to

126

Kingsley Amis

the prank shows that the worlds of Amis-Larkin and Amis-Conquest were ­essentially ­irreconcilable. Horrified by the court summons, Larkin spent the day hiding in his solicitor’s office then, once he realized it was a prank, he sent Bob his £10 bill for taking up the man’s time. Bob paid up, of course. His manner showed no remorse when he discussed the incident with me. The solicitor should have known, or soon found out, that the [Obscene Publications] Act and the cases were fictitious, he said. I suppose I said to myself that I could see the funny side, and then rather stiffly that it would never have done if we had all been built the same. (145) Though Amis appears to sympathize with Larkin, he also reveals the proper way of taking a joke, for he too had been troubled by the arrival of his military summons, but his concern “hardly outlasted a glance at the contents” (145). Ironically, it was Larkin’s inability to think under pressure and to improvise – the qualities most highly prized in The Egyptologists – that kept him on the outside looking in at the bad boys, Amis and Conquest.5 In the composition of The Egyptologists, the roles of writer and editor that were divided between Amis and Larkin in Lucky Jim were shifted to Amis and Conquest, and reversed. Amis edited Conquest’s draft and provided basic instruction in the writing of a novel. Amis’s lack of faith in his co-author’s creative abilities recalls his criticism of Bruce M ­ ontgomery’s detective novels.6 Amis liked Conquest’s premise, though, and as long as he was not required to discuss the project in person he was not averse to participating. The first mention of The Egyptologists in Amis’s correspondence comes in a 30 July 1958 letter to Larkin, in which he recalls seeing Conquest in London: “Bob ­Conquest was in evidence, telling me you have been around and also bits of his forthcoming two novels. One of them, the Egyptology one, sounds as if it would be quite good if someone other than Bob were doing it” (2001, 540). Over five years later, on 31 December 1963, Amis related to Larkin some of the pitfalls of collaboration. First, Conquest relished recounting plots in great detail and though “Working on the text will be all right, it’s the thought of ‘discussing’ it with him that daunts me slightly.” Conquest’s preference for announcing, rather than discussing, plans also worried Amis. In the same letter, he characterized the problem as a “quirk of his whereby, when one has at last succeeding [sic] in interrupting him to contest point A,



New Reasons to Write 127

he has moved on meantime to telling you point B. Still,” Amis added prophetically, “it’s the money” (644). Soon after ­publication, Richard Attenborough purchased the film rights to the novel for £25,000 and the co-authors split the money, though the film was never made (Jacobs 1995, 268). Thus, financial gain and friendship were the reasons Amis collaborated, and not a respect for Conquest’s literary talents. Since discussions of Lucky Jim in draft form had been endless and Amis had delighted in explaining the plot and potential ideas, The Egyptologists may be seen as a compositional inversion of Lucky Jim. Conquest replaces Larkin and Amis usurps the role of editor, successfully turning a dull manuscript into a relatively entertaining one. The positive reception and sales of the novel did not encourage Amis to collaborate again, but he would continue to write occasional entertainments in between serious literary projects. Larkin, meanwhile, moved in the opposite creative direction, the volume of his published verse diminishing as he became reluctant to put anything less than perfect before the public. The mocking of academia in The Egyptologists has been quite accurately read as Amis’s farewell to the university world, since his career as a lecturer ended in 1963 when he gave up a fellowship at Peterhouse, ­Cambridge.7 Eric Jacobs interpreted the resignation as an opportunity for Amis to indulge his interest in less serious forms of writing: “He could have some fun without worrying what effect it would have on his chances of promotion or his reputation as an academic of the required weight and substance” (1995, 267). Amis’s principal complaint in looking back on his time at Cambridge was that he did not enjoy himself as much as he had wanted. In Memoirs, the chapter on Cambridge primarily comprises vignettes of forgettable dinner parties and social engagements, a call from a landlady about a drunken student, and the time consumed by internal politicking. The only part of the academic world that Amis confessed to missing was, oddly, the socially sanctioned discussion of literature with students, who occasionally “take your point almost before you have formulated it yourself” (1991, 227). He clearly enjoyed these intellectual exchanges, and though he has often been accused of philistinism, it was the inauthentic, self-aggrandizing aspect of higher learning that was anathema to him. His remark, after visiting Larkin’s Leicester University senior common room, that someone “ought to do something about this” (Amis 1979, “Writing and warning,” 262), has generally been seen as a reference to the potential for using the academic world as the fictional material, but it is also a critique of academic vapidity. Not only did the scene in the senior common room strike him as ­incongruous or

128

Kingsley Amis

bizarre but also he felt something was wrong in the university world and needed to be remedied. In The Egyptologists, the emptiness of the academy is embodied in L. Stone Caton’s undelivered lecture. The president calls Caton a “Brilliant fellow, evidently – I don’t know him at all myself – but a bit unreliable by all accounts. Hope he turns up, or I shall have a miserable evening” (158). Caton, of course, does not turn up because he does not exist, but he is the pretext for an evening without the wives. Therefore, the planned lecture is inauthentic because it does not exist, symbolizing all university lectures devoid of content delivered to indifferent audiences. Interestingly, The Egyptologists is the only novel in which Caton is truly a fiction. In previous novels, he had always been a living nuisance, requesting inconvenient favours from afar or blatantly using the central characters. However, in this collaboration he has been invented by the characters themselves, which symbolically shows that the legend of Caton had exceeded the author’s control. It is as though the very name “Caton” has become a byword for dodging responsibility. The inauthenticity of the Metropolitan Egyptological Society, then, makes it increasingly difficult to maintain and is the ultimate cause of its destruction. Similarly, Jim Dixon’s inability to find an authentic voice or material for his Merrie England address ends his university career. Many of the academics and students depicted in Lucky Jim are bored by research and study, but feign interest to appease colleagues or professors. In The Egyptologists, Amis took the incongruous scene from the Leicester University senior common room out of the university setting, and placed it in the context of a club room behind closed doors. He challenges the reader to distinguish between a legitimate, socially sanctioned academic society full of phonies, and a phony one in which everyone behaves authentically by doing as they please. The Society’s rule that none of its members may discuss Egyptology is a cutting satire of academics who are not averse to meeting with colleagues for drinks but are loath to listen to one another’s theories and research results. Although Amis’s contribution to The Egyptologists was limited, the introduction of Dr Pearson hints at the further development of artistic antimodels in his later fiction. He would remain intransigent in passing judgment on art as either good or bad, but was losing interest in the antimodel as a one-dimensional figure of mockery. He had already tried to show in the character of Wulfstan Strether that bad artists can be good people, and his concern for humanizing the antimodels becomes increasingly apparent in his post-1970 novels.



New Reasons to Write 129 t h e a n t i - d e at h l e ag u e

(1967)

In this novel Amis disposed of L.S. Caton and wrote primarily for the approval of another member of his inner audience, Elizabeth Jane ­Howard. He recycled themes and set pieces from earlier works, and introduced an important narrative innovation that would enable him to expand the role of antimodels in subsequent explicitly artistic works. In each of his novels, with the exception of the co-authored The Egyptologists, the authorial voice had been linked with that of the protagonist. However, in The Anti-Death League the character whose manias, temperament, and general approach to life most closely resemble the author’s is Max Hunter and he is neither a version of Kingsley Amis nor the novel’s central character. This was important for his development as a writer8 because it allowed him to provide competing perspectives, thereby maintaining balance, and it leads directly to the creation of un-Amisian narrators and protagonists. His most ambitious novel, the unpublished fragment Difficulties with Girls, features a homosexual narrator and this novel’s roots are found in the character of Hunter.9 Amis invokes another formative influence, G.K. Chesterton, to launch a discussion of the mortal condition and time. Psychiatric and ecclesiastic shams, first introduced in The Anti-Death League, recur in Amis’s later novels. They continue the legacy of Ned Welch and Gareth Probert while facilitating a discussion of time in all its forms: past, present, and future. In the novel’s first scene Amis prepares the reader for an argument against the Christian God and mortality by showing a world in which the natural, human, technological, and theological realms are at odds. Disharmony foreshadows later trouble and points to the author’s concern for time. On the opening page a cat hunts baby birds; James Churchill falls in love with Catherine Casement; and a jet aircraft passes overhead, casting a dark shadow. According to the military chaplain, Ayscue, this shadow lends a “blank and frightened” expression to Catherine’s face (10), which is not surprising since she is recovering from a nervous breakdown. This entangling of events and causes continues throughout the novel. When Catherine develops a cancerous lump in her breast, Churchill realizes that “time has become tremendously important” (202) and tries to step outside of it by entering a self-induced catatonic state during her operation. No one in the novel can explain suffering, and religion provides little consolation. Ayscue has lost his faith and epistemological issues interest him less than researching eighteenth-century music.10

130

Kingsley Amis

When one is faced with the cruelty of the natural world, in which cats lie in wait for baby birds and people are killed in random accidents or by sudden, unexpected illnesses, there ought to be some way of effectively dealing with these twists in fate. None of the central characters believes in God, though the divine is sometimes invoked as a shadowy, malicious figure to be blamed for misfortune. Aside from Churchill’s attempt to retreat from the world by refusing to move or speak,11 alcohol and sex are the more common temporary solutions to unhappiness that are resorted to in the novel. Max Hunter stays drunk all the time to avoid thinking, while Lady Lucy Hazell sleeps with every man who wants her. For both, overindulgence is a means of eradicating negative memories; through the repetition of a single process, they attempt to cheat time, by forcing it to move in a circular rather than linear fashion. Just as Amis did with Swinburne and Waugh in One Fat Englishman, he uses a textual situation in The Anti-Death League to invite comparison between his own ideology and that of another early influence. In 1971 he would characterize The Man Who Was Thursday as “the first grown-up novel I remember reading outside school” and describe ­Chesterton’s passing in 1936 as “the first total stranger’s death that meant anything to me personally” (Amis 1990, The Amis Collection, 43). There is little doubt that he had Chesterton in mind when he wrote The Anti-Death League, for it inverts what he subsequently called the message of The Man Who Was Thursday: that life is “a bewildering but good-natured and all-reconciling joke” (1990, 45). Furthermore, Amis thought that Chesterton “saw destructive forces in our society that would be nothing but destructive” (46); the same forces dominate The Anti-Death League, which offers a variation on Chesterton’s metaphoric depiction of the connection between God and humanity. In the Father Brown story, “The Queer Feet,” God is said to catch a sinner “with an unseen hook and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread” ­(Chesterton 1935, 62). Amis had James Churchill describe a broad horizontal disc, vague and granular at the periphery, thickening towards the middle. Through the exact center a taut vertical thread ran both ways to mathematical infinity. You entered the node, or it moved across you, until you arrived at the thread. Thereafter, instead of moving or seeming to move on towards the farther edge of the disc, you could only move up or down the thread. (229–30)



New Reasons to Write 131

Churchill thinks that the alcoholic Hunter and oversexed Lucy are at the disc’s periphery while he and Catherine, having found true love, have arrived at the centre and are now “on the thread” (230). While one’s connection to the thread represents the key to human happiness in both Chesterton’s and Amis’s interpretations, in The Anti-Death League we must each make our own way towards the disc’s centre. Even if one reaches the goal, movement up or down the thread, in the direction of happiness or misery, is largely a matter of luck and God does not intervene to save those who fall into despair. The presence in the novel of three set pieces recycled from previous novels could be seen as evidence that Amis had begun repeating himself, but alterations in narrative voice and perspective allow the continued use of such pieces, and would enable him to express his artistic ideas through more complex antimodels after 1970. First, much of the novel’s situation is borrowed from the unpublished collaborative novel fragment “Who Else Is Rank.” In his contribution, Amis had satirized military life through Francis Archer, an intellectual, sensitive soldier suspected of experimenting with homosexuality at Oxford.12 Similarly, neither the romantic Churchill nor the alcoholic homosexual Hunter fits the army mould, and the sense of desperation in Archer’s search for romantic happiness is mirrored in Churchill’s all-consuming love affair with ­Catherine Casement. Second, the rebellious spirit of The Anti-Death League is borrowed from Lucky Jim and encapsulated in a semi-literate poem entitled “To a Baby Born Without Limbs,” submitted anonymously by Hunter to a new army magazine. Written from the point of view of a malevolent Christian God threatening humanity with disease and death, the form of the poem resembles Jim Dixon’s threatening letter to his colleague Johns. Dixon and Hunter both use orthographical errors to conceal their identities. Dixon had written: “This is just to let you no that I no what you are up to” (153), while Hunter begins: “This is just to show you whose boss around here” (136). The deliberate spelling and punctuation mistakes do not fool Johns, who immediately suspects Dixon, with whom he is on bad terms. Hunter, meanwhile, is tripped up by inconsistencies in tone. His superior officer Jagger remarks: “Now that’s odd, you see. For every twenty people who can spell there’s hardly one who can punctuate. Pretty well everyone who can punctuate can spell as a matter of course. So our man isn’t really semi-illiterate, he’s just pretending to be” (292). Both letters are symbolic acts of rebellion. Dixon does not wish to become a respectable but lifeless academic like Ned Welch, and he sabotages his own career by indulging in juvenile mischief directed

132

Kingsley Amis

against overly serious colleagues. On the other hand, Hunter is rebelling against human suffering. He thinks: “You can’t let things like this go sliding past without any kind of remark, as if nobody noticed or cared. It won’t do” (293). The third key element in The Anti-Death League that has its roots in an earlier novel is the league itself, which is a modified version of the Egyptological Society. All of the Egyptologists are married men in need of an official excuse to carry on extra-marital affairs. By committing adultery, they break the rules of the marriage contract into which they have each entered; in other words entrance to the league is contingent upon breaching a previous contract. The Anti-Death League is established by Max Hunter to protest “the inflictions of death on the innocent” (191) and its members are recruited from the military. Thus, membership in the league is itself a conflict of interests for it requires soldiers to refuse to participate in killing. In Amis’s first five novels the central character and narrator are closely linked to the authorial voice, but the author began the process of dissociating himself from his characters in The Anti-Death League. By doing so, he could freely recycle scenes and situations from previous novels and make them seem original for, while elements in the story may have been the same, the point of view had changed. He had shown in I Like It Here that the way the story is told can be more important than the story itself, and he conducts another experiment in perspective through Max Hunter, who behaves in typical Amisian fashion. His mischievous behaviour is Dixonesque and, while Jim Dixon was not Kingsley Amis, Amis clearly liked and sympathized with his hero. Hunter, on the other hand, is more like Roger Micheldene than Dixon: an exaggeration of a splinter from Amis’s personality, in whom drinking becomes acute alcoholism, an interest in homosexuality becomes a personal sexual policy, and impatience with certain varieties of music and literature is manifested in the virulent rejection of most artistic forms. Hunter’s literary proposal to rid the world of worthless writing by sending all authors whose books sell less than a million copies to prison (150) is intended as a joke, but it is an extension of the point Amis made in his BLitt thesis that bad writers should not be given encouragement, and that sales figures are an accurate measure of literary success. While certain aspects of Amis’s personality are taken to the extreme in Hunter, the author makes sure to distinguish himself from the fictional character by making him homosexual and not the novel’s protagonist. The creation of characters such as Hunter prepares us for the portrayal in later novels of horrible art­ nqualifiedly ists who are given at least one trait that Amis considered u



New Reasons to Write 133

­positive. Girl, 20’s composer Roy Vandervane would inherit verbal ingenuity; Anna Danilova, the poet in The Russian Girl, beauty; and professional Welshman Alun Weaver in The Old Devils, wit and insight. Amis prized all these characteristics and their possession alone makes it impossible for the author to condemn the antimodels. The Anti-Death League also anticipates the discussion of dubious psychiatric theories and methods that feature in post-1970 novels such as Jake’s Thing, Stanley and the Women, and Difficulties with Girls. In these works, psychiatric debate supplants artistic discussion, and the figure of the misguided psychiatrist imposing pet t­heories in contravention of common sense becomes another version of the shamming artist. In The Anti-Death League, Dr Best13 is not only misguided but insane, and he attempts to convince his patients that their problems will be solved once they admit their homosexuality. All four of Amis’s psychiatric novels revisit artistic issues dealt with in his pre-1970 novels, including appropriate language usage, the importance of telling one’s own story and accepting responsibility for it, and problems with the publishing industry. i wa n t i t n ow

(1968)

Like The Anti-Death League, this novel depicts the perfection of Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s love along with some of the difficulties they faced before marriage. The use of this relationship as the backdrop for both works is well-documented. With Amis’s sanction, Eric Jacobs labelled I Want It Now “a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth – Prince Ronnie awakens Princess Simon.” Though he maintained that Amis and Howard were “not in the least like Ronnie and Simon,” “the fictitious story of the latter contains a version of the true romance of the former” (1995, 299). Lawrence Graver called the novel another “piquant fairy tale for the ’60s” along with The Anti-Death League, which makes the reader reflect on the “implications” of the tale in lieu of providing satisfaction (in Bell 1998, 136). Richard Bradford followed this line of argument by describing I Want It Now as an “indulgently romanticized version” of Amis and Howard’s love story that parallels Sleeping Beauty (2001, 241). The author’s pre-novel notes support this interpretation, albeit with a measure of Patrick Standish added, for he wrote “sleepg beauty,” and explained that a “chap,” meaning Appleyard, “kissed [Simon] meaning just to bugger off but she awoke” (HEHL). The novel has also been read as an anti-1960s book,14 but from an artistic standpoint Amis was addressing the problem of fame through

134

Kingsley Amis

the struggles between different generations and economic groups. This novel, The Green Man, and The Alteration focus explicitly on time in advocating a plunge into the uncertain future over unnatural attempts to prolong the present or return to the past. In I Want It Now Amis’s determination to write different kinds of fiction is reflected in the lovers’ struggle to break out of the repetitive cycles in which they find themselves caught. Both Ronnie Appleyard and Simon Quick have negative doubles against whom they compete, then disentangle themselves from in order to marry. Simon tells her future husband that they can help “each other not to be as bad as we would be on our own,” and he agrees (204), which recalls John Lewis’s vow at the end of That Uncertain Feeling “to keep trying not to be immoral, and then to keep trying might turn into a habit” (1955, 239). In I Want It Now the appetites of the wealthy for sex, power, and social attention are satirized just as they were in That Uncertain Feeling, but the focus on time and fame in I Like It Here turns the novel into a commentary on the artistic process. Thirty-six year old Ronnie Appleyard aspires to dethrone fifty-three year old Bill Hamer as London’s most famous television talk show host and Appleyard’s discovery of the proper method of attaining his goal – to become acclaimed – supports Amis’s own theory on how to achieve literary fame. Appleyard is often recognized in public and asked, to his irritation, whether he knows Hamer. Metaphorically, then, Amis uses Appleyard to criticize derivative artists who model themselves on a particular artist or adhere to a movement but lack individuality. Simon Quick’s role is to emphasize the importance of developing a distinctive style. She lives in the shadow of Lady Baldock, her domineering and manipulative mother, and when she first meets Appleyard she has no personal identity. She is barefoot and without makeup, money, or personal identification, which suggests that she is stuck outside of time, waiting for life to begin. Her eyes are an indefinable colour, making her simultaneously no one and anyone, a girl available to all but impossible to possess. If she were an artist, nothing in her work would be memorable or recognizable. At the end of the novel, Appleyard gets the girl and improves his professional status by breaking the cycle of copying the master. He appears on Hamer’s talk show and defies Lady ­Baldock, publicly revealing her to be grasping, selfish, and manipulative. In contrast to Hamer’s preferred method of fawning on the rich and powerful, Appleyard follows the Amisian way of directly confronting one’s social and literary superiors. As we have seen, he did this both by invoking early literary influences and by representing writers



New Reasons to Write 135

c­ onsidered ­hateful as antimodels. After Appleyard’s televised confrontation with Lady ­Baldock, her husband decides that it is safe to bless his step-daughter’s union. The lovers are reunited and Appleyard “notice[s] for the first time that there was some very dark blue or purple somewhere in her eyes.” She now looks “precariously grown-up, like a senior schoolgirl in her first thoroughly adult get-up” (203). Through rebellion against models and predecessors, the two central characters forge their own identities. Appleyard’s contribution to the television show helps Simon escape her mother’s influence and it enables him to emerge from Hamer’s shadow. This is borne out by a taxi ride Appleyard takes the day after the decisive television battle. When the driver receives his fare, he says, “‘Thank you, Mr Appleyard,’ and did not go on to ask him if he knew Bill Hamer.” Appleyard considers this “something. Not much, though” (199). It is, however, a definite sign that he has begun to create his own identity, which is the first step towards becoming a legitimate television star. The importance of achieving fame through creation, rather than recreation, is further emphasized in the depiction of architecture. In The Evans Country the narrator warned readers that the ugly town centre in “Aberdarcy: the Main Square” reflected “Permanent tendencies of heart and mind” (l. 17). One such tendency is the recreation of classical Greek architectural styles to make new money appear old. Amis reveals this to be an artistic trick, as impressive outer appearances mask inner emptiness. During a visit to the home of the Greek magnate Vassilikos, Simon tells Appleyard that, aside from “the part where the pictures and the statues and the vases and things are,” the rest of the house is off-limits. Should he attempt to enter a restricted area, a servant “would tell him he’d have to talk to Mr Vassilikos about it, and Mr Vassilikos would explain why it couldn’t be done.” Appleyard presses for a further explanation and is told: “It couldn’t if he says it couldn’t. It’s his house, isn’t it?” (84). Amis uses the scene to remind us to be suspicious of the whimsical behaviour of the wealthy, who are able to make up the rules as they go along so that they do not have to prove themselves on a level playing field. Roger Micheldene behaved in a similar manner by invoking class and privilege as an excuse not to compete with his fellows. Although I Want It Now contains minimal discussion of art or literature and falls into the category of an entertainment, rather than a serious literary work, Lady Baldock’s relationship with the media mirrors the one Amis previously depicted between artist and critic. She depends on Appleyard’s and Hamer’s positive appraisals to maintain, if not improve,

136

Kingsley Amis

her social standing, just as Buckmaster needed Garnet Bowen to ­validate his claim to be Strether. In return for Lady Baldock’s hospitality and the privilege of associating with rich socialites, Appleyard and Hamer are expected to facilitate a television appearance. They are not permitted to analyze her world, and she pre-empts any attempts to engage her in serious discussion by launching vicious attacks on her guests. While her outbursts are inexcusable, in the world of I Want It Now the rich are not judged by the same code of conduct as everyone else and they get away with bad behaviour in the same way that shams such as Gareth Probert did in early novels. The situation changes dramatically in Amis’s subsequent artistic novels, as will become evident in Girl, 20, in which both audience and artist are held accountable for their roles in the ­creative process.

CONCLUSIONS Three important components in Amis’s artistic development are contained in his first eight novels. As a natural extension of what Amis himself called “horse-pissing,” he began using antimodels as examples of how not to create art. These figures remain on the periphery of the novel and are never allowed to form lasting relationships with the main characters, but they tell us what Amis deemed acceptable in artistic creation. Artistically, Lucky Jim is probably the most telling novel Amis wrote until 1970, because the antimodels encapsulate all that the author finds simultaneously hateful and admirable in shamming artists. ­Bertrand Welch shows that affectation of any kind is bad since artists are just like everyone else and must be held to the same code of conduct. To claim that one is different and somehow deserving of special treatment is a form of crafty behaviour resorted to by Bertrand Welch and Roger Micheldene because they secretly doubt their own abilities and fear open competition. A shamming artist can strike a pose in any number of ways, and all of them are pernicious for Amis. If it were not for the ingenuity of poseurs who fool the public and convince others to support them financially, the process of supply and demand delineated in his BLitt thesis would take its course. It seems, however, that bad artists always find ways to survive, and Amis laments this, except when the antimodel is exceptionally sly, like L.S. Caton. Cunning is a creative trait and the commingling of admiration and outrage that Jim Dixon feels for Caton signals Amis’s ambivalence about antimodels. Certainly, to be a sham is horrible, but if one does it very well then shamming itself becomes an art



New Reasons to Write 137

form. This concept is expanded on in Amis’s later artistic works, with the advent of characters who sham creatively. In addition to antimodels, Amis constantly invoked formative influences in the novels written before 1970. Most of these writers exercised a strong influence on him at Oxford and, in the cases of Dylan Thomas and William Empson, the influence is completely rejected. Their writing styles and central tenets are re-examined and found lacking in merit, and Amis’s purpose is generally to show how his own artistic ideas have evolved. The Empsonian concept of beautiful poetic ambiguity contrasts with Amis’s disturbing ambiguities in content. Empson, like Dylan Thomas, had captured Amis’s imagination as an undergraduate and he thought that both were to blame for delaying his artistic development. We can see Amis redefining terms such as uncertainty and ambiguity in the artistic subtext of several novels. While his novels are always immediately comprehensible, the message remains ambiguous. Gareth Probert and Wulfstan Strether, on the other hand, use formal experimentation and verbal ambiguity to hide a lack of skill and intellectual rigour. Amis’s recurring use of aporia (which is particularly evident in his post-1970 novels) shows not only the pleasure he derived from unsettling the reader but also his distaste for convenient answers to difficult textual problems. Sometimes Amis invokes early artistic influences because his own evolving interests had made them personally relevant again. Charles Algernon Swinburne’s notebooks are introduced in One Fat Englishman not only as a source of wicked comedy but also because Amis, like Swinburne, came to enjoy provoking readers and was becoming a writer with sectarian appeal. The Catholic trio of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and G.K. ­Chesterton do not become satiric targets but are also used for the purpose of self-definition. One of Amis’s greatest artistic concerns throughout the first eight novels is to show how stories ought to be told; as a reader, he was drawn to accomplished storytellers who explored existential questions such as guilt and the relationship between humanity and God. He objected to the effect of religion on these three writers, though, for he thought that it prevented Greene from laughing, blunted Waugh’s sharp, satiric tone, and led to convenient, comforting conclusions in Chesterton’s mysteries. Although Amis would deplore Waugh’s wanton cruelty and tendency to bully others, he recognized that “without this compulsion to say the unsayable he would never have come to be the writer he was” (1990, The Amis Collection, 80). This compulsion is at work in One Fat Englishman, and in the 1970s and 1980s Amis too

138

Kingsley Amis

would say things other writers feared to say about women, homosexuality, modern psychiatry, and other social issues. Amis seems to be telling Greene to trust in imagination and intuition for they are rarely wrong, and they still provide us with pleasure. When he directs his attention to Waugh, we are given a lesson in Englishness. Privilege is not necessarily bad and Amis has no qualms about mercilessly satirizing fools, but it is language, not class, that determines what we each deserve. And, in The Anti-Death League, Amis questions Chesterton’s interpretation of our relationship to the divine by referring to the problem of suffering. If God cares enough about sinners to pull them back with twitches upon threads then He surely ought to rescue them from despair as well. The third significant component in the development of Amis’s artistic vision is Englishness. He reminds us in several of the pre-1970 novels that language is both a communicative tool and a powerful weapon. Since he was exceptionally gifted in using language for both purposes, it is not surprising to see him arguing for its increased social valuation. Jim Dixon’s ability to manipulate language gets him a better job, while Roger Micheldene’s linguistic failings lead to unhappiness and ostracism. Amis likes language best when it is used by someone like himself or ­ arkin – with control, wit, and invention – and this is the standard Philip L against which all other speakers and writers are measured. A final point of artistic significance, first raised in the investigation of Wulfstan Strether in I Like It Here and returned to in I Want It Now, is Amis’s interest in fame and posterity. He would praise Henry ­Fielding for his enduring reputation, have Ronnie Appleyard ponder on how to become famous and, in the early 1970s, consider Rudyard Kipling’s gradual drift from greatness to mediocrity. To become famous, one must be recognized by the general public, and in the novels written after 1970 Amis turns his attention to the role of the audience in the creative process. This signifies a broadening of Amis’s perspective, for in his first eight novels he was primarily concerned with one part of the artistic equation: the recognition of bad or shamming artists and academics. While he would continue to “horse-piss” in the final three decades of his writing career, The Green Man points to a willingness to give the antimodels voices, and to represent them as people with lives and personalities that may not be completely expressed in their faulty art.

PA R T T WO 1969–1995: Towards Reciprocity and Balance The second half of this work will show that Amis’s explicitly artistic novels written after The Green Man examine the reciprocal relationship between flawed artists and their peers. Martin Green prematurely and mistakenly suggested that “After The Anti-Death League, Amis seemed to have made up his mind that he could not write novels, and must devote himself to the minor forms of fiction” (1984, 155). His novels are never minor, though experiments in genre, narrative voice, and content have baffled critics who stubbornly measure later works against Lucky Jim. In the novels written after 1970, Amis does not always employ artistic antimodels, but when they do appear they tend to be central, rather than peripheral, characters. This change is due to Amis’s maturity as a writer, which allows him to view artistic creation from multiple perspectives, not just from the point of view of a bored or irritated audience member who feels entitled to ridicule the artist who has unjustly wasted his time. Amis would begin to argue that both the outer audience and inner circle of friends must be held accountable for the production of bad art. He continues to introduce shamming descendants of Bertrand Welch, Gareth Probert, and L.S. Caton in the novels written between 1971 and 1995, but no longer as foils or comic caricatures. Perhaps the most striking change in Amis’s artistic vision is embodied in the implication of the passive observers and recorders who had previously sneered at shamming artists. In Amis’s post-1970 novels, it is neither acceptable nor, strictly speaking, possible to laugh at bad artists, and he suggests that it is our social duty to discourage them from creation if they cannot be improved or at least be made to see the errors of their ways. The figure of Kingsley Amis, writer, also

140

Kingsley Amis

makes its way into the subtext of some of these works, inviting the reader to compare him with the antimodels. Consequently, several novels read like manifestos in which the author justifies artistic decisions and makes claims for the superiority of his own craftsmanship. In the novels that do not feature antimodels as central characters, Amis still addresses artistic issues that have received little or no critical recognition. He examines publishers, the artist’s inner circle of friends, and the outer audience. These issues combine to reflect an obsessive interest in the artist’s role in society and the attainment of fame. One sees that his position on art substantially changed during the period between the writing of his BLitt thesis and I Want It Now because he had achieved his primary goal of becoming a celebrated writer. The object of his thesis had been to determine how one went about acquiring a readership and reputation, and it was written from the perspective of an unsuccessful fiction writer who was turning into a reluctant academic. Perhaps the failure of the thesis led him to explore its central ideas in his early fiction to see if he had, after all, been right. He secured an ideal reader in Philip Larkin then distanced himself from Larkin while trying to prove his own artistic legitimacy. After acquiring a large band of followers, or readers, he began to challenge them in novels such as Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman by denying them the traditional pleasures of the romantic comedy genre to which they expected him to adhere after Lucky Jim. Since his books continued to sell these experiments were, to an extent, validated, though the increasingly negative reaction of some critics and readers would lead Amis to ponder the role of the audience and its obligations to artists. Another pattern in Amis’s post-1970 novels is the use of doubles. Though he maintained that, with the exception of L.S. Caton, he never recycled characters and always strove to tell different stories, c­ reative doubling is apparent as he dealt with the same issue or persona twice from diametrically opposed sides. Examples include: two novels about professional musicians (The Alteration and Girl, 20); one novel, The Anti-Death League, that questions the very existence of God and another, The Green Man, in which the divine becomes a character; two novels featuring librarians (That Uncertain Feeling and The Folks that Live on the Hill); a pair of books about Russians (Russian Hide-andSeek and The Russian Girl); a sequel to Take a Girl Like You (Difficulties with Girls); two analyses of modern psychiatry (Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women); two novels with characters modelled on Peter



Part Two: Towards Reciprocity and Balance

141

and Marilyn Quennell (The Folks that Live on the Hill and The Biographer’s Moustache); a second novel set in America, I Want It Now, to go with One Fat Englishman; and two novels about television personalities with large egos (I Want It Now and The Old Devils). The important point in relation to these doubles is that they show Amis’s concern for artistic balance, and his ability to examine any given issue from different sides. Some of the doubles might be more accurately characterized as inversions. For example, two musicians could not have less in common than Hubert Anvil, the pre-pubescent soon-to-be eunuch who sings for the glory of the Roman Catholic Church, and the aging, oversexed avant-garde composer Roy Vandervane. And yet The Alteration and Girl, 20 ask the same fundamental question: should an artist follow the safe, creatively stifling path to fame or risk losing his reputation for the sake of experimentation? Young Hubert chooses the former path and Vandervane the latter. In regard to these doubles, Amis did not simply change certain variables to avoid the charge of creative recycling, but made concerted efforts to consider competing perspectives.   Amis’s interest in, and awareness of, the inner audience emerges in the novels that are often labelled misogynist. Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women follow the Amisian trend of writing against a member of the inner audience. We have seen how Amis minimized the influence of Larkin through the writing of That Uncertain Feeling and The Egyptologists. He attacked Larkin’s profession, then collaborated with Robert Conquest to write about a particularly masculine world – an adulterer’s club – to which Larkin as a bachelor (though not a faithful one) was not privy. Even before the writing of The Egyptologists, Amis had moved on and begun to write with Elizabeth Jane Howard as his inner audience. He not only wrote for her, by detailing the perfection of their love in an imperfect world in The Anti-Death League and I Want It Now, but got her to write for him in One Fat Englishman. To complete the cycle, he then wrote against her in Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women in trying to prove that men do not need women and are better off without them. The pattern was initiated once again with the Sovietologist Conquest through the composition of Russian Hideand-Seek and The Russian Girl. The latter work includes a poem written by Conquest and it joins Lucky Jim and One Fat Englishman as the third non-collaborative novel with material directly borrowed from the inner audience. Perhaps the most artistically enlightening aspect of Amis’s novels written after 1970 is their introspective, self-exploratory side. In The

142

Kingsley Amis

Alteration, Ending Up and The Biographer’s Moustache one sees Amis scrutinizing his own aims and achievements. If one of the primary points in his BLitt thesis was to determine which nineteenth-century British writers had aged well, in many late novels he begins to wonder how Kingsley Amis was aging. It will be argued that he understood the necessary components in a successful novel and envisioned the loss of his literary powers in Ending Up, a novel about five septuagenarians who become worse as they get older. The components in Ending Up will be applied to his subsequent works to see how well Amis measured up to his own criteria.

9 Looking into the Artistic Future: The Green Man, Girl, 20, Ending Up, and The Alteration the green man

(1969)

Although Amis co-authored an entertainment and wrote the spy novel Colonel Sun as Robert Markham, The Green Man represents the first genre experiment published under his own name. This ghost story expands on arguments made against the Christian God in The AntiDeath League, but is of particular interest from an artistic perspective because it alerts us to Amis’s concern for reciprocity in human relationships, the key point in his explicitly artistic post-1970 novels. An analysis of the discussion between the protagonist Maurice Allington and God in The Green Man shows that even if the relationship is imperfect, it is reciprocal. Ultimately, God helps Allington and the hero does his part by completing his assigned mission. The relationship between ­Allington and the divine anticipates the one that will exist between all of the antimodels and central characters in subsequent novels. Through their art and personal behaviour, the antimodels irritate and inconvenience the heroes and narrators in these works. Rather than focusing solely on the foolishness of the antimodels and allowing the Amisian characters to alternately shun and satirize them, the author emphasizes the antimodels’ humanity and the importance of helping those with whom one becomes personally involved. The wide range of critical readings of The Green Man indicates that it is a complex, multi-layered artistic work. It has been suggested that Amis deliberately unsettles the reader by using a narrator who cannot be trusted,1 and in this sense he was returning to a narrative device first introduced in That Uncertain Feeling. He does not undermine

144

Kingsley Amis

­ llington’s authority in the same way that he did John Lewis’s, though, A perhaps because he did not need to further arouse the reader’s suspicions. ­Allington is an alcoholic subject to visions, and this alone makes others skeptical of his claims to see ghosts and to participate in supernatural events. The main elements in the novel’s intricate plot are as follows: Allington owns an inn called The Green Man, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Dr Thomas Underhill, a practitioner of dark magic. When the story begins, Allington is drinking heavily and trying to seduce his wife’s friend. His psychological state becomes increasingly delicate with the death of his elderly father, though he is buoyed by success in seduction. However, he is then visited by Underhill’s ghost, which summons the green man for whom the inn is named. This prompts a visit from God in the form of a young man in a dark suit, who instructs the hero to dispose of Underhill, thereby preventing the secrets of the divine from being revealed. Allington defeats the ghost and the green man, strengthening a shaky relationship with his teenage daughter in the process, but loses both his wife and lover. At the end of the book he has decided to sell the inn and move to a new location. The conversation between the protagonist and God continues for six pages and signals Amis’s intention to take future antimodels more seriously. God is given both a body and a voice in The Green Man and the conversation is dominated by the theme of reciprocity, as are the relationships between the antimodels and central characters in the post1970 novels. You may not like me, says God, “But you’ll never be free of me, while this lot lasts” (144), and the characters who become personally involved with the artistic antimodels in subsequent novels will learn the truth of this statement. Allington initially refuses to recognize his relationship with God as reciprocal and attacks God for a variety of failings. His principal complaint relates to the problem of suffering, which was previously explored in The Anti-Death League. When the hero asks, “What about making life a little less hard on people?” he has not considered that he might be asked to make things easier on God by offering his assistance. Later heroes like Douglas Yandell of Girl, 20, Richard Vaisey of The Russian Girl, and Harry Caldecote of The Folks That Live on the Hill will also be critical of the antimodels’ art, but as friend, lover, and brother respectively they are obligated to offer assistance. Amis shows in these novels, as he does through the relationship between God and Maurice Allington, that it is precisely because one has a personal connection to a flawed artist that one must try to support and improve him or her.



Looking into the Artistic Future 145

Elements of the artistic antimodel are also seen in the portrayal of God as the flawed creator in The Green Man. After comparing creation to a chess game that one observes and occasionally feels the desire to join “just for two or three moves, to get the feel of it, without at the same time stopping running the game” (142), God calls creation “an art and a work of art rolled into one,” albeit an imperfect one, since He made “some fairly disputable decisions right at the start, not having foreknowledge.” The artist’s dilemma is summarized by God when He tells Allington, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to be faced with a set of choices that are irrevocable and also unique” (142). The creative artist is always faced with such choices and after a work has been completed one must learn to live with the imperfections that become clear to those with sharp, critical eyes. One such critic, the poet Milton, “caught on to the idea of the work of art and the game and the rules,” confides God, though it was “Just as well it never quite dawned on him who Satan was, or rather who he was a piece of. I’d have had to step in there, if it had” (143). This is a reiteration of the idea that the flaws in a work of art are the inevitable result of the artist’s flawed personality. Thus, readers of That Uncertain Feeling were made to see that the inconsistencies in Gareth Probert’s character were reflected in his incomprehensible play. God’s excuse for the flaws in creation is that he did not possess foreknowledge, and when Amis gives the antimodels voices in later novels this will also give them the opportunity to apologize for artistic weaknesses. While Allington does not believe the disagreeable arrangement between himself and God to be reciprocal, it proves to be so because they help each other. At first, God appears as self-interested as the worst of Amis’s early antimodels. He denies visiting Allington because of interest in his creation, “But slightly because you’re particularly interested in me. In all my aspects” (139). God’s trouble is that because of free will, He cannot intervene against Underhill’s ghost, which has conjured the green man and poses “A minor threat to security” in his capacity to convince others that there is indeed an afterlife (140). God, it seems, would prefer people not to know one way or the other. Once Allington reluctantly agrees to help, he is advised to “Use the Church where appropriate” because the local parson, though a fool, has “certain techniques at his disposal” (143). One of these is the rite of exorcism, which ­Allington has Reverend Sonnenschein perform twice to help defeat Underhill (167) and the green man (171). God also gives Allington a silver crucifix, which the hero will hurl at the approaching green man to save his own life (158).

146

Kingsley Amis

Another point of creative interest in the novel is its thematic concern for the future, which combines with the divine’s prolongation of the present to connect it with The Alteration. One might argue that Amis’s desire to enter an uncertain, but also unrestricted, creative future in which he could write genre novels in addition to straight fiction is reflected in Allington’s problems with time. He is neither willing nor able to deal with present time for most of the novel, seeking diversion through sex and alcohol. His attempts to escape the present and hurry into the future contrast with God’s ability to freeze time, which He does for twentyfour minutes during their interview (144). With four hours until his midnight meeting with Underhill, Allington attempts various diverting tasks, each of which reflects his inability to properly engage with present time. He watches part of a movie, reads a novel for forty minutes, and then has a serious car wreck as his journey home is aborted by an ill-advised attempt to overtake a car on a curve (150–1). As his wife Joyce notes, Allington’s biggest problem is this failure to deal with the present. She decides to leave him for a person “Who hasn’t always got somewhere more important to be in the next two minutes” (170). On an artistic level, Amis understood this feeling completely since he had been dissatisfied with the Gollancz publishing house for several years. On 24 February 1967 he wrote to Livia Gollancz after Victor, her father, had passed away both to cancel a lunch engagement and to announce his move to another publisher. Amis explained, “For some years I have been unhappy with Gollancz Ltd and would long ago have moved elsewhere but for my personal loyalty to Victor.” He added that, with the patriarch’s passing, “Now, sadly, my loyalty is at an end, and I am off” (Amis 2001, 677). The Green Man marked the beginning of Amis’s new relationship with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s publisher, Jonathan Cape. It would therefore seem that Amis too believed that he had somewhere more important to be and hoped that by changing publishers he would get the necessary support to write more freely. girl,

20 (1971)

In this explicitly artistic novel, Amis continues the argument against artistic pretension begun in That Uncertain Feeling. The artistic situation is borrowed from I Like It Here, in which a critic pondered passing personal and artistic judgment on a flawed artist. Girl, 20 too suggests that critical judgments are of little value, for it is always better to be a creative artist – even a mediocre one – than a derivative commentator.



Looking into the Artistic Future 147

For the first time in Amis’s work, the novel’s central character, Sir Roy ­Vandervane, is also the artistic antimodel. In examining the function of the antimodel, a change in Amis’s view of the role of art in society becomes apparent. His previous novels tended to focus on the artist’s public responsibilities and, when a creative artist failed the audience, as Gareth Probert did with his play, it was perfectly acceptable for the audience to show its displeasure by abandoning the artist. The equation changes in Girl, 20 as questions are raised about the responsibilities of the audience. Music critic Douglas Yandell would seem to have fulfilled his duties to his friend, the violinist and composer Vandervane, in struggling to dissuade him from producing bad art. However, Yandell’s actual concern is to preserve his friend’s artistic reputation. Amis would have the reader admire Vandervane at least a little for not caring about past glory and deciding to find a new audience through different forms of musical expression. Yandell puts butter on Vandervane’s violin bow to sabotage the performance of Elevations 9, but the concert continues and Yandell, unlike John Lewis, stays until the end. Afterwards he even helps Vandervane ward off an angry mob of young listeners. Though he takes his responsibilities seriously and often tries to help his friends, Yandell is punished personally and professionally for not trying harder and for his artistic conservatism. In a scene that encapsulates the new reciprocity in Amis’s vision of the relationship between artist and audience, Yandell’s occasional companion, Vivienne, blames him for not ameliorating her horrid sense of fashion. In 1960 John Lewis abandoned friends and fled from trouble because Amis had not yet conceived of the relationship between artist and audience as reciprocal. Ten years later, he would begin implicating his narrators and protagonists in the lives of the antimodels. As a friend, Yandell is expected to guide Vandervane, not abandon him, and if he is unable to stop him from creating horrible music then he has failed as much as the composer himself.2 At the end of the novel, Yandell still has not fully grasped his duties. “I don’t think people should try to stop people doing what they want to do” (249), he insists, while allowing that Vivienne is probably right in saying that on occasion people do need interference in their lives. The relationship between artists and (in this case their inner) audience thus proves more complex than Amis at first believed. Like his teenage girlfriend Sylvia, Vandervane’s fusion of rock and classical music is indubitably bad, but he is still someone with whom Yandell has formed a personal relationship and the music critic’s duty is to help, not ridicule. This idea will be more fully developed through the bad poet

148

Kingsley Amis

Anna Danilova and her relationship with Richard Vaisey in The Russian Girl. Vandervane is also of interest as an antimodel because he shows that creative achievements cannot always be measured in the formulaic manner proposed in Amis’s BLitt thesis. Vandervane acts like a shamming, inauthentic artist and his abilities are second rate, but he has still grown wealthy and secured a critical reputation. In other words, he has fooled the audience and continues to do so, which suggests that Amis the Oxonian had overestimated the evaluative capacity of the audience or, perhaps, its ability to influence artists. In temperament at least, Vandervane is a first-rate artist, for he is “a great one for making other people do what he wanted them to do, [though] he tended to turn suspicious if they showed signs of wanting to do it on their own account” (91). As a solo violinist and conductor, he is “[W]ell-trained and conscientious” but unexceptional and as a composer he is an utter failure. And yet he is rich and celebrated, thereby proving the inadequacy of Amis’s early equation of profit with artistic merit. Vandervane’s wife Kitty is convinced of his genius: “it’s quite frightening how much Roy earns now. He’s really arrived. Oh, we know he’s had the respect of the musical world for years and years, but these days he’s a national figure, in the top bracket. And without lowering his artistic standards” (21–2). The irony is that Vandervane has no personal or professional standards. He abandons his family for an awful seventeen year-old girl and performs live with a popular rock band. Though Vandervane pulls faces, impersonates and mimics others, he does so without spontaneity, to make theoretical points, and this differentiates him from Amis’s early positive protagonists. He justifies his maniacal driving as a demonstration against the conservative rightwing: “You pretend to be one of the other side behaving crappily, or rather behaving as they actually would if they felt strong enough” (187). Jim Dixon would never have been able to think far enough ahead to make the Welches look bad by pretending to be one of them. His pranks are never based on ideology, but are personal and spontaneous. He gains the reader’s support through innocence while Vandervane’s premeditation reminds us of another hypocritical artist, Irving Macher from One Fat Englishman. It is difficult to take Vandervane seriously because his actions rarely represent his true feelings. Dixon’s irritation at Johns is genuine, and this motivates him to send the threatening letter, but ­Vandervane’s fellow motorists have done nothing to incur his ill will. Road rage is little more than an affectation.



Looking into the Artistic Future 149

Yandell reveals one of the actual goals of Vandervane’s bizarre social experiments when he accuses him of trying to “arse-creep youth” (139). The same phrase will be used to describe Jimmie Fane’s sycophantic attitude towards the rich in The Biographer’s Moustache. While Fane will pretend to like other snobs in order to finagle invitations to aristocratic outings, Vandervane surrounds himself with young people because he wants their “uncritical admiration” (140). These two novels present the same paradoxical situation of artists struggling to join a group to which access can only be gained by birth. Roy Vandervane wants to be young again, while Jimmie Fane wishes he were old money. One artistic development in Amis’s post-1970 novels is the attribution of positive characteristics to his humanized antimodels. While ­Vandervane is not a particularly good person (or father or husband), and he is without doubt a poor composer, he is extremely funny. Amis reveals his true creative abilities through “obscenity-savers,” or trite phrases and clichés that are used as substitutes for epithets. Vandervane’s determination not to behave conventionally leads to the birth of the obscenitysavers, which are a recognizable variation on Amis’s “bum” ending to his letters to Larkin. In his correspondence, Amis would sometimes begin his closing remarks with part of a cliché or a tired, empty saying, then finish abruptly with “bum.” A letter of 14 January 1980 ends as follows: “After decades of Western supremacy the world seems to be heading for an era of bum” (2001, 882). In Girl, 20 the reader is told that “To qualify as a fuckette, a phrase had to have annoyed [Vandervane] at some stage in his life.”3 Examples include “school of thought” (43), “Oh, peace in our time,” and “Statesmanlike act!” (79). Though glimpses of Vandervane’s creative potential are offered in the obscenity-savers, his musical experimentations are less successful. Amis identifies verbal ingenuity as one of the characteristics of the frustrated shamming artist who is unable to put his abilities to creative use. Alun Weaver in The Old Devils suffers in a similar way, for he is proficient at “horse-pissing,” or revealing others’ flaws with biting humour, but cannot write. Amis understood this problem well, since he had gone through a stage in which he delighted Larkin with wickedly funny letters only to bore him with his creative writing. Girl, 20 reconsiders the relationship between writer and audience delineated in Amis’s BLitt thesis and early novels. In later novels, he would continue to give the antimodels redeeming features while making the inner audience accept partial responsibility for the production of bad art. The position of the sardonic observer is no longer glorified, and the authorial persona will at times be at odds with the narrator, as

150

Kingsley Amis

it is in this novel. Amis is careful to distinguish himself from Yandell by making his character disinterested in religion, science fiction, and social anarchy, three of his own most serious concerns. While the gradual disappearance of a sardonic Amisian narrator from the post-1970 novels has been correctly identified as proof of the end of the alliance between author and narrator, the reason for this change was not the darkening of Amis’s vision or the loss of his comic touch. If anything, his vision was broadening as he began to consider not only the art produced by the antimodels but also motivations, causes, and human relationships. ending up

(1974)

Amis began writing the black comedy Ending Up in the early 1970s, when he was living with: Elizabeth Jane Howard; Howard’s homo­sexual brother, Colin; a painter and friend of the family, Sargy Mann; and his mother-in-law. The house was large and the occupants disparate in character and habits. The idea for the fictional situation emerged from a simple hypothesis: what, Amis wondered, would they all be like in twenty years? Or, more precisely, “What would it be like if we were all old and all, or some of us, handicapped to some degree?” When he told Dale ­Salwak in 1973 about his work in progress, he stressed that it was not a gerontological study, though the book would feature five septuagenarians as the main characters: “By the end, all five are dead through a series of mishaps ... One thing the book isn’t going to be is a serious, in-depth etc. study of old age. It’s about five particular people who wouldn’t be behaving as they do if they weren’t old” (Amis 2001, 754). And how they would behave was badly. In his pre-novel notes, Amis catalogued fortyfour ways of being annoying and distributed these attributes amongst his characters, who represented five different horrible personalities: a “shit,” a bore, an egotist, a fool, and a perverse shag (HEHL). Over the last thirty years, most critics have agreed that Ending Up is one of Amis’s most entertaining novels, but there has not been a consensus view of his purpose, aside from the depiction of an elderly community gone awry.4 Critics praise it as a wickedly entertaining book5 and note that it is concerned with more than just aging. When one considers Amis’s literary interests at the time, it is not unreasonable to consider it as metafiction. While working on the novel, Amis was rereading the works of Rudyard Kipling for a monograph he would publish two years later in 1975. Martin Green has astutely noted a similarity in the two writers’ senses of humour, for Amis too “has always played jokes and



Looking into the Artistic Future 151

surprises on the readers, and given them clues” (1984, 156). The presence in Ending Up of more insinuating, leading humour than usual suggests the influence of Kipling, and the contents of the monograph hint at deeper connections. Amis protests against the unfair critical treatment of Kipling,6 and his natural affinity for him is evident in their common interests in Englishness, entertaining the reader, and proper language usage. He does, however, make criticisms of Kipling, and one is particularly telling. Kipling, he wrote, “developed early and he went off early” (1975, 91).7 Amis was prolific, but anxiety over the mortal condition and his own fallibility are evident in some of the novels immediately preceding Ending Up, such as The Anti-Death League and The Green Man. Perhaps, then, we can read Ending Up, not just as a study of the attendant troubles of aging, but of the troubles particular to a writer approaching his declining years, for Amis did not want to “go off” as Kipling had. His opinions on what constituted good and bad writing were always clear and uncompromising, and each of the five characters in the novel is not just a horrid or unfortunate human being but represents the inversion of an integral factor in a successful Amis novel. These factors are the appropriate use of language, memory, pleasing one’s audience, balance, and romantic optimism. The novel is short, with forty chapters compressed into 176 large type pages, and it covers the last three months in the lives of five elderly people living communally in the English countryside. It begins in October 1973 and ends just after New Year’s with the deaths of all five characters within hours in a series of related accidents. Their residence, Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage, is described as “far from a bad place to end up,” (12) because it would be worse, presumably, to finish one’s life in a nursing home or alone. They have ended up in this communal arrangement because of their mutual lack of money and friends. Adela Bastable and her brother Bernard moved to the cottage with Bernard’s former army servant, Derek “Shorty” Shortell, eleven years earlier. Adela, now 73 and a lifelong spinster, runs the household; Bernard, a retired army officer, is a 75 year-old misanthrope who does nothing on account of a bad leg; and Shorty, a spry 71, runs errands and cleans for the others. At seventy, George Zeyer is the youngest member of the group and its newest arrival. This professor emeritus in history arrived at the cottage five months earlier, after a stroke left him partially paralyzed and suffering from aphasia, a speech affliction characterized by the inability to recall common nouns. His connection to the Bastables is through his deceased sister, Vera, who was unhappily married to Bernard. The final member

152

Kingsley Amis

of the household, Marigold Pyke, once a minor stage actress, is Adela’s 73 year-old friend. Her husband died four years earlier, leaving her with little money. Amis used these five characters not only to represent personal irritations but also to explore his own anxieties about maintaining his literary powers. Each character clearly represents one of the key principles in Amis’s artistic vision. When he wrote at his highest level, he maintained control over language, told new stories, and entertained the reader while offering a balanced, hopeful perspective. First, the importance of appropriately and skilfully manipulating language is underscored by George Zeyer’s nominal aphasia. He is less disturbed by physical immobility than by his sudden inability to communicate. “The gift of language is a very precious thing,” he declares once his powers have returned. “After all, it’s what differentiates us from the animal kingdom.” Amis offered the same opinion at the beginning of his first draft of On Drink by citing, as one of the differences between human beings and chimpanzees, “the basic fact that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a peculiarly intimate, profoundly human way” (HEHL). In The King’s English he would go on to explain the importance of speech patterns and habits and, though Zeyer is neither a berk nor a wanker, his failure to use language with discrimination makes him a bore. If Amis had written novels the way that Zeyer talks, the reader would have yawned throughout, as Garnet Bowen does when he reads Wulfstan Strether. Marigold’s role is to demonstrate through inversion the significance of memory. The onset of senility effectively removes her from society, for once she discovers that she has been sending people the same letters on consecutive days – that she is repeating herself – she stops corresponding. A good memory is essential in social networking; for a novelist, the ability to draw on a bank of experience and knowledge is the basis for creation. It was essential for a writer as prolific as Amis to remember what he had written so that he could avoid recycling scenes, characters, and anecdotes. At least in part, the fear of repeating himself led Amis to conduct genre experiments, for readers could not accuse him of having done something before when he was writing his ghost story, detective novel, or work of science fiction. There was no surer sign that a writer had “gone off” than the discovery that he was telling the same story again. Amis was at the height of his powers in the early 1970s and a comparison of draft versions of his next novel, The Alteration, illustrates the degree to which he was capable of monitoring repetition in his writing. At one point in the first draft, he circled the word “taken” twice



Looking into the Artistic Future 153

along with “noticed” and “noticeable” (HEHL, 35). He solved the problem in the second draft (51) by changing the phrase “taken her” to “had his way with her” and “noticed” becomes “observed.” However, repetition would plague Amis in his final novel, The Biographer’s Moustache, as his memory weakens and ability to self-edit proves fallible. The importance of entertaining one’s audience, a factor present in all of Amis’s most successful works, is conveyed through Shorty, who entertains himself in lieu of possessing an audience. Though the others consider him a drunken buffoon and ignore his jokes, his ability to laugh at himself is admirable. Shorty is not bothered but amused when Bernard pours hot urine over his trousers while he is sleeping to convince him that he has wet himself. Humility and a sense of humour are positive qualities, but Shorty’s problem is his complete isolation. Amis always contended that a writer without an audience ought to find another profession. For this reason he was a virulent opponent of arts council grants.8 As he explained in a 1979 lecture, “If you’re paid in advance or have your losses underwritten, the temptation to self-indulgence is extreme. If you have to please to live, you’ll do your best to please” (1990, The Amis Collection, 248). Shorty is always eager to please, and the others depend on his help around the cottage, but because he continues to tell jokes and sing silly songs even though no one wants to listen, he is self-indulgent. Amis, on the other hand, would never lose his audience9 even if some readers stopped finding him amusing; he had no trouble publishing and his books all made money. However, the final two factors in a successful Amis novel – balance and hope – would become problems in his much-maligned late novels. Amis had always been careful not to tip the scales too far for or against a particular character or position. As John McDermott noted, he is “too interesting a novelist, too cunning a tactician, to allow one side to have all the best tunes” (1989, 121). One example of Amis’s scrupulous attempt at maintaining balance is found in the character of Patrick ­Standish, whom the reader is encouraged to like before condemning him for his actions and feeling slightly guilty for having been charmed by him. In contrast, there is nothing positive to offset Bernard Bastable’s misanthropy. The cancer that is killing him is emblematic of the bile that eats away at his soul. Love and romantic optimism are of great importance in Amis’s world, and his satire of the romantic spirit through characters such as Patrick Standish and Dai Evans should not be seen as a rejection of love. Amis was exploring different manifestations of love and sex in Take a Girl Like You and The Evans Country in order to

154

Kingsley Amis

state his artistic ­preference for ambiguity and realism. But in his better novels, the recurring message is always that hope emerges from love. His sardonic protagonists may chase other women, but they believe in love’s transformative powers. After Ending Up Amis would, however, write three novels that suffer from pessimism and a lack of balance; one side gets all the best lines and the reader is given no reason to expect things to improve in Jake’s Thing (1978), Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980), and Stanley and the Women (1984). It will prove to be Amis’s determination to avoid Kipling’s fate that prevents him from going off early, just as those who fear the physical effects of aging embark on exercise regimes and follow strict diets. This may delay the aging process, but it requires discipline.10 When Amis suffers problems in his personal life he experiences lapses in his fiction, with balance and romantic optimism being sacrificed to bitterness and negativity. In Ending Up Amis did not consciously present the reader with a recipe for literary success but in showing what can and will go wrong with life through five irritating septuagenarians, he reminds us of the essential elements in his fiction. The Kipling monograph encouraged him to think about literary longevity and to wonder at the horror of losing one’s powers. In Amis’s vigilant adherence to a successful creative formula he shows acute awareness of the audience’s needs. This awareness was probably most helpful in delaying the effects of aging, though signs of creative senility are visible in the convoluted prose in his final novels. t h e a lt e r at i o n

(1976)

This novel begins on a metafictional note, with a discussion of literature that reflects Amis’s own method. The pre-pubescent hero Hubert Anvil, who is destined to become a castrato soprano, secretly reads illegal Time Romance novels. Amis suggests that the genre has been improperly named, for in many Time Romance stories “time as such played no significant part” (26). It does in The Alteration, however, as Amis renews arguments against unnatural attempts to stop time that were first launched in I Want It Now. Amis’s novel is not a romance, but belongs to a science fiction sub-genre called Alternate World, the use of which enabled him to portray a castrato “living here and now. All you have to do is go back and change history” (1974, “Profile 4,” 28). In The Alteration, he labelled this genre Counterfeit World: “a class of tale set more or less at the present date, but portraying the results of some momentous change in historical fact” (26).11 The Alteration envisions



Looking into the Artistic Future 155

the ­Western world as if the Reformation had never taken place, and in the novel’s artistic subplot Amis defends his decision to conduct genre experiments. The reader wants Hubert Anvil to resist the alteration that will fix the pitch of his voice and force him to musically repeat himself until death. He does resist until an unexpected health difficulty leads to his surrender. This is significant in itself, for it shows that true independence – artistic or otherwise – is not gained through a single act of rebellion but through constant, renewed efforts. The powerful self-serving elite is represented by the Catholic Church and Yorkshireman Pope John XXIV, who inherits Lady Baldock’s weakness for ceremony and God’s cool calculation from I Want It Now and The Green Man respectively. In ordering his aides to do his bidding, the Pope’s word selection betrays his desire to control time: “No time like the present – that’s our motto” (201). Though it is impossible to control the future, religious authorities hope that through Hubert’s alteration his voice will be preserved and the present state extended. His voice possesses “agelessness,” which is precisely what the plotting ecclesiasts yearn for. Amis argues, however, that the only way to achieve true immortality is by creating an enduring work of art. In the world of The Alteration, this is the only escape from God, who Amis characterized in a letter to Larkin as “a shit” for answering the Abbot’s prayers and preventing Hubert’s flight to America (10 November 1976, Bodleian). Amis returns to one of his favourite themes, rebellion, to argue for the importance of free will in the creative process through an unlikely character: Father Lyall, the religious advisor to the Anvil family. Lyall follows the pattern established in The Anti-Death League of offering the authorial perspective through an un-Amisian character who is neither the protagonist nor the narrator. The priest refuses to approve of Hubert’s alteration and is given a week to consult his conscience. His irritated employer Tobias Anvil suspects that “this is a sort of game. All you mean is to savour the thrill of defiance without any actual risk. Let me know when you’ve had enough of your game. You place me in a most uncomfortable posture” (54). Of his decision to withhold approval, Lyall says simply, “I choose not to give it” (128), and he acts with the knowledge that he will be forced to leave the priesthood regardless of the outcome. This stubborn refusal on principle combines with a sexual misadventure – Lyall sleeps with Mrs Anvil – to irrevocably change his path and initiate a pattern similar to the ones followed by Jim Dixon, John Lewis, and Patrick Standish. The idea of surrendering the right to choose12 and being cast into a mould was abhorrent to these early protagonists and

156

Kingsley Amis

sexual missteps with professional repercussions led to their expulsion from the university, the library, and middle-class married life. Hubert’s alteration can be read as a treatise against the creation of inauthentic artists. The novel features two antimodels in the middle-­aged castratos Fritz Mirabilis and Lupigradis Viaventosa, whose example shows that the alteration of Hubert will render him incapable of true artistic creation.13 Though Hubert’s composition teacher warns that claims on his time as a professional singer will prevent him from pursuing a career in composition (104), Amis was convinced that the creative and sexual drives are inextricably connected.14 Early in The Alteration it is clear that Hubert is developing a healthy appetite for both the arts and the opposite sex, and that he might become a good composer if nature is allowed to take its course. He is a voracious reader of Time Romance novels, purchased on the black market from Ned the ­brewer’s boy (100); like most pre-pubescent boys, he is both fascinated and repelled by sex (39). The unnaturalness of the proposed alteration is emphasized in a meeting Hubert has with the Pope. A photographer is summoned to take “a picture of the Pope standing with his hand on Hubert’s head and smiling down at him while he looked up at the Pope.” Hubert is told to look “grateful” and “honoured” but, notes the narrator, “It was the expression on Hubert’s face that proved difficult to get right” (115).15 Soon after this meeting, the eunuch Viaventosa begs Tobias Anvil to reconsider: “Hubert must not be altered, for the love of God,” he says (118). This sets up the novel’s concluding scene. Fifteen years have passed since the alteration and Hubert’s concert performance brings tears to the eyes of the two eunuchs. Viaventosa says, “Deo ­gratia,” or “by the grace of God” (204). The mortal representatives of the Christian God in The Alteration are neither loving nor endowed with grace and the unnatural invocation of religion has turned Hubert against his nature into an illegitimate artist.16 Previous unflattering depictions of the divine in The Anti-Death League and The Green Man are echoed in the capricious, vengeful Pope who decides to kill several thousand deformed children simply because “To be reminded that the wrath of God can be strange and terrible and sudden does folk a power of good” (197). In its examination of artistic choices, The Alteration may be read as the companion piece to Girl, 20. After Hubert Anvil becomes an acclaimed singer, he still has second thoughts about what he might have been able to achieve musically if he had not been altered. In typically Amisian fashion, Hubert’s doubts are conveyed through what goes unsaid. First, his friends tell him that he looks “not a day older” and is “Quite unchanged,”



Looking into the Artistic Future 157

to which he makes no reply; change is essential in the Amisian creative world. When one friend says that he must be satisfied by “the practicing of the art” of music, Hubert again avoids answering (since a true creative artist, in Amis’s view, is never satisfied) and he tries to change the conversation’s direction by asking his friends why they have come to Rome (203). And, finally, Hubert hints to his childhood companion Thomas that the music he must perform is flawed. He believes that he might have been able to compose something better before his alteration, though “Not now” (204). While Hubert had the potential to become a first-rate creative artist, Roy Vandervane did not. He never demonstrated particular talent as a performer or composer but instead of being content with a solid conducting career he engages in questionable creative experiments. The reader is invited to offer him a certain degree of respect for his refusal to be content, even if his music is without merit. These novels show that Amis’s artistic vision was evolving, particularly in the admiration expressed for the experimental spirit and increased concern for the role of the audience. The audience does indeed have an effect on the artistic process, and it can be negative. Hubert is altered in response to the audience’s wants; music lovers and church officials care less about his dreams and personal happiness than about the preservation of his voice. Similarly, the presence of critics and music listeners willing to embrace anything avant-garde leads to the indulgence, if not celebration, of Vandervane. The Alteration is something of an artistic anomaly, for it is the only novel in which an antimodel – in this case the eunuch Viaventosa – warns others against following his example. Most of the antimodels lack the self-knowledge to recognize their own illegitimacy, while the more cunning antimodels are always more interested in helping themselves than others. The only other antimodel who understands his artistic limitations is Freddie Caldecote in The Folks That Live on the Hill. Amis will use this character to explore acceptable reasons for creating bad art, then go on to suggest in The Russian Girl that in certain circumstances it might be better not to try to improve bad artists.17 These examples will show that even as Amis’s views on society and the relations between men and women became polarized, his artistic vision was evolving from the inflexible model offered in his BLitt thesis.

10 Problems with Language and Balance: Jake’s Thing, Stanley and the Women, and Russian Hide-and-Seek ja k e ’ s t h i n g

(1978)

This novel is a sequel of sorts to Lucky Jim. It imagines what might have happened to Jim Dixon if he had stayed in academia.1 Jake Richardson has, unfortunately, turned into a wanker and he is submitted to a linguistic and communicative trial that recalls Roger Micheldene’s in One Fat Englishman. Critics have failed to recognize that the central artistic dilemma actually recreates the plot of Lucky Jim. Jake R ­ ichardson too is stuck with an unattractive romantic partner for whom he feels responsible, and the novel ends with their separation. Like Dixon, he must deliver an address at a university assembly on an unnatural and disagreeable theme. He dreads the address and, instead of offering the arguments for allowing women into the Oxford college Comyns, he gives the opposite view. This is his true opinion for, if a weekend of madrigals with the Welches convinced Dixon of Merrie England’s unmerriness,2 Richardson’s sexual troubles lead him to believe that women are to be avoided at all costs. After enumerating the reasons for barring women from Comyns, he changes sides to argue that some trends cannot be resisted and “it may be better, more advantageous, to yield at once rather than fight on” (195). The hook in the ending takes the audience by surprise and it reinforces Amis’s anti-Empsonian approach of conveying ambiguities through provocative content. It also shows his desire to challenge readerly expectations by again offering a convenient, albeit unsatisfying, conclusion. The protagonist could have been talking about the novel itself and not a psychiatric workshop when he declares, “this whole thing is all about language” (139). Like Roger Micheldene, Jake Richardson takes



Problems with Language and Balance 159

­ atters of language and nationality with the utmost seriousness. Early in m the novel “someone from Asia” takes his preferred seat on the bus (36) and he engages in a discussion of the pronunciation of the word “libido” with his psychiatrist “on the basis that we’re talking English, not Italian or Spanish” (36).3 Though he is generally nicer and more tolerant than Micheldene, he too is convinced of his linguistic superiority. Richardson often remarks that the English have become insensitive to language and overlook fundamental truths in favour of perversely complex theories. To prove his thesis, he calls attention to everything from the false advertising in an off-license to his psychiatrist’s linguistic errors. Amis too would make similar points in his usage guide, The King’s English. At the workshop the case against Richardson is succinctly expressed by the young ruffian Chris: “Who gave you the bloody right to be so fucking superior?” (151). As a result of Amis’s growing concern with accepting personal responsibility, the Amisian character does not uncover shams but is himself (quite literally) uncovered. The workshop facilitator, acting as “sham-detector” (157), forces Richardson to strip naked, submit to physical prodding, and endure false praise from the other workshop participants.4 The hero briefly endures then quits, like Micheldene, dropping out of therapy. The trouble with Richardson’s libido proves to be related to his inability to communicate properly. He used to be attracted to the illusion of female innocence (79) and, after sleeping with a character named Eve, whose promiscuity and garrulousness make her the embodiment of all that is at once attractive and repellent about women from Richardson’s perspective, he will admit: “I despise [women] intellectually” (213). Outside his college, he is accosted by women who are picketing Comyns’ all-male policy. They present him with a dildo on which is written, “Try This One, Wanker!” (101). The scene is ironic, for Richardson is unable to maintain an erection, but word choice suggests that the root of his problem is snobbery. To exonerate himself, he must prove that he is not a “shirker” of responsibilities, the definition offered in the novel for a wanker (115). He fails most gloriously by deceiving Eve, a former lover who is now married. She agrees to have dinner with him on the condition that he will not to try to sleep with her, though he does just that and succeeds. The artistic subtext of the novel is not merely a regurgitation of the Englishness argument in One Fat Englishman but amounts to a revision of Amis’s language policy. In his mature novels, the issue of personal responsibility becomes a serious concern, as evidenced by Douglas

160

Kingsley Amis

­ andell being held accountable for the passive observation of blunders Y made by a friend and a lover. Richardson too is measured against a high linguistic and communicative standard and found lacking. Because he avoids communicating with his wife Brenda, she leaves (257), and though he will not talk with his own spouse, he listens to and comforts a mad woman on a bus, mistaking her for a victim of wrongheaded modern psychiatry. At last he realizes his error and sees that she has understood nothing he has said after, “Yes, I do,” his reply to her query: “Don’t anybody think I’ve been given a raw deal?” (67). It is only fitting that Richardson be forced to pay penance for being a wanker by spending time with the most disagreeable person in the book, ­Alcestis ­Mabbott. Amis again employs aporia – the textual knot that resists untying – to tease the reader while showing that the punishment fits the crime. Alcestis is the irritating Geoffrey’s wife, and Richardson is dismayed to find that she plans to visit him regularly now that they have both been deserted by their spouses. At the Richardson kitchen table she tells her side of the story of their failed marriages, though the speech is completely drowned out by a passing airplane. Once the engine noise subsides, she says: “Which as far as I’m concerned is an end of the matter” (264). The airplane blocks out Alcestis just as Richardson himself has been blocking out women for years and the reader is made aware of how one-sided his communications with women have been to this point. The novel would perhaps have ended on a more positive note if the hero repented and determined to make an effort – even a half-hearted one in the mode of John Lewis or Ronnie Appleyard – to be better. That he does not is confirmed by a final meeting with his physician, who suggests that his sexual trouble might be physical and treatable with medication. Richardson ponders this and decides that since sexual desire will inevitably bring him into contact with women again he is better off impotent and alone. For the reader, the novel’s greatest drawback is its pessimism. While Philip Larkin, who shared Amis’s appreciation for nasty humour, praised “the determined foul-mouthedness of the book,” he too found it “rather gloomy on the whole” and said that it made him “depressed” (1992, 590). Most Amis novels include in the background younger, happier people to mitigate the unhappiness of the central characters. This is even the case in Ending Up, as Adela’s grandson arrives with his wife to remind the reader of the continuing existence of life, love, and sanity ­ ussian in the outside world. Jake’s Thing, Stanley and the Women, and R Hide-and-Seek never suggest happiness as an option for the young or



Problems with Language and Balance 161

the old. The c­ hances of Jake Richardson and his wife rekindling their romance are slim and, while it would be hard to fault her for leaving him because of his communicative deficiencies, things can only get worse with her new partner, Geoffrey Mabbott, whose knack for misunderstanding and uttering non sequiturs makes conversation an impossibility (217). This is the conclusion that one arrives at if Richardson’s narration is reliable. But since the story is funnelled through his negative, disillusioned consciousness, it is reasonable to assume that many of the characters are not as bad as they seem. If this exaggeration is deliberate then it is a significant artistic achievement5 on Amis’s part and it helps to explain ­Richardson’s misogyny, for his failure to see the good in others is one of the causes of his marital problems. However, such an interpretation is weakened by Amis’s use of distorted autobiography in basing Richardson’s treatment on his own psychiatric experiences. If one is to accept Terry Teachout’s characterization of Amis as a “conservative novelist [who] draws full-length portraits of men as they are, not as he would wish them to be” (in Bell 1998, 53),6 then one wonders why he depicted the psychiatric profession to be worse than it was when he encountered it.7 When viewed as cultural commentary, the critical inability to appreciate the subtleties in the argument in Jake’s Thing is doubtless related to the tendency to see Jake Richardson as the successor to Jim Dixon, rather than Roger Micheldene. By shifting the focus to Englishness and comparing Richardson’s trials to those of Micheldene, the novel becomes comprehensible in its insistence on linguistic and communicative responsibility. As part of Amis’s developing artistic vision, characters who refuse to accept their responsibilities – both personal and social – cannot achieve happiness, as Stanley and the Women also argues. ru s s i a n h i d e - a n d - s e e k

(1980)

In Russian Hide-and-Seek, Amis’s second “counterfeit world” novel after The Alteration, he presents three situations from previous novels, updates his ideas on Englishness, and offers his first extensive analysis of the potentially harmful effect of the audience on artistic creation. Amis re-writes history so that the Russians have invaded and taken political control of England. In examining life from the perspective of expatriates resistant to foreign culture, he inverts the central situation of his anti-travelogue, I Like It Here. The Russians fit the stereotype of the ugly, unilingual Englishman abroad: they do not travel well. Fifty years of Russian occupation has all but destroyed English cultural history and

162

Kingsley Amis

the effect on the current generation is reflected in the inscription “Hora e sempre” under the rooftop of the Controller’s residence. The narrator explains the inscription’s dual meanings as “now and always” and “now is always” (41). Neither rendition recognizes the past and one is reminded of the Pope’s motto in The Alteration, “No time like the present.” As he did in his first counterfeit world book, Amis protests against the mortal condition, though with increasing despair, for the problem of evil has been reduced to a problem of luck. In this sense, and in the employment of military life as a backdrop, the novel resembles The Anti-Death League. The protagonist, Alexander Petrovsky, is a Russian version of Patrick Standish and the discussion of Englishness that Amis left off in Jake’s Thing is also continued. For most Amis fans, the novel is oddly unsatisfying because it lacks the verbal ingenuity of his best work. The decision to represent Russian in English translation limits his ability to amuse the reader through language, with only periodic reminders of his true talents in the English gambits used mistakenly by the Russian occupiers. Even at his bleakest, Amis always remembered to squeeze humour from the incorrect but creative English speech patterns of foreigners. From a creative standpoint, the novel deals with the necessity of entertaining one’s audience and one might argue that Amis fails his readership for the same reason that the production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet fails: the audience’s expectations are left unfulfilled. Because the novel is almost humourless, one begins to appreciate the positive contribution made by verbal and linguistic pyrotechnics in most Amis novels. The translation of Russian into bloodless English deprives Amis of the means of amusing the reader in passing – as Shorty did in Ending Up – via accents, mimicry, and word play. Verbal creativity is not only entertaining, but serves to lighten the mood and in Russian Hide-and-Seek the mood is sombre throughout. This is not to say that Amis ought to have returned to the romantic comedy formula. That he did not wish to become f­ ormulaic is borne out by his collaborations and genre experiments. However, verbal comedy and linguistic ingenuity were indispensable parts of his narrative voice, and a brief comparison of the malevolent hero of Russian Hide-and-Seek with Patrick Standish reveals that, while they are remarkably similar in their characters and behaviour patterns, Alexander Petrovsky’s lack of humour creates a serious problem of balance. He has no redeeming qualities at all and the reader cannot even temporarily take his side.8 While The Anti-Death League presented a world in which life is essentially ordered and comprehensible, albeit with inexplicable and



Problems with Language and Balance 163

­ iscomfiting twists of fate, order is disrupted in Russian Hide-and-Seek. d This is exemplified by the deadly game of hide-and-seek played by Russian military officers. In The Anti-Death League Amis removed the divine’s hand from Chesterton’s thread and in this novel he eliminates God altogether. To show the randomness of human life, he offers a variation on Russian roulette in which the players call out to each other in the darkness, then remain motionless while the others shoot in the direction of the voices. However, everyone cheats by running before the shooting begins to increase their survival odds. When a newcomer participates, Petrovsky worries that he will naively follow the rules and be shot. After an ominous build-up, the scene ends in tragedy, though the victim is Leo, an experienced player and the game’s instigator. The result is a curious inversion of L.S. Caton’s death, for he was the only person with no connection to the fighting at the end of The Anti-Death League. Leo’s death is more disturbing because it reinforces the thesis that in Russified ­England life is not only unfair but completely unpredictable. The game that gives the novel its name is, therefore, a cry of despair against the random forces controlling human destiny. The most important character that recurs from a previous Amis work is Patrick Standish, who is reborn as Alexander Petrovsky. His mother believes that his self-centredness is due to overindulgence in childhood: “All human beings, especially those with good looks or some other advantage over their fellows, need strong opposition when young,” she reasons. “If it isn’t forthcoming, their characters suffer. They become egotistical, impossible to deflect from any course of action they may have set themselves, and yet erratic, given to abrupt, entire changes of direction for no external cause” (130–1). In Take a Girl Like You, Jenny Bunn made a similar speech about a child in her class being, like S­ tandish, “incapable of noticing ­opposition” (30). Both Petrovsky and Standish engage in malicious pranks and deception that target the innocent, distinguishing them from Dixonesque heroes whose principal goal in tricking others is diversion from boredom. Furthermore, most of ­Dixon’s pranks are harmless, because his enemies are only fooled temporarily, if at all. But Petrovsky’s malice is apparent from the novel’s opening scene, in which, while horseriding, he frightens a flock of sheep, then returns home and recounts the tale to his sister, weeping in apparent repentance. In another emotional scene he says to his girlfriend, Kitty Wright: “Let me tell you how I feel – how you make me feel.” Once he has done so he concludes: “I wish you could have been ... kidnapped and taken prisoner by Vanag’s men so that I could come riding in to rescue you”

164

Kingsley Amis

(55). He later uses the telephone in typically deceptive Amisian fashion to convince a guard to give him access to munitions. Petrovsky pretends to make a call to a superior officer and the results of his deception are murderous, rather than comical. Because of his cunning and his refusal to recognize opposition, he must be killed to stop him from carrying out the mission. His negative traits – emotionalism, the love of duplicity for its own sake (35), and a twisted sense of honour (79) – are inherited from Patrick Standish, though Petrovsky appears far worse, since he lacks both humour and a sense of the absurd. The Englishness debate is renewed, not recycled, in the novel, with Amis imagining the effect of cultural deprivation on language. The ironically named Dr Wright notes that “English is a language” but “England is a place” (151), a distinction made to emphasize Jake Richardson’s point that fewer and fewer people living in England can correctly manipulate the language. The English revolt fails primarily for linguistic reasons, as the cultural festival ominously foreshadows. Though it had become customary for Amis to satirize the decorative use of foreign loan words by poseurs, in Russian-Hide-and-Seek English is only ever used only for decorative purposes. Society as a whole is guilty of linguistic posturing. Few of the Russian occupiers speak English fluently, but they employ it for greetings and epithets and, in most cases, its application is incorrect or inappropriate. When the thirty-year-old Theodor Markov addresses the director of security, Korotchenko, who is at least twenty years his senior, as “dear chap,” the latter, unsurprised, calls him “old customer” in reply (16). At a dinner party, Petrovsky is deservedly upbraided for not showing his father proper respect. But when he is told by a young woman at the dinner table to “piss off” (23), the non-reaction of the other guests suggests that either no one understands the phrase or it has taken on a different, inoffensive meaning. Most of the English employed in the novel will seem odd or offensive to native speakers, thereby proving the point that language use (and not one’s nation of birth) is the most accurate measure of Englishness. The people in the novel who are descended from English stock and were born during the occupation have grown up speaking Russian, and they have no more of a claim to be English than the occupiers. It is not surprising then that the “English” revolt should fail. Through his representation of the decline of culture, Amis shows that art cannot survive and flourish unless there is a reciprocal relationship between artist and audience. He had never thoroughly examined the audience’s side of the relationship, but he does so through a ­performance



Problems with Language and Balance 165

of Romeo and Juliet. An analysis of the shortcomings of the audience helps clarify the meaning of reciprocity for Amis, and shows the potential of the audience to exert a negative influence on art. Deprived of their cultural history, the English festival-goers are unable to understand either the intended message or the artistic medium. Their reactions range from boredom, when subjected to a Christian sermon, to anger at an art exhibition and dramatic production. Paintings are vandalized for no apparent reason; John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger inspires laughter; and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet leads to arson and a riot.9 The two plays are of particular importance, for they show that the emphasis on reciprocity affects the relationship between artist and audience. When one considers the performance of Elevations 9 by Roy Vandervane, one sees that Amis was warning of the necessity of educating the audience. In Russian Hide-and-Seek, the audience comes for stimulation and out of curiosity, but the people’s lack of cultural sophistication turns art into unintentional farce. In Girl, 20, critical perversity (the fear of missing out on the next wave of the avant-garde) transforms a musical joke into a sophisticated musical experiment. In both cases, ignorance inhibits understanding. Perhaps the performance of Look Back in Anger is called “an outand-out success” (176) because the audience has identified with Jimmy Porter, the lower-middle class hero who is angry at social injustice, but the play is not a comedy and the narrator’s ironic assessment shows that the audience has misinterpreted Osborne’s message: “Only very rarely in the past could the theatre have rung with so much happy, hearty laughter. Afterwards the members of the cast had been chaired round the neighbouring streets by an enthusiastic crowd” (176).10 In contrast, the performance of Romeo and Juliet is poorly received and ends in a violent mob setting fire to the theatre. The illiterate and culturally unprepared audience can neither understand nor appreciate Shakespeare. Amis has the audience eating chocolates throughout because “A Russian researcher of unusually wide reading had come across the remark (sarcastically intended) that chocolates seemed to be compulsory at English theatrical performances” (178), thereby demonstrating the adverse effect of misguided art critics. In his BLitt thesis, Amis saw it as the artist’s duty to please the ­audience. Any failure to do so would result in the artist losing his or her audience. Russian Hide-and-Seek examines the relationship between artist and audience in a different way, showing that Amis was becoming disillusioned by wilful misinterpretations of his craft. In the descriptions

166

Kingsley Amis

of both the Osborne and the Shakespeare productions, he enumerates the potential faults on the audience’s side that may hinder a creative artist. First, he shows that unfair audience expectations can lead to trouble. Those in attendance at the performance of Romeo and Juliet had been looking forward to enjoying themselves and had been bewildered and bored. They had been told over and over again that this was a great play by a great Englishman and there was nothing in it. They had put on these ridiculous clothes and come all this way to be made fools of. It was what some of them had been calling it from the beginning – just another Shits’ trick. (181) Amis himself could appreciate this type of misunderstanding since many critics and readers measured his novels against Lucky Jim and considered changes in content or style indications of artistic failure rather than a widening of his creative vision. In Russian Hide-and-Seek the audience, not the artist, is inauthentic, as the English have been rendered incapable of appreciating art by decades of cultural deprivation. The most interesting part of Amis’s presentation of these two failed dramatic productions is contained in the suggestion that romantic love cannot survive in the absence of culture. The audience does not recognize Romeo and Juliet as a romance because no one is capable of having a traditional love relationship in Russified England. Petrovsky’s sado-masochistic affair with Sonia Korotchenko serves as the centrepiece in a loveless world.11 s ta n l e y a n d t h e w o m e n

(1984)

With Amis holding his characters responsible in relation to artistic creation, this is a fascinating, if unsatisfying, novel that features a grudgingly responsible narrator. It also gives us a glimpse into Amis’s narrative method, as changes made to the manuscript draft show that he deliberately created a distasteful protagonist so that readers would not think that Stanley Duke has authorial endorsement. Careful analysis suggests that while Amis was deliberately trying to cause offence in the creation of Duke’s portrait, he expected readers to understand that the world he depicts is so dark precisely because the hero’s perspective is skewed. This was lost on most readers, who concluded that the offensive opinions offered by the hero were also the author’s. One might characterize Stanley and the Women as an alternative world ­ rotagonist novel masquerading as a work of literary realism, since the p



Problems with Language and Balance 167

appears uncomfortable in the increasingly surreal England of the 1980s. While many Amis novels end on uncertain notes, this one begins with ambiguity. Amis offers a disembodied third-person analysis of Susan Duke and her dinner party and finally, after three pages, ­Stanley Duke, a newspaper advertising manager, reluctantly admits to being her husband and the book’s first-person narrator. The unwillingness to accept responsibility is the root of the hero’s later troubles. ­William ­Laskowski notes that “Amis’s narrative habit of initially mystifying the reader at the beginning of his works is at its peak” in this novel, and he claims that the absence of a “steady narrative focus” prepares the reader for “a certain indeterminacy” (1998, 118). It is also an effective way of showing that the hero is a shirker. Duke will try throughout the novel to avoid taking responsibility for portions of the story that are his wife’s, his ex-wife’s, or his son’s. In this respect he resembles Douglas Yandell, the narrator in Girl, 20, who claimed to be “a great believer in letting people decide things like [how to dress] for themselves” (HEHL, 3). In both novels, Amis offers an indictment of those who passively observe the lives and mistakes of their significant others, though the author himself might be accused of the same crime. In forming Stanley Duke’s persona, Amis blended the characteristics of his early sardonic heroes with autobiographical detail to create an unattractive but ambivalent character completely unlike Jim Dixon and Kingsley Amis. The fact that Duke is intended to be different from Dixon or John Lewis is ironically emphasized by what they have in common: humble beginnings and the tendency to fuss over moral issues. The following warning, delivered to Duke by his son Steve’s psychiatrist, could have been lifted directly from That Uncertain Feeling: “I must say it would be a pity if you let concern with your own moral position get in the way of more important things” (128). If he were concerned, he would be John Lewis; however, the psychiatrist has simply failed to read the sarcasm in Duke’s claim to be responsible for Steve’s mental condition. He is not at all concerned. Midway through the book, Duke drives his Apfelsine sports car through South London, and says that he is glad to have escaped the area where both he and Amis were born (117). Again, the casual reader that knew about Amis’s lower-middle-class background and literary success might think that he is, like Duke, a snob who has forgotten his humble beginnings. But to prevent the strict association of Duke with the author, key details from the lives of Amis and the members of his immediate circle are inverted. Susan’s mother is called Lady Daly because her husband was ­ ilmarnock, a knighted member of parliament, thereby recalling Lady K

168

Kingsley Amis

who was Amis’s first, not second, wife. Steve, Duke’s son by his first wife, has aspirations to be a writer and just in case the reader connects him to Martin Amis, the author has Steve destroy a copy of Herzog by ­Martin’s favourite novelist, Saul Bellow (26).12 And, further, Duke has written about cars and drives a sports car himself. He is planning to write to the editor of Classic Car Club on the subject of exhausts: “I might well work it up into an article – after all, Susan was not the only writer in the family” (55). In this way Amis takes his literary rivalry with Elizabeth Jane Howard and makes the wife well-known and himself a mere amateur. Amis, who knew nothing about cars and did not even drive, turns Duke into an auto enthusiast and, by novel’s end, the newspaper’s new automotive critic (231). In spite of its faults, Stanley and the Women shows how much Amis’s art had advanced in thirty years. While his failed novel The Legacy was full of pointless details that convey nothing because the narrative perspective is so weak, changes made to Stanley and the Women in manuscript form show that descriptive details reveal as much about the protagonist’s way of viewing as they do about the action. Marginal notes and alterations to the manuscript suggest that Amis decided to make Duke both more complex and more disagreeable. Although the resulting novel is not particularly enjoyable to read, Amis seems to have done it to prevent readers from sympathizing with Duke or thinking that he has authorial endorsement. In the first draft, Duke drives a Porsche and, when trouble arises with the clutch, it is revealed that he knows gearboxes well and has published on the subject. Halfway through the Porsche becomes an Apfelsine, which is apparently intended to be a rarer breed of expensive sports car (128). Amis would, however, forget once, write “Porsche,” cross it out, and make the correction. This change was made to add complexity to Duke’s character. While ownership of a Porsche would be interpreted as status motivated, Duke’s choice of an Apfelsine indicates that he is a true auto enthusiast. This addition of a redeeming characteristic contrasts well with other changes made during the manuscript stage to prevent the reader from sympathizing with Duke. After he calls his mother-in-law by her title, “lady,” without the family name “Daly” he internally remarks that this is “either poetical or vulgar, nothing in between.” Amis then added the following marginal note: “Going too far is a good thing on his part – shd be more setting him up for what is to happen” (HEHL, 16). He would have Duke go too far primarily in his observations of fellow beings. A search for something diverting on the radio at first results in the discovery that “Most of



Problems with Language and Balance 169

5 Midway through the first paragraph of this manuscript page from Stanley and the Women, the phrase “rock record” is replaced by “yobbos’ war chant.” In several Amis novels in the 1970s, characters with tacit authorial endorsement voice unattractive or offensive opinions. Many of the revisions made to Stanley and the Women in draft prevent the reader from identifying with the central character. While the reader always knows whom to cheer for in his most popular work, Lucky Jim, the author’s sympathies are far from obvious in his commercially and critically less successful later works.

the stations were evidently playing the same rock record.” This became: “Most of the stations were evidently a sort of hooligans’ anthem playing the same yobbos’ war-chant” (HEHL, 59). Another representative alteration occurs when Duke observes an employee at the psychiatric hospital. “I thought that he looked tremendously unmedical” became, “It struck me that this Asian, quite apart from being an Asian, looked tremendously unmedical” (HEHL, 107). Duke is racist, sexist, and intolerant, and his attitude towards his humble beginnings does not endear him to the reader either. “By the time I got to New Cross I had come to within five miles of where I had been born and brought up,” he reports in the manuscript, after which Amis made the following marginal addition: “not changed much, still shitty” (HEHL, 92). Though the novel was not well-received critically, it signalled another important adjustment in Amis’s developing artistic vision. For perhaps the first time in his fiction, he shows the limitations of art, as the lessons learned through art often have no application to life. Duke’s ex-wife, Nowell, has just appeared in a television drama playing “the maverick

170

Kingsley Amis

matron” in a hospital “who didn’t really think they ought to be torturing the patients to death just yet” (21); she is, however, indifferent to the poor care that her own son receives at the mental hospital, giving all the responsibility to Duke (208). She is a professional actress and medical professionals are described as “colossal actors” (58). Nowell’s roleplaying includes a penchant for imaginative interpretation or, as Duke explains, “She makes up the past as she goes along” (98). Her current husband, Bert Hutchinson, is also an actor: he pretends to be perpetually drunk to avoid dealing with his wife (168). Staged episodes in the novel, such as the discovery of a switchblade knife in Steve’s dresser drawer and his beating at the Jabali Embassy, lend it a surrealist air. The most significant such episode is Steve’s attack on his step-mother. This has actually been orchestrated by Susan – she stabs herself in the forearm – as a means of getting him committed to the mental hospital. Nothing is as it seems in Stanley and the Women, and while there are no shamming artists in the novel, there are numerous shamming people, and most of them are women. The novel is one of Amis’s poorest because he fails to maintain balance, one of the keys to literary success identified in Ending Up. ­Bernard Bastable’s bile has infected Stanley Duke, who takes a dim view of women, homosexuals, and minorities. Although Amis would defend himself against critics who disliked the novel by insisting that he had portrayed men unfavourably as well, men are not put on trial in the same way that the women are. One witness after another is called by Amis to testify against women as conniving, evil, and mad. The novel would have had a semblance of balance if Amis had limited himself to the polarized views of Stanley and Susan Duke, but he invokes the authority of a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, a newspaper editor, a policeman, a cheerful businesswoman, and a cleaning lady to show that women are manipulative and insane. Although Amis developed the habit of re-examining characters and concepts, he almost always adopted an opposing perspective the second time. However, in his portrayal of both women and psychiatry in Stanley and the Women, he merely repeats the points made in Jake’s Thing. Philip Larkin recognized this as a departure from habit and wrote in a 29 January 1984 letter: “I thought you’d given women a pretty good going-over in JT; still got more to say, eh?” (HEHL). Amis countered that it was “not another JT by any means. None of the sentimental mollycoddling that women get in that. This has moments of definite hostility. It’s an inexhaustible subject” (Amis 2001, 969).13

11 Resolving Creative Problems: The Old Devils, Difficulties with Girls, The Folks That Live on the Hill, and The Russian Girl the old devils

(1986)

The Old Devils is a vitriolic comic novel that, like Ending Up, addresses the issues of aging and artistic authenticity to apparently argue that bad people, like shamming artists, get worse as they grow older. For the most part, the thesis of Ending Up is reinforced by the old devils – the five central male characters – whose tempers shorten and idiosyncrasies are exacerbated as the body declines. This is most obvious at the wedding that concludes the novel. Peter Thomas,1 who is overweight and in poor health, is subjected to a tedious diatribe on the results of the loss of one’s faculties by a woman who speaks “in an accent from somewhere not very nice in England” (364). She concludes: “Take my advice, Mr. Thomas, and don’t go deaf” (365). Sadly, physical decrepitude descends on one without one’s permission, and this realization may give the reader the sense that Amis is despairing over human frailty and limitations. However, The Old Devils differs from Ending Up by offering both human and artistic hope, suggesting that, while Amis’s view of humanity had changed little over the years, he had regained the balanced life view that characterized his most successful novels. The Old Devils is unique in admitting the potential for both romantic and artistic happiness, in spite of imperfections. Two points are of particular interest in this novel in considering the development of Amis’s art. First, a major alteration in draft form shows that Amis was still aware of the importance of maintaining balance, but that he had to overcome natural prejudices to do so. By greatly reducing the role of the hateful American Welshman, ­Llywelyn ­Caswallon Pugh, he made the novel less ­offensive. ­Nevertheless, the extended argument

172

Kingsley Amis

against Wales remains illogical and unfair, based as it is on Amis’s tendency to use English language and culture as the ideal against which Wales is measured. A discussion of Rudyard Kipling is perhaps not inappropriate in trying to understand what Amis as an Englishman thought he was doing by denouncing all things Welsh. In the television script for the series Writers and their Houses, he claims that Kipling’s masterpiece was Kim (HEHL, 5) and quotes Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri as saying that Kim is “the finest story about India ever.” According to Amis, C ­ haudhuri said: “We Indians shall never cease to be grateful to Kipling for having shown the many faces of our country in all their beauty, power and truth” (HEHL, 6). This was another of the points about Kipling to which Amis was drawn: he had written successful novels set in India without being an Indian. And yet Amis knew how many Welsh readers would react to having their culture lampooned by an Englishman, since he had written on a related subject in the 1963 essay, “What’s Left for Patriotism?” In discussing the problem of how to be an English patriot, he declared: “the modern nation-State is in important ways like a family, an organisation in which loyalty is not only based on self-interest, and may fly in the face of logic, fact and outside allegiances. I can knock or kick my Aunt Edna, but you mustn’t” (HEHL). The second point of artistic interest in The Old Devils relates to antimodels, as Amis offers two new variations in the professional Welshman Alun Weaver and the amateur poet Malcolm Cellan-Davies. The former proves that shamming at the highest level is akin to art – something hinted at but never fully demonstrated through L.S. Caton’s character – while the latter suggests that even if a bore can never be transformed into a great artist, the act of creation might have personal significance. Amis would return to this idea in The Folks That Live on the Hill, in justifying the resumption of failed poet Freddie Caldecote’s writing career. ­ atrick In Alun Weaver, the negative qualities of Gareth Probert and P Standish combine to create a literary, cultural, and sexual predator. He manipulates Welsh tradition when it is to his benefit and, like ­Standish, cannot tolerate opposition. Artistically, he is an antimodel once removed, for he looks and acts like a shamming artist but is incapable of creation, thus, legitimate or otherwise, cannot be considered a creative artist. Alun’s status as antimodel is further complicated by his self-conscious shamming. He is “the up-­market media Welshman” who has changed his name from “Alan” to “Alun” to appear more authentically Welsh and readily admits to being a fraud. At the same time, he is relentless in uncovering other frauds and skilled at doing so. The impossibility



Resolving Creative Problems 173

of ascertaining his talents or even knowing with certainty whether he is striking a pose or behaving naturally is ironically expressed by Alun himself in comparing the fictitious Welsh national poet Brydan to an onion: you successively peeled away layers of it, with frightful shit and quite decent old bloke alternating, until you got to the heart. The trouble was he could not at this stage remember, and certainly not decide off the cuff, which of the two you ended up with. There was something of the same difficulty with the works: talented charlatanry, or deeply flawed works of genius? Or perhaps they were just beside the point. (303) Alun’s own onion-like character is revealed soon after his return to Wales from London. He meets his friends and calls himself “an old fraud” and “ham.” This leads them to reassure him that he is not (91), even though the reader knows that they actually agree with his assessment. Via his unsuccessful attempt to write a Welsh novel, we also learn that even if Alun publicly denigrates himself, he still harbours artistic dreams. The psychological complexity of this game is not lost on his friend Charlie Norris, who suspects that Alun thinks “a fraud who’s come out is more believable than a closet fraud” (92). Charlie will later tell his manipulative friend, “We see through you, chum” (151), and it is primarily to maintain a semblance of honour that Alun goes out of his way to identify and expose other shams. Unlike the Welches, Gareth Probert, and Wulfstan Strether, he is not ignorant of his creative limitations and this makes the reader sympathize to a certain degree. Furthermore, his uncanny ability to reveal awkward truths that others do not perceive, or are afraid of broaching, is more a curse than a blessing, because his revelations emerge in socially embarrassing contexts, not art. This makes him both an antimodel and poor company. Alun is most irritated by the American Pugh, to whom he is introduced at the unveiling of a monument to Brydan. Pugh bothers Alun because he is even less legitimate from a Welsh cultural standpoint and he lacks self-awareness. According to this sliding scale of authenticity, it is quite bad to be a sham, but much worse to be one and not to realize it. Like Strode Atkins in One Fat Englishman, Pugh is over-zealous about the language and culture of the “mother country,” which is how he refers to Wales. He insists on addressing Charlie in Welsh, not suspecting that many people who claim Welsh citizenship cannot speak the language.2

174

Kingsley Amis

Alun is critical of the American for speaking Welsh “on purpose” (120), a ridiculous insinuation that there is no need to speak Welsh in Wales if both parties understand English. This contradiction – that so many people who argue for the uniqueness of Welsh culture cannot even speak the language – is at the heart of Amis’s refusal to recognize Brydan’s model, Dylan Thomas, as a great Welsh poet. In his speech at the unveiling of Brydan’s statue, Alun admits that the bard could not speak Welsh but calls this “a matter of the purest chance, a matter of fashion only” (113). By having a charlatan offer the following weak defence of Brydan, Amis smears Thomas and leads the reader to the conclusion that culture and language are inextricably connected: “Nobody who knows his work and who knows Wales and the Welsh language can be in any doubt that that land and that language live in that work. He had no literal, wordfor-word understanding, but at a deep, instinctive, primal level he understood” (113–14). That this is double-speak is underlined by the unnecessary repetition of “knows,” “language,” “that,” and “word.” To clarify the link between sham commentator and shamming artist, Amis also has Alun utter a Dylan Thomas-like inverted homily – “Heart is where the home is” (64) – when he returns to Wales. Such expressions were hateful for an author who had satirized modernism throughout his fiction to show that common sense inverted becomes nonsense. In Pugh’s case, the situation is reversed: he understands the indigenous language of Wales but not its culture. Perhaps the pitting of Pugh against Alun is best understood as the physical representation of the dilemma faced by Amis’s philandering protagonists who want to have both a wife and a mistress. In art, however, one not only can but must do both, as a thorough knowledge of both culture and language is a prerequisite for creation. One of the weaknesses in The Old Devils is the recurring xenophobic tendency to measure the Welsh against the English and find the Welsh lacking. This surfaces in anecdotes and stories, and is distilled in the character of Pugh, though Amis’s ability to self-edit prevented the novel from being unduly damaged by xenophobia. Peter’s wife, the malicious Muriel, offers an anecdote on Welsh honesty that represents the attitude taken towards Wales throughout the novel. She claims to have heard of a Welsh preacher who repeatedly used the English word “truth” in his sermon because there was no word in Welsh with the same power. Ironically, “there is a Welsh word truth, same word, spelt the same anyhow, and it means falsehood” (239). But the most damning witness called in the case against Wales is Pugh, for whom Amis at first envisioned a much larger



Resolving Creative Problems 175

role. In the first draft, he appears between pages 73 and 101 (HEHL), and is revealed to be insincere, more German than American, a shirker of his round at the pub, and a devious homosexual. These characteristics represent some of the most commonly recurring negative stereotypes in Amis’s fiction, but it is rare to find all of them in a single character. Since Pugh is one of the few Welsh defenders in the novel, such a thoroughly negative treatment would have made the attack on Welshness extreme, if not malicious, and Amis was wise to reduce his role, having him enter and exit within six pages in the final version (1986, 113–18). Initially Amis did not conceive of Alun swearing in farewell at Pugh from a car window after the unveiling of Brydan’s statue. This ends Pugh’s role in the published text, as Alun deems him cheap for extending an invitation to America, then suggesting that he stay at Pugh’s home rather than a hotel. In the first draft, Pugh is invited on a pub crawl with the old devils after the ceremony. Just before their departure, Pugh excuses himself and Alun says to the others, “Oh, bugger it. That fellow’s a bloody German, not a Welshman at all. I wonder he didn’t click his bloody heels while he was at it.” Charlie agrees: “It’s all Germans over there now, I was reading.” When the question of Pugh’s legitimacy is broached, Alun says, “I don’t know. You’ve got to remember that whatever else he may or may not be he’s an American, and there’s nothing anybody can think up, however bizarre, that an American can’t be. That some actual American isn’t, if you follow me.” Alun ends the scene with the declaration that “Llywelyn Arseholing Pugh isn’t getting a five-pound note off me for anything under the sun, that’s for sure” (HEHL, 75). The original justification for inviting Pugh to come on the drinking expedition is that he has “got Alun by the balls.” If the latter incurs his displeasure “Pugh would be obligated to fuck him up with his committee, get him uninvited to go to the States” (75). This means both that Pugh’s irritating company must be borne and that Amis has an excuse for deriving more wicked humour from ­cultural ­stereotypes. At the first stop, Pugh asks “to what extent this here would be ­considered a typical or characteristic Welsh pub.” In answer, Charlie’s enormous buttocks produce a tear in the canvas seat of his chair, loud rock music begins to play, and the party departs (82). In the published version, it is left to ­Malcolm to play the part of the person who takes Welsh culture seriously (as he does throughout the novel) and ask Alun whether or not the ­General Picton is a characteristic pub. In the first draft, after a visit to the pseudo-Indian restaurant and with Pugh still in tow, the party returns to the Glendower, the Thomas brothers’ restaurant. Victor, who is himself

176

Kingsley Amis

homosexual, asks Charlie in an aside, “Who’s your lady friend? Sticks out a mile, I promise you. There are some that need a second glance and some that don’t. Bronwen Pugh is your instant department” (85). Pugh then asks the wine waiter to take him on a tour of the wine cellar, in the obvious hope of making a pass (88), but Charlie sees through this design and prevents the tour. Next Pugh offers everyone the chance to make more anti-Welsh remarks by saying: “We were reading in Bethgelert of a growing Welsh resistance movement on the lines of the IRA” (94). Alun confirms that “there is a Welsh resistance and always has been, but it’s all in the mind” (94–5). At the last pub Pugh again avoids paying for his round (96) to the disgust of the others. In an ironic reversal, when everyone (including the reader) has had enough of Pugh, he suddenly claims to have tired of his companions: Malcolm just asked what there is to show this is Wales and the three of you handed him nothing but sarcasm and cheap mean remarks. You talked the same way all day. I come to Wales to find me some Welshmen and what do I run across but a bunch of goddam limejuicers. Now if you’ll excuse me for a spell I’ll go take a look around for something a little more authentic, a little more real. Malcolm. (98) They exit after Malcolm tries to intervene between a young ruffian and Pugh, who is being sworn at, and Malcolm falls over at the bar and bangs his nose (101). Though Amis must have enjoyed indulging a variety of natural prejudices through Pugh, the cuts show an awareness of the need for creative balance. Since he did not attempt to represent the other side – the Welsh side – in The Old Devils, as he had done so assiduously in previous successful books, he did the next best thing and silenced himself. The central paradox of The Old Devils, represented in Alun the charlatan and speaker of plain truths, could also be applied to Amis himself: the most astute observers may recognize others’ faults but are often oblivious to, or unable to correct, their own. This has obvious artistic significance; sometimes bad writers, musicians, and painters do realize that they have not succeeded, and they can do nothing about it. Alun’s shrewd, critical eye is matched by his sharp tongue, and when he sees something amiss he rarely lets it go without commenting. In an amusing and revealing scene, he provokes an altercation with Tarquin Jones, the arch-conservative pub landlord who enjoys delivering harangues against disturbing social trends. While Charlie, Peter, Malcolm, and Garth do



Resolving Creative Problems 177

little to discourage the landlord, Alun finally takes action after listening to a diatribe against the water board: What are you to do? If you really don’t know what to do then God help you. But I’ll tell you what you don’t do, so at least you’ll know that much for next time, all right? You don’t go on as if they’ve told you they’re coming round to take you to a gas-chamber and you don’t hold the floor for half an hour with a bloody music-hall monologue when you could just be boring us stiff about the price of booze like anybody else. That’s what you don’t do, see. (328) Alun calls the landlord “the kind of idiot who’s ruining Wales” by becoming one of the “wonderful old characters who speak their own highly idiosyncratic and often curiously erudite kind of language” (329). His primary objection to “Tarc” is that he pretends to be impassioned about something that interests him very little – an interesting charge since Alun does the same thing by glorifying Wales and the onion-like Brydan. Claiming that he cannot stand Tarc’s “posturing” is also hypocritical, since, as Peter points out, he has no objection to various other kinds (330). The same inconsistencies emerge in Alun’s criticism of the alcoholic Dorothy. When she embarks on a drinking session, he watches “in some professional distaste” as she pretends to have a connoisseur’s appreciation for wine. In fact her only concern is to drink as much as possible. Alun tries to distinguish his shamming from Dorothy’s by claiming that his goal is “self-entertainment.” Dorothy, however, “was seriously trying to create an effect” (301). The distinction is fine, but it ­underlines Alun’s status as artistic antimodel once removed. Though he creates nothing, he has turned shamming into an art form. He is too selfconscious to fully commit himself to art and is, therefore, always a step removed from creation. Although Alun’s personality dominates the novel, it begins and ends with Malcolm the bore translating medieval Welsh poetry into English.3 With the expressed goal of improving on an existing translation of a medieval Welsh poem, he has spent hours comparing translations while also intending to write his own original poetry. However, he writes nothing and, as the narrator points out, “He ought to have had the sense to know that intentions alone were no good in a case like this” (20). The news that the Weavers are moving back to Wales upsets him to such a degree that he looks at his translation, thinking of his love for R ­ hiannon Weaver, and a surge of boredom makes him contemplate ­tearing up the

178

Kingsley Amis

manuscript. Deciding that poetry must spring from hope, not intentions (21), he determines to revive the one-sided relationship with R ­ hiannon. Malcolm’s exchanges with her and friends at the pub are, like his poetry, revisitations of the past, as he attempts to deny the inevitability of physical and emotional change. He also represents the deluded audience member who unintentionally perpetuates the creation of bad art. His weakness for nostalgia blinds him to the obvious flaws in Alun’s poetry, which he defends early in the novel: “It’s true that a lot of his work falls under Brydan’s shadow, but I see nothing very shameful in that. And there’s more than that in it. I’m not saying he didn’t get quite a bit from Brydan, but they were also both drawing on a common stock to rather different effect. Something like that” (28). When Malcolm takes Rhiannon out for a day trip he tries to trigger memories of a shared past that she has forgotten, if it ever existed at all. To pacify him, she agrees to his reconstruction of a beach outing until he realizes memory has failed him. Things did not take place as he remembered them, thus Rhiannon has no recollection of the trip at all, as she tearfully admits (223–5). At the end of the novel, however, Malcolm has changed and, while one could not call him a positive artistic model, his poetic enterprise has become creative and therapeutic. Through Malcolm, Amis shows that imaginative revisitations of the past may not work in life but they are perfectly acceptable in art. The change is occasioned by Alun’s death, which forces Malcolm to abandon all hopes of recreating a romantic past with Rhiannon, because she has moved in with Peter. The final chapter begins with Malcolm and his wife, Gwen, discussing a letter from Peter’s estranged wife, Muriel. Though Malcolm has doubts about Gwen’s interpretation of the letter’s contents, he refrains from contradicting her. Later he reads the letter in private and finds factual information that she neglected to pass on. With this idea of the wilful distortion of truth in mind, Malcolm then proceeds to his work-table to continue another poetic translation that is different from the one that launched the novel: 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. (384)



Resolving Creative Problems 179

Thus, Malcolm seems willing to accept both change and failure in life, and any further romantic recreations of the past will be limited to the realm of art, a decision Amis would support.4 The project has personal meaning, even if it might never result in the creation of an artistic masterpiece, and this is an important concession for Amis. He was not becoming any less dogmatic about what constituted good and bad art, but he was thinking more seriously about the compulsion to create. Without sanctioning the creation of bad art, Amis allows that there may be extenuating circumstances that make poor or amateurish creation worthwhile. In Malcolm’s case, he has finally separated fantasy from reality and accepted that Rhiannon has feelings for Peter, not him. He also realizes that one of the wonderful things about art is that artists are allowed to recreate events as they wish. If he wishes to fantasize, he should do so at his work-table, pen in hand. This is a stunning reversal for, at the beginning of the novel, Malcolm appeared blind to the truths in life and creatively blocked by his stubborn adherence to the original in his poetry translations. d i f f i c u lt i e s w i t h g i r l s

(1988)

Artistically, this novel may be compared to The Alteration, for Amis uses it to explain his reasons for conducting genre experiments. He also criticizes the publishing industry through Simon Giles, who is modelled on Victor Gollancz and facilitates a discussion of the negative influence of publishers who prioritize politics and their own public image over the promotion of good literature. Legitimate writers suffer, and often go unpublished, when the wrong type of audience is pandered to for political reasons. The novel begins by striking a similar note to Amis’s abandoned work of the same name, which examined homophobia at the time of the repealing of the English ban on homosexuality. The uncompleted novel featured an openly homosexual narrator and a male character who experiments with being gay. Though the published work has a completely different plot and characters, the experimental homo­sexual survives in the form of Tim Valentine and the novel opens with an insensitive pub landlord ejecting a customer suspected of being gay. The landlord will later ominously quote from Chesterton’s poem “The Secret People”: “We are the secret people of England, and we have not spoken yet” (266).5 Amis uses this character both to reject wrongheaded views of Englishness, as he had in One Fat Englishman, and to broach concerns about the potential for the audience to harmfully influence artistic creation.

180

Kingsley Amis

Amis’s post-1970 interest in holding his characters responsible by showing that their relationships with others always involve reciprocal obligations is certainly admirable, and it proves that his awareness of the social function of art was increasing. However, this concern for responsibility clashes with his rather irresponsible fictional practice of putting unsavoury opinions in the mouths of distasteful characters. He often agreed with these opinions, and the technique enabled him to express unpopular or controversial views without having to take responsibility for them. One of his most controversial novels would have been the original Difficulties with Girls, which he abandoned after one hundredand-thirty pages because of lingering suspicions that the vulgar and uncultured reader – represented by the thuggish pub landlord in the published novel – would conclude that the author too was gay. In a letter that accompanies the incomplete manuscript in the Huntington Library, Amis explained that he would not allow the novel to appear until after his death: I can’t let DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS be published in my lifetime because it would make everyone but my closest friends and perhaps even them think I was queer, or secretly queer, or had been queer in my 20s, or was a bit queer or something ... No use telling people I wrote the book because of the comic and general plot-possibilities and the challenge of portraying a queer from the inside. Or asking a stranger who recognized me and jeered if he had read the last chapter but one. (HEHL) This, however, is only half of the story, for Amis accepted the landlord’s view of homosexuality as the majority opinion, and one that must be heeded. The same letter explains that in the first Difficulties with Girls he had “tried to cover up two horrible facts,” one of which was “that anything to do with queer activities is permanently revolting to most men” (HEHL). While he was intrigued by the psychology of gays and lesbians – the latter group features in his next novel, The Folks That Live on the Hill – he was horrified at the prospect of being connected with his gay narrator. At the beginning of the published Difficulties with Girls, concern for the judgment of the audience is expressed through Patrick Standish. Because he enters the pub alone he is suspected of being gay, but he receives a warm reception once the beautiful Jenny arrives. He experiences the same mixed feelings as the author himself must have when he shelved the original fictional project: relief at being recognized



Resolving Creative Problems 181

as heterosexual mingled with disgust at being influenced by parochial judgments. Though both Amis and Standish would prefer to walk a tightrope between two fundamentally unappealing camps, the situation becomes untenable and they are forced to choose sides. Amis’s predicament reflects the shift made by successful writers from writing for a limited number of friends and admirers to addressing a large, sometimes misinformed readership; it also shows the influence wielded by Amis’s own inner audience, Robert Conquest,6 in the genesis of Difficulties with Girls. The novel was wedged between two works that Amis could not have created without information and stimulation provided by Conquest: Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980) and The Russian Girl (1992). Amis began writing the first Difficulties with Girls in the same year that his first Russian novel appeared, and there is reason to believe he abandoned it because of his relationship with Conquest. Their correspondence is filled with masculine jokes and anti-homosexual remarks and on 2 December 1985 Conquest relayed the following comment from a “nice, bright, quite pretty” female admirer of Stanley and the Women: “when I told her, perhaps wrongly, that your next book would be about queers, about whom you took a liberal attitude, she went pink with rage at the thought that you had given women hell but would temper the wind to the homos, who deserved it just as much” (HEHL). Such comments helped to keep Amis informed of the man (or woman) on the street’s opinion of his writing but also must have deterred him from appearing too sympathetic to homosexuals.7 While a large portion of the published Difficulties with Girls is devoted to the theme of social decline, which links it with Stanley and the Women,8 the novel is directly concerned with the artistic question of how writers ought to behave. At a publisher’s party at the beginning of the novel, Jenny sees a “tall man of about sixty with a pink face, a great cloud of white hair and large blue eyes fixed on a point near the ceiling” and declares: “That must be a poet” (11). Those readers familiar with Amis’s novels will recognize him as a poseur, like Gareth Probert or Alun Weaver, but it is subsequently revealed that this Australian man’s writing is not without artistic merit. Just as external appearances can deceive, preconceptions can also lead us astray. He proves to be an irritating companion, though, and this confuses Jenny, who is chided by Standish for her romanticized view of art: “You think you have to be a decent bloke to write well” (23). The Australian is just one in a series of antimodels introduced at the party. The others include: a poet who does not read others’ poetry (12); a male writer who tries and fails to get a standing

182

Kingsley Amis

offer of free tea from Jenny while he is working at a nearby library (14); and a short, loquacious, aging poet, with poor personal hygiene, who is obsessed with negative literary reviews. With the occasional exception, such as the Australian poet, the writers who attend publishers’ and agents’ parties seem to do so for the purpose of self-promotion, because their books are not good enough to secure an audience or reputation. Jenny later becomes aware of this truth while perusing the local library’s shelves; she realizes that the writers one meets and the writers whose books are in libraries belong to two distinct categories that rarely overlap (63). Legitimate writers and artists do not need to cultivate an artistic appearance; it is quite possible, therefore, to act normally and still be a successful artist. However, bad poets often misbehave, thinks Amis, because they are incapable of attracting attention through their art, so they compensate by behaving erratically or eccentrically. When a female poet makes a vulgar scene at another literary party, one of the characters will quote Shelley – “‘Poets are the unacknowledged ­legislators of the world’” (230) – to suggest that bad poets act like tyrants because they are powerless. Amis used Difficulties with Girls and the relationship between Patrick and Jenny Standish to examine himself as a writer and to retrospectively justify the decision not to write more romantic comedies. Take a Girl Like You surprised readers by featuring a rogue hero who is allowed to get away with his misdeeds. In Difficulties with Girls Amis admits that he continued to write about rakes and rogues because he enjoys depicting bad characters more than good ones. This is revealed in a scene in which Jenny berates her husband for philandering and deception, and advises him to change his reading material if he is serious about altering his character. Somerset Maugham, for example, wrote “All about people not doing things they very much wanted to do because they thought they had an obligation to someone else. And going on not doing what they wanted for years on end, not just a couple of weeks” (238). Unfortunately, Standish prefers Fielding’s Tom Jones, in which the rakish hero admonishes himself for his indiscretions and promises to do better, but enjoys himself all the same. “‘Though he did not always act rightly,’” quotes a disgusted Jenny, “‘yet he never did otherwise without feeling and suffering for it’” (239).9 Amis always had a greater affinity for ­Fielding than Maugham, but it should be noted that he tried to follow Jenny’s advice by writing a book with a “queer protagonist,” even if he would boorishly justify the decision to Conquest as a means of saying “lots of crappy things about women (and men) as well as about



Resolving Creative Problems 183

queers” (Amis 2001, 903).10 Though he strove to represent the perspectives of un-Amisian characters, he found rogues like Roy Vandervane more interesting than the bland Douglas Yandell. The author admits as much in having Standish virulently reject the way of Maugham through Tim Valentine, the experimental homosexual who disingenuously claims to be trying to write. Once Standish learns that his projected novel is about “innocent and defenseless people,” he says: “I’m sure you won’t come to me to get it published for you, Tim,” (71) and threatens to have nothing further to do with him if he does. For both Amis and Standish, nice things may be nicer than nasty ones, but they are not nearly as much fun to read or write about. By the time Amis wrote this novel, personal responsibility had clearly become an important creative theme. In Girl, 20 ­Douglas Yandell is not allowed to remain a passive observer and he is p ­ unished for doing so. The same standard is applied to Patrick S­ tandish and the publishing industry in Difficulties with Girls. ­Graham ­McClintock demands to know why Standish’s firm knowingly publishes bad poetry. Standish tries to dodge the question but is forced to admit, “if we only published books I thought were some good, or had a chance of being some good, any good at all, we’d probably publish about eleven a year” (189). He offers token resistance by preventing particularly bad authors, such as a Welsh historical writer, from being published. However, when an indignant Pedrain-Williams arrives at Hammond & Sutcliffe demanding to know why his book will not be published, Standish sends him to the managing director Simon Giles, saying, “He’s getting his things together ready to cut and run. In five minutes he’ll be gone by the back stairs. First floor” (264). The reader may feel that Standish is justified in trying to exact revenge against Giles for selling the firm and placing him in an uncomfortable position with his sexually aggressive wife, Barbara.11 And yet the hypocrisy inherent in Standish’s high literary standards and his relative lack of concern for the decisions made by the firm is unacceptable. Since he is not part of the solution, he is contributing to the problem and his punishment at the end mirrors Douglas Yandell’s, as he loses his job and (almost) his romantic partner. The reader is alerted to the connection between Victor Gollancz and Standish’s boss, Simon Giles, through a naming similarity. Standish suspects that Giles is a Jew who has changed his name from “Goldstein,” and he is said to pour money into Marxist propaganda books because it is the “trend” (52). Gollancz was Jewish, had ties with the Communist party, and in the 1930s often published left-wing propaganda while

184

Kingsley Amis

c­ensoring authors of a different political persuasion (Johnson 1988, 280–1). Though Standish is irritated by Giles’s generous but “creepy” (because unmerited) payments to authors with similar political views and little prospect of making money through sales (9), he cannot help admiring his employer for the scale on which he operates. Eric Jacobs noted that “Victor’s egotism had its good side. It made him capable of the big gesture which could mean more than cash advances” (1995, 274), and such gestures impressed Amis. They are recalled at the agent’s party near the conclusion of the novel, when another publisher approaches Jenny’s table, spilling food and drink over her conversation partners. Standish calls the man important, “if a publisher ever is important. No of course he’s not important in the way Victor was or Jonathan or ... But yes, he’s got a lot of money to spend” (231). Amis offered a similar appraisal of a Gollancz biography: “If a publisher can be called a genius, which is uncertain, Victor was one” (Amis 1987, 34). Amis is also referring to his third publisher, Jonathan Cape, with whom he placed The James Bond Dossier and whose wide distribution and publicity networks appealed to him (Leader 2006, The Life, 540). Difficulties with Girls adds to Amis’s repertoire of commentaries on artistic matters by discussing the role of literary agents. He had succeeded in getting an advance for Jake’s Thing from Hutchinson that was three times larger than Jonathan Cape’s offer, thanks to the intercession of newly hired agent Jonathan Clowes (Amis 2001, Letters, 930).12 The episode is recalled through Irish writer Deirdre Jones’s threats to leave Hammond & Sutcliffe for a £20,000 advance on a salacious memoir detailing her relationships with literati (72). This anticipates Amis’s own tell-all Memoirs, which contained more juicy titbits about celebrity acquaintances than they did about the author himself. Thus, Difficulties with Girls explores every major component in the artistic process. The roles and perspectives of the writer, audience, publisher, and agent are all considered. The discussion is varied and the artistic argument difficult to summarize, but it is clear that Amis’s vision was broadening due to his own experience as a famous, well-remunerated writer. He was trying to look at the creative process from all sides both to understand his present role and to retrospectively justify his earlier artistic decisions. t h e f o l k s t h at l i v e o n t h e h i l l

(1990)

In this novel, Amis again takes a previous hero, reverses a key career decision, and shows us his life thirty years later. If Jake Richardson ­represents



Resolving Creative Problems 185

a version of Jim Dixon that has stayed in academia until retirement, then Harry Caldecote is John Lewis after accepting his library promotion. Caldecote differs from Lewis in that he not only maintains an interest in libraries and books but, after two failed marriages, has learned to keep his sex life discreet and controlled. However, both Caldecote and Lewis are hyper-critical, suffer from existential boredom, and long to escape domestic responsibilities. Superficially the ending of The Folks That Live on the Hill echoes That Uncertain Feeling as Caldecote rejects an attractive offer of library employment just as Lewis turns down his promotion. The difference is a product of Amis’s obsession with personal responsibility, as Caldecote decides it would be wrong to evade domestic and social obligations by fleeing to America, the site of his prospective job (240). Lewis, on the other hand, leaves the library because he is incapable of dealing with temptation and a tangled web of social and professional obligations. The Folks That Live on the Hill deviates from the artistic pattern of most of Amis’s late works in its use of an antimodel as a secondary character. The plot does not revolve around failed poet Freddie Caldecote but his brother Harry. The former is invoked largely to continue the argument against politicizing art first made through Roy Vandervane and subsequently reiterated through The Russian Girl’s Anna Danilova. Freddie also becomes the vehicle for further satire of both publishers and audiences that encourage bad artists. He is modelled on historian and biographer Peter Quennell, a different side of whom Amis would later reveal in bohemian novelist Jimmie Fane in The Biographer’s Moustache’s. Amis’s purpose in using Quennell in The Folks That Live on the Hill seems to have been satire. Quennell was an aging acquaintance, once considered a promising poet but well past his prime, who had become a figure of pity because of his grotesquely domineering wife. Artistically, this novel is one of Amis’s most fascinating projects, as he discovered in mid-composition another reason for permitting bad artists to create: the escape from hateful people in the outside world. In the published version, Amis had Freddie write a left-wing poem, the contents of which are never divulged, but in the first draft Freddie’s wife Désirée approaches Harry and asks him to find a publisher for a poem completed some time ago. When he is reminded of his promise to help Freddie, with instant, hideous clarity and completeness, Harry remembered, remembered the tomatoes. In the revolting Tuscan village these two

186

Kingsley Amis

6 Even though he had dabbled, with varying degrees of success, in disparate literary mediums and genres throughout his career, it took Amis a long time to appreciate the value of the creative process for irredeemably bad artists. In the above excerpt from The Folks That Live on the Hill, we can see Amis changing his mind about how to represent Freddie Caldecott’s art. He abandoned the idea of having him try to publish a long-finished work, instead opting to “give him something new to be a failure as/at.” Even though Freddie is completely devoid of literary talent, creation does enable him to escape from his domineering wife for a few hours each day.

sometimes visited in the summer, it seemed a dispute had taken place between peasantry and authority about tomatoes, something to do with their growing or marketing. With too little to do as always, Freddie had jotted down a sort of record of it, along with what had sounded like a selection of heartfelt colourful piss about the district. And he, Harry, had kept the conversation going one time by urging him to write it up and send it to him. (HEHL, 24a) On the next page of the manuscript, the narrator reports: “the tomato saga was Harry Caldecote’s baby from now on. He was going to have to try to get it published here or there, really try, or else feel a shit, seem a shit, even be a shit, though that was curiously not as undesirable as the other two” (HEHL, 25). On re-reading the first draft, Amis added in the margin, “give him something new to be a failure at” (HEHL, 25), which led to the second version in which Freddie works on a new poem



Resolving Creative Problems 187

­ uring the first half of the novel. In the abandoned version, Désirée acts d as Freddie’s agent, aggressively campaigning on his behalf and delivering the first instalment of the poem to Harry in a blue cardboard box, saying, “You asked for it.” Shaken, he accepts it and says, “Now I need a, now let’s have a drink” (HEHL, 66). Midway through the manuscript, Amis intuited that Freddie’s primary motivation in writing would not be fame or even the prospect of financial gain, but the thought of a few hours away from his nasty wife while he was supposed to be writing. He therefore eliminated Désirée from the creative equation, adding a scene in which Harry tells Freddie to busy himself with writing his poem and forbids both his brother and sister-in-law from discussing the project. This necessitated the addition of the following scene. On a page in his diary, Harry writes a message for Freddie: PUT YOUR POEM IN AN ENVELOPE AND ADDRESS IT TO ME AND DROP IT IN AT THE POST OFFICE AND DON’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT TO HER BUT JUST PRETEND TO BE GOING ON AS NORMAL AND THEN BURN THIS. After some thought he added the words PIECE OF PAPER in the hope of making it less likely that Freddie would burn his poem. Harry was sitting close enough to Freddie to manage to slip this message into his jacket pocket unobserved. (HEHL, 92) In the finished novel, this scene survives with slight editorial changes (118), and its purpose is to show that the act of creation is significant for Freddie, in spite of his lack of talent, because it allows him a temporary reprieve from his wife. Amis probably had not considered why a shamming artist might be motivated to write until he created Freddie Caldecote, and a scene at the end of the first draft probably made him consider this character’s motivation, thereby triggering the changes. In this incongruous and ultimately excised scene, news of the publication of Freddie’s poem has reached the King’s pub landlord, Kenneth, who asks if he is an expert on tomatoes. “I suppose you could say it’s not really about tomatoes,” replies Freddie. “How to grow them or anything” (HEHL, 193). In response to the suggestion that he must have made money from the book, he says, “Well, not a great fortune, no. It’s more the satisfaction of writing it.” With “faint disgust,” the landlord says, “Oh, yeah” (HEHL, 194). The disgust was doubtless the author’s as well, for the idea of deriving pleasure from the creation of bad art was anathema to Amis and a sure sign of artistic

188

Kingsley Amis

delusion. Even in Amis’s first draft, though, Freddie is not delusional. He knows his limitations and admits them to his brother: To think of any grown man not merely being able to get through what I wrote but apparently seeing his way to ­making some money out of publishing it ... well ... do you know what I thought I was doing when I was, what would you call it, ­smearing, plastering down the rubbish, like kids dancing in that Irish style or doing pictures of Mam-ma and Dad-da. (211) In contrast to antimodels like Gareth Probert, Roy Vandervane, and Alun Weaver, Freddie does not take art seriously, which makes him complex in a different way. When he is supposed to be writing poetry, he secretly does crosswords (271) because the idea of poetry is more appealing than its reality. The narrator tells us that for Freddie, “music was rather like poetry in that he loved it but seldom ran into any he could have said he really liked” (275), thus inviting further comparison with Jim Dixon, who was more comfortable with the idea of a leisurely academic life than with the particulars of lecturing, meeting students, and conducting research. In spite of his innate flaws, Freddie earns the reader’s admiration through his own futile act of rebellion. Each month he receives a haircutting allowance from Désirée and goes to a cheaper barber than the upscale one she has designated. He then spends the extra money on forbidden greasy pub fare and acquisitions for a stamp collection that she believes he abandoned years ago. This indulgence in illicit pleasures is reminiscent of the thrill Amis’s early heroes felt at the mere thought of adultery. Out of fraternal sympathy Harry insists the poetic work-inprogress be kept secret, thereby offering him “a way of escaping from Désirée” (19). Aside from his amusing rebellious streak, Freddie’s only other attractive feature is his humility. He is unique among Amis’s antimodels because he knows and admits that his poetry has no merit. Even Malcolm CellanDavies in The Old Devils did not possess such a degree of artistic selfknowledge, for he embarks on his final poetic project in the belief that it will be a tribute to his beloved. Freddie’s twin creative motivations are to escape his wife while cloistered in his study and to earn money for greasy food and stamps. He may be a bad poet, but he possesses a strange innocence, since he does not believe in a political cause and has no delusions about his own abilities. However, he is still a sham who understands how to fool a sector of the audience by passing off idiosyncrasies as



Resolving Creative Problems 189

­ rofundities. Harry is suspicious of his brother when he throws a kipp per from his healthy breakfast into the gutter (186), suspecting that this is a premeditated act performed for Harry’s benefit but not indicative of any true desire to rebel against Désirée’s dietary regimen. Later he will stop the taxi in which he is riding with Harry and jump out to frolic with schoolchildren from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. For “no more than a dozen seconds,” he “run[s] among them, neither greeted nor ignored, probably yelling too but not separately heard to be so,” before getting back in the taxi, calling the children a “Jolly load of beggars” (212) and saying that “all these black and brown people who’ve come over here to live” are, for the most part, “terrific fun.” The possibility of Freddie having uttered a profundity is undermined by his asking at the conclusion of the scene, “I couldn’t make out quite what [the children] were doing, though, could you?” (213). The scene serves as a microcosm for Freddie’s approach to art and it reveals what Amis considered problematic about bohemianism. The impulse that propelled Freddie from the cab towards the schoolchildren dissipates into confusion just as the desire to write dissipates once he puts pen to paper: “the strong feeling with which he set out on each fresh poem or section seemed each time to have dwindled away long before the end into meaninglessness or claptrap” (270). Freddie also afforded Amis the opportunity of revisiting arguments first developed in his BLitt thesis about the poet-audience relationship. The manner in which his poem is published contradicts Amis’s recipe for literary success. A poet ought to write for an inner circle of friends first, but Freddie does not have such friends and is forbidden from showing anyone the work-in-progress. Though Freddie claims to have been trying to write “the sort of thing Désirée would think was jolly clever and important” (211), she is portrayed as horrid, vulgar (36), insincere and verbally pretentious (40) – in other words, a completely inappropriate ideal reader.13 And yet such readers exist, as does the market for bad left-wing literature, which is perpetuated by nefarious publishers. The latter are again ridiculed through Will Morrissey, a successor to R.A. Caton who has “an appearance that suited his calling, or perhaps rather better that of a venal city official in some corruption-disclosing American classic” (204). Morrissey says of Freddie’s poem: “Crap it is, in Renascence cursive upper and lower case. But my opinion of literature is worth nothing, as everyone agrees” (206).14 He is not only willing to publish the poem but to pay as well, which leads Freddie to remark: “Well, Harry, to be fair you’ve always said publishers were the biggest

190

Kingsley Amis

bloody fools anywhere off the stage and the High Court and I suppose this must be some of it coming true” (211). In this respect, as in others, Harry’s views are the author’s. To ensure that the reader recognizes the connection, Amis has Harry express irritation at stinginess in pubs (37) and lazy or incorrect language use (46, 261). Publishers who prioritize profit over quality do a social disservice, thought Amis, and though he was powerless to stop them, he could expose them in his fiction. The art of Freddie Caldecote prepares us for the argument against politicized poetry that Amis would launch in his next novel, The Russian Girl. The Folks That Live on the Hill opens with the news that Freddie has been “yammering something about taking up the struggle again or renewing his attempt to forge a personal diction” (17–18). The poem that he writes ends up being published in a volume called European Poetical Testaments with a foreign title in Hungarian or Czech to “draw a highly respectable sale from middle-aged to elderly intellectuals who want to feel part of an international community of philosophers and seekers after truth” (206). This is Amis’s literary version of being a “mean sod,” or getting away with offering something of inferior quality at a premium price (Amis 2008, 73). The use of translation misleads the reader and helps sales in the same way that Jim Dixon’s article becomes worthy of publication in Italian. Given an exotic twist, the mundane becomes marketable. Freddie’s poetry and personality are said to be quite similar, for both are confused and generally uninspiring, though with “a few interesting additions” they were both “just right for the late Fifties,” the period during which the Beat poets, whom Amis particularly disliked, were active.15 Freddie’s art has as little to offer the reader as he himself does to his companions in the pub, where he is “ever an instinctive provider of, if anything at all, halves and singles and the cheapest brews available” (42). Amis’s admission that there may be valid reasons for the creation of bad art shows that his visions of both the writer’s impact on society and the importance of creation from the artist’s perspective were evolving. Tellingly, Freddie’s human flaws surface in his poetry, which is said to be uninteresting with intermittent flashes of undeveloped insight. This was not Amis’s definitive word on the connection between life and art. In The Russian Girl he would envision an intelligent woman who is personally and physically attractive but writes irredeemably bad poetry; as attested to by the publisher’s party at the beginning of Difficulties with Girls, bad people sometimes make good artists, but not always. The Folks That Live on the Hill is one of Amis’s weaker efforts because of its



Resolving Creative Problems 191

lack of ­balance. There are frequent references to yobbos and berks giving away England to immigrants (13, 27, 312) and, as in Stanley and the Women and Jake’s Thing, women are negatively portrayed. After James Joyce is paraphrased as saying that sex prevents men and women from being friends, one of the many confused Anglo-Saxon males in the novel, Desmond, remarks: “You know, a lot of troubles in this world come from reading books” (315). Amis was never afraid to express loutish, anti-feminist sentiments in his novels and he used this confrontational approach to engage the reader in debate. But the obvious desire to portray women as neurotic and malicious, and the generally negative atmosphere in the novel results in a problem of bias. t h e ru s s i a n g i r l

(1992)

The Russian Girl is an explicitly artistic novel that revisits arguments against academia and literary modernism while using as its central situation an inversion of the plot of Girl, 20. It is the second of the novels Amis wrote with his Sovietologist friend as inner audience and, according to Anthony Powell, Russian literature professor Richard Vaisey is “obviously based on Bob Conquest” (1997, 183). Vaisey falls in love with the poet Anna Danilova and is compelled to assist her efforts to free her brother from prison in Russia. He balks at signing a petition demanding the release of the wrongly imprisoned brother, not because he doubts the brother’s innocence, but because his principles prevent him from praising terrible poetry. At this point Vaisey’s path diverges from Douglas Yandell’s. He chooses love over professional scruples, signs the petition, then encourages Anna to write poetry as she sees fit. He gets the girl at the cost of his principles, while Yandell loses a friend but not his pride. The petition as fictional centrepiece has its roots in Amis’s own refusal to support Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s bid for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford. He wrote to The Times on 21 November 1968 to protest the nomination, calling attention to Yevtushenko’s alleged denunciation of dissident Russians and support of the Soviet regime (Amis 2001, 707–8). Anthony Powell would recall in his memoirs an impromptu meeting with the Russian poet after his nomination had failed. “‘I believe you know ­Kingsley Amis,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately I do,’ replied Yevtushenko. ‘The shit’” (Powell 1983, 426). Both Dale Salwak (1992, 214) and ­Zachary Leader (2006, The Life, 605) have noted that Amis’s anti-Soviet and anti-Communist feelings first emerged creatively in the 1969 television

192

Kingsley Amis

play ­General Tomski’s Army, which was abandoned due to lack of funding after Amis wrote the synopsis and first episode. While Salwak has pointed to connections between the series and Russian-Hide-and-Seek, the artistic links with The Russian Girl are equally strong. As one of the central characters, Amis envisioned a “brilliant writer” Peter Sabanin, aged 30, “admired all over the world, a glamorous figure adored by youth. (Compare the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.) Peter is in disfavour – he has recently refused to sign a manifesto condemning a Soviet novelist for having his work published in the West.” A tribunal would be established to consider Peter’s case and “If he still refuses to sign the manifesto, he will be taken as officially ‘disloyal’, his travel privileges will be stopped and his books banned” (HEHL, 5). The dilemma of whether or not to risk one’s reputation and sign a manifesto is the same as that faced by Richard Vaisey in The Russian Girl. The central question explored by Amis through poetry and the events at the London Institute of Slavonic Studies is the importance of artistic principles. Anna puts the question most directly: “Richard, what does it really matter if you don’t like the poems I’ve written, what difference does it make?” (66). He insists that it does matter and, when she compares art with food, any faithful reader of Amis’s novels immediately understands the author’s position. “After all,” asks Anna, “why should two people as different as you and me have the same taste in poetry, any more than we have the same taste in food?” (67). Vaisey, like Amis, is dogmatic about both art and food. Early in the novel his friend ­Crispin Radetsky apologizes for taking him to a trendy restaurant where the food proves to be bad. Crispin admits that he ought to have been suspicious when he read in The Spectator “that somebody called Marc, who I took to be the chef, derives his philosophy of cuisine from the poetry of Dylan Thomas, in which, it will be remembered, many adjectives meet their nouns for the first time” (22–3). In Amis’s fiction, poetic and culinary experiments almost always end badly, for an inordinate concern for style and presentation is usually a way of fooling the public by disguising mediocrity.16 Bad food and poetry cannot become good through an innovative or stylish presentation. Amis’s claim that there is no substitute for authentic food and art is undermined by the problem of translation raised in the novel’s text. It opens with a debate between Vaisey and his department chair, Tristram Hallett, over the necessity of teaching Russian literature in the original. Vaisey insists that all A and B candidates must study the original texts while Hallett counters that “in fifteen years or less Russian texts as such



Resolving Creative Problems 193

will be read by a tiny minority of students here, if by any at all” (3). This debate prepares the reader for Vaisey’s stubborn refusal to sign Anna’s petition. If literature can only be fully appreciated in the unadorned original, then it is impossible for the reader to pass judgement on Anna Danilova’s poetry. For the novel’s climactic scene, Amis asked Robert Conquest to write an English version of a stereotypically bad Russian poem.17 While the poem is bad, it can only ever be a facsimile of the work that Anna composed. Amis was on record as saying that he did not like literature in translation and felt that poetry could not be translated effectively. Furthermore, although the author had minimal knowledge of Russian, his protagonist is supposed to be a fluent speaker. This is, of course, a fantasy, for Amis would not have been capable of rendering a character’s thoughts in Russian. Because Anna does not speak English well, they converse in Russian that is simultaneously translated into English by the third-person narrator. As one considers the manner in which Amis’s novel spirals away from authenticity, one is forced to conclude that the book is a poor copy of the original containing Russian dialogue.18 Amis’s disdain for translation19 is a by-product of his insistence on direct experience. One recalls Garnet Bowen’s rejection of the Finnish fishing boat story because it is not his story to tell. In The Russian Girl, second-hand judgments are satirized via Julius Hoffman, who announces to a party of Russian expatriates that he has heard things are bad at home. The narrator notes that “Nobody in that company thought Hoffman should have gone and seen for himself, any more than the least surprise or disappointment or sorrow was shown at what he had said” (35). Vaisey is similarly dismayed at the expatriates’ willingness to accept rumours about the situation in Russia as truth. One can only say that Amis himself strayed far from first-hand reportage in writing a novel about Russians when he had never visited Russia and could not speak the language. His opinions on the Russian language and the Soviet Union were not even formed independently; his relationship with ­Robert Conquest and acquaintance with Yevgeny Yevtushenko influenced him greatly. This further calls into question the validity of comments attributed to Anna and Vaisey on the current state of Russian society, since they are hearsay. When one gauges the authenticity of Amis’s novel by the author’s own rules, it is either inauthentic, a trick played on the reader, or an irresolvable paradox.20 The contradiction inherent in Amis’s treatment of authenticity in The Russian Girl suggests that the issue was more complex than the author

194

Kingsley Amis

suspected. Even if his view of bad artists as charlatans to be ridiculed and shunned had softened, his artistic dogmatism remained unchanged and he does not seem to have tried to apply this theory of authenticity to his own writing. In consequence, Amis wrote a novel that, like Vaisey’s wife Cordelia, focuses on superficial detail to detract attention from internal contradictions. Cordelia, who William Pritchard calls “magnificently awful” (1995, 143), leaves signs of “intellectual activity” in her drawing room for visitors to duly note: a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, a chess problem, and the daily crossword from The Times (73). Amis too includes in his novel a Russian secret policeman and an expatriate novelist. The policeman reminds us of the insidious, far-reaching arm of communist Russia while the writer testifies to the poor quality of Anna’s poetry and allows Amis a shot at one of his favourite poetic targets. The writer, Kotolynov, calls Anna’s poetry so bad that “you could hardly believe the stuff had come out the end of a human arm at all unless it happened to be Sylvia Plath’s” (248). This is, in effect, a revision of the supposition made in his BLitt thesis that highbrow literature that sells must be good. Both Anna Danilova and Sylvia Plath enjoy commercial success, but only, according to Amisian logic, because they have managed to fool critics and a sector of the audience. In spite of its language-based flaws, this novel confirms that the audience’s reliability had become a serious concern for Amis for political reasons. He had used Roy Vandervane’s unfortunate musical experiments, Freddie Caldecote’s poetry, and the Shakespearean production failure in Russian Hide-and-Seek to show that socialism and left-wing policies not only damage art but contribute to the public’s inability to discriminate between good and bad art. For both social and political reasons, sales and popularity prove not to be the infallible measures Amis suspected they were in the 1940s. It is interesting that Amis decided to make Anna Danilova beautiful and nice, and to have Vaisey compromise his principles for love, but these complications are undercut by the wooden dialogue, and the romantic ending is carried off without conviction. Perhaps the novel does not work because Amis himself still had not resolved the artistic issues that its success depended on. Or maybe his penchant for having things both ways in art – for insisting that something should not be done then attempting to do it anyway – and his determination to examine issues two or three times had led him into trouble. Even though the simultaneous translation of Russian into English had not worked well in Russian Hide-and-Seek, he makes a second attempt in this novel. While his persistent railing against the politicization of art makes sense



Resolving Creative Problems 195

in a critical essay or in relation to a petition signing, it is somewhat selfcontradictory in an attack on socialism that pleads for the separation of politics and literature. And yet the reader cannot help but admire Amis for attempting the impossible, for his literal representation of the incongruities all artists face.

12 Final Creative Self-Definitions: You Can’t Do Both and The Biographer’s Moustache

yo u ca n ’ t d o b ot h

(1994)

While not dealing explicitly with art, this novel tells us what kind of writer Amis was determined to become and why. It also shows that when Amis did not care to maintain artistic balance and allowed his personal biases to emerge, his fiction suffers. Throughout the novel Robin Davies rejects artists such as D.H. Lawrence and W.H. Auden in order to define his own tastes by the Amisian method of negative comparison. He begins by singing a different tune from his father – superimposing the popular jazz song “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on Mr Davies’s Gilbert and ­Sullivan – which leads the father to accuse the son of suffering from “Early Morning Peevishness” (2). Robin’s interruption is actually a deliberate attempt to differentiate himself from his father; not that he dislikes his father’s music, but he wants to establish his own style. This is further conveyed through his initial sexual experience and the father’s funeral. At Oxford the virgin Robin decides to follow the guide Happier Love for his first sexual exchange with fellow student Barbara Bates, even though he suspects sex “is supposed to do with instinct and the unconscious mind and feeling rather than thinking” (86). In spite of the consideration he shows for her feelings, intercourse is less than satisfactory and at their next meeting he ignores the manual and follows instinct. He succeeds in pleasing himself, but not Barbara, and Robin’s retrospective analysis of intercourse shows that his approach mirrors Amis’s to writing: I didn’t have nearly such a good time myself last time, in fact if I’d gone on being considerate much longer probably neither of us would



Final Creative Self-Definitions 197

have had any sort of time at all. And what’s happened is just that I’ve decided Vanderdecken has got it all wrong from the start. (90) After Barbara flees from his Oxford quarters with her copy of Happier Love, the rather irritated Robin reflects that he would like to have told her: “Be sure to give your conniving chum Patsy Cartland a ram up the duff from me!” (91). Thus, Amis tells the reader, as is his habit, about his writing preferences via negative example. He admitted his inability to write like Somerset Maugham in Difficulties with Girls and in You Can’t Do Both he uses the names of two young women along with a sex guide for the sensitive male to say that he is neither willing nor able to write popular romances in the manner of, for example, Barbara Cartland.1 The second scene through which Amis transmits his ideas about what kind of writer he aspired to be comes at the funeral of Robin’s father, Tom Davies. Tom has requested that a short passage be read at the cremation, the effect of which is to deny the existence of God and to claim that religious belief offers no consolation for the inevitability of death (205). Robin’s uncle, Emrys, a devout Christian, wonders where his brother found this atheistic passage, not suspecting that he wrote it himself: “Of course he used to read a lot,” reflects Emrys. “In a restless kind of way, as if he was looking for something he was afraid he’d never find” (207). And so Amis asks if we find what we are looking for in books and the answer he offers several times in the novel is negative. Rather than telling others’ stories, we must follow the example of Tom Davies and create our own, as Amis hinted in I Like It Here through the tale of the marooned fishing boat. As in The Old Devils, the extent to which Amis’s Englishness distorted his view of foreign culture is apparent in the consistently negative depiction of Wales. The Welsh commentaries in the two novels are so similar that one can only conclude that the views belong to Amis, and not the teenaged Robin Davies or the devilish oldsters. When the adolescent Robin returns to Wales, attention is drawn to a stationer who only speaks Welsh but sells English newspapers (50), and this becomes the lens through which the country is seen. Amis could not conceive of Wales as a bilingual or even bicultural country. If Welsh people can all speak English but occasionally choose to communicate in Welsh, then this is nothing more than perversity, according to Amis, and he ascribes dark motives to those who speak their native tongue or behave in a fashion that conflicts with English cultural norms. Robin’s uncle, Cousin Emrys, calls him “boyo,” and this leads Robin to think there must be a

198

Kingsley Amis

symbolic significance in the uncle’s insistence on being called “cousin.” “Cousin and boyo somehow did not mix,” thinks Amis through Robin, not considering that they do not necessarily have to (51). When the English language is known and available for use, cultural plurality is never a positive situation in Amis’s fictional world. The teenaged Robin next visits the village pub with his English friend Jeremy, and the locals speak Welsh “on purpose” to alienate the newcomers (62), which recalls Alun Weaver’s complaint against the American Pugh. In this way Amisian linguistic and cultural obstinacy causes relatively innocent scenes to become proof of schism and confusion. In sexual matters, not being allowed to do both means that Robin cannot reasonably expect to keep both a wife and a mistress. But this does not, by extension, mean that the Welsh must ­ obert H. Bell has choose between English and their own language. If, as R argued, in You Can’t Do Both “many voices are enabled, none is sanctioned” (1998, 152), then we are forced to hold their creator responsible. The slippery slope of Amis’s argument against Wales first became clear in The Old Devils and his inability to allow two languages and cultures to coexist leads him to ascribe nefarious intentions to the Welsh for making natural linguistic choices. At other times, social complexities are conveniently dismissed as proof of the incomprehensible, pseudo-mystical Welsh spirit. What one might call Amis’s cultural imperialism, or insistence on judging the world by an English code, was most evident in Colonel Sun, the James Bond novel written under the pseudonym Robert Markham. Amis was not just pandering to an anti-intellectual audience in Colonel Sun, but in some ways must have felt free to express political, sexual, and cultural biases without worrying about being fair to both sides. Bond is depicted as the ideal Englishman in that he is patriotic and virile, with strong appetites for women and alcohol. He often laments cultural decline and shows what middle England has to offer the world both culturally and linguistically. Amis’s application of his own standard of ­English behaviour to Greeks, Chinese, and Russians might be excused on the grounds that Bond is an agent in Her Majesty’s Secret Service who must believe in the superiority of the English way; however, when similarly stereotypical remarks are made in You Can’t Do Both, one suspects that the views are Amis’s own. By writing Colonel Sun in the vein of Ian Fleming and under a pseudonym, he was able to escape from certain constricting Amisian patterns, such as the non-depiction of graphic sex – Bond’s love interest, Ariadne, has a “honey-blonde triangle” and “her loins [are] thrust against his” (Amis 1968, Colonel Sun, 99) – and



Final Creative Self-Definitions 199

he was encouraged perhaps to offer dubious reflections on both English­ ness and foreigners. Three years before the publication of Colonel Sun, Amis wrote The Book of Bond or Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-incheek guide to becoming a secret agent. In it he suggests that secret agent hopefuls ought to follow Bond’s example and drop racially insensitive remarks, though “not more than one or at most two of the above in any one evening” (1965, 66).2 Amis’s Bond novel is full of such remarks, and many are not even ascribed to Bond but made by the narrator and other characters. The purpose of such slurs is the confirmation of English superiority. The great difference between Englishness in Colonel Sun and One Fat Englishman is that in the former the emphasis is placed on the superficial appearance of Englishness. After Bond rescues a Greek girl, Ariadne, from a bully, he is told by way of compliment, “you look English, Mr Bond. Nobody could mistake you, not even for an American” (69). Later the Chinese leader Colonel Sun speaks to Von Richter, the German war villain, in English, and Bond finds his pronunciation odd, “as if instead of learning the language he had had it fed into him mechanically” (190). Sun is judged not by his ability to use English for communicative purposes – in this respect he is flawless – but by how natural he sounds to an Englishman. The novel ends on a culturally imperialist note, with Bond prodding a Soviet official to speak in a more natural, straightforward manner. The official concedes: “that’s not so easy, you know, for a Russian” (276). In addition to these examples, the reader is told that Greeks are lazy (110), the Chinese intelligent but cruel (229), and Americans are cultural expansionists who destroy indigenous culture (72, 114). Only the English are decent and honourable (111, 115, 135). The purpose of the above discussion is not to determine which view of Englishness more accurately represents Amis’s own, for he clearly believed in Englishness as a measure of one’s intellectual and communicative abilities. But You Can’t Do Both becomes an indictment of Wales in the same way that Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women are of women because he did not bother to represent both sides of a complex issue. When Amis was able to maintain balance, as outlined in Ending Up, the novels are generally successful with both readers and critics. t h e b i o g r a p h e r ’ s m o u s tac h e

(1995)

The Biographer’s Moustache is a novel about a mediocre journalist of Scottish descent who attempts to write a biography of a ­pompous,

200

Kingsley Amis

wordy writer who has been out of print for years. Though stylistic troubles combined with a convoluted questioning of life through art to make it a critical and commercial failure,3 it provides ample opportunity to summarize Amis’s artistic goals and achievements. During composition, Amis was assisting his own biographer, Glaswegian and former Fleet Street journalist Eric Jacobs, and their relationship as a backdrop to The Biographer’s Moustache is well-documented;4 the role of literary biographer and historian Peter Quennell as the model for the writer and artistic antimodel Jimmie Fane, however, has not been thoroughly examined. Jacobs himself revealed the connection: If there is a model for [Jimmie Fane] it is Peter Quennell, a muchmarried literary gent of Graham Greene-Anthony Powell vintage. Quennell would pop into the Queen’s pub where Kingsley would consign him to the fringes of the conversation on the grounds that he was a bore, apt to mumble. Poor Quennell was suffering the disabilities of old age but that did not spare him from K ­ ingsley’s harsh enforcement of his rules of congeniality. (Jacobs 2000, 5) As was earlier noted, Quennell first appeared as a model in The Folks That Live on the Hill. But it is a testament to Amis’s abilities that while Jimmie Fane is Freddie Caldecote’s opposite in almost every way, both are recognizable splinters from Quennell’s persona.5 Unlike Caldecote, who is dominated by his awful wife, Fane takes advantage of women; while the former is a fool with artistic pretensions who becomes sympathetic once he admits his lack of talent, the latter enjoyed early literary success, watched his books go out of print, and continues to overrate his literary powers. In The Folks That Live on the Hill, Amis seems to have been taunting Quennell, testing him to see if he still had sufficient possession of his faculties to read the novel, which was dedicated to him, and to recognize himself in Freddie Caldecote.6 Although reviewer David Nokes thought that Amis and Fane “are pretty much indistinguishable” (1995, 7), Quennell’s function as model is to ensure that author and protagonist can be distinguished. In an essay on autobiography in fiction entitled “Real and Made-Up People,” Amis called the novelist’s protagonists “vehicles of his self-criticism” (in Bell 1998, 25), and in this sense Fane’s character reveals at least as much about Amis as it does about Quennell. Fane tells the reader emphatically what and who Amis is not.7 Distracted by the presence of obvious autobiography in The Biographer’s Moustache, most critics have failed



Final Creative Self-Definitions 201

to see Fane as anything other than a distortion of the author himself. However, as Terry Eagleton has written, “Even if a novel states actual facts, it does not somehow become truer” (2007, 90); by distorting the relationship between himself and Eric Jacobs through the blending of Quennell into Fane, Amis offered his views on language, art, and life for the last time. The first point of contrast between Quennell and Amis is related to language and class. Amis states bluntly in The King’s English: “My tolerance wears thin when I hear an accentuation that seems to me wilfully or absurdly eccentric” (1996, 3), which would seem to ally him with Fane, who calls any issue of language or pronunciation “a prime concern” (59). He refers to Fowler’s guide to English usage, which Amis himself revered and, for the most part, followed and, in defending himself against the charge of snobbery, cites the Oxford English Dictionary. He claims that snobs by definition have an exaggerated respect for wealth and social position while his respect is “by any reasonable standards perfectly proper” (83). The evidence suggests otherwise though, as Fane asks his biographer, Gordon Scott-Thompson, to pronounce “curriculum vitae” (15) and “tissue” (57) in order to sneer and prove his own social superiority. The logic of Fane’s argument – that the second word in “curriculum vitae” must be pronounced “like vie-tee” and not “vee-tye” because “we’re supposedly talking English rather than Latin or Italian” (15) – may be sound, but his motivation is to embarrass his biographer and this combines with the inconsequentiality of the discussion to make him a wanker rather than a language purist. A brief examination of the Quennells’ portrayal in Memoirs in relation to Amis’s views on language shows that he considered them linguistic and cultural snobs. In The King’s English, he criticizes the use of foreign languages – particularly French – for affectation, devoting three pages to the proper pronunciation of French loan words. The general rule is that if an equivalent English expression exists then foreign expressions should be avoided and the snobbish tendency to insist on the overly correct French pronunciation is lamented. Amis notes that, when spoken, “hors d’oeuvres” is almost an “infallible wanker-detector” (80). In the portrait of the Quennells in Memoirs, matters of language usage and French are both significant, and the same points surface in The Biographer’s Moustache. After becoming reacquainted with Peter Quennell in a wine bar in the 1960s, Amis reports that he was invited to his Chelsea home for “luncheon” (242). The Biographer’s Moustache opens with Jimmie Fane and his fourth wife Joanna quibbling over the difference

202

Kingsley Amis

between “lunch” and “luncheon.” She p ­ romises “not to arrange a­ nything frightfully stuffy [like luncheon] ever if [Jimmie’ll] help by calling things by their right names” (1), which suggests that she too is a pedant, if not a snob. Gordon Scott-Thompson has been invited to discuss his proposal to write Fane’s biography, and he brings his girlfriend, Louise, whose presence allows Amis to return to the theme of properly naming things and people. When introduced to Louise, Fane repeats her name and asks, “Does that mean you’re French? If I may say so you don’t look it.” She replies that she is “English all the way back as far as I know” (8). In Memoirs, Amis and his first wife Hilly arrived at the Quennells for lunch only to discover that Marilyn had forgotten anyone was coming and Peter had failed to invite other guests. Amis made “some mildly derogatory comment” about the menu of “squashed quiche lorraine,8 a salad of lumps of tomato and onion, and ice cream with mangoes” (244) which prompted Marilyn, darkly drawn as “a bit manic-­depressive with a fondness for vodka” (243), to erupt: “You’re a great fat bum ... What you write is a load of rubbish and you can’t even speak French. You are extremely boring and very rude and who the hell do you think you are anyway, I’d like to know” (244). Displaying uncharacteristic forbearance, Amis “managed a laugh at this, and stayed on. Hilly walked out. Either that evening or the next they were round at [his] place for drinks” (244–5). Embedded in Marilyn Quennell’s insults are some delicate personal issues for Amis. While he would not have disputed his weight problem, to be dismissed as a boring writer or companion would have been insulting for someone who considered entertainment of great personal and professional importance.9 Amis craftily links things French with irrationalism and affectation. Why should Amis speak French, and why should Louise’s name serve as proof of French lineage? The curiosity of the Quennell-Fanes about class and national origins betrays a snobbery that recalls Roger Micheldene. In the second volume of Peter Quennell’s memoirs, The Wanton Chase, French conversation often appears untranslated, perhaps implying that anyone sufficiently cultured to read Quennell must be fluent in the language. This implication would not have pleased Amis, whose general principle in the discussion of French loanwords in The King’s English is that foreign languages must not be used to exclude monolingual Anglophones. Quennell frequently mentions Proust and his enormous influence on his own life: “During middle age I studied the London background, and categorised my friends and acquaintances from a distinctly Proustian point of view” (1980, 105). In contrast, Amis did not



Final Creative Self-Definitions 203

believe that detailed knowledge of foreign cultures and languages was a mark of urbanity and the discussion of language and culture conducted via Jimmie Fane throughout The Biographer’s Moustache highlights the difference between acquisitive and inquisitive behaviour. At the opening lunch, the Fanes’ acquisitiveness is symbolically represented by an Italian count who speaks no English and “from first to last ha[s] nothing to say” (10). He has been invited because the Fanes sometimes visit his palazzo and he is a member of the nobility. Jimmie Fane does not bother to speak with him even though, according to Joanna, he speaks Italian fluently (51), which indicates that the count only has value for them as an exotic nobleman. In Memoirs, Amis expresses general distaste for the trappings of culture and the homes of the rich. After confessing to not liking the ­Quennells’ “irritatingly pretty house,” he explains: It is a defect of mine that I hate having to notice and perhaps admire others’ possessions on display, or just prefer to have as little to do with houses as possible, though I can see the point of living in one. I once most rewardingly disconcerted some elevated and well-off fellow who asked me, in a tone that expected an affirmative answer, if I would like to “see round” his rather grand house by replying with a tolerant smile, “No thank you.” But I digress. (243) The lunch at the Quennells’ is preceded by a description of their home’s interior, which suggests their cultural acquisitiveness: “Spectacular artificial flowers were arranged with great style all over the place, not least on the dining-room table, on which lay also two cats and a lot of valuable or valuable-looking plates and silver” (244). Thus, while the narrator’s vague description in The Biographer’s Moustache of the furnishings in the Fane house superficially points to Gordon Scott-Thompson’s lack of cultural refinement, it is actually an affirmation of Amis’s distaste for the Quennells’ prettified house: “The ceilings had the look of having been the work of somebody in particular and over the sideboard there hung an oil painting of foreign parts that had a distinctly pricey appearance” (11). While Amis the novelist and autobiographer is unimpressed by price tags and high art, Peter Quennell’s memoirs at times read like a catalogue of the homes of the rich and bohemian (95). Amis’s bias against what he perceived to be cultural acquisitiveness doubtless coloured his judgment for, in celebrating Quennell’s life, Michael Grant offered a different view of his home and companionship:

204

Kingsley Amis

Many is the enjoyable hour I spent in [Peter’s] and Marilyn’s house in Cheyne Row, and I confess that when we once exchanged houses I took the opportunity to look through his collection of personal photographs, some of which would have lent considerable added zest, if it was needed (as it is not), to his autobiographies. (1993, 50) Amis does not seem to have considered that self-restraint was a part of Quennell’s personality, or that he came by his interest in houses quite naturally, since his father was an architect with a “love of quality” (Quennell 1976, 21). Another point of contrast between Fane and Amis is class. Fane believes himself to be out of “a top drawer but not of the top drawer, the one with dukes and marquises in it” (180) and though he is critical of both snobbery and privilege, he tells Scott-Thompson, “I like people of wealth and rank as a group, they’re the people I want to mix with” (85). He later confesses to being a “frightful old arse-creeper of the nobility” (180), a depiction that fits the persona of Quennell in The ­Wanton Chase, though Amis, in his own memoirs, actually attributes the use of the term “arse-creeping” to Marilyn Quennell. She says of Evelyn Waugh: “Horrible little man. What I couldn’t bear about him was the way he arse-crept rich and important people.” After deriding Waugh for praising an acquaintance’s house and belongings, she concludes: “Little fart. You know I used to be Lady something. Nobody could have made more fuss of me while I was. And nobody could have started ignoring me quicker when I stopped being it” (245). Similar ground is covered in The Biographer’s Moustache through the second Mrs Fane, whose status has been upgraded from Rosie to Lady Rowena because of a fortuitous marriage. It is rumoured that Jimmie Fane will leave Joanna for Rosie’s wealth and new-found title (242). Like Marilyn Quennell, Joanna hypocritically accuses others of snobbery and pretension. After becoming romantically involved with Scott-Thompson, she rarely lets him finish a sentence and addresses him as though he were her social inferior. When she becomes emotional and he tries to calm her, she says: “For Christ’s sake don’t tell me I’m being hysterical, there’s a good boy” (206). Then they go to bed and he confesses his love, but she makes no reply for “She was either asleep or, what was in effect the same thing, closed for maintenance” (216). Joanna herself has become an object, like wealth or status, to be maintained. Earlier in the novel she is similarly depicted, post-coition, entering maintenance mode but satisfied with her



Final Creative Self-Definitions 205

a­ cquisition: “She made a noise like someone sampling a more than usually delicious chocolate and turned on her side” (153). Peter Quennell-as-model in The Biographer’s Moustache also afforded Amis the opportunity to portray a view fundamentally antipathetic to his own. The voice in the novel that is closest to being Amisian belongs to Gordon Scott-Thompson, who may be seen as the last in a long line of cynical realists beginning with Jim Dixon. Scott-Thompson has inherited Dixon’s intellectual boredom and limited sense of morality and on occasion makes Dixonesque pronouncements. The oft-quoted line summarizing Dixon’s opportunism – “nice things are nicer than nasty ones” (1953, 140) – is updated by Scott-Thompson: “human beings were good at avoiding unpleasant things if they could and making the best of them if not” (138). Both would prefer to coast through life rather than struggle at self-improvement. Their artistic value for Amis is negligible, though, because even if their anti-romantic perspective mirrors his own, they are incapable of creation and this Amis valued above all else. Quennell-Fane was a creative artist, but with a style and approach diametrically opposed to Amis’s. While Quennell was a romantic in search of epiphanic glimpses of beauty, Amis was intrigued by the volatility and unpredictability of human nature. On numerous occasions in his twovolume autobiography, Quennell pontificates on artistic beauty. He provides “three incidents, selected at random, that [he] shall never forget” (180) as representative examples of beauty: a valley in south-western France; a woman’s neck on a London bus; and the movements of his pet cat, Suki. The inclusion of the third example is explained in the following way: “Dogs often parody human emotions; a cat’s occasional display of feeling is all the more effective because it is so obviously histrionic, and seldom followed, when it has achieved its end, by the smallest show of gratitude” (1980, 183–4).10 Amis, on the other hand, thought life unpredictable and episodic, but art is always ordered, rational, and comprehensible. His familiarity with Quennell’s character surely led him to have Fane tell Scott-Thompson that he wrote “predominantly to create beauty” (176), which provides a sharp contrast with Amis himself, who typically avoided serious artistic discussions with friends on the grounds that too much talk led to creative paralysis. Eric Jacobs reported that “Literary matters as a subject of social intercourse always made Amis uneasy” (1995, 77) and one must remember that Amis was writing The Biographer’s Moustache while responding to Jacobs’ questions almost daily:

206

Kingsley Amis

Writer though he was to his fingertips, the literary world was not his. He preferred the heterogeneous company of pub and club. For one thing, fiction and poetry were to him a kind of private transaction between writer and reader, best not discussed in public, particularly by writers themselves who were apt to be put off their stride by too much chatter about what they were up to. On this view, theory was the enemy of practice. (Jacobs 2001, 30) Through Jimmie Fane, the romantic novelist who has run out of things to write but continues to hold forth on art and beauty, Amis suggests that romantic visions of aesthetic beauty are anathema to creation. Although Fane claims that he had “no gift” for novels, Amis would have the reader believe that he failed for a different reason. Scott-­ Thompson notes in Fane’s novels a “preference for the unexpected when the obvious would have served perfectly well or even, perhaps, stronger in the context” (144). Amis thought many American novelists were too obsessed with aesthetics to depict reality accurately and in The King’s English he wished they would “come off it” and “be natural” (11). To Amis, Quennell the historian was also overly concerned with the package at the expense of its contents, as he points out in a brief explanation of their divergent methodologies: “As his work on Byron, Boswell and many others will show, Peter’s interest in literature and in writers is mainly biographical and personal. This bias is reflected in his conversation. Time and time again I will try to keep the focus on, say, The Village and Peter will shift it languidly but inexorably to Crabbe’s opium addiction” (1991, 245).11 To distinguish himself from Quennell, who suggests that essential truths are revealed in epiphanic moments, Amis teases readers with insoluble puzzles symbolic of nothing beyond unpredictability and flux. After Scott-Thompson and Fane arrive at Hungerstream, the country seat of the drunken Duke of Dunwich, for a weekend party, the host greets them by asking something that sounds like, but is not, “Have you had much experience of puttock-sleighs?” Although he has not understood the question, Scott-Thompson replies in the negative, and is duly encouraged: “You’ll soon get the hang of it” (163). Fane suggests that the Duke might have meant “buttock slaves” but for the intellectually vapid Scott-Thompson the phrase remains meaningless (181). Later he asks for a clarification and the Duke claims not to understand the question until, as the departing visitors assemble in front of the estate, he suddenly remembers: “That phrase you wanted me to explain. I knew what



Final Creative Self-Definitions 207

it must have been almost as soon as you asked me. Actually you hadn’t got it quite right. It was – .” And the explanation of puttock-sleighs is “lost in a mechanical roar,” as a car engine starts and Scott-Thompson is driven away from Hungerstream (211). In a similar episode, ScottThompson and Fane watch from a distance as the Duke attempts to mount a horse. He partially succeeds and is towed, half in the mount with one foot in a stirrup, for about one hundred yards. When the horse disappears at a gallop around the corner of the house then reappears seconds later without its rider (182), they wonder if the comedy has not, perhaps, been staged, but decide that it could not have been timed so perfectly to coincide with their own return from a walk in the countryside. The episode concludes with the Duke surfacing at cocktail hour uninjured and smartly dressed (184). Both puzzles are left unresolved and they tell the reader nothing about beauty. Amis might have been using them to suggest the lack of purpose of the English aristocracy but, in the absence of narratorial analysis, they become aporias, or reminders that one cannot understand everything. Mysteries and puzzles may seem tantalizingly symbolic and significant but they are just as often mundane and inconsequential. While it would be impossible to determine whether Mark Members or Jimmie Fane more closely resembled Peter Quennell, the differences in the two novelists’ approaches reveals Amis’s purpose. When he reviewed The Acceptance World in 1955 he thought that Members “covets literary status chiefly for the influence it brings” (Amis 1991, 59), which is not unlike the depiction of Jimmie Fane he would offer forty years later. In the comparison of his own writing to Powell’s, previously referred to in the chapter on I Like It Here, Amis maintained: “I make things up, whereas Powell writes down what has happened” (Amis 2001, 1018).12 Though the distinction may be fine, it might be more accurate to characterize Amis’s late fiction as more self-reflexive than autobiographical. He called I Like It Here (1958) his worst novel because it followed Powell’s creative method: “I really cobbled it together out of straightforwardly autobiographical experiences in Portugal, with a kind of mystery story rather perfunctorily imposed on that. The critics didn’t like it, and I don’t blame them really” (1975, “Interview,” 10). The Biographer’s Moustache was composed in a similar way, by drawing on straightforward autobiography, with the imposition of the Quennells onto the story and an extended commentary on art. Robert H. Bell was one of the few critics to praise The Biographer’s Moustache, calling it “a thoroughly enjoyable and intelligent novel, treated shamefully by British reviewers, some

208

Kingsley Amis

of whom seemed impatient for Amis to hush and die like a good chap” (1998, 15). The Biographer’s Moustache may be intelligent but for many readers it fails to satisfy because it is full of disagreeable people. The biographer is a dullard; the writer, unpleasant and pompous; and the women, grasping, predatory, and hard. Amis does manage to maintain a balanced perspective, however, by reserving many of the best pieces of repartee for the female characters, even if he seems to have forgotten Jim Dixon’s maxim that nice things are nicer than nasty ones and begun to revel in nastiness. Perhaps it would be fair to say, as Zachary Leader has of his later novels, that Amis really did come to “enjoy causing offence, as he did in real life” (2006, The Life, 306). A more serious problem with the novel lies in unintentional repetition. Amis apparently asked Eric Jacobs to serve as proofreader to “search out obvious bloomers. Had he changed the colour of someone’s eyes between chapters, or perhaps their names? He was beginning to worry about his previously unimpeachable memory” (Jacobs 2000, 5). Unfortunately, Jacobs was little help, and a curious pattern of unintentional repetition is apparent throughout. Different characters from disparate backgrounds use the same hackneyed phrases and clichés, which gives the impression that the author had a particular speech in mind and after using it once, attributed it to another character because memory failed. One example is “passé,” which Louise uses to refer to Jimmie Fane’s writing (27) before Scott-Thompson’s editor employs it in exactly the same way (54). Similarly, the clichés “blue moon” and “top drawer” are used by different characters who have not spoken with each other. These are the kinds of errors that Amis was careful to avoid in all of his previous novels. A final instance of aporia is found in Gordon Scott-Thompson’s moustache. Bowing to the consensus opinion that he looks better without facial hair, he removes it at the beginning of the novel, then has grown it back by the end. The moustache, one would assume, has some significance since it features in the title but it proves to be another blind alley. Aporia, like the fusion of Jimmie Fane and Peter Quennell, serves to warn the reader not to become overly enamoured with appearances. Even if Scott-Thompson is more attractive without the moustache, he remains uninteresting. To Amis, Peter Quennell was a literary hangeron, following the greats to their homes, notebook in hand. Amis, however, aspired to be one of the greats. He envisioned himself as Quennell, an aging writer cooperating with an inexperienced biographer, to suggest that things and people can always be worse. Thus, when critic Peter



Final Creative Self-Definitions 209

Bien lamented of Jacobs’s work that it is too bad this “authorized biography leaves us with such a bad opinion of this talented man” (Bien 1996, 414), one wonders what he would have thought of The Biographer’s Moustache, for Jimmie Fane is worse than Amis and less talented. If the reader considers Kingsley Amis a disagreeable fellow, he becomes even less agreeable with the addition of some of Peter Quennell’s character traits.

Conclusions

Perhaps the most striking development made in Kingsley Amis’s art is connected to balance. At first he had maintained balance by representing both sides in a particular debate, providing attractive characters with disagreeable characteristics, and giving his novels oddly unsatisfying happy endings. In many of his post-1970 novels, there are no deliberate attempts to prevent the scales from tipping too far in one direction. But the vehemence with which objectionable opinions are expressed in S­ tanley and the Women and Jake’s Thing invites disagreement and, although The Old Devils was more warmly greeted by critics, its narrative is similarly slanted, with most of the witnesses in the case against Wales lacking credibility. The convenient and probably correct explanation for the lack of balance in several post-1970 novels is that natural biases and personal problems prevented the author from recreating his own recipe for success. And yet we must remember that Amis was highly conscious of how readers would react to his writing and, after 1970, he shows the relationship between artists and their audiences to be reciprocal. Perhaps, then, another reason that some of his later novels were less successful was that they demanded too much from the audience. While Amis knew that his readers wanted to be entertained, and he endeavoured to do so in all of his novels, he could not resist drawing them into the text. When only one side of the story is being told, as it is in many of his late novels, the reader has to work to restore balance by constructing the other side, and Amis might have overestimated the average reader’s willingness and ability to do so. In reflecting more generally on Amis’s writing, the concepts broached in his BLitt thesis are clearly of great importance, even if many of them turn out to have been false hypotheses. Though he had at first thought the inner audience was only necessary for an unproven writer,



Conclusions 211

he ­continued to value his own inner audience and to write almost exclusively for different ideal readers. He also did not foresee the possibility of writing against the audience, to provoke, irritate, or achieve separation. Beginning with Lucky Jim and Philip Larkin, Amis initiated a process whereby he wrote first to please the ideal reader then to achieve distance from that reader. He repeated this process with Elizabeth Jane Howard and, though Robert Conquest also served as an inner audience, he does not seem to have tried to provoke him in any novels. Each of Amis’s ideal readers was an established writer whose style and taste differed markedly from his own and each, therefore, exerted a unique influence, enhancing different aspects of his personality. The wicked sense of humour he developed with Larkin emerges in Lucky Jim, and is revisited in Ending Up and The Old Devils. With Howard in mind he explored the birth of love in The Anti-Death League and I Want It Now before turning to expositions of love withered and dying in Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women. Conquest doubtless influenced Amis to write his two Russian novels and may even have been the model for Richard Vaisey, but he did not have sufficient artistic or emotional sway over him to necessitate rebellion, though he may have prevented him from finishing his study of homosexuality, Difficulties with Girls. The influence of Martin Amis as inner audience was primarily as literary competitor, and in this sense the initial arrangement between Amis and Larkin was recreated. Because of his fiercely competitive nature and satiric sensibility the relationships with the ideal readers were always characterized by the twin desires to gain approval and to provoke. Another constant in Amis’s writing career was his delight in “horsepissing.” There is little doubt that if he had not learned how to vent spleen in his fiction as effectively as he did in his correspondence, Lucky Jim would not have caused the sensation that it did. But spleen also led to trouble, as the vehemence with which he made pronouncements on life and art became part of a pattern, and Amis would sometimes forget the restrictions he placed on writers as a cranky, intolerant critic. Or perhaps he just wanted to have it both ways, by telling the reader that a certain kind of book could not (or should not) be written then writing it anyway. After insisting that literature in translation was an unsatisfactory version of the original, he proceeded to write Russian Hide-and-Seek and The Russian Girl, in which the characters speak Russian rendered simultaneously into English by the monolingual Amis. This would be a marvellous feat of imagination if it were not, according to his own stipulations, impossible and unwise. But when one is

212

Kingsley Amis

both dogmatic about art and tirelessly innovative, such contradictions are inevitable. James ­Fenton notes a similar contradiction arising from Amis’s dogmatic approach to poetry: an awful lot of poetic subject-matter is being placed out of bounds: don’t write poems whose purpose is to show off your acquaintance with foreign lands, or to blind us with philosophy or your superior reading habits. Don’t lay your heart bare in such an embarrassing way. Don’t blather on about nature. (2009, 120) As a result, Amis is “in danger of making the whole [poetic] enterprise impossible” (Fenton 2009, 120). And this is precisely the point of The Russian Girl, for, if one takes Amis at his word, the novel should never have been attempted and could not have been completed. To a certain degree, Amis was always trying to have things both ways, as The Old Devils proves by being a Welsh novel that refuses to talk about Wales. Though Alun Weaver’s failed novel is intended as proof that such a project cannot be completed, Amis not only finished his book but won a literary prize for it. His awareness of the contradiction is evident in an early draft that features an excised explanation of the typical Welsh novel. Below the description of a Welshman’s novel set in pastoral Wales in the first half of the twentieth century he added in longhand, “it can’t be done anymore. y certainly haven’t done it” (HEHL, 188a). This comment might refer to Alun’s novel, but it is also self-referential. Even when he was aware of the impossibility of doing both, it was in Amis’s nature to try. The result is a novel in which most of the characters refuse to talk about Welsh matters and false Welshness is criticized throughout. The desire to do both, or to enjoy more than one’s share, is also a product of Amis’s fear of death. When Maurice Allington has the opportunity to meet God in The Green Man he asks quite bluntly, “How about making life a little less hard on people?” God replies, “No prospect of that, I’m afraid” (1969, 143). The solution to the mortal condition is to achieve literary immortality, by writing enough good books to secure an enduring reputation. While the application of labels such as purveyor of lad-lit and misogynist to Amis’s writing and persona has hindered the appraisal of his art, Amis himself admittedly contributed to the problem through his simplistic and sometimes misguided attacks on modernism. Any claim for Amis as an anti-modernist is undermined by his acute self-­ consciousness  – evidenced by the existence of Amisian attitudes and



Conclusions 213

7 In the centre of this page Amis wrote, “Perh[aps] it can’t be done any more. y[ou] certainly haven’t done it.” The line was not adopted in the second draft, but it perfectly captures the feeling shared by Alun Weaver and the author of the impossibility of writing a serious Welsh novel. It may be taken as proof that Amis was aware of the irony in an Englishman who denies the validity of Welsh culture through a novel that tirelessly discusses Wales.

authorial m ­ outhpieces in every novel – and his exploration of artistic questions. In yet another sense, Amis was trying to have it both ways by writing novels that explore artistic questions while condemning selfconscious artistic behaviour. In Amis’s lexicon “modernism” is a byword for indulgence in pseudo-­intellectualism. Without ever giving a thorough examination of modernism, he often takes a single modernist tendency and exaggerates it into a horrible fault. These faults include: Dylan Thomas’s penchant for incongruities; Henry James’s wordiness; and Peter Quennell’s bohemianism. This anti-modernist bias is aptly expressed in a 1988 review of Hugh ­Kenner’s A Sinking Island: The Modern ­English ­Writers, which Amis hated primarily for slighting Philip Larkin and ignoring the writers he himself liked. He refers to its American author as “a veteran foot-slogger or camp-follower of the old Modernist movement, or what he calls International Modernism, the prime example of which is notoriously Ulysses.” Next he quotes Kenner on Joyce’s opus: “‘Anyone in 1895 who’d fore-guessed a book so transcendently innovative would have expected its dictionary to be French’” (1990, The Amis Collection, 23), a line which must have delighted him

214

Kingsley Amis

because it connects ­modernism with another of his pet irritations: the French language. The single potentially valid criticism of modernism implied in several Amis novels is that the easiest way to appear innovative or experimental is simply to question tradition. He resisted this impulse and he often affirms literary traditionalism while conducting experiments in content, narrative perspective, and genre. However, this anti-modernist bias has combined with the subtlety of his experiments to convince many that he is a naive realist. By focusing on Amis’s own artistic process, we can see that he always considered the effect of his novels on readers, and balance becomes a key concept again. He went back through the manuscript of Stanley and the Women to make his protagonist worse and prevent the reader from taking his side, even if he is treated badly by women. If Amis had been kinder to Stanley Duke and his viewpoint had seemed reasonable, the novel would have been a thorough indictment of women. Duke’s fictional world remains distasteful and offensive, primarily because we see things through his blinkered eyes. Taken out of context, many of the diatribes and speeches in Amis’s novels have been offered as evidence of misogyny and misanthropy. Dr Nash’s insinuation in Stanley and the Women that all women are insane is highly irresponsible, coming from a medical professional, but since he has been married at least four times the reader discerns that he is not very good at dealing with the opposite sex and has found it convenient to blame his own problems on his wives. In contrast, in The Old Devils Amis decided to preserve a semblance of balance by not going too far. He resisted the temptation to have more laughs at the expense of Wales and ended Llywelyn Pugh’s participation after three, rather than thirty, pages. In composition Amis must have enjoyed taking Pugh on the pub crawl with the old devils, but as the nastiness increases the reader squirms and begins to suspect the author of being gratuitously cruel. And though Amis agreed with Jim Dixon’s hedonistic philosophy that nice things are preferable to nasty things, and that the object in life was to enjoy the nice ones as much as possible, he liked to be nasty in his writing. In The Biographer’s Moustache, Gordon Scott-Thompson’s scrupulous attempts to be fair earn the scorn of his girlfriend Louise, who sounds much like the author: “Christ, Gordon, why have you got to be so bloody balanced about everything under the sun? In your world it’s always on the one hand this, but on the other hand that.” As she says, it can be “most uncool” (1995, 7). Amis’s intriguing answer to the problem of balance was the humanization of the antimodels. In The Folks That Live on the Hill, when we learn



Conclusions 215

that Freddie Caldecote has no personal freedom because his wife has decided to run his life, we do not necessarily feel sorry for him, but his need to escape becomes comprehensible. If he is able to gain solace from creating bad poetry in solitude, then surely he should be allowed this pleasure. Though it is not always possible to ascertain the reasons bad artists continue to create, if they have captured an audience then perhaps they should be left alone. This is the conclusion reached in the cases of Roy Vandervane and Anna Danilova. Amis was always concerned with motivations and causes, and the fundamental question of why people feel compelled to create. His early novels present only good artists and bad ones, and the depiction of the latter must have become boring, along with the realization that art of which he did not approve would continue to be created no matter how loudly he spoke out against it. If the antimodels do tell us about the author’s artistic ideal, then we should consider the lessons contained in the portrayal of Jimmie Fane, his last shamming artist. Fane is a pedant, a snob, and a literary bohemian. After early success, he has faded into obscurity and his writing production has petered out to nothing. By inverting Fane’s characteristics and personality traits, we arrive at Amis’s early vision of the ideal as “a man speaking to men” (11 August 1946, Bodleian) who “writ[es] for the man in the street” (18 May 1947, Bodleian). This writer communicates with the reader through realist texts and continues to publish, never resting on his laurels but steadily building a reputation. Amis does quite well when he is measured against this ideal. His novels are all eminently readable and realistic, though they are never just diverting stories. They communicate his attitude on complex issues such as sexuality and gender relations, and the ongoing battle between socialist politics and Thatcherism. However, we can see that his innate desire to provoke, the joy he experienced in being slightly malicious, and his love for ambiguity make communication problematic. Furthermore, Amis himself had pedantic tendencies: why else would he have bothered to write ­ ingsley an English usage guide at the end of his life? And to say that Sir K Amis, single malt whiskey aficionado, member of the Garrick Club, and staunch political conservative, was always in touch with the man on the street would be an exaggeration. His novels were not always realist either, for he diverged from the traditional path to take on James Bond, ghosts, and alternative reality. But if Amis’s early work is characterized by artistic intransigence, his late work is notable for change. Ideals are far less important than the desire to renew oneself and the willingness to experiment.

216

Kingsley Amis

Amis’s artistic vision continued evolving until his death because of this obsession with renewal. He argues in the subtext of novels like The Alteration that we must make continual efforts to maintain artistic independence, and to continue creating. As noted earlier, That Uncertain Feeling ends with Gareth Probert’s art condemned and forgotten while the focus has shifted to John Lewis’s weak promise to try not to sleep with other women. In the later works, the artists are not forgotten, and we are reminded in novels like The Old Devils that continual efforts to create are far more important than past achievements. Thus, Amis was becoming less dogmatic about why people create and more honest about himself as a flawed person. Jake Richardson, reactionary university don with an outmoded sense of Englishness, is presented with a dildo outside his college and declared a wanker. Alun Weaver recognizes the faults in others but fails to ameliorate his own. Detested by his former friends, he dies of a heart attack in shock at his host’s cheapness in dispensing alcoholic drinks. And Jimmie Fane uses his biographer as drinking companion and sparring partner, ultimately sabotaging his literary project by refusing to allow the most salacious details to be published. At novel’s end he is contemplating a return to his previous wife for financial reasons. All three portraits enlarge on and satirize Amis’s personal situation or character. They show the depths to which we are all capable of sinking, and the difficulty of understanding human motivation. The commentaries on art in Amis’s novels are really all about life, and the endless search for meaning. While his preference for expressing ideas negatively in highly entertaining texts has made it easy to overlook his creative lessons, there is much to be learned from all of his novels. One hopes that future generations of readers will show more appreciation for his compelling artistic arguments, unique ambiguities, and extraordinary command of the English language.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE   1 The anti-woman and anti-Welsh sentiments become problematic in several novels in the 1970s and 1980s and are discussed in the second half of the book.   2 See Joel Conarroe’s New York Times review of Memoirs in which he states that “Kingsley Amis, if a dazzling writer, is not an altogether agreeable chap. He is, in fact, as he would probably be the first to admit, something of a (bleep)” (1991, 7). The reviewer does not seem to have been personally acquainted with Amis. Similarly, Stuart Wright read both ­Memoirs and Jacobs’s biography and called Amis “misanthropic, hypochondriacal, mean-spirited, hypercritical, and hypocritical; and he has been a notorious philanderer. In other words, not a very nice chap. By comparison Philip Larkin was a Boy Scout” (1996, 452). And, finally, the tenor of Peter Bien’s review of Jacobs’s book shows that the more the reading public learned about Amis, the less inclined it was to take him seriously as a writer: “Amis hated bores. It is ironic that he himself emerges as the number one bore” (1996, 413). Such anecdotal slights combine to create an overwhelmingly negative portrait of the man, which encourages the dismissal of his art. Though he does seem to have become curmudgeonly in his final years, and to have behaved boorishly to bores and snobs, there are numerous testimonials to his charm, wit, and generosity. Violet ­Powell, Anthony Powell’s wife, recalled Amis’s behaviour at a dinner party she hosted for Maria Luisa Astaldi, a wealthy art collector: “Kingsley was at the top of his form and kissed Maria Luisa when the time came to say goodbye, an embrace which she accepted in the spirit it was offered” (1998, 158).

218

Notes to pages 18–21

  3 If Amis had not edited Eric Jacobs’s biography, there would have been many more reminders of his alcoholism. He objected to anecdotes that focused on reprehensible behaviour and encouraged the reader not to take him seriously as a literary artist. When Jacobs suggested that he congratulated himself for good writing with a large pre-lunch whiskey, “award[ed] himself the rest of the day off,” and “invariably [quit] the typewriter by twelve-thirty,” Amis printed “NO” three times in the manuscript margin (HEHL). Broad insinuations about Amis’s intolerant and boorish behaviour when he was drinking were also eliminated from the published biography. On his evasion of bores and women at the Garrick and in pubs, Amis wrote “rubbish” twice and “COCK!” These anecdotes may have been true and they make for entertaining reading, but Amis preferred to have the emphasis placed on his literary works.   4 See the 25 November 1944 letter to Philip Larkin and Zachary Leader’s commentary for a more detailed definition of this term (Amis 2001, 13).   5 On the importance of the author entertaining both himself and the reader, see the seminal interview with Amis in The Paris Review. He said of his relationship with the reader, “I always bear him in mind, and try to visualize him and watch for any signs of boredom or impatience to flit across [his] face” (1975, 33).   6 See Amis’s collaborative novel fragment, “Who Else Is Rank,” in which a section written by Frank Coles describes the Coles character, Stephen Lewis, attending an Oxford party in the rooms of Bruno Coleman. Lewis finds Archer/Amis’s copy of Chaucer, the Man and his Work and reports: At first I read both the text and the pencilled comments in the margin; soon I found I was reading only the comments and my sympathy which did not amount to approval was wholly with the commentator. A long and flowery metaphor paralleling the richness of medieval literature with a gorgeously appointed palace had been converted into a description of a combined brothel and lavatory. (HEHL) The effect of Archer’s satire on Lewis is precisely what Amis hoped to achieve through “horse-pissing”: a combination of comic entertainment and voluntary empathetic understanding of his own artistic goals.   7 Amis portrays Lord David Cecil in Memoirs (1991, 101–7) as an incoherent, irresponsible representative of the decaying aristocracy. While he admits that the thesis was imperfectly researched and written, he blames Cecil for shoddy supervision and failing him out of spite for changing supervisors. Amis is convincing on Cecil’s demerits but rather sly in diverting the reader’s attention away from the faults in the thesis to those in the supervisor.



Notes to pages 21–7

219

  8 Biographer Eric Jacobs appears to have accepted Amis’s version of his troubles without actually reading the thesis, for he refers to it only briefly and indirectly (1995, 118–9). Paul Fussell treated it in some detail, though bias emerges in the declaration that “Cecil contrived to flunk Amis” and the exaggerated claim that “Its general excellence would fulfil high academic requirements almost everywhere” (1994, 28). Zachary Leader generally agreed: “For all its flaws and weaknesses, it is well written, intelligent in its treatment of the audience it presents, and, as the examiners admit in their report, the product of some ‘genuine work’” (2006, 255).   9 In the copy of the BLitt thesis read and marked by Lord David Cecil (HRC), there are no marginal comments besides “always?” next to Amis’s assertion in the second paragraph that poets write first for close friends (1), but there are numerous question marks and underscores. Cecil was justifiably bothered by Amis’s tendency to make declarations such as the following: “Two years later the friendship between Rossetti and ­Swinburne came to an end. The cause of this breach is now irrevocably fossilised in reticence, nor is it much to the purpose” (12). Cecil marked this passage with a question mark, no doubt confused as to Amis’s reasons for alluding to it if it were not to purpose. The tendency to use vague expressions also attracted Cecil’s attention, as when Amis refers to the “slightly ‘middle-brow’ Omar Khayyam Club” and the “somewhat different enthusiasm of the poets of the ’90s, notably Wilde” (132). The latter merited a double underscore and question mark (132). 10 Amis says this most explicitly in a marginal note to a letter written 8 January 1954 to Larkin: “you were very much what I called my ‘inner audience’ in my thesis, quite apart from the actual tips you gave, which aided my judgment a great deal ... I can think of nothing I’d rather have than your approbation. I’d rather have it than anyone else’s approbation, any road” (Bodleian). 11 All references to published correspondence offer the dates and page numbers from The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2001), edited by Zachary Leader.

CHAPTER TWO   1 For more information on The Legacy’s moral concerns, see Dale Salwak’s analysis (1992, 46–52). He concludes that in spite of a general lack of humour, the novel is important for the presence of a “moral man” in the form of the fictional Kingsley Amis. This becomes the model for future Amisian heroes (50). However, since Amis was at this stage in his writing career “more concerned with proving a point or preaching a moral

220

  2

  3

  4   5

Notes to pages 28–31

than with creating fully rounded characters, believable reactions, or subtle nuances,” the novel is missing “the rich vein of detail that Amis would learn to mine so skilfully” (52). Zachary Leader, on the other hand, shows many of the connections between events in the novel and the author’s own life, including: similarities between Amis’s father William and the overbearing, snobbish Sidney (2006, The Life, 182–3); Amis’s perpetual worry over finances in the years immediately following the war (184); and his obsession with odd English locutions that could be used to comic effect (185–6). A letter to Larkin dated 22 August 1947 contains one example of Amis’s wishful thinking in regard to R.A. Caton and the publication of his poems. Amis wrote on the back of the letter in pencil: “I dreamed last night that I was interviewing Caton. He said ‘oh yes, it’s ready. If you call into my office at 8 tonight, you can pick up as many copies as you like’” (Bodleian). Amis submitted the manuscript to several publishers, finally becoming convinced to abandon all hope by Doreen Marston. She was a C ­ ollins reader and the mother of Amis’s Oxford friend, Adrian Marston. See Zachary Leader’s summary of the 1 January 1951 letter from Marston in which she lists the novel’s flaws under the following headings: “redundancy,” “lack of conflict,” “weak feminine characterization,” “ungrammatical writing,” and “total lack of humour” (Amis 2001, 252). Graham McClintock in Take a Girl Like You is a variation on Jock McClintock, though the latter is more splenetic and less attractive. Aporia can refer to “A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question” or “An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text’s meanings.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004). Amis’s protagonists are in perpetual doubt about almost everything except for art, food, and bores, and his texts would become increasingly riddled with paradoxes. The term aporia has been used by many theorists including Jacques Derrida and Roman Jakobson. J. Hillis Miller linked it with “undecidability,” or “the impossibility of being sure” about the genuineness of certain fictional depictions (1999, 301). Noting the original Greek meaning “no passageway,” Miller defines an aporia as “a blind alley in a logical sequence, an impasse that forbids going any further” (303). Lewis Edwin Hahn examined the role of aporia in Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy and found that he uses it to express “the difficulty of reconciling the threefold splitting of time into the ecstacies of past, present, and future – to use Heidegger’s terms – and the unshakeable conviction that time is one, a



  6

  7

  8   9

10

Notes to pages 31–6

221

collective singular” (1995, 576). Thus, the term is particularly appropriate in relation to Amis because of its connection with time, one of his great fascinations, and duality of meaning. See John Haffenden’s account of the first meeting between Empson and Wain. Empson reportedly said, “‘Hello, young man, I’m told you imitate me.’ Wain replied, ‘Imitate you? Why, I invented you!’ – a reply which Empson said ‘quite won my heart’” (2006, 352). Wain was Empson’s champion, though probably not his inventor. This anecdote reinforces Zachary Leader’s claim that much of the trouble between Amis and Wain, which developed in the mid-1950s, stemmed from “Wain’s unshakeable sense of entitlement” (Leader 2006, The Life, 217). By way of introduction, the narrator states that “A line from a modern poem he had recently read fell like a pebble into [Charles Lumley’s] mind,” then the hero offers the following four variations on Empson’s line: “And I a lover twist what I abhor”; “And twister I, abhorring what I love”; And I a whore, abtwisting what I love”; “Love eye and twist her and what I abhor” (1953, 22–3). An overriding concern for class is apparent in the writing of many English post-war writers, but it is of far more importance in Wain than in Amis. Wain did indeed serve as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a five-year position generally given to Oxonians, from 1973 to 1978 (Harrison 1994, 418). See Ted E. Boyle and Terence Brown (1966) for an existential reading (105). Bruce Stovel, under the influence of Northrop Frye, examined the use of masks, double plot, and irony to show that the novel is a traditional comedy (1978). More recently, Frederick M. Holmes (2002) used the Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque to dissect the character of Jim Dixon. Kenneth Womack (2002), in a study of post-war English academic fiction, concluded that Lucky Jim is not really a comic novel, but one in which the protagonist is faced with “ethical predicaments” (27); Alice Ferrebe (2005) focuses on Dixon’s “compromise with patriarchal powerstructures” (41) in a feminist psychoanalytic study; Nick Bentley (2007) offers a plausible analysis based on Englishness, claiming that Dixon represents the “emergent” group that challenges the foreign-influenced Welches (136). Several later novels are analysed in relation to Englishness in this study. And, most curiously, David Lodge, after declaring it a comic novel in 1963, decided thirty-three years later that it was really “a comic inversion of the tragic [Graham Greene novel] The Heart of the Matter,” with pity the dominant emotion (1996, 94–5). Part of the argument of this book is that Amis’s writing is so entertaining, thematically controversial,

222

11

12

13

14

15

16

Notes to pages 37–41

and deeply layered that critics have not concerned themselves with Amis’s art. Two representative critics in the case against Amis on the grounds of moral fuzziness are Patrick Swinden (1984) and Richard Jones (1992). Swinden notes that while “there is more than enough moral fussing in Lucky Jim, there is hardly any moral content” (1984, 188). Jones, irked by Amis’s treatment of Wales and Dylan Thomas, wonders “why Amis’s opinions and pseudo-memories are taken so seriously. As a comic writer, he rarely aimed to give the reader more than the occasional snigger; and, although one study of his work referred to him as ‘An English moralist,’ the idea of Amis being an arbiter of taste or morals is absurd” (1992, 181). Showalter depicts the genre in the following unflattering terms: Stretching from Kingsley to Martin Amis, lad-lit was comic in the traditional sense that it had a happy ending. It was romantic in the modern sense that it confronted men’s fear of the final embrace of marriage and adult responsibilities. It was confessional in the postmodern sense that the male protagonists and unreliable first-person narrators betrayed, beneath their bravado, the story of their insecurities, panic, cold sweats, performance anxieties and phobias. (2002, 24) See the 1979 interview with Michael Billington for Amis’s version of the visit to Leicester University’s senior common room: “I got in there and it was perfectly ordinary, nothing outrageous or absurd was said or done. I thought within five minutes: ‘My God, somebody ought to do something about this, this is untilled soil’” (Amis 262). By all accounts, Amis was a highly entertaining person and his own talents must have made it difficult for him to tolerate bores. In a 1975 interview, he called himself the “school wit” at age twelve, since he was able to “imitate the masters.” Amis continued: “I’ve always been a fair mimic; one of my party pieces is FDR as heard by the British over shortwave radio in 1940. This perhaps has something to do with writing fiction; a novelist is a sort of mimic by definition” (Amis 1975, “Interview,” 3). Amis was not always tactful in referring to Philip Larkin’s girlfriend, Monica Jones, upon whom the character of Margaret Peel was based. In a 17 September 1950 letter to Larkin he admits to having found M ­ onica more attractive than he remembered her being, though “it’s strange in one so soignée that she should still be using the same wrong make-up” (Bodleian). See Amis’s 1948 to 1951 letters to Larkin about his father-in-law, Leonard Bardwell, for examples of verbal invention and fury. The emphasis in the following extract from a 12 July 1949 letter is in the original:



17

18

19

20

Notes to pages 41–4

223

My hatred of Daddy B has reached a new high – the other Saturday Nick and his girl and my wife and my girl (’ssh!) and me went to a carnival here, and more or less enjoyed ourselves, until the old ape-man turned up – he had ‘come to see the country dancing’. We all came back here for tea, and a man we know turned up, so that WITHOUT THE APE we should have been a merry party, but THE APE WENT ON SITTING ABOUT AND GRINNING (2001, 208). The hero’s path to self-expression and social rebellion is quite similar in The Legacy. The fictional Kingsley Amis is frequently defeated in exchanges with his brother and publisher because he is socially inept, particularly in confrontational situations. Two-thirds of the way through the novel, the devious Mr Masters encourages Kingsley to express resentment against their landlady, rather than repressing it: “The reason the old seem to do everything they can to pester and worry the young is because they do do [sic] everything they can to pester and worry the young. It’s the only thing that gives them the heart to go on living” (196). While Masters’s motives are questionable, and he too seems to enjoy pestering the young because he has nothing better to do, the fictional Kingsley does need to become more self-assertive. He is not, however, as successful as Dixon in this respect. Though Kingsley does stand up to his publisher, it remains unclear whether he will bow to fraternal pressure and marry Stephanie or choose Jane. In a 25 July 1947 letter to Larkin Amis reports that he has heard from Caton that his poems are printed and that “It was understood that you (yes) would take 50 copies as a minimum when the copies are ready. (Then does he mean that 50 copies won’t be enough for me to take? How many more does he want me to tout round for him, the bastard, eh?)” (Bodleian). See the letter to Larkin on 17 January 1956 in which Amis writes, “Haven’t seen the Caton advt yet: looking forward to digging it: have told my agent to stop him, what?” Two months later, Amis seems resigned to the fact that Caton will do as he pleases, as he continues to ignore letters from Amis’s agent: “If you’ve no standing whatever to keep up, you can do as you bloody well like, it seems to me” (Bodleian). He would also report finding a bookshop well-stocked with copies of Bright November and reflect, “Even if I bought up existing stocks of the bloody thing, old L.S.C. would just print more, wouldn’t he?” (10 March 1956, Bodleian). Finally, Amis learned on 10 April that he could purchase the copyright from Caton, and at this point he gave up (2001, 462). In the original draft of the novel, when Dixon steals the Barclays’ taxi, Christine says, “That was all very efficient,” adding, “I didn’t know you

224

Notes to pages 44–6

were like that.” He replies, “Neither did I. I can’t make decisions as a rule, especially when it’s things like dealing with people.” The change is marked, because Dixon has not played a single prank until this point and the emphasis has been on his indecision, not deception (HRC, 109). 21 The backdrop for the South American escape is well-documented in Amis’s monograph on Graham Greene. Amis completed and submitted the monograph to Jack Rush at the University of Tucuman, though it was never published and he received no payment. In a 16 July 1948 letter, when Amis was still at work on the Greene project, he asked Larkin “if it’s necessary (I don’t mean just polite) to get a living man’s permission before writing a book about him?” (Amis 2001, 174). He is referring to Greene, but he was also no doubt thinking about Larkin, Monica Jones, and ­Leonard Bardwell. The visit to Larkin’s senior common room had taken place two years earlier in 1946, and he had since been thinking of using the above three people as fictional models. Like Dixon, Amis seems to have been unconcerned by ethical issues. 22 Flat characters are caricatures that have their beginnings in seventeenth century “humours.” They usually have only one dominant characteristic, but when they have more than one, Forster explains, “we get the beginning of the curve towards the round” (1974, 46–7). In contrast, a round character “is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round” (54). The trouble with L.S. Caton is that he does surprise – the reader does not expect him to pass off Dixon’s article as his own – even though his only identifiable characteristic is evasiveness. 23 See the 1974 interview with Clive James in which Amis calls The AntiDeath League his favourite novel and claims that “The fact that L.S. Caton finally gets bumped off in it is a signal that it’s to be taken seriously” (25).

CHAPTER THREE   1 Larkin’s two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, were not failures, but they suffer from the same lack of humour that plagued Amis in The Legacy. Mutual friend Anthony Powell thought Larkin “had no talent whatever as a novelist. He did not read many novels himself, nor was he interested in other people, only himself. Interest in other people is the only absolute sine qua non for a novelist in my opinion” (1997, 218). Amis continued to encourage Larkin to work at a third novel. In a 9 December 1953 letter he writes: “Sorry to hear about your fiction. I find the labour, not the shame,



Notes to pages 47–50

225

the chief deterrent. Why don’t you send me your most promising draft and let me see what I can make of it wwowwowwww And seriously, it would cheer me to read a Larkin novel, even a half-finished bed-crapped one” (Bodleian). Though he sent Amis numerous poems, Larkin does not seem to have sent any fiction.   2 One of the greatest differences between the manuscript of “Dixon and Christine” and Lucky Jim is the use of flashbacks. Originally, Amis had Dixon remember his parents and hometown, then visit Veronica Beale in hospital. After an evening with the Welches, he recalls speaking with Christine at a pub. This recollection takes place the following Monday in his rooms at college (HRC, 39). Things become rather confusing and the published novel is far superior in its simplicity and adherence to chronology. Action and dialogue are given precedence over dreamy reminiscence. This is not to say that Larkin exerted a negative influence on Amis in his editorial role. However, Larkin expressly told him to cut or reconsider many potentially interesting scenes for the sake of simplicity. For example, he criticized a coffee scene in the university common room for being “another of those conversations. I think the fault is that they’re too detailed [for] their purpose” (52).   3 See Dale Salwak’s Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist for a detailed defence of Lewis’s moral position. After reading the first three chapters of ­Salwak’s book in draft form, Amis pronounced it “altogether unsatisfactory” (Amis 2001, 1098). Recently, in a private interview, Salwak reflected on the quality of his book: “there is a very great possibility that it wasn’t as polished an achievement as I had hoped it would be. I did my best but I didn’t rise to his standard, his expectations” (15 August 2009). In a letter to Larkin dated 23 July 1985, Amis echoed an apparent criticism of Salwak by Larkin: “Dear Dale comes tonight. Yes, pity about him, but a relief to think he might be a smart operator who is also absolutely d. of etc. rather than a chap who is just adoakomw.” The abbreviated “d” stands for “devoid of merit” and the acronym “adoakomw” represents “absolutely devoid of any kind of merit whatsoever” (Bodleian). This is an overly harsh assessment of Salwak, both personally and professionally. Possibly Amis objected to the interpretation of his art through moral and biographical lenses. In our interview, Salwak also suggested that Amis’s motivation in offering him fifteen years of encouragement might have been to increase American book sales, which would seem to accord with Amis’s expressed hope that he turn out to be a “smart operator.”   4 See Amis’s Memoirs for an anecdotal description of Larkin’s tightness with money (1991, 60–1).

226

Notes to pages 50–1

  5 In Amis correspondence he often criticizes the Arts Council’s activities. In 1969 he was disturbed by a proposal to have writers visit schools and colleges for the paltry fee of fifteen pounds (2001, 714). To Amis, this meant that the council was being cheap and taking advantage of artists by appealing to their social conscience. In 1980 he would call for the council’s abolition because he considered it “power-hungry ... socialist, collectivist, authoritarian, giving the public not what it wants, not what it is prepared to pay for, but what certain bureaucrats think it wants, or think it ought to want, or think would do it good. This damages art” (Amis 2001, 900).   6 Amis stopped voting for the Labour Party in part because of his dissatisfaction with the state of education: “if you pack your class with thicks you will either have to ignore them and teach only the bright people, or, if like most teachers you feel responsible for all levels of pupil, you will compromise, i.e. lower your standard” (1970, “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right,” 202). Amis was not one to compromise. Thus, while he states that “It still seemed to me logical to support the Labour party that Bevin, ­Attlee and Gaitskell had shaped and led in the 1950’s” (in Amis 1957, 202), he begins That Uncertain Feeling with the following cryptic statement: “The Bevan ticket ... has expired, and will have to be renewed” (7). John Lewis is referring to a library ticket, but one might interpret this line as an indication that Amis was running out of patience with socialism. Richard Bradford considered such a view plausible, suggesting that perhaps Amis was asking, “Are Nye Bevan’s left-wing ideas no longer relevant?” (1998, 17).   7 Caton’s appearance in That Uncertain Feeling is again a non-appearance. A note arrives for Lewis at the library from one L.S. Caton, who is thinking of emigrating to Argentina and wants some books on the country. He is typically vague, saying that he will fetch them “in due course” and will write again “before very long.” Lewis throws the paper into the street (142).   8 See Patrick Swinden’s perceptive commentary on Amis’s use of characters as “expressions of his own temperament who ‘stand for’ him.” Such characters “have been constructed so as to enable [Amis] to speak from them in his own tone of voice, often, but not always expressing his own opinions. Other characters are set up as targets against which this tone of voice and set of attitudes is encouraged to expend itself” (1984, 183). Swinden offers Gareth Probert and Bill Evans in That Uncertain Feeling as examples of the target variety of character.



Notes to pages 52–5

227

  9 See chapter seven for a detailed analysis of Amis’s poetry and the flaws in the provincial aesthetic. 10 See Michael Dirda’s commentary on the American tendency to overlook Amis’s talents for moral reasons. He intriguingly suggests that disturbing moral aspects in his novels stopped readers from looking deeply at his art. According to Dirda, Amis “The man might have just escaped being a complete swine, but not by much” (2007, B9). Regarding the works, he declares: “a lot of people felt that the books were cold-hearted, and certainly no one could deny that the male protagonists were often despicable, no matter how artfully portrayed” (B11). 11 The closest Amis came to praising Thomas was in the explanation that accompanies the Thomas poem “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines” that he had selected for The Pleasure of Poetry, a compilation of the poems he introduced to Daily Mirror readers as the paper’s poetry editor. In typical fashion, Amis offers a mild compliment followed by a strong backhand: “In almost everything Thomas wrote he created a particular kind of excitement no one else has matched [and] if he sometimes seems to deliver less than he promises, the excitement is real enough” (Amis 1990, 18). 12 Richard Bradford claims that it is “Probert’s reliance upon opacity and abstraction [that] provides Amis with the antithesis of his own view of the way in which literature should deal with the extremities of life” (1989, 36), an estimation that recalls the quotation from T.E. Hulme at the beginning of the book about beauty being in “small, dry things.” 13 The contents of The Martyr are deliberately ambiguous and impossible to summarize. Dale Salwak calls it “a distasteful mixture of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot” that reveals culture “as a kind of industry, perpetrating various kinds of fraud to be sold to a gullible public” (1992, 96). 14 Amis seems to have forgotten the distinction between Dylan Thomas and Gareth Probert. Though Thomas drank heavily, Amis had decided in his pre-novel notes that “Nobody [in That Uncertain Feeling] is going to be a drinker, not even Probert.” This suggests that to the author Thomas and Probert were interchangeable. 15 See the April 1951 letter to Larkin in which Amis gleefully describes the audience’s negative reaction to an inebriated Thomas reading his poetry. “I went into the pub and found him half-stewed before the meeting,” reports Amis. Once the reading began, “the poems he spoke out with his mouth: ooh corks!!! He fucked up 2 of Auden’s things.” “In the pub afterwards,” continues Amis, “the more intelligent students sneered at him gently, and he perceived this; I was glad, because he made a very strong

228

Notes to pages 58–61

and very nasty impression on me, not as a charlatan so much as a terrible second-generation G.K.C. or Alf Noyes – you know, frothing at the mouth with piss” (2001, 255).

CHAPTER FOUR   1 Larkin’s gossiping must have caught Amis by surprise since he had requested permission in advance to borrow his friend’s send-up of the boring interviewee for That Uncertain Feeling: “By the way, old man, I laughed like hell at your ideal-candidate dialogue, and propose to use it, altered a lot o’ course, for the novel on which I am at present engaged” (18 October 1953, Bodleian). Larkin presumably did not object.   2 A sampling of the negative reviews finds: John D. Hurrell calling it “barely worth serious consideration” (1958, 66); G.S. Fraser comparing it unfavourably to Amis’s earlier work and dismissing it as “a misfire” (1964, 177); Robert H. Bell deciding that “for most readers the novel does not travel well or endure vitally” (1998, 5); and Malcolm Bradbury labelling it a “disappointing effort” (in Bell, 1998, 69).   3 On a more immediate level, Garnet Bowen’s defensive attitude towards abroad is a distillation of Amis’s own discomfort at leaving familiar surroundings. As noted by Russell Fraser, his travelling companion in Italy, “Though he dreaded Abroad, he turned uneasiness to haughtiness.” Fraser recalls seeing an anxious Amis off in Italy: “We got him to the station, but he wouldn’t let go of my arm ... After he was seated, he peered from the window, gesticulating frantically like a stage Italian. Stay put, his hands were telling us, and we had to” (1996, 791).   4 See Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals for an informative chapter on the complexities of Victor Gollancz’s ego (1988, 269–87). Gollancz becomes a model for a character in Difficulties with Girls (1988).   5 Amis too was impressed by the abundance of cheap alcohol in Portugal (Amis 2001, 432).   6 See Jacobs’s summary of the novel’s genesis (1995, 208–14), which includes the idea of having Gore-Urquhart dispatch Jim Dixon to Portugal to meet the real Kingsley Amis. The author found “this hybrid partfact-part-fiction” unworkable and decided, according to Jacobs, to replace Dixon with Garnet Bowen, “leaving out Kingsley Amis altogether” (211). Again, Jacobs shows himself to be suggestible in swallowing Amis’s version, for he did not leave himself out of the novel at all. Bowen’s artistic ideas and problems are the author’s.



Notes to pages 61–6

229

  7 This incident probably has autobiographical basis in Amis being given a rather cheeky summation of his talent while in Portugal: “By the way, Tyrrell told me the other day that while I would never make another ­Conrad I might WITH LUCK make another Wodehouse” (15 September 1955, Bodleian).   8 Bowen’s Birmingham talk, at which “some foreign persons needed to be addressed on CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELISTS (vi): Graham Greene” (45), draws upon Amis’s own experience at Oxford in 1951. After the completion of the monograph his interest in Greene dissipated, though he subsequently offered at least one public lecture on Greene. In a letter to Larkin, Amis reported that it “went off quite well” and was attended by “A Jesuit from the Belgian Congo,” a Flemish schoolteacher, and “four wop doctors called Marra, Parra, Pollo and Porro – this is true” (14 ­September 1951, Bodleian).   9 Amis’s definition of ale constitutes one such fabrication. The stated purpose of the entry is to correct Fowler’s declaration that ale is synonymous with beer. However Amis’s actual reason for redefining ale is to prove, through a single feigned example, that his work is at least as authoritative as Fowler’s: “The two drinks are distinct,” writes Amis, “ale being the result of a fermentation of malt, and beer being the same thing flavoured with hops (or ginger, etc.)” (5–6). In truth, ale is most definitely a variety of beer. If it were not hopped, the result would be a sickeningly sweet malt soup. The accepted modern definition of beer is derived from the German Beer Purity Law, which dates back to 1516 and states that beer may only be made from water, barley, and hops. The role of yeast, the other essential ingredient, was not understood until the 1800s. See Ian S. Horsey’s Brewing for a more complete definition (1999, 15). Broadly speaking, every beer is either an ale or a lager, depending on the type of yeast used and the fermentation temperatures. Amis should have understood the distinction, since he toured the Tuborg brewery during a trip to Denmark in 1960. In his trip diary (HEHL) he quotes the brewery tour guide as saying that “British beers fermented from top, theirs from bottom” (6). The commission of such an elementary error from someone with a lifetime of alcoholic experience suggests that Amis’s imaginative interpretation of reality was not always restricted to the sphere of the novel. 10 Most of the points of comparison between The Third Man and I Like It Here have been identified by Norman Macleod and are not repeated here. However, the key points in relation to artistic creation are as follows: Amis echoes Greene’s creative subtext through the literary lecture

230

11

12

13

14

Notes to pages 68–73

and Rollo Martins’s name. His pseudonym, Buck Dexter, would become Buckmaster in Amis’s book. Martins is asked to deliver his lecture because he is mistaken for the acclaimed modern novelist Benjamin Dexter, who (like Wulfstan Strether) writes in the mode of Henry James (31). Even if Amis based Bowen’s talk on personal experience rather than Greene’s fictional lecture, the latter’s critique of modernism must have interested him, particularly when a woman in the audience objects to Benjamin ­Dexter’s books because “a novel should tell a good story” (82). In this respect, Greene and Amis were in complete agreement. Amis’s own reviews are usually more about himself than the book. In a review of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint he identifies the novel’s primary concern as “being Jewish and what it does to people, or rather to the hero, who is on stage all the time, usually alone, ostensibly talking to the shadowy doctor in charge of his case.” His reactions are subjective throughout. Thus, he objects to the hero’s reference to his own mother as “the most unforgettable character I’ve met” because “Even in England, where there are still quite a few Gentile authors about, it is possible to feel that one has had nearly enough of this sort of thing” (Amis 1970, 104). Since the novel made Amis feel like an outsider, he was by turns bored and bothered. As a non-professional, personal reaction to literature, this is perfectly acceptable, but it is not at all evidence of critical broadmindedness. See Eric Jacobs’s account of the Amis family in 1949–1950, during which time Hilary Amis worked as a dishwasher at the Tivoli cinema while Kingsley marked examination papers to supplement his income. He borrowed money from Larkin and often complained of being unable to smoke as much as he wanted for financial reasons (1995, 134–5). The English literary tradition of expressing world-weariness is long and varied, though Amis’s contribution in I Like It Here represents a slight variation. In a piece representative of the tradition, Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society” (1764), the protagonist is a “pensive exile” (l. 419) who discovers that his search for “That bliss which only centres in the mind” (l. 424) has been “Vain, very vain” (l. 423). As one critic puts it, “the farther he travelled the stronger was the force with which he felt the pain of separation” (Jeffares 1959, 27). While Goldsmith’s traveller reaches this conclusion after wandering across Europe, Bowen is convinced of the merits of home before he goes anywhere. Because the pain of separation precedes departure, his stance is intellectual and artistic rather than experiential. “It was saddening to remember how lustrous, as well as abundant, her hair had been before she’d had children; to know how necessary



Notes to pages 76–80

231

that ­careful make-up was and how angular her hips and shoulders had become” (Amis 1955, 26).

CHAPTER FIVE   1 See the anonymous piece in the Times Literary Supplement, “The Uses of Comic Vision: A Concealed Social Point in Playing for Laughs” (9 September 1960) in which the author claims that Lucky Jim “perfectly exemplifies the insularity of English humour, and its intense concern with class.” Amis’s next two books are cited as proof that he is “a much more amiable person, and a much less serious writer, than his first novel suggested. It was, as it seems now, by chance sympathy rather than artistic design that Lucky Jim struck prophetically the true note of the 1950’s: a genial philistinism both apparent and real, a firm distrust of all sorts of merits.” Perhaps this nameless critic changed his opinion after reading Amis’s fourth novel, which is serious and not at all amiable.   2 See Martin Green’s analysis of the “gentleman rogue” in Amis, a character that he argues is negatively depicted in early novels but “becomes a hero or model” (147) in later works. He places Ormerod “part way along the curve towards the Kipling heroes we are to meet in The Anti-Death League from the starting point of Lucky Jim” (1984, 148).   3 See Rubin Rabinovitz for a summary of the argument that the plot of Take a Girl Like You is based on Richardson’s novel. He calls Jenny Bunn “a modern Clarissa who spends her time alternately defending her virginity and providing an opportunity for the next assault” (1967, 44). As Zachary Leader has pointed out, though, the only reference to literary works in Amis’s pre-novel notebook is to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2006, The Life, 441).   4 Terry Teachout’s view is representative. He claims that in spite of the “sober proliferation of detail” in Take a Girl Like You, “Amis’s purpose is uncertain. The greater length of Take a Girl Like You is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in gravity, and the reader ultimately feels that underneath the descriptive padding, the book’s real scope is no greater than that of such lighter efforts as Lucky Jim or That Uncertain Feeling” (in Bell 1998, 243).   5 This is the first mention of what Amis would later describe as putting a down payment on sex by pretending to listen to tedious female conversation. In his pre-novel notebook for Take a Girl Like You, Amis wrote of Anna de Jong’s character: “Fond of fucking and quite free with it, but makes men pay for it by indulging in grandiose sentimentality with her.

232

  6

  7

  8

  9 10

11

12

Notes to pages 81–4

Part of P[atrick] sucked in by this, part repelled” (HRC, 7). Similarly, in the notebook for Take a Girl Like You’s sequel, Difficulties with Girls, he used the terms “fuck-tax” and “cock-tax” frequently and explained that “P. perfectly habituated to the idea that listening to a lot of balls was part of getting to a fuck, cheerfully if poss but not so as to encourage them” (HEHL). Clive James offers a unique perspective on this exchange between Jenny and McClintock. He claims that the passage shows that “our response to beauty is unreasonable in the first place,” thus there is no way of convincing others to accept our feelings as their own. “We can argue that he ought to think differently,” James says of McClintock, “but we can scarcely ask him to feel differently” (2007, 396–7). Unlike Dylan Thomas, Keats was not a formative influence. He had never liked him, as a 7 April 1947 letter to Larkin shows. Amis writes: “I can’t help feeling it’s a pity [Keats] didn’t go to a decent school, where they’d have soon knocked the nonsense out of him” (Bodleian). See the interview with Clive James in which Amis reveals that Joan’s character also came from a book, albeit a low-brow one: She was real! In the early days when one still bought tit mags, there was a model – isn’t it incredible, I even remember her name – her name was Rosa Domaille. She had this amazing look of being sexy and intellectual as well. You know the look. Amazingly thoughtful. It’s part of the impressiveness of really sexy women. They’ve thought a lot. (Amis 1974, 24) The futility of trying to learn about love through books is a theme that Amis would return to in Jake’s Thing. See James Wolcott’s defence of Amis, “The Old Devil” (in Bell 1998, ­237–41), in which he argues: “Despite having written sympathetically from the female point of view in the Trollopian Take a Girl Like You, Amis has acquired the reputation of behaving in print like a sour-ball S.O.B. beset by bitches. It’s a somewhat dubious rap and rep” (238). While Alice Ferrebe’s analysis of Take a Girl Like You is more concerned with pushing a feminist agenda than taking the novel on its own merits, she does make a valid point when she says, “it is the male viewpoint which is shown as closer to the absolute truth.” Her conclusion – “Female sexuality is policed to ensure that it conforms to masculine-­ dictated ­hierarchies of heterosexual desirability” – is less convincing (2005, 45). See Bernard Bergonzi’s argument for authorial bias in favour of Standish: “Patrick, we have to assume, is verbally aggressive, obsessed and sexually



Notes to pages 85–92

233

attractive; yet we never see him objectively, for the author’s sympathy ­covers him with a protective mantle of charm” (1970, 165–6). 13 Amis battled Empson’s spectre long before the publication of Lucky Jim, confessing in a 17 September 1947 letter to Philip Larkin that the poem “Elizabeth’s Intermezzo” was composed “under E[mpson]’s direct influence” (2001, 142). In editing Amis’s letters, Zachary Leader noted that “Empson’s poems employ metaphysical conceits and other complexities much in evidence in Amis’s early verse” (Amis 2001, 384). As late as 15 April 1954, Amis admits to still “trying to come out on the other side” of his influence, rejecting ten-syllable lines, three-line stanzas, and “all those laconic enigmas” (2001, 384). Amis wrote Take a Girl Like You after reaching the other side, but the Empsonian idea of beautiful formal ambiguities continued to disturb him. 14 For a similarly dismissive treatment of Take a Girl Like You, see D ­ onald Bruce’s “The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: Amis Versus ­Vladimir Nabokov” (1996). Bruce argues that Amis was in no position to criticize Nabokov’s ornate prose in Lolita for “The opulence of Nabokov’s recollection is hardly matched by the meagre statement Amis makes of the unremarkable pleasures of Patrick Standish’s youth in Take a Girl Like You.” Bruce writes that “It is hard to pass by [Amis’s] jeers at far better writers than himself” (256). The thread connecting Hermione Lee’s and Donald Bruce’s vitriolic articles is their refusal to engage with the text. Standish’s thoughts and behaviour are deliberately taken out of context and used to show that their author does not merit serious consideration.

CHAPTER SIX   1 See Christopher Ricks’ review in the New Statesman in which he calls the novel “pervasively equivocal.” Though his remarks on Amis’s satire are perceptive, he fails to see the novel as anything other than an insoluble moral puzzle that Amis offers in order to dissociate himself from his protagonist (1963, 790).   2 As an example of the alliance between hero and narrator, consider the scene in which Micheldene decides to teach the arrogant student-writer Irving Macher a lesson: “He would do something about Macher’s air,” reports the narrator, using the terms that Micheldene himself would choose to express his intentions (12). There is little, if any, narrative filtering in the novel and Amis employs free indirect discourse throughout.   3 See the interview with Clive James in which Amis says, “Roger is undoubtedly the most unpleasant of my leading characters. I like Roger”

234

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8   9

Notes to pages 92–5

(1974, 24). He then expressed mixed feelings to Michael Barber, calling Micheldene’s behaviour inexcusable “from a moral pinnacle” though admitting that he would “quite enjoy a couple of drinks with Roger” (1975, 15). Bernard Bergonzi found the novel morally problematic – not surprising in light of his criticisms of Take a Girl Like You – and chastised the author for ambivalence: “If Amis does not endorse Roger’s odious attitudes, they are not very energetically distanced or disowned” (1970, 168). Not everyone considered him an authorial mouthpiece, though, with P ­ atrick Swinden calling Micheldene’s opinions “atrocious” and “unAmisian” (1984, 188) and David Lodge allowing that while the hero’s “consciousness totally dominates ... the authorial voice is only rhetorically in collusion” (2002, 37). See the following two essays contained in The Amis Collection (1990): “Sacred Cows,” in which Amis describes Bellow’s “picking between” the unidiomatic and the affected as “painful” (19); and “The Sound of Dying Laughter,” a piece on humour that labels Roth the “unfunniest” person in the world. Critics such as Ferdinand Mount have noted this tendency in Amis’s personal behaviour: “Baiting was a pastime, ranking only slightly behind drink and sex. Nor did he restrict his venom to people who could stand up to him” (2006, 46). Though socially unattractive, baiting in the literary sense forces readers to engage with the text and measure themselves against fictional characters. See the Eric Jacobs article “Dear Martin, Yours Eric” printed in The Times, in which he claims to be the only person besides Philip Larkin to have read an Amis novel in draft, ignorant perhaps of Howard’s role in the composition of One Fat Englishman (2000, 5). Note that Micheldene also discovers a letter from “L.S.,” who hopes to publish a book on South America (157). At this point in Amis’s fiction, Caton has only nominal comic value for those dedicated readers with good memories and friends such as Conquest and Larkin familiar with the operator of the Fortune Press. In 1984–85, Amis sold his archives to the Henry E. Huntington Library in California in order to buy a bigger house (Jacobs 1995, 335). Part of the reason for the delay was that Swinburne had given the manuscript to his solicitor, Walter Theodore Watts – the same Watts who receives three lashes in the Atkins notebooks. It was returned in June 1875 missing several chapters on the beating of schoolboys. When ­­Swinburne pressed for the return of the entire manuscript, Watts insisted that the other sections were lost, hoping to protect his client’s reputation. Most



10 11

12

13

14

15

Notes to pages 96–100

235

curiously, biographer Philip Henderson writes, “after Swinburne’s death, [Watts] ‘found’ them and sold them to Thomas J. Wise, the bibliographer and forger” (1974, 128). Henderson notes the Victorian fascination with “incredibly silly flagellation literature, catering mainly for an aristocratic and upper-class public. The writers of these books assumed that their readers had been to public schools.” This recalls Amis’s reference to ­Dickens’s sadistic boarding school, Dotheboys Hall, in Take a Girl Like You and anticipates a sado-masochistic scene in Russian-Hide-and-Seek that has autobiographical roots, as is explained in the treatment of this novel in chapter nine. See the examination of Amis’s novel of the same name in chapter eleven for further information on the original Difficulties with Girls. Elizabeth Jane Howard also defended her ex-husband: “Kingsley was never a racist, nor an anti-Semitic boor. Our four great friends who witnessed our wedding were three Jews and one homosexual.” Terry ­Eagleton’s response in the same column was defiant: “I still stand by my characterisation of Kingsley Amis and I am not sure I have anything more to say about it” (Cockcroft 2007). See John McDermott’s comparison of Roger Micheldene’s return voyage to England with Tony Last’s abandonment and death in the Amazon at the end of A Handful of Dust (1989, 123). The connection is intriguing, if spurious. Micheldene’s return voyage to England in the company of the Anglophile Strode Atkins is an unpleasant but just punishment. When Tony Last becomes trapped in the South American jungle, he is not punished but sentenced to death. See the interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard in The Times conducted shortly after Amis’s death. “One of the cruellest things is to be given such a strong constitution,” she stated, adding that she was forced to give up drinking for her health. “That didn’t happen to Kingsley: it might have given him a reason to stop. He had a tremendous constitution. He could work, whatever he felt like. He had to; it was a compulsive thing. I envy that passion” (Howard 1995, 1). The term “wanker” will feature prominently in three of Amis’s post-1970 novels. The central character in Girl, 20, Sir Roy Vandervane, goes to ridiculous lengths to hide his wankerish tendencies; Jake Richardson, the Oxford don and hero of Jake’s Thing, is called a wanker by female undergraduates; and The Biographer’s Moustache is a study of an insufferable wanker, the snob Jimmie Fane. A proponent of the Orwellian version of class-based Englishness will appear in the form of a right-wing pub landlord in Difficulties with Girls.

236

Notes to pages 102–13

The landlord character quotes from the Gilbert Keith Chesterton poem “The Silent People” and is used by Amis to issue a warning against politicizing Englishness. 16 Amis did not like being asked to improvise in public interviews. ­Zachary Leader notes that he was shy and “rarely seemed comfortable in live formats” (2006, The Life, 231). In a 23 June 1982 ­letter to ­Larkin, Amis writes about a television program on poetry for which he was interviewed. In addition to not liking the program, he says, “I didn’t think I was very good on the prog either. I mean they made me talk off the cuff” (Bodleian). And so, while Amis enjoyed competition, he could certainly sympathize with Micheldene’s plight when his script is stolen. 17 A successor to Strode Atkins does not appear until The Old Devils, in which the American Llywelyn Caswallon Pugh, who is obsessed with Welsh culture and language, arrives in Wales to torment the locals by glorifying what (to Amis) is inglorious.

CHAPTER SEVEN   1 Although Larkin would laugh at Dai Evans’s obsession with sex in correspondence with Robert Conquest, he approved of the poems, as indicated by a 6 October 1976 letter to Amis on which poems to include in a collection. Larkin writes, “I like ‘Aberdarcy’, ‘St. Asaph’s’, ‘Maunders’, and ‘Welsh Ferry’ best of the Evans poems” (Bodleian).   2 See the Martin Amis essay on J.G. Ballard in which he comments on his father’s tendency to pass irreversible judgments on writers. Kingsley admired early Ballard but was “decisively turned off by Crash, on moral grounds, and on anti-experimentalist grounds too. And, once they had displeased him, he seldom gave novelists a second chance. To his son, incidentally, [Kingsley] gave three, The Rachel Papers, Success and Time’s Arrow” (2002, 110). Finally, in late novels such as The Old Devils, The Russian Girl, and The Folks That Live on the Hill Amis concedes that artists who are not to his taste might have a modicum of merit, or legitimate reasons for continuing to create. This significant concession is explored here in some depth.   3 See Donald Davie’s astute and insightful analysis of Keats, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1987, in which he shows a predilection for word puzzles. In the essay’s final line, he sounds much more like the epigrammatic Empson or Wain than the critics of cant, Amis and Larkin.



Notes to pages 113–21

237

The classic status of Keats’s poetry may be thought assured in the sense that it’s hard to imagine a time when numerous readers won’t fall in love with it. For others of us, measuring him against his own masters (Dryden has been named, and may serve), this body of poetry will always seem more poignant than masterly. But of course the masterly will always be the last thing sought by those who want to master a text and its author, rather than be mastered by them. (Davie 1992, 304)   4 There are problems in Davie’s critical method, however, as he analyzes the Amis poem “McGrady” as an anti-authority piece, then immediately quotes at length from his own poem, “Creon’s Mouse,” to show that “Amis was not alone in concerning himself with such matters” (1973, 85).   5 In March 1991 Amis was asked by the Housman Society to provide a testimonial on behalf of the deceased poet as part of the campaign to have a memorial made in Westminster Abbey. Amis wrote: “I consider A.E. Housman to be a great English poet, one of our greatest since Matthew Arnold” (Amis 2001, 1006).   6 See Perry Anderson’s citation of Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972 (1998, 21), along with Charles Jencks’ Language of Post-modern Architecture (1977), for further information on the connections between postmodern theory and architecture. Anderson argues that the postmodern condition is defined by “the loss of credibility of ... meta-narratives” (25).

CHAPTER EIGHT   1 See the preface to Greene’s Three Plays (1961) in which he calls the pressure of novel-writing in confinement with one’s “depressive self ... extreme,” and claims to “have always sought relief in ‘entertainments’ – for melodrama as much as farce is an expression of a manic mood” (xiii). Amis, however, did not necessarily need an escape from seriousness, for he was able to blend his popular, manic brand of comedy into serious fiction. His entertainments are escapes from obsessing about artistic creation and measuring his own achievements against those of other writers.   2 In an interview with Dale Salwak, Amis stated: “Robert Conquest wrote the original draft which had the idea in it, and most of the characters in it, and a lot of the dialogue, and the science fiction dream, the Nefertiti statue, and so forth. I put in the plot, I introduced the women in fact, and the television debacle” (in Bell 1998, 276).   3 See Amis’s own reference to the use of Conquest’s flats during his “unregenerate days” in Memoirs (1991, 148). As Richard Bradford has

238

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

Notes to pages 125–9

pointed out, Amis possibily included this bit of “laddish humour” to diminish the negative feelings of guilt and depression that he experienced later in life after the disintegration of his second marriage (2001, 165). One of the key points in Bradford’s biography is that Amis realized in his declining years that he had not been so lucky with women after all. Amis’s veracity was widely contested after the publication of Memoirs, with Anthony Powell one of the more perturbed victims of Amis’s misremembering. In his review for The Spectator, he said that the book was “on the whole, not very well written” and that it contained “many chestnuts (some quite implausible)” (1997, 96). In his journal he called Amis’s “disregard for the truth” “shocking” (103). Larkin, being deceased, was unable to comment on the accuracy of his portrait. It is sometimes difficult to tell which potentially slanderous anecdotes are chestnuts, though. One of the more salacious pieces was devoted to Tom Driburg, who was openly and flamboyantly homosexual. When he was asked through ­Christopher Hitchens to have lunch with Kingsley, Driburg replied, “Kingsley Amis, now. Tell me, is he as attractive as his son?” (1991, 312). The portrait concludes with Driburg chasing Martin around a bed. In Hitch-22 the telephone exchange between Hitchens and Driburg is repeated with only slight changes in wording (2010, 153). See Richard Bradford’s biography of Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear (2005) for a detailed analysis of the tri-cornered relationship between Amis, Larkin, and Conquest. On Larkin, Bradford writes that he suspected “Amis and Conquest would always in some way be the wags and himself the stooge” (143). In an undated June 1948 letter to Larkin, Amis wrote that Montgomery’s books “have all gone for a shit, now” (Bodleian). He had complained previously to Larkin about Montgomery’s lack of humour, “pharisaical” treatment of sex, and his improbable plots (23 August 1946, Bodleian). Richard Bradford thinks that by satirizing “straight-faced academic discourse” in the novel, Amis was “drawing a line beneath his previous persona as a professional academic who also produced fiction” (2001, 221); Paul Fussell refers to the “knowledgeable send-up of professorial discourse, the sort of speech appropriate to a lifetime spent explaining things to the slow-witted or uninterested” as proof that Amis had become a jaded university lecturer (1994, 62). Unfortunately for Amis, even his kindest critics had difficulty understanding what had happened and such developments in his narrative voice have often been mistakenly cited as evidence of either the darkening of his vision or a failure to remember a winning formula. James Gindin observed



Notes to pages 129–30

239

in 1962 that “less of each successive novel is filtered through the perception of the hero. Take a Girl Like You does not even have a single hero, for both Patrick and Jenny are equally central.” He thought this meant that Amis had “lost the essentially comic conception of the antihero bumbling through society” (1962, 43). John Betjeman, whom Amis admired as both a poet and a person, also encouraged him to stay humorous. In an undated letter written in 1954 he praised Lucky Jim and concluded: “I want you to get your second [novel] done as soon as possible so that I can read it and laugh like that again” (HEHL).   9 For a decidedly negative portrayal of homosexuality as a manifestation of mental and spiritual sickness, see Amis’s James Bond novel, Colonel Sun. General Arenski, the Russian in charge of security at the conference around which the book is centred, is gay and uses his sexuality to professional advantage: “His sexual tastes had paradoxically stood in his favour – the consensus in the corridors of the Kremlin had been that someone as obviously vulnerable as that was no danger in any quarter” (1968, ­147–8). Arenski has relations with a “fisher-boy” on a Greek island and makes advances to another teenage boy, who is revolted at the idea. A sadistic German war criminal and pedophile also appears. Later in this book, I argue that when Amis did not make conscientious efforts to offer a balanced perspective, his natural biases – particularly against Wales and homosexuality – surface in his fiction in a disturbing way. 10 See the Amis essay “Godforsaken,” published in The Spectator on 18 April 1987, which was originally entitled “Why There Must Be a Church.” In it he refers obliquely to The Anti-Death League. Rather than struggling to change with the times, Amis thought that the Church of England “should move back to where it was before and preach the Christian religion, at whatever price in incomprehension, indifference and hostility, and wait for the times to return to it if they will.” With The Anti-Death League in mind, he added: “Unlike many human institutions and practices, but like a language and like a literature, its most intimate associates, a religious belief, once no longer current, is dead and gone for ever. Some years ago I wrote a novel on that theme” (HEHL). 11 Amis sometimes explored the idea of passive resistance to the mortal condition in his poetry. The 1950s poem “On Staying Still,” describes a broken boat lying on a beach. At the conclusion, readers are advised to remain still amidst all of the meaningless bustle of life for “Staying still is more / When all else is moving / To no end” (HEHL, ll. 22–4). A similar course of non-action is recommended in an apparent poem written in a 1980 notebook: “If only we cd / carry on / lf [life] wdn’t be too bad / w.

240

Notes to pages 131–43

cups of tea / & quietly reading / not doing any harm / never going out / causing no trouble / just left alone / not intruding / using nothing up / and not dying” (HEHL). 12 Six hours after meeting Francis Archer, the Amis character, Stephen Lewis (a version of co-author Frank Coles) announces: “He is intelligent, childish and vicious; a common enough combination. But he is interesting.” Another character, Hiller, who has known Archer longer, insists, “Frans a bloody homo. Always has been. Still I can’t talk.” Lewis replies: “I’m not sure about that. He doesn’t strike me as being a genuine homo; if he had I shouldn’t have pronounced him vicious.” The scene ends with Lewis leaving the Oxford party disgusted at drunken quasi-homosexual behaviour (HEHL). 13 Amis actually conceived of the sexually crazed psychiatrist as a character in 1960 or 1961. At the beginning of an undated notebook for One Fat Englishman, he wrote “Sadistic psychiatrist who tells patients e.g. unconscious homo’y their problem – give up yr girl & screw men.” There is no supplemental explanation and the rest of the notes concern One Fat ­Englishman, so it is likely that he was unable to fit the character into this novel (HRC). 14 D.J. Taylor claims that the anti-1960s novel actually began with I Want It Now, though other hostile social exposés in this decade were written in the 1970s and 80s (1994, 198). According to Taylor, “The chief feature of the anti-1960s novel ... is the dreadful people who wander about in it,” and he lists Ronnie Appleyard as an example (203).

CHAPTER NINE   1 Emma Hawkins posits that the novel follows the postmodern pattern of “deliberately undermining the confidence” of the reader (Hawkins 2003, 47), for Allington “de-centers readers all too well, depriving them of the opportunity to formulate and sustain a single certainty” (2003, 59). ­Zachary Leader drew on biographical evidence to show that in using episodes from his own life the author was having “several types of fun” with the reader. At the time of composition, Amis, like Allington, was drinking a bottle of Scotch whisky each day, and often had difficulty determining whether memories were real or imagined (2006, The Life, 618). Robin Sims also thinks that all is not as it seems in the novel. He borrows from Freud and Lacan to argue that Allington desires what he most fears: his “vigorous appetite for sex is an appetite for death, while also an attempt to escape both it and the unacknowledged desire for it” (2007, Screen 12).



Notes to pages 147–53

241

  2 D.R. Wilmes has written convincingly of the impossible position in which Yandell is placed by Amis. Yandell, he notes, “is condemned to be both a judge and an accomplice of the book’s principal satiric target, Sir Roy Vandervane” (in Bell 1998, 183).   3 As was his creative wont, Amis made the language stronger and the humour more vitriolic in the progression of drafts. Originally he had ­Yandell call the obscenity-savers “swearettes” but, in perhaps the final draft copy, he crossed this word out and replaced it with “fuckettes” (HEHL, 29). The Huntington Library calls this an “early” draft, though the absence of an earlier one in its collection and the relative lack of major alterations between it and the completed novel suggest that it was the one submitted to the publisher.   4 For example, it has been read as a commentary on the human predicament – “Amis’s subject is not just old age and decay,” for “Old people are old; but they are also people” (Gardner 1981, 100); as a model for a world in which the failure to communicate results in desolation (McDermott 1989, 176); and as a book in which death is a thematic substitute for love (Salwak 1992, 194).   5 The view of Amis’s friend, the poet John Betjeman, is representative. He wrote to Amis on 26 June 1978 to say that Ending Up “is a book to make one want to cut one’s throat before getting old. It is your best. Marigold is particularly awful. Do you think everyone’s like that four? I suppose most of them are” (HEHL).   6 Amis too had experienced fickle and unfair critical pronouncements. An anonymous piece in the Times Literary Supplement in 1960 on comic vision argued that “Mr. Amis’s later books, That Uncertain Feeling and I Like It Here, show him as a much more amiable person, and a much less serious writer, than his first novel suggested. It was, as it seems now, by chance sympathy rather than artistic design that Lucky Jim struck prophetically the true note of the 1950s.” Considering that only six years had passed since Amis wrote Lucky Jim, this was a rather hasty judgement.   7 See the Joanna Coles interview conducted months before Amis’s death in which he remembers Kipling and says, in paraphrase of C.S. Lewis, that Kipling is the type of writer one grows tired of (Amis 1995, “Curmudgeons,” 27).   8 Amis’s correspondence and essays contain numerous references to the detrimental effect of arts council grants. See the 24 April 1984 letter by Amis in praise of past poets who survived on sales rather than grants (Amis 2001, 973).

242

Notes to pages 153–6

  9 Consider too Neil McEwan’s remark that Amis is original and “has written entertaining fiction for twenty-five years without repeating himself and without losing interest in the technical side of imaginative prose” (1981,78). Karl Miller, writing after Amis’s death, provides an even more convincing testimonial to Amis’s staying power: “His novels were, on balance, and if anything, even better late than early. His talent held up because it helped to hold him up” (1998, 43). 10 Many commentators have noted that Amis strove to be entertaining not only in literature but in person, and that this continued until his death. David Yezzi writes: “Amis was extremely fearful of losing his ability in old age to drink and laugh and be with friends” (2007, Screen 8). 11 Another way of viewing The Alteration is as a variation on the utopian novel described in New Maps of Hell: “Conformist utopias maintained by deliberate political effort are a cherished nightmare of contemporary science fiction” (84). As he was wont to do in his mature period, Amis did this a second time in Russian Hide-and-Seek. In spite of the success of The Alteration with science fiction insiders – Harry Harrison called it “that rare novel that is a classic of mainstream fiction and science fiction at the same time” (1996, 52) and Philip K. Dick labelled it “one of the best – possibly the best – alternate world novels in existence” (10 September 1979, HEHL) – he never pandered to popular opinion. There would be no more alternative reality novels after this second effort. Not recognizing the doubling trend, Bruce Montgomery wrote to Philip ­Larkin on 4 August 1975 to say that he was unimpressed by Crime of the Century, Amis’s second detective story after The Riverside Villas Murder: “Can’t say I’m bowled over by Kingsley’s serial. The trouble is, he rather fancies himself as a detective story writer, and unless we’re all very careful he’ll end up writing nothing else” (Montgomery papers, Bodleian). ­Montgomery need not have worried, for Amis did not attempt a third detective novel. 12 Dale Salwak also recognized the importance of free choice in the Amisian world. Of The Alteration he wrote: “No longer can a person make a selfless, significant choice, as had been possible in That Uncertain Feeling or I Want It Now. Instead, life at the personal level is out of control” (1992, 207). 13 See Barbara Everett’s analysis of the novel, which comes close to broaching the artistic antimodel theory: “The ‘altering’ is not merely or primarily the frightful damage done by human beings to each other and to all natural creatures, but in this case one form of the making of an artist – even if only a second-order or performing artist” (in Salwak 1996, 95).



Notes to pages 156–8

243

14 This theme is more fully developed in Amis’s next novel, Jake’s Thing, in which the protagonist’s lack of interest in academia coincides with the loss of his sexual drive. However, on the connection between sex and creativity in The Alteration, Amis offered the following compositional explanation. He listened to a 1909 recording of an Italian soprano castrati, ­Alessandro Moreschi, which was “Musically very fine. High notes at the end well tackled. But the noise was indescribably depressing. You thought, this poor creature, singing away: big success, but no man at all. I was depressed for days” (Amis 1974, “Profile 4,” 28). True artistic creation is never depressing in Amis’s fictional world. 15 In the first draft of the novel, Amis used the word “castration” rather than “alteration.” The second draft includes the introduction of visual and linguistic subtleties that serve to remind the reader of the ecclesiastics’ unnatural and insidious intentions. One such addition is the scene in which Hubert and the Pope are photographed together. In the first draft, Amis concluded their interview abruptly with a “photogram” without any description of Hubert’s expression or the pose the pair strikes (HEHL, 90). 16 One could argue that the negative depiction of organized religion results in a balance problem in The Alteration as well. Larkin suspected that Amis’s obsession with God and teleology had coloured the novel’s conclusion. In a 4 November 1976 letter he asks first “why Hubert loses his balls in the end,” for “The happy ending had been set up suitably enough; it came as a shock. Was it just a non-happy ending? Or are you telling us that God’s will cannot be evaded, my dear little bro in Xt? Not going over, are you? (‘I’ll go over your –’).” This criticism is tempered by a marginal addition: “The Pope was fine. The whole thing a remarkable imaginative feat” (Bodleian). Perhaps the simplest answer to Larkin’s question is found in Lawrence’s observation that the lack of finality in Amis’s endings is his “signature pattern” (in Bell 1998, 136). This was identified in the chapter on Take a Girl Like You as a deliberate reaction against moral closure and satisfying the reader’s expectations, two literary components highly valued by William Empson, among others. 17 See the discussion of Alun Weaver in The Old Devils. He too seems to recognize his limitations, though his ego will never allow him to show weakness.

CHAPTER TEN   1 See Richard Bradford’s analysis of the novel in which he states that Jake Richardson “is Jim Dixon thirty-five years after Lucky Jim,” and goes on

244

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

Notes to pages 158–61

to suggest that Amis’s hypothesis was “What would Jim be like in late middle age without the desire for and enjoyment of sex?” (2001, 305). Thus, if Jim Dixon set out to convince all who would listen that the English middle ages were Hobbesian, one of Jake Richardson’s roles may be to convince both the reader and fellow academics that things are not much better in the 1970s. Keith Wilson sees in Jake’s Thing the summarization of a wave of despair that engulfed many English novelists during the decade. He cites Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age as another representative work that suggests Britain had nowhere to go but down (in Salwak 1990, 82–3). Amis’s greatest wanker, the writer Jimmie Fane in The Biographer’s Moustache, will make similar remarks about the proper pronunciation of foreign loan words. Dale Salwak correctly notes that in Lucky Jim and Jake’s Thing the protagonists reveal “the essential phoniness of these so-called experts who are testing [them]” (1992, 211). However, there are important differences in the way these characters react to their respective tests. Dixon endures and has numerous physical and verbal encounters with his enemies. Unlike Micheldene and Richardson, he never refuses a challenge because he considers the challenger unworthy of acknowledgment. As suggested here, there is room for debate over whether or not the funnelling of the narrative is an achievement or an authorial failure to represent both sides faithfully. Ardent Amis supporter Norman Macleod argues in the essay “The Language of Kingsley Amis” (in Salwak 1996) that Jake’s Thing, Stanley and the Women, and The Old Devils are Amis’s “three masterpieces” (104). He maintains that readers of Jake’s Thing must remember that the narrative is deliberately slanted (119). Similarly Paul Fussell thought that Richardson, not Amis, might be accused of misogyny, because the book’s “wild, conscious exaggeration ... will mislead no reader acquainted with classical satire or equipped with a sense of humor” (1994, 9). While Teachout is generally well-disposed towards Amis, he was rightly critical of “the obvious coarsening of Amis’s prose style” in Jake’s Thing, as the author seemed “no longer capable of the lapidary concentration of Girl, 20. His ear is less sure, his style less pithy. This loss of tautness can be found to an even greater degree in Russian Hide-and-Seek” (in Bell 1998, 252). Teachout calls the latter “Amis’s weakest novel for artistic reasons” (253). The key point is that the degree of artistry of Amis’s novels largely determined their success. Most critics have thought that Amis’s emotional anger and right-wing politics negatively affected his writing;



  7

  8

  9

10

11

Notes to pages 161–66

245

however, as Teachout notes, it was Amis’s inability to maintain linguistic control – one of the factors outlined in Ending Up – that makes the novel problematic. See Zachary Leader’s informative account of how Amis turned his own female sex therapist, Dr Gillan, into the Irishman Dr Rosenberg (2006, The Life, 672–4). Leader reports that Dr Gillan was disturbed to find that “in the novel the [erectile dysfunction] testing was conducted in front of an audience, whereas at the Maudsley it took place in a small laboratory with only herself and one other person in attendance. Amis made the session ‘into a display, an exhibitionist set-up, a farce’” (673). Sometimes with Amis’s less successful novels, the negative reviews of those who dislike his writing are less revealing than the comments made by perennial supporters. John McDermott placed it “among the most depressing of the Amis books.” He was particularly troubled by the figure of Petrovsky, who he described as “disgusting without any redeeming charm, wit or talent. It is this unrelieved quality that accounts for the comparative lack of success on this occasion in blending various elements” (1989, 151). Dale Salwak offered a lengthy analysis of the political and linguistic regressions that Amis perceived in England at the time as the backdrop to the novel. He details much that is disturbing in the novel, offering little of his characteristic praise of things Amisian and concludes that Amis “produced a technically adroit expression of disillusionment and despair” (1992, 224). To illustrate the difficulty in overcoming the loss of artistic culture, Amis initially planned to use a different playwright from Shakespeare. In 1979 he told Michael Billington that he was envisioning the Russians trying to give the English back their culture after fifty years of rule, “And, of course, you can’t do that; so there are farcical scenes at Glyndebourne, when they try to put on Benjamin Britten – nobody knows what to do” (263). Jimmy Castronovo notes that Jimmy Porter was not the first young man in the 1950s to lament the absence of brave causes. “Amis actually beat Osborne to the insight,” says Castronovo, adding that “Kingsley Amis had a lifelong anxiety, which he expressed quite plainly: the fear that the ­‘BORING CRAPS’ would win the day. Overcoming this fear became a career” (2009, 53). Though Castronovo does not discuss Russian Hideand-Seek, his comments are relevant because the “craps” are victorious in the novel and Amis’s goal is clearly to inspire the reader with fear at the prospect of the loss of English culture. The autobiographical roots of Petrovsky’s disturbing relationship have not been critically identified, for it has generally been assumed that Amis’s

246

Notes to page 168

attitude towards sex was, like his politics, conservative. Thus, in The Green Man Maurice Allington is typically Amisian in feeling exhilarated at the thought of a threesome, then becoming prudish when the women show more interest in each other than in him. And in Jake’s Thing, the hero’s psychiatrist will rebuke him for his failure to produce kinkier fantasies. However, it would probably surprise many readers to learn that the sado-masochism in Russian Hide-and-Seek actually sprang from Amis’s own experience, as an excised chapter from the original manuscript of Memoirs proves (HEHL). Amis begins with a rather defensive justification for telling the story of picking up his hostess at a party in London at an unspecified date: “I have written little here about sexual matters on the grounds that to do so might hurt or give offence to individuals, but I hardly think that this brief anecdote can. I include it because of the interesting and little-known fact of behaviour that it contains.” Amis surreptitiously takes the woman back to the maisonette where he is staying and after sex is told, “I’m a masochist. You know, a serious one. Whips and things.” He apologizes for not having pleased her but is forgiven because she sensed that he was not interested: “You’ve got to mean it and I’ve got to know that, you see.” The woman says of her husband: “Well, the thing is I like being hit a little harder than he likes hitting me. I try to tell him sometimes but I have to go carefully. I have to be careful not to shock him.” The unpublished chapter concludes with Amis rather unconvincingly claiming that he has just realized in composition that the pass he threw at his hostess “could have been her idea before it was mine. Must have been,” which makes him appear the victim of a conniving, perverted woman. Petrovsky’s affair too is orchestrated by the woman, who asks him to take her “for a turn in the gardens.” While he is pondering how best to make a pass at her, she grabs him and “The speed and violence of her assault took him quite by surprise” (25–6). It remains unclear on whose advice the chapter was excised from Memoirs. 12 See Gavin Keulks’s at times forced study of Kingsley and Martin Amis’s novels for a theory explaining the destruction of Herzog. He calls it “entirely appropriate” because “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.” According to Keulks, the novel “defends the precepts of realism against the insurrections of ­Martin’s brand of fabulation and postmodernism” (2003, 186). This is not implausible, but it is doubtful that Amis thought so deeply about which Bellow novel to have Steve destroy. He probably never read Herzog, since



Notes to pages 170–7

247

he made a point of avoiding authors for whom he felt a natural aversion, unless he was forced to write a newspaper review. He did not review any Bellow novels or make detailed remarks about his fiction, though he did claim to have found out after writing Stanley and the Women that Herzog means “duke” (Amis 2001, 1109). Furthermore, Amis did not even think of Bellow until he wrote the second draft of Stanley and the Women. In the first draft, Steve rips to pieces The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz (HEHL, 18). There are two probable reasons for the change. First, it allowed Amis to take a shot at one of Martin’s favourite writers and, second, because Duke’s wife is a writer and a literary person in her own right. The presence of a modern American novel on her shelves is more appropriate than a psychiatric tome. This is made clear at the beginning of the novel, when the reader is told that “books predominated” in the sitting room: “no science, no history, a bit of biography and some essays alongside a lot of plays, poetry, novels and short stories” (12). 13 Jake’s Thing too became nastier as Amis corrected it in manuscript. ­Richardson’s recollection of meeting Alcestis Mabbott for the first time “at a dinner-party somewhere south of the river” is changed to “earlier at some cultural crapper south of the river” (8). Similarly, “he was buggered if he was going to” was altered to “fucked” (HEHL). Such corrections suggest that Amis was enjoying causing offence and Stanley and the Women continues the trend.

CHAPTER ELEVEN   1 The treatment of The Old Devils departs from the convention followed to this point in the book of referring to the central male characters by their family names. Early in his novelistic career, both Amis and critics tended to refer to the protagonists this way, calling them “Dixon” and “Lewis.” However, in The Old Devils the presence of four central male characters that are consistently referred to both in the body of the novel and in chapter headings by their given names makes it logical to follow the same system.   2 Barbara Everett was one of the critics who noted something odd in the consistent denial of Welsh culture in a book set in Wales featuring characters who are not truly Welsh (in Salwak 1996, 89). Perhaps, as Robert Conquest suggests, “Amis is a little inclined to apply British or democratic standards rather too rigidly” (in Salwak 1996, 13).   3 Zachary Leader has noted two biographical factors that influenced Amis’s outlook in composition: his reunion with ex-wife Hilly Kilmarnock and

248

  4

  5

  6

  7

Notes to pages 179–81

the death of Philip Larkin. Leader argues convincingly that these two events led Amis to discuss human loss with less dread and more philosophic consideration (2006, The Life, 746). While most critics understood and appreciated The Old Devils, its artistic subplot has been consistently neglected. See Charles McGrath’s “Amis Lite,” an essay that focuses on Difficulties with Girls but devotes a long paragraph to The Old Devils, calling it “a remarkable and affecting book” that is “tired and grumpy” like the central characters. McGrath mentions Malcolm’s second poetic project as proof of Amis’s undying pessimism: “And the vision that it offers of what’s in store for all of us is so bleak and unforgiving that in the end one of the characters decides to devote what time is left him (allowing for daily visits to the pub, that is) to memorializing the past by translating an old Welsh epic poem and inserting references to a lost love” (in Bell 1998, 308). This surely misses the point that Malcolm’s poetic translations are no longer escapes from reality, but expressions of true emotion. There is optimism in his willingness to accept life as it is and eagerness to create art that reflects his emotional experience. Amis has Standish reply to the landlord’s quotation of Chesterton with a speech from Othello: “‘Like the base Indian,’” says Standish, comparing himself to Othello in his failure to appreciate his beloved (Shakespeare, Act V, Scene II, ll. 347–8). The unheroic Standish has as little in common with Othello as the landlord does with Chesterton’s implied true Englishman. This trading of ironic, undercutting quotations reminds us of Standish’s exchange with Dick Thompson in Take a Girl Like You, in which Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens are invoked to deflationary purpose. The homophobic landlord becomes something of a stock character in Amis, reappearing in a Welsh pub in You Can’t Do Both to warn the Amisian hero Robin Davies not to bring homosexual companions to his establishment in the future (1994, 287). See the letter to Paul Fussell dated 22 May 1993 in which Amis says, “My inner audience did I think consist chiefly of Larkin and Conquest, especially Larkin. More lately I have added Martin” (Amis 2001, 1126). The depiction of women and homosexuals in the published Difficulties with Girls did not please most female reviewers. Gabriele Annan’s review is particularly negative. She writes: “Amis’s beery literary persona and tweedy diction have helped to persuade us that he’s a misogynist. But he is really a misanthropist. Women are ghastly but men are ghastly too; so we should as far as possible forgive each other our ghastliness” (in Bell 1989, 299).



Notes to pages 181–9

249

  8 In both novels the difficulties in finding adequate domestic help are presented in furtherance of this theme. Jenny Standish’s lazy, incompetent, and light-fingered cleaning woman is even worse than her predecessor in Stanley and the Women (145). Similarly the uppity immigrant, recognized by Amis as a lamentable feature of contemporary England in Girl, 20’s intelligent, abrasive West Indian Gilbert Alexander, recurs in the surly bouncer of South African descent, Colin Zurrico. By day he is an Oxford law student and Standish calls him “the bounciest most offensive young bastard I’ve ever met” (130).   9 Richard Bradford calls this confusion of fiction and reality a magic realist device, the function of which is to shift the reader’s focus back and forth “between suspended disbelief and fictional self-reference. Jenny interprets the real Patrick in the way that a critic, who knows Amis’s tastes and affiliations, would interpret his fictional counterpart. At the same time the fiction-reality interplay is part of the fiction” (1998, 71). Self-reference also serves to draw attention to the novelist, as Amis invites the reader to measure his art against Maugham’s and Fielding’s. 10 Amis’s own literary tastes became increasingly narrow and masculine as he aged. One of his favourite writers, George Macdonald Fraser, the creator of the Flashman series, must have appealed to him on numerous levels. The novels claim to be based on historical truth and are complete with endnotes. This in itself is an offshoot of “horse-pissing,” for Fraser adopted this pseudo-academic style to write entertainments about a rogue who lies, gambles, and womanizes. 11 The depiction of an emasculated publisher may have had its roots in ­Victor Gollancz’s own experiences after a breakdown in 1943. See ­Humphrey Carpenter’s description of how guilt over an extra-­marital affair contributed to “the belief that his penis was retracting into his body” (2002, 107). 12 According to Zachary Leader, Jonathan Clowes did not become an agent until 1960. He met Amis in 1970 and began representing him in 1976 (2006, 733). Dale Salwak, however, claimed that Clowes was Amis’s agent in 1955 and that he submitted That Uncertain Feeling on his behalf to Gollancz (1996, 85). In an e-mail to the author, Leader confirmed his version. Clowes did not respond to e-mail requests for confirmation. In a private interview, Salwak suggested that he might have confused Clowes with Hilary Rubenstein (2009). 13 This portrayal generally accords with the account of Désirée’s model, Marilyn Quennell, at the time of her death. The source, ironically, is her son Alexander, quoted in the Evening Standard: “She adored giving

250

Notes to pages 189–92

­ arties and her salon in Cheyne Row became quite famous for a certain p bohemian grandeur in the 70s and 80s.” Though she was “generous and keenly intelligent,” he admitted that “she could be unbelievably rude. She had a talent for seeing the weakness in people and giving it a good prod to get a reaction” (Anonymous 2005, A15). Amis’s reasons for employing the Quennells as characters are more fully explained in the section that deals with The Biographer’s Moustache. According to the role of the ideal reader, as explained by Amis in his BLitt thesis, by writing for Désirée’s approval Freddie might succeed in securing a certain type of pretentious reader, but it disqualifies him from writing anything of merit. 14 Amis offers his own evaluation of the quality of both Freddie’s poetry and Morrissey’s collection by placing the volume “in” European Poetical Testaments. The word “in” added to the initials of the title spells “inept.” Morrissey explains that the title was chosen because it “strikes a lot of people as a better class of series title than Things from Underground (another very good line of [Harry’s]) or Tales of the Whip” (206). The former title recalls Amis’s explanation of the quality of Chaucer’s writing through a lavatory metaphor while the latter suggests Swinburne. 15 See Amis’s farcical account of a reading he shared with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in America. Amidst the circus created by Kerouac, Amis recalls “Disengaging [him]self from a 250-pound brunette who had leapt on to the stage to reassure [him] that, contrary to [his] apparent belief, there was a beat generation” (1969, What, 155). 16 Although Amis’s literary views were at times limiting they were never superficial. In contrast, his attempt to apply provincial guidelines to fine dining produced embarrassing results. In the restaurant reviews written, coincidentally, while he was at work on The Russian Girl, between 1990 and 1993 (HEHL), the extent of his culinary knowledge is limited to whether something is overdone or underdone, appropriately hot or cold, and whether the salad can be eaten without cumbersome leaves of lettuce getting in the way. In an undated early draft of a review of Tante Claire, Amis makes it clear that his chief problem with the restaurant is that it appeals to the culinary insider, and not to the average diner, just as “Contemporary poetry is written to impress other poets or would-be poets, not to please the ordinary reader.” Though the restaurant’s interior had changed since his previous visit, Amis notes that “the tradition of serving bad pretentious food has been faithfully kept up” (HEHL).   Perhaps one of the reasons Amis became, if anything, less tolerant of culinary experimentation is that he had tried against his nature to appreci-



17

18

19

20

Notes to page 193

251

ate fine cuisine while courting Elizabeth Jane Howard. In a 21 November 1962 letter to Howard he wrote: “Have been dipping into the Good Food Guide, London section, on the look-out for handy little out of the way places to eat. Haven’t come up with anything decisive, but we’ll be throwing down shish-kebab in Shepherd’s Bush and whitebait in Whitechapel before very long” (HEHL). As his marriage soured, so did his opinion of good food guides and culinary pretension. Paul Fussell’s ex-wife, Betty, perhaps best expressed Amis’s attitude towards food: “Eating bored him. Drinking did not” (in Salwak 1996, 34). See the note Amis sent to Conquest, contained in the Henry E. Huntington Library with the publisher’s draft of The Russian Girl: “Could you possibly run up a very bad poem for use in my current novel? In English though translated from Russian (very well, the text says). 10–15 lines, young Russn girl’s sincere tribute to her English bloke who’s in his 40s. Any suggestions welcome.” Richard Bradford also remarks on the ironic use of translation in The Russian Girl. He calls the English rendition of Russian exchanges between Anna and Vaisey a “puzzling feature of the novel” for “We overhear the most intimate moments between two people in love, but what they have really said will remain private” (2001, 400). See the 1962 essay, “Kipling Good,” in which Amis recounts meeting ­Yevtushenko for the first time. He reports that the Russian asked his opinion of Dr Zhivago. Amis admitted that he had not read the English translation and privately reflects: “I thought of doing my piece about an interest in the para-phrasable content of literature being an anti-literary interest, but refrained. It felt too boring in anticipation” (Amis 1970, 173). The transcription of Russian conversation in natural English presented obvious problems for Amis during composition. He rewrote several of the conversations between Anna and Vaisey, including their initial meeting at a party for expatriates, two or three times. Though changes in content are minimal, he made countless minor alterations in wording. Amis had an excellent ear for conversation and claimed it was the easiest part of writing for him, but he was doubtless hindered because he could not hear the central couple talking in this novel. Another troublesome scene for the divorced and still embittered Amis was the one in which Vaisey discusses with her ex-husband Godfrey the uncomfortable state of being married to the monstrous Cordelia (183 in the manuscript’s first draft, HEHL). This scene received four different treatments.

252

Notes to pages 197–200

CHAPTER TWELVE   1 The only time Barbara Cartland’s name appears in Amis’s correspondence, she is characterized as a “shag” in a 29 May 1981 letter to Larkin (2001, 922).   2 Three examples are given: “Few Asiatics are courageous gamblers;” “The highland turks are all right. The Turks of the plains are no good;” and on the tough “Chigroes,” or Chinese Negroes of the West Indies, “They’ve got some of the intelligence of the Chinese and most of the vices of the black man” (Amis 1965, The Book, 66–7).   3 David Sexton wrote of Amis’s comedic sentences that “their fatigue is infectious” (1995, 6) while Jenny Turner declared that “The Biographer’s Moustache finds itself a good half century out of date in the very week of its publication” (1995, 2). Zachary Leader devotes some space to analyzing the stylistic problems in Amis’s final novels (2006, The Life, 787–92). He concludes: “Sometimes late Amis can be as orotund and impenetrable as late James, a comparison Amis would not have welcomed” (790).   4 Eric Jacobs claims that he threatened to sue Amis if he put him into The Biographer’s Moustache, and this prompted the change of the journalist’s name from Cedric (a name that “embraced my own,” writes Jacobs) to Gordon. Though Amis accommodated his biographer with the name change, Jacobs was irritated at the portrait of the journalist’s superior: “The version of me that does appear is hardly admiring. It comes in the person of Gordon’s boss, a books editor called Desmond O’Leary who is bald on top but hairy ‘like an ape’ everywhere else. This is how I once described myself to Kingsley, exaggerating a bit, but never mind. O’Leary smokes ‘a smallish cigar of rectangular cross-section’ as I did at the time” (Jacobs 2000, 5).   5 Amis did not often repeat himself with characters, even if several of his protagonists are recognizable sardonic strains from the Amisian persona. This has made his repeated attacks on the Quennells difficult to understand. One possible explanation for the recycling of Quennell-as-model comes from a 21 May 1967 letter to Larkin in which Amis praises him for “crapping on” Norman Iles because this “opens new vistas.” It seems that Larkin had attacked Iles more than once for writing bad poetry and this is what intrigues Amis: “Crapping on a chap twice for only one load of shit” (Amis 2001, 680).   6 Anthony Powell has offered a different theory to explain the ­dedication. He suspected it was intended to ease Amis’s guilty conscience (1997, 24), which is not implausible but dubious in light of the fact that his



  7

  8

  9

10

Notes to pages 200–5

253

c­ onscience was so thoroughly eased that he proceeded to write an unflattering depiction of the Quennells in Memoirs and fictionalize them a second time in his final novel. Powell himself had discovered the fictional possibilities of Peter Quennell long before Amis, having used him as the model for Mark Members in A Dance to the Music of Time (Allason and Marshall, Screen 12). Powell’s biographer Michael Barber confirms this: Members “is clearly based upon the young Peter Quennell,” who “played to perfection the role of aesthete” (2004, 44). To be fair to David Nokes, though he did not like The Biographer’s Moustache, he recognized its ongoing metafictional commentary: It’s as if Amis is attempting in fiction the equivalent of one of those Beerbohm cartoons of the younger and the older self confronting one another, as if he’s trying to imagine not so much what his biographer can secretly have made of him but rather what the debunking younger Amis would have made of the monstrous persona he has so successfully foisted on the world in recent years. (1995, 6) See Amis’s restaurant reviews in the early 1990s for his bias against French cuisine. He was particularly ill-disposed towards quiche, as this excerpt from a review of L’Escargot shows: “The idea of a soul-­stirring quiche of anything is about as likely as coming across a phlegmatic ­Neapolitan or a tuneful modern opera; even so I managed to get this one down without falling asleep at the table” (HEHL). See the short Amis essay “The Lobster’s Claw” (HEHL) written in 1992, the purpose of which is to explain the biographical basis for Roy ­Vandervane’s lunch at the Retrenchment Club in Girl, 20. Amis admits that the scene was an act of authorial revenge against an Apartheid supporter, Harold Soref, with whom he lunched in 1970 along with John Braine. Soref wanted Amis to write something sympathetic about South Africa, a proposition which was particularly displeasing since the lunch was unsatisfactory, the drinks did not flow, and Amis’s attempt to procure a side-order was discouraged. “Right, my lad, I thought, it may take a year, it may take five, but you’ll be getting it back for this,” writes Amis. “A lot of fiction is revenge for scores of one size or sort or another. A lot more is ­fantasy-revenge.” While The Biographer’s Moustache similarly opens with a lunch scene through which Amis settles an old score, the principal role of the Quennells in the novel was not revenge, but to enable Amis to portray himself as a legitimate creative artist who is neither Quennell nor Fane. The connection between Quennell and cats is reinforced by biographer Michael Barber’s description of him at Oxford as “one of those feline

254

Notes to pages 206–7

charmers whose success with women can drive their macho rivals to distraction” (2004, 44). 11 See Amis’s 1993 review of Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: a Writer’s Life for a similar argument in support of the separation of an author from his works. Amis is scathingly critical of Motion’s tendency to focus, as Quennell did, on the man’s habits to explain the art: “It will be seen that the argument keeps shifting from the work to the life, and it is the life or the supposed character of Philip Larkin that Motion, no doubt properly, is most concerned with” (HEHL). However, Amis does not consistently adhere to this position. In the case of Charles Algernon Swinburne, to whom Amis had no sentimental attachment, the titillating details were of greater interest than the poetry and he lamented that more were not supplied in the biography he reviewed. 12 For a more detailed explanation of Amis’s objection to Powell’s novelistic method, see the unpublished letter of 11 November 1982 in which he complains: “Easy work, writing novels, isn’t it? Every so often you type up your diary, changing the names a bit, and send the result to the publisher. Or if you’re AP you let your diaries pile up for 25 years and then start typing them up in batches” (Bodleian). A similar sentiment closes a 21 August 1985 letter to Larkin: “Well Mr Powell when did you decide to give up trying to look as if you were making up a story and just fall back on ­typing up your diaries?” (Bodleian).

Bibliography

Allason, Julian and Keith Marshall. Models for Characters in Anthony ­Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. . (Accessed May 24, 2007). 16 screens. Amis, Kingsley. 1946–1980. Letters to Philip Larkin. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. – 1946–1995. Collection of letters, personal papers, and original manuscripts of Kingsley Amis. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. – 1950. English Non-Dramatic Poetry, 1850–1900, and the Victorian Reading Public. Thesis submitted for the degree of Bachelor of Letters, Oxon. With marginal notes by Lord David Cecil. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. – 1954. Lucky Jim. Repr., 2000. London: Penguin. – 1955. Review of Officers and Gentlemen, by Evelyn Waugh. Spectator (July 8). Repr., 1997, in Evelyn Waugh, The Critical Heritage, Martin Stannard, ed. London: Routledge. 371–4. – 1955. That Uncertain Feeling. London: Victor Gollancz. – 1958. I Like It Here. London: Victor Gollancz. – 1960. New Maps of Hell. Repr., 1969. London: New English Library. – 1960. Take a Girl Like You. Repr., 1975. London: Victor Gollancz. – 1961. My Kind of Comedy. Interview with Kingsley Amis by Pat Williams. Twentieth Century (July): 46–50. – 1961. Review of Unconditional Surrender, by Evelyn Waugh. Spectator (October 27). Repr., 1997, in Evelyn Waugh, The Critical Heritage, Martin Stannard, ed. London: Routledge. 419–23. – 1963. One Fat Englishman. Repr., 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin. – 1965. The Book of Bond or Every Man His Own 007. London: Jonathan Cape. – 1965. The James Bond Dossier. Repr., 1966. New York: Signet.

256 Bibliography

– 1967. A Look Round the Estate: Poems 1957–1967. London: Jonathan Cape. – 1967. The Anti-Death League. New York: Ballantine. – 1968. Colonel Sun. Contained in manuscript form in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. – 1968. I Want It Now. Repr., 1971. London: Panther. – 1969. The Green Man. Repr., 2004. London: Vintage. – 1970. What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. – 1971. Girl, 20. New York: Summit. – 1974. Profile 4. Interview with Kingsley Amis by Clive James. The New Review (July 4): 21–8. – 1974. Ending Up. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. – 1975. Aspects of Amerenglish (II). Encounter 44, no2: 41. – 1975. Interview with Kingsley Amis by Michael Barber. The Paris Review 59, 64 (Winter): 1–33. – 1975. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Thames and Hudson. – 1976. The Alteration. Repr., 2004. London: Vintage. – 1978. Jake’s Thing. Repr., 2004. London: Vintage. – 1979. Collected Poems 1944–1979. London: Hutchinson. – 1979. Writing and warning. Interview with Kingsley Amis by Michael ­Billington. The Listener (February 15): 262–3. – 1980. Russian Hide-and-Seek. London: Hutchinson. – 1981. Difficulties with Girls. Unfinished novel with summary and four pages of notes regarding reasons for abandoning the novel. Henry E. ­Huntington Library, San Marino, California. – 1984. Stanley and the Women. Repr., 2004. London: Vintage. – 1986. The Old Devils. Repr., 2004. London: Vintage. – 1988. Difficulties with Girls. Repr., 1989. London: Penguin. – 1990. The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990. John McDermott, ed. London: Penguin. – 1990. The Folks That Live on the Hill. London: Chivers Press. – 1991. I’m a great man for tyrannies. Interview with Kingsley Amis. Economist 318, 7697 (March 9): 89–90. – 1991. Memoirs. London: Hutchinson. – 1992. The Russian Girl. Repr., 1995. London: Penguin. – 1994. You Can’t Do Both. London: Hutchinson. – 1995. Curmudgeons Never Say Die. Interview with Kingsley Amis by ­Joanna Coles. The Manchester Guardian (August 26): 27. – 1995. The Biographer’s Moustache. London: Flamingo.



Bibliography 257

– 1996. The King’s English. London: Harper Collins. – 2001. The Letters of Kingsley Amis. Zachary Leader, ed. London: Harper Collins. – 2008. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. New York: Bloomsbury. Amis, Kingsley and Robert Conquest. 1965. The Egyptologists. Repr., 1975. Frogmore: Panther Books. Amis, Martin. 2002. The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000. New York: Vintage. – 2007. Interview with Martin Amis conducted by conference call at Biography and Autobiography Conference, June 21, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Anderson, Perry. 1998. The Origins of Postmodernity. Repr., 2002. London: Verso. Anonymous. 1960. The Uses of Comic Vision: A Concealed Social Point in Playing for Laughs. Times Literary Supplement (September 9). Anonymous. 2005. Proud to be a snob. Evening Standard (December 21): A15. Baker, Robert S. 2005. Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis: The Ironic Inferno of British Satire. Review of Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950, by Gavin Keulks. Contemporary Literature (Fall) 46, 3: 544–54. Barber, Michael. 2004. Anthony Powell: A Life. London: Duckworth Overlook. Barry, Peter. 2002. Beginning Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1976. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller, trans. ­London: Jonathan Cape. Bell, Robert H., ed. 1998. Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis. New York: G.K. Hall. Bentley, Nick. 2007. Radical Fictions: the English Novel in the 1950s. Bern: Peter Lang. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1970. The Situation of the Novel. London: Macmillan. Bien, Peter. 1996. Review of Kingsley Amis: A Biography, by Eric Jacobs. World Literature Today 70, 2: 413–14. Boyle, Ted. E. and Terence Brown. 1966. The Serious Side of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Critique 8, 1: 100–7. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1993. The Modern British Novel. Repr., 1994. London: Secker and Warburg. Bradford, Richard. 1989. Kingsley Amis. London: Edward Arnold. – 1998. Kingsley Amis. Plymouth: Northcote House.

258 Bibliography

– 2001. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owen. – 2005. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. London: Peter Owen. Bruce, Donald. 1996. The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: 11 – ­Kingsley Amis Versus Vladimir Nabokov. Contemporary Review 269, 1570 (November): 254–6. Carpenter, Humphrey. 2002. The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950’s. London: Allen Lane. Castronovo, Jimmy. 2009. Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature. New York: Continuum. Chambers, Ross. 1984. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chesterton, G.K. 1935. Chesterton’s Stories Essays & Poems. Repr., 1965. London: Everyman’s Library. Cockcroft, Lucy. 2007. Family leaps to defence of Kingsley Amis. The Daily Telegraph (October 10): News 1. Coleman, John. 1960. King of Shaft. The Spectator (September 23): 445–6. Conarroe, Joel. 1991. Nasty Boy. Review of Memoirs, by Kingsley Amis. New York Times Book Review (September 8): 7. Culler, Jonathan. 1997. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Repr., London: Oxford University Press, 2000. Davie, Donald. 1969. On Hobbits and Intellectuals. Encounter 33 (October): 87–92. – 1973. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. – 1992. Older Masters: Essays and Reflections on English and American Literature. Manchester: Carcanet. Defoe, Daniel. 1701. A True-Born Englishman. Repr., 1975, in Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, James T. Boulton, ed. London: Cambridge University Press. 52–81. Dirda, Michael. 2007. Kingsley Amis’s Troublesome Fun. The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 22): B9–B11. Eagleton, Terry. 2007. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso (first ed. in 1991). Empson, William. 1930. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Repr., 1963. London: Chatto and Windus. – 1987. Argufying. John Haffenden, ed. London: Chatto & Windus. English, James F. 1994. Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Epstein, Joseph. 2006. Written to Last. The New Criterion (September): 15–21.



Bibliography 259

Fenton, James. 2009. Kingsley Amis: Against Fakery. In The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries. Zachary Leader, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 106–22. Ferrebe, Alice. 2005. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping it Up. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Flaubert, Gustave. 1963. Letter to Louise Colet, January 1854, in Docu­ ments of Modern Literary Realism, George J. Becker, ed. Princeton: Princeton ­University Press. Originally published in Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres ­Completes, Correspondance, vols 2–8 (Paris: Louis Conard, 1926–1933). Forster, E.M. 1927. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings. Repr., 1974. London: Abinger. Fraser, G.S. 1964. The Modern Writer and His World. Repr., 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fraser, Russell. 1996. Lucky Jim As I Remember Him. The Southern Review 32, 4: 783–92. Frith, Simon and Jon Savage. 1993. Pearls and Swine: The Intellectuals and the Mass Media. New Left Review 198: 107–16. Fuller, Jean Overton. 1968. Swinburne: A Critical Biography. London: Chatto & Windus. Fussell, Paul. 1994. The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardner, Philip. 1981. Kingsley Amis. Boston: Twayne. Genette, Gerard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. Jane E. Lewin, trans. Oxford: Blackwell. Gervais, David. 1993. Literary Englands: Versions of “Englishness” in Modern Writing. Repr., 2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gindin, James. 1962. Postwar British Fiction. London: Cambridge University Press. Goldsmith, Oliver. 1764. The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society, in The Poems of Oliver Goldsmith, 1893. Austin Dobson, ed. London: J.M. Dent. Grant, Michael. 1993. Sir Peter Quennell, 1905–1993: An Appreciation. History Today 43 (Dec.): 50. Green, Martin. 1984. The English Novel in the Twentieth Century [The Doom of Empire]. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Greene, Graham. 1948. The Heart of the Matter. London: Heinemann. – 1950. The Third Man. Repr. 1974. London: Heinemann. – 1961. Preface. Three Plays. London: Mercury. Haffenden, John. 2006. William Empson: Volume II: Against the Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

260 Bibliography

Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. 1995. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Chicago: Open Court. Hamilton, Ian. 1996. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harland, Richard. 1999. Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes: An Introductory History. London: Macmillan. Harrison, Brian. 1994. The History of the University of Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon. Harrison, Harry. 1990. Amis vs SF. In Kingsley Amis, in Life and Letters. Dale Salwak, ed. Houndmills: Macmillan. 51–6. Hart, Kevin and Yvonne Sherwood. 2005. Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments. New York: Routledge. Hawkins, Emma. 2003. Kingsley Amis: Where Did That Green Man Come From? Lamar Journal of the Humanities 28, 1 (Spring): 47–63. Hayman, Ronald. 1976. The Novel Today: 1967–1975. Essex: Longman Group. Hazlitt, William. 1920. Lecture VIII on the Living Poets. In Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays: and Lectures on the English Poets. New York: Macmillan. 387–402. Head, Dominic. 2002. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction: 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henderson, Philip. 1974. Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hitchens, Christopher. 2002. The Man of Feeling. The Atlantic Monthly 289, 5: 103–8. – 2010. Hitch-22. New York: Twelve. Holbrook, David. 1962. Llareggub Revisited: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry. London: Bowes and Bowes. Holmes, Frederick M. 2002. Comedy, the Carnivalesque, and the Depiction of English Society in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. English Studies in Canada 28, 1: 645–66. Hopkins, Robert H. 1966. The Satire of Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here. Critique 8, 3: 62–70. Horsey, Ian S. 1999. Brewing. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry. Howard, Elizabeth Jane. 1995. I had to bolt from Kingsley or become an awful person. Interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard by Valerie Grove. The Times (November 3): 1. Hulme, T.E. 1924. Speculations. Repr., 1960. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.



Bibliography 261

Hurrell, John D. 1958. Class and Conscience in John Braine and Kingsley Amis. Critique 2, 1: 39–53. Jacobs, Eric. 1995. Kingsley Amis. London: Hodder and Stoughton. – 2000. Dear Martin, Yours Eric. The Times (May 11): 3–5. – 2001. The Day I Became a Ghost. British Journalism Review 12, 26: 26–32. James, Clive. 2007. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. New York: Norton. – 2007. Public Account. Times Literary Supplement (February 2): 3–5. Jeffares, A. Norman. 1959. Oliver Goldsmith. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Jencks, Charles. 1977. Language of Post-modern Architecture. Rizzoli, NY: Academy Editions. Johnson, Paul. 1988. Intellectuals. London: Weidenfelt & Nicolson. Johnson, Samuel. 1985. The History of Rassalas, Prince of Abissinia. London: Penguin. Originally published 1759. Jones, Richard. 1992. A Severe Case of Memoiritis. The Virginia Quarterly Review 68, 1: 174–84. Keulks, Gavin. 2003. Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Larkin, Philip. 1992. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin: 1940–1985. Anthony Thwaite, ed. London: Faber and Faber. Laskowski, William. 1998. Kingsley Amis. New York: Twayne. Leader, Zachary. 2006. I Want More Than My Share. The Sunday Telegraph (November 19): 9, 11, 13. – 2006. The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Jonathan Cape. Leggett, B.J. 1996. Larkin’s Blues: Jazz and Modernism. Twentieth Century Literature 42, 2: 258–76. Lodge, David. 1996. Lucky Jim Revisited. In The Practice of Writing. London: Secker and Warburg, 85–97. – 2002. That Uncertain Feeling. The Guardian (June 15): 37. Lucas, John. 2006. Peter Porter: The Metropolitan Voice. Critical Survey 18, 1: 109–22. Macleod, Norman. 1985. A Trip to Greeneland: The Plagiarizing Narrator of Kingsley Amis’s I Like it Here. Studies in the Novel 17: 203–17. McDermott, John. 1989. Kingsley Amis, an English Moralist. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McEwan, Neil. 1981. The Survival of the Novel: British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century. London: Macmillan.

262 Bibliography

Merwin, W.S. 1957. He Can Be Funny, Too. Review of A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956, by Kingsley Amis. New York Times Book Review (March 17): 33. Miller, J. Hillis. 1995. Topographies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. – 1999. Black Holes. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Miller, Karl. 1998. Dark Horses: An Experience of Literary Journalism. ­London: Picador. Mittleman, Leslie. 1995. Review of The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters, by Paul Fussell. World Literature Today 69, 3: 593. Montgomery, Bruce. Letters to Philip Larkin. Contained in Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Morrison, Blake. 1984. Kingsley Amis takes next step into misogyny. Review of Stanley and the Women, by Kingsley Amis. The Globe and Mail (May 12): E8. Moseley, Merritt. 1993. Understanding Kingsley Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Mount, Ferdinand. 2006. The Monster We Hate to Love. Review of The Life of Kingsley Amis, by Zachary Leader. The Spectator (November 11): 43–6. Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich. 1947. The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of Modeste Petrovich Musorgsky in Letters and Documents. Sergei Bertensson, trans. New York: W.W. Norton. Nokes, David. 1995. Boring for Britain. Review of The Biographer’s Moustache, by Kingsley Amis. The Sunday Times (August 20): 7. Orwell, George. 1941. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. Repr., 1962. London: Secker and Warburg. Patey, Douglas Lane. 1998. The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Poburko, Nicholas. 1999. Poetry, Past and Present: F.T. Prince’s Walks in Rome. Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 51, 2: 145–63. Pope, Alexander. 1961. An Essay on Criticism. In Pastoral Poetry and an Essay on Criticism. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, eds. London: Methuen. ­239–326. Originally published 1711. Powell, Anthony. 1983. To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell. Repr., 2000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1997. Journals 1990–1992. London: Heinemann. Powell, Violet. 1998. The Departure Platform. London: William Heinemann. Press, John. 1963. Rule and Energy: Trends in British Poetry Since the Second World War. London: Oxford University Press.



Bibliography 263

Pritchard, William H. 1994. Entertaining Amis. In Playing It By: Literary Essays and Reviews. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 75–83. – 1995. Appreciating Kingsley Amis. The Hudson Review 48, 1: 137–44. Propp, Vladimir. 1928. Morphology of the Folktale. Repr., 1968. Lawrence Scott, trans. Louis A. Wagner, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Quennell, Peter. 1976. The Marble Foot. London: Collins. – 1980. The Wanton Chase. London: Collins. Rabinovitz, Rubin. 1967. The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricks, Christopher. 1963. Cant Trap. Review of One Fat Englishman, by Kingsley Amis. New Statesman (November 29): 790–2. Rossen, Janice. 1998. Philip Larkin and Lucky Jim. Journal of Modern Literature 22, 1: 147–65. Salwak, Dale, ed. 1990. Kingsley Amis, in Life and Letters. London: Macmillan. – 1992. Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist. Lanham: Barnes and Noble. –, ed. 1996. The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. London: Macmillan. – 2009. Interview with Dale Salwak by Andrew James at Henry E. Huntington Library (August 15). Scott, J.D. 1954. In the Movement. Spectator (October 1): 399–400. Scott, Sir Walter. 1996. Lochinvar. In Scottish Literature: An Anthology. vol. 2. David McCordick, ed. New York: Peter Lang. 401–2. Sexton, David. 1995. The life and the wife. Review of The Biographer’s Moustache, by Kingsley Amis. Times Literary Supplement (September 8): 6. Shaffer, Brian W. 2006. Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000. Oxford: Blackwell. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans, ed. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Showalter, Elaine. 2002. They Think It’s All Over. New Statesman 131 (August 12): 24–6. Sims, Robin. 2007. Facing the Thing: The Green Man, Psychoanalysis and Kingsley Amis. Critical Survey 19, 2. . Accessed 12 October 2009. 19 screens. Sinclair, Andrew. 1994. In Love and Anger: A View of the ’Sixties. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Smith, Joan. 1995. The afterlife of Kingsley Amis. The Independent (October 28): 5. Stevenson, Randall. 2004. The Oxford English Literary History. vol. 12. 1960– 2000: The Last of England? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

264 Bibliography

Stovel, Bruce. 1978. Traditional Comedy and the Comic Mask in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. English Studies in Canada 4, 1: 69–79. Swinden, Patrick. 1984. The English Novel of History and Society: 1940– 1980. London: Macmillan. Tallis, Raymond. 1988. In Defence of Realism. London: Edward Arnold. Taylor, D.J. 1994. After the War: The Novel and England since 1945. London: Harper Collins. Turner, Jenny. 1995. Amis Among Oiks. Guardian. (31 August). Accessed 25 May 2007. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wain, John. 1953. Hurry on Down. Repr., 1983. London: Secker & Warburg. – 1956. A Word Carved on a Sill. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. – 1957. Preliminary Essays. London: Macmillan. – 1962. Sprightly Running. Repr., 1965. London: Macmillan. Waugh, Evelyn. 1928. Decline and Fall. Repr., 1999. New York: Back Bay Books. – 1934. A Handful of Dust. Repr., 1999. New York: Back Bay Books. – 1942. Put Out More Flags. Repr., 1999. New York: Back Bay Books. – 1955. Officers and Gentlemen. Repr., 1999. New York: Back Bay Books. – 1957. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Repr., 1999. New York: Back Bay Books. – 1980. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Mark Amory, ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Womack, Kenneth. 2002. Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community. New York: Palgrave. Woodring, Carl, ed. 1994. The Columbia History of British Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Wright, Stuart. 1996. The Angry Old Man. Sewanee Review 104, 1: 452–6. Yezzi, David. 2007. The Amis Country. New Criterion 25, 8 (April). . Accessed 1 March 2010. 9 screens. Young, Edward. 1854. Conjectures in Original Composition. In The Complete Works, Poetry and Prose of the Rev. Edward Young, ll.d. vol. II. London: William Tegg & Co. Zola, Emile. 1868. Preface to the 2nd ed. of Therese Raquin. Repr., 1971. L. W. Tancock, trans. London: Penguin, 21–7.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures “Against Romanticism,” 109–10, 114 Alteration, 154–7; as Alternate World novel, 154–5, 162, 242n11; and Amis’s avoidance of repetition, 152–3; Amis’s self-exploration in, 141–2, 154, 155, 216; connection between sex and creativity in, 156, 243n14; and Difficulties with Girls, 179; the divine in, 155, 156, 243n16; drafts of, 243n15; focus on time in, 134, 146, 154; and free will, 155, 242n12; and Girl, 20, 156; Larkin on, 243n16; and the problem of fame, 141, 157; use of antimodels in, 6–7, 156, 157; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Amberley Hall, 24, 115 ambiguity: Amis’s use of, 36, 75–89, 137, 153–4, 158, 167, 215; Empsonian, 31, 75–6, 85–7, 137, 233n13 Amis, Kingsley: on ‘abroad,’ 59–60, 61, 62, 69, 228n3; on academia, 4, 38, 41, 108, 116, 127–8, 238n7; on aging, 3, 7, 142, 150, 151, 154, 171, 241nn4,5, 242n10; and anti-

Semitism, 19, 77–8, 235n11; and artistic balance, 5, 36, 108, 141, 151, 153–4, 170, 171, 196, 210, 214–15; artistic development of, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 27, 46, 53, 129, ­136–8, 139, 149, 161, 216; and artistic independence, 27–8, 46, 50, 58, 155, 216; and artistic intransigence, 52, 68, 107–8, 128, 157, 212, 215; on the Arts Council, 50–1, 153, 226n5, 241n8; avoidance of repetition, 9–10, 71, 1 ­ 52–3, 208; belief in his superiority as an artist, 3, 5–6, 10, 32, 33–4, 108, 140; on bohemianism, 33, 37, 89, 189, 213; on bores, 84, 217n2, 218n3, 220n5, 222n14; at Cambridge, 55, 122–3, 127; and characters who shirk their rounds, 30, 49, 77–8, 175, 176; as competitive, 25, 94, 101, 103, 211; concern for reciprocity, 6, 74, 139, 143, 144–5, 147–8, 164–5, 180, 210; creative process, 8, 9, 19, 60, 166, 168–9, 184, 186, 214; and critical labels, 19, 37, 212; and critical

266 Index

­ isinterpretations, 4, 10, 17–19, m 21, 89, 91–2, 165–6; on critics and criticism, 67–8, 69, 85, 146; definition of ale, 229n9; depiction of women, 7, 17, 71, 80, 138, 157, 170, 191, 212, 214, 217n1, 244n5, 248n7; and the desire to entertain, 9, 21, 33, 37, 64–5, 122, 153, 162, 202, 210, 218n5, 242n10; drinking habits of, 18, 218n3, 235n13, 251n16; Eagleton on, 19, 96, 235n11; experiments in content, 18, 31, 56, 75–89, 214; and ex-wife, Hilly, 12–13, 18, 35, 202, 230n12, 247–8n3; on the fall of academic standards, 51, 226n6; and father-in-law, Bardwell, 41, 44, 222–3n16, 224n21; and father, William, 220n1; on French language and culture, 17, 201–2, ­213–14, 253n8; genre experiments, 3, 4, 6, 23, 118, 143, 146, 154–5, 179; on good and bad art, 4, 7, 8, 33, 52, 107–8, 128, 215; and Howard, 6, 8, 94, 120, 129, 133, 141, 150, 168, 211; on imagination, 64–5, 122, 138; and impromptu speeches, 236n16; interest in fame and posterity, 8, 23, 133–4, 135, 138, 140; invocation of formative influences, 3, 4, 5–6, 90, 117–18, 129, 134–5, 137; James Bond books, 143, 184, 198–9, 215, 239n9; and the killing off of L.S. Caton, 45, 224n23; Leavis on, 18; librettos, 8, 24, 115; on literary success, 5, 7, 8, 25, 28, 46, 142, 154, 170, 199, 245n6; on love, 153–4; meritocratic principles, 100, 123; and morality, 5,

17–18, 36–8, 52, 86, 89, 90, 93–4, 105, 106, 114, 219–20n1, 222n11; and the Movement, 26, 51–2, 106, 108; original manuscripts, 8–13, 47–8, 62–3, 166, 168–9, 186, 187, 213, 214, 225n2, 246n11, 247n13; at Oxford, 19–24, 33, 191; persona, 18, 54, 94, 217n2, 234n5; poetry of, 6, 27–8, 42, 43, 51–2, 82, 86, 88, 106–20, 212, 220n2, 223n18, 237n4, 239–40n11; on Portugal, 59–60; at Princeton, 90; and proper language use, 7, 29–30, 37, 62–3, 64, 71–2, 90, 99, 100–1, 102–3, 133, 151, 158–9, 199, ­201–3, 215; and provincialism, 51, 56, 59, 60, 68–9, 106–20; provocation of readers, 9, 17, 57, 76, 94, 95–6, 106, 108, 137, 191, 208, 211, 215, 247n13; and publisher, Cape, 146, 184; and publisher, Caton, 27, 28, 42; and publisher, Gollancz, 6, 60, 146, 179, 183–4, 228n4, 249nn11,12; restaurant reviews, 250–1n16, 253n8; on science fiction, 90, 116, 242n11; and socialism, 7, 35, 191–2, 194, 195, 226n6; and son, Martin, 18, 21, 25, 64, 168, 211, 246–7n12, 248n6; and son, Philip, 11–12; in Swansea, 28, 55–6, 110; use of ambiguity, 36, 75–89, 137, 1 ­ 53–4, 158, 167, 215; use of doubles, 140–1; visit to the Leicester University senior common room, 38, ­127–8, 222n13, 224n21; Waugh on, 96; writing as ­Robert ­Markham, 143, 198. See also under titles of individual works and names of other authors



Index 267

Amis, Martin, 18, 21, 64, 168, ­246–7n12; on his father, Kingsley, 25, 236n2; as his father’s inner audience, 211, 248n6; and lad-lit, 222n12 Anderson, Perry, 237n6 Angry Young Men, 61, 96 Annan, Gabriele, 248n7 Anti-Death League, 129–33; Amis on, 224n23; and Amis’s use of antimodels, 6–7, 129, 131, 133; and Chesterton, 129, 130–1, 138; death of L.S. Caton in, 124, 129, 163, 224n23; the divine in, 6, 129–31, 138, 140, 143, 156, 162–3, 239n9; homosexuality in, 96, 131, 133; and Howard, 6, 129, 141, 211; and the problem of suffering, 129, 132, 138, 144; psychiatry in, 129, 133; and publisher, Caton, 42–3; and narrative voice, 129, 131, 132, 155; set pieces recycled from previous novels in, 131–2; and the use of doubles, 140–1 antimodels: in Alteration, 6–7, 156, 157; in Amis’s post-1970 novels, 131, 138, 139–40, 143, 144, ­149–50, 185; and Anti-Death League, 6–7, 129, 131, 133; in Biographer’s Moustache, 4, 7, 149, 200–1, 205, 206, 215; as central characters, 4, 7, 80, 139, 147; comparison invited between Amis and, 139–40; defined, 3–4; in Difficulties with Girls, 181–2; in Folks That Live on the Hill, 7, 10–11, 144, 157, 172, 185, 188–9, ­214–15; in Girl, 20, 4, 6–7, 120, 132–3, 136, 144, 147–50; and Green Man, 6–7, 74, 138, 139,

143, 144–5; humanization of, 108, 128, 143, 149, 128, 138, 143, 149, 214–15; in I Like It Here, 67, 74; lack of in Take a Girl Like You, 75, 80, 84; and Legacy, 30; in Lucky Jim, 4, 32, 38, 39, 42, 45, 54, 68, 74, 136, 139; non-artists as, 4; in Old Devils, 7, 132–3, 149, 172–3, 177, 178–9; in One Fat Englishman, 90, 92–3, 136, 148; as peripheral characters, 4, 136, 139, 140, 185; relationships with other characters, 3, 6–7, 45, 74, 85, 143, 144, 147–8; roots of, 5, 8, 19–21, 25–6; in Russian Girl, 7, 132–3, 144, 147–8, 157, 185, 190, 194; as a source of comic relief, 4, 30, 32, 92; in That Uncertain Feeling, 21, 26, 46, 50–5, 56, 68, 74, 129, 137, 139, 145, 147, 173, 181, 188, 216; used to explore artistic authenticity, 4, 26, 32, 33, 38, 40, 67, 74, 136–7, 172–3, 174, 181–2, 215; used to explore the artist-audience relationship, 26, 92, 147, 148; used to express Amis’s artistic intransigence, 52; used to satirize Amis’s personal situation, 216; used to show artistic ideals, 4, 51–2, 136, 215 aporia, 87–8, 220–1n5; in Amis’s post-1970 novels, 137; in Biographer’s Moustache, 206–7, 208; in Jake’s Thing, 160; in Legacy, 31; in Lucky Jim, 44–5, 88 architecture, 69, 237n6; depiction of Swansea’s architecture in Evans Country, 106–7, 111, 115, 118–19, 135 Arnold, Matthew, 237n5

268 Index

Arts Council, 50–1, 153, 226n5, 241n8 Astaldi, Maria Luisa, 217n2 Auden, W.H., 41, 53, 109, 196 audience, 3, 4, 6–7, 25, 26, 153, 157; Amis on inner audience, 22, 24, 124, 210–11, 219n10, 248n6; and Amis’s BLitt thesis, 21–3, 50, 92, 105, 124, 149, 165, 189, ­210–11, 250n13; antimodels used to explore the artist-audience relationship, 26, 92, 147, 148; Conquest as Amis’s inner audience, 6, 8, 120, 121, 181, 182–3, 191, 211, 248n6; and Folks That Live on the Hill, 185, 188–90; Howard as Amis’s inner audience, 6, 120, 129, 141, 211; Larkin as Amis’s inner audience, 5, 8, 23, 24–6, 39, 46, 50, 58, 76, 120, 124, 140, 141, 211, 219n10, 248n6; and Lucky Jim, 38–9, 41–2; and reciprocity, 6, 74, 139, 143, 144–5, 147–8, 1 ­ 64–5, 180, 210; and Russian Hide-andSeek, 55, 161, 162, 164–6; son Martin as Amis’s inner audience, 211, 248n6; writing against members of the inner audience, 141, 211 Baker, Austin, 37 Baker, Robert S., 3 Ball, Ian M., 100–1 Ballard, J.G., 236n2 Barber, Michael, 253n6 Bardwell, Leonard (Amis’s father-inlaw), 41, 44, 222–3n16, 224n21 Barry, Peter, 31, 56–7 Barthes, Roland, 20, 56 Bell, Robert H., 84, 198, 207–8, 228n2

Bellow, Saul, 168, 246–7n12 Bentley, Nick, 31–2, 221n10 Beowulf, 26, 56, 108 Bergonzi, Bernard, 76, 232–3n12, 234n3 “berks and wankers,” 99, 100, 101, 152; protagonists as “wankers,” 102–3, 104, 158, 159, 160, 201, 216, 235n14, 244n3; references to yobbos and berks in Folks That Live on the Hill, 191 Betjeman, John, 239n8, 241n5 Bien, Peter, 208–9, 217n2 Billington, Michael, 222n13, 245n9 Biographer’s Moustache, 199–209; Amis on, 207; Amis’s self-exploration in, 7–8, 141–2, 200–1, 205, 206, 207, 208, 253n7; criticism on, 207–8, 252n3; and Jacobs, 200, 201, 205–6, 208–9, 252n4; and the Quennells, 7, 140–1, 200–5, 206, 207, 208–9, 252n5, 253n9; and decline of Amis’s literary powers, 31, 153, 208; inaudible speech in, 45, 206–7; Jimmie Fane as a “wanker,” 235n14, 244n3; language and class in, 201–5; manuscript of, 12–13; and nastiness, 214; puzzles/aporias in, 206–7, 208; use of antimodels in, 4, 7, 149, 200–1, 205, 206, 215 bliss vs. pleasure (Barthesian concepts), 56 BLitt thesis. See “English Non-­ Dramatic Poetry, 1850–1900, and the Victorian Reading Public” bohemianism, 33, 37, 89, 189, 213 Book of Bond or Every Man His Own 007, 199



Index 269

Boyle, Ted. E., and Terence Brown, 221n10 Bradbury, Malcolm, 36, 89, 100, 228n2 Bradford, Richard: on Amis’s satire of academia, 238n7; on Amis’s second marriage, 237–8n3; on Difficulties with Girls, 249n9; on I Want It Now, 133; on Jake’s Thing and Lucky Jim, 243–4n1; on Larkin, 238n5; on One Fat Englishman, 91; on Russian Girl, 251n18; on That Uncertain Feeling, 48, 226n6, 227n12 Bright November, 27–8, 42 Bruce, Donald, 233n14 Burgess, Anthony, 62–3 Cambridge University, 55, 122–3, 127 Cape, Jonathan, 146, 184 Carpenter, Humphrey, 33, 36–7, 249n11 Case of Samples, 120 Caton, R.A., 27, 28, 42–3, 220n2, 223nn18, 19 Cecil, Lord David, 21, 22, 218n7, 219nn8, 9 Century’s Crown, 24 Chambers, Ross, 3 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 20, 26, 53, 56, 218n6 Chesterton, G.K., 129, 130–1, 137, 138. Works: Man Who Was Thursday, 130; “Queer Feet,” 130; “Secret People,” 179; “Silent People,” 235–6n15 Clowes, Jonathan, 184, 249n12 Cockcroft, Lucy, 96, 235n11 Coleman, John, 77 Coles, Frank, 218n6

Colonel Sun (James Bond novel), 143, 198–9, 215, 239n9 competition: Amis as competitive, 25, 94, 101, 103; as Amisian theme, 36; in One Fat Englishman, 6, 32, 100, 101–2, 103, 105 Conarroe, Joel, 217n2 Conquest, Robert, 24, 47, 67–8, 69, 247n2; as Amis’s inner audience, 6, 8, 120, 121, 141, 181, 182–3, 191, 211, 248n6; and Egyptologist, 6, 120, 121, 122, 124–7, 237n2 Crime of the Century, 4, 242n11 Culler, Jonathan, 48 Davie, Donald, 113, 114, 236–7n3, 237n4 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 42 Defoe, Daniel, 21, 98–9, 102, 105 Derrida, Jacques, 87–8, 220n5 Dick, Philip K., 242n11 Difficulties with Girls, 179–84; and Alteration, 179; Amis’s self-­ exploration in, 7, 179, 182–4, 197; and Conquest, 181, 182–3; depiction of women in, 248n7; and ­Englishness, 235–6n15; and ­Gollancz, 179, 183–4, 228n4; homosexuality in, 10, 96, 129, 179, 180–1, 183, 211, 248n7; manuscript of, 9, 10, 11, 231–2n5; and original Difficulties with Girls (uncompleted novel), 179, 180, 211; psychiatry in, 7, 133; and Take a Girl Like You, 7, 79–80, 140–1, 231–2n5; use of antimodels in, 181–2 Dirda, Michael, 227n10 divine. See religion/the divine “Dixon and Christine.” See Lucky Jim

270 Index

Drabble, Margaret, 244n2 “Dream of Fair Women,” 86, 88 Driburg, Tom, 238n4 Eagleton, Terry, 201; on Amis, 19, 96, 235n11 Egyptologists, 121–8; Amis on, ­126–7; and Conquest, 6, 120, 121, 122, 124–7, 237n2; criticism on, 121; and Larkin, 121, 122, ­124–7, 141; mocking of academia in, ­127–8; positive artistic model in, 45, 118, 121, 122 Eliot, T.S., 88, 106, 227n13 Empson, William: on Amis, 86, 87, 114; Amis’s rejection of, 109, ­117–18, 137; and Take a Girl Like You, 5–6, 31, 75–6, 85–9, 233n13; on Thomas, 86–7; use of ambiguity, 75–6, 85–7, 137, 233n13; and Wain, 31, 221n6. Works: Argufying, 85, 87; “Beautiful Train,” 31; Seven Types of Ambiguity, 31, 85 Ending Up, 150–54; Amis’s selfexploration in, 3, 7, 141–2, 150–1, 152–4; Betjeman on, 241n5; characters who mitigate unhappiness in, 160; criticism on, 241n4; prenovel notes, 150; recipe for literary success in, 142, 154, 170, 199, 245n6; as transitional point in Amis’s development, 3; verbal creativity in, 162 Englishness: and Amis’s artistic development, 138; and Colonel Sun, 198–9; and Kipling, 151, 172; and Lucky Jim, 27, 37, 138; and One Fat Englishman, 6, 90, 91, 98–105, 138, 159, 173, 179, 199; and Russian Hide-and-Seek, ­161–2,

164–5, 166; and That Uncertain Feeling, 54 “English Non-Dramatic Poetry, 1850–1900, and the Victorian Reading Public” (BLitt thesis), 21–4; and Cecil, 21, 22, 218n7, 219nn8, 9; failure of, 21, 140, 218n7, 219n8; and hierarchical ranking of poetry, 85; and literary success, 5, 8, 25, 28, 46, 92, 132, 136, 140, 148, 157; and the role of audience, 21–3, 50, 92, 105, 124, 149, 165, 189, 210–11, 250n13; and Swinburne, 21, 23, 90, 93–4, 95, 219n9, 254n11 Epstein, Joseph, 87 Evans Country, 106–20; “Aberdarcy: the Chaucer Road” (final poem), 110, 111, 113, 114; “Aberdarcy: the Main Square” (opening poem), 111–12, 113, 119, 135; “Aldport (Mystery Tour),” 111, 112; and Amis’s artistic vision, 6, 118, 120; criticism on, 113–14; critique of romanticism in, 82, 106–7, 108–14, 119, 153–4; depiction of Swansea’s architecture in, 106–7, 111, 115, 118–19, 135; title of, 113; “Langwell,” 113; Larkin on, 236n1; “Llansili Beach,” 112–13; and postmodernism, 118; and the provincial aesthetic, 108, 111, 118, 120; and provocation of readers, 106, 108; “St. Asaph’s,” 113; “Welch Ferry, West Side,” 111–12. See also Look Round the Estate: Poems 1957–1967 Everett, Barbara, 242n13, 247n2 Fenton, James, 212



Index 271

Ferrebe, Alice, 221n10, 232n11 Fielding, Henry, 21, 61, 66, 72–3, 138, 182 flat vs round characters, 44, 224n22 Flaubert, Gustave, 17, 90 Fleming, Ian, 198 Folks That Live on the Hill, 184– 91; and argument against politicizing art, 185, 190; and artists’ personal reasons for creating art, ­185–7, 190–1; depiction of women in, 191; homosexuality in, 180; and the poet-audience relationship, 185, 188–90; and the ­Quennells, 140–1, 185, 200, 249–50n13; references to yobbos and berks in, 191; revisions, 10–11, 186–7; use of the antimodel in, 7, 10–11, 144, 157, 172, 185, 188–9, 214–15; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Forster, E.M., 44, 224n22 Fortune Press, 27, 234n7. See also Caton, R.A. Fowler, H.W., 64, 201, 229n9 Franck, César, 117–18 Fraser, George Macdonald, 249n10 Fraser, G.S., 66, 228n2 Fraser, Russell, 100, 228n3 Frith, Simon, and Jon Savage, 69 Fuller, Jean Overton, 95 Fussell, Paul, 84, 120, 238n7, 244n5, 248n6; on Amis, 94; on Amis’s BLitt thesis, 219n8; ex-wife, Betty, on Amis, 251n16 Gardner, Philip, 124, 241n4 General Tomski’s Army, 191–2 Genette, Gerard, 50 Gervais, David, 37 Gindin, James, 238–9n8

Ginsberg, Allen, 250n15 Girl, 20, 146–50; and Alteration, 156; dance club in, 64; drafts of, 241n3; and I Like It Here, 146; and imagination, 65, 75; impartiality of the protagonist, 32; and the problem of fame, 141, 148; and provocation of readers, 9; and realism, 62, 66; and Russian Girl, 191; Sir Roy Vandervane as a “wanker,” 235n14; use of the antimodel in, 4, 6–7, 120, 132–3, 136, 144, ­147–50; and the use of doubles, 140–1; and weakening of Amis’s artistic intransigence, 52, 215 “Godforsaken” (“Why There Must Be a Church”), 239n10 Goldsmith, Oliver, 230n13 Gollancz, Victor, 6, 60, 146, 179, 183–4, 228n4, 249nn11, 12 Grant, Michael, 203–4 Graver, Lawrence, 133 Green, Martin, 150–1, 231n2 Greene, Graham: Amis’s invocation of, 137, 138; on “entertainments,” 4, 121, 237n1; and I Like It Here, 5–6, 58–74; monograph by Amis on, 25, 62, 67, 224n21, 229n8. Works: Heart of the Matter, 63–4, 65, 67, 221n10; Human Factor, 107; Third Man, 61, 65, 67, ­229–30n10; Three Plays, 237n1 Green Man, 143–6; and Amis’s use of antimodels, 6–7, 74, 138, 139, 143, 144–5; criticism on, 240n1; the divine in, 6, 140, 143, 144–6, 155, 156, 212; focus on time in, 134, 146; as genre experiment, 3, 143; as transitional point in Amis’s

272 Index

development, 3, 74; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Haffenden, John, 31, 221n6 Hahn, Lewis Edwin, 220–1n5 Hamilton, Ian, 113 Harland, Richard, 44 Harrison, Brian, 35, 221n9 Harrison, Harry, 242n11 Hawkins, Emma, 240n1 Hayman, Ronald, 62 Head, Dominic, 21, 100 Henderson, Philip, 95, 234–5n9 Henry E. Huntington Library, 8, 234n8, 241n3 Hitchcock, Alfred, 45 Hitchens, Christopher, 42–3, 107, 238n4 Holbrook, David, 86, 87, 88–9, 114 Holmes, Frederick M., 221n10 homosexuality: Amis accused of being homophopic, 19, 96, 235n11; and Amis’s compulsion to say the unsayable, 137–8; Amis’s sympathetic portrayal of, 96, 181; and Anti-Death League, 96, 131, 133; and Colonel Sun, 239n9; and Difficulties with Girls, 10, 96, 129, 179, 180–1, 183, 248n7; and “Ever-Fixed Mark,” 108–9; and Folks That Live on the Hill, 180; homophobic landlord as stock ­ evils, character, 248n5; and Old D 175; and One Fat Englishman, 95–6, 103; and original Difficulties with Girls (uncompleted novel), 179, 180, 211 Hopkins, Robert H., 61 “horse-pissing,” 19–20, 26, 41, 108, 136, 138, 149, 211, 218n6, 249n10

Housman, A.E., 118, 237n5 Howard, Colin, 96, 150 Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 94, 133, 150, 168; on Amis, 235nn11, 13; as Amis’s inner audience, 6, 8, 120, 129, 141, 211 Hulme, T.E., 18 Hurrell, John D., 228n2 Hynes, Samuel, 37 I Like It Here, 58–74; Amis on, 59, 60; and Amis’s artistic independence, 58; as anti-travelogue, 5, 59–60; and coercion, 70, 75; detective in, 45, 65; fishing boat story in, 70, 81, 193, 197; and Girl, 20, 146; and Greene, 5–6, 58–74, 77; and Greene’s Third Man, 61, 65, 67, 229–30n10; humour in, 59, 62–4, 77; linguistic control in, 59, 62, 65, 71–2; as metafiction, 59, 61, 69–70; mood in, 59, 62, 70–1; narrators in, 61–2, 65, 132; reception of, 59, 61, 66, 228n2, 241n6; and Russian Hide-and-Seek, 161; serialized in Punch, 60; title of, 68–70; use of the antimodel in, 67, 74; view of the inauthentic artist in, 59, 67, 74; and Wain’s Samuel Deronda, 34 inner audience. See under audience I Want It Now, 133–6; and Amis’s travels, 59; as an anti-1960s book, 133–4, 240n14; criticism on, 133; depiction of architecture in, 135; and Howard, 6, 133, 141, 211; indeterminacy in, 45; p ­ re-novel notes, 133; and the p ­ roblem of fame, 133–5; and the use of doubles, 140–1



Index 273

Jacobs, Eric: on the Amis family in 1949–1950, 230n12; on Amis’s BLitt thesis, 219n8; on Amis’s ­fiction, 38; on Amis’s resignation from Cambridge, 127; and Biographer’s Moustache, 200, 201, 205–6, 208–9, 252n4; biography of Amis, 18, 208–9, 217n2, 218n3; “Dear Martin, Yours Eric” (article), 234n6; on Evans Country, 110, 113; on Gollancz, 184; on I Like It Here, 228n6; on I Want It Now, 133; on One Fat Englishman, 101 Jake’s Thing, 158–61; aporia in, 160; depiction of women in, 71, 170, 191; ending of, 158; and H ­ oward, 141, 211; inaudible speech in, 45, 160; Jake Richardson as a “wanker,” 158, 159, 216, 235n14; Larkin on, 160; and Lucky Jim; 158; pessimism and lack of balance in, 7, 154, 160–1, 210; psychiatry in, 7, 133, 140, 158–9, 161, 170; revisions, 247n13; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Jakobson, Roman, 220n5 James Bond Dossier, 184 James, Clive, 76, 83, 109, 224n23, 232nn6, 8, 233–4n3 James, Henry, 90, 213, 230n10 Jeffares, A. Norman, 230n13 Johnson, Paul, 228n4 Jones, Monica, 47, 222n15 Jones, Richard, 17, 55, 222n11 Joyce, James, 66, 191, 213 Keats, John, 82, 108, 112–13, 114, 117, 232n7, 236–7n3; Amis’s essay on (“Poet and the Dreamer”), 81, 109, 111

Kenner, Hugh, 213–14 Kerouac, Jack, 250n15 Keulks, Gavin, 246–7n12 Kilmarnock, Hilly (Amis’s ex-wife), 12–13, 18, 35, 202, 230n12, 247–8n3 King’s English, 65, 159, 206, 215; “berks and wankers” in, 99, 152; critique of foreign languages in, 201, 202; examples of “harmful repetition” in, 71–2; and Fowler, 64, 201; Greene and Burgess in, 62–3 “Kipling Good,” 251n19 Kipling, Rudyard, 231n2, 241n7; and Englishness, 151, 172; monograph by Amis on, 19, 138, 150–1, 154 lad-lit, 37, 212, 222n12 Larkin, Philip: on Alteration, 243n16; Amis’s “bum” ending in ­letters to, 41, 149; as Amis’s inner audience, 5, 8, 23, 24–6, 39, 46, 50, 58, 76, 120, 124, 140, 141, 211, 219n10, 248n6; Amis’s letters to, 8, 24, 60, 62, 63, 67, 97, 106, 108, 155, 220n2, 223nn18, 19, 227–8n15, 238n6; Amis’s visit to the senior common room of, 38, 127–8, 222n13, 224n21; death of, 247–8n3; and Egyptologist, 121, 122, 124–7, 141; on Evans Country, 236n1; girlfriend, Jones, 47, 222n15; and “horse-­pissing,” 19–20; on Jake’s Thing, 160, 170; jealousy of Amis, 46–7; and Lucky Jim, 5, 8, 24, 27, 29, 38, 41, 42, 46–7, 48, 49, 50, 69, 120, 126, 127, 211, 225n2; profession

274 Index

s­ atirized by Amis, 5, 46, 47, 48–9, 50, 57, 141; and the provincial aesthetic, 51, 120; and That Uncertain Feeling, 5, 46–50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 121, 141, 228n1; on Wain, 35; and Waugh, 96. Works: Jill and A Girl in Winter, 224–5n1 Laskowski, William, 167 Lawrence, D.H., 111, 114, 115, 196 Leader, Zachary, 8, 94, 120; on Amis and Empson, 233n13; on Amis and live formats, 236n16; on Amis and Wain, 221n6; on Amis’s attack on romanticism 110; on Amis’s BLitt thesis, 21, 219n8; on Amis’s later novels, 208, 252n3; on Caton, 42; on Clowes, 249n12; on ­Egyptologists, 121; on Evans Country, 113; on General Tomski’s Army, 191–2; on Green Man, 240n1; on Jake’s Thing, 245n7; on ­Legacy, 2 ­ 19–20n1; on Old Devils, ­247–8n3; on Take a Girl Like You, 76, 86 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al.), 119 Leavis, F.R., 18, 61 Lee, Hermione, 89, 233n14 Legacy, 27–36; Amis on, 25; and Amis’s use of antimodels, 30; aporia in, 31; criticism on, ­219–20n1; flaws in, 5, 29, 31, 49, 62, 168, 220n3; indeterminacy in, 45; manuscript of, 8, 9, 29, 63; and narrative voice, 5, 8, 27, 29, 30; and publisher, Caton, 27, 42–3; pub scene in, 30, 49 Leicester University, 38, 127–8, 222n13, 224n21

Lewis, C.S., 85, 241n7 “Lobster’s Claw,” 253n9 Lodge, David, 61, 83, 97, 221n10, 234n3 Look Round the Estate: Poems ­1957–1967, 106–20; “A.E.H.,” 118; Amis on, 108; artistic poems in, 107, 116–17, 118; ­“Chromatic Passing-Note,” 117; “Coming of Age,” 118; “EverFixed Mark,” 108–9; “Huge Artifice: an interim assessment,” 116; “L’Invitation au Voyage,” 116; narrators in, 107, 108, 112, 118, 120; “New Approach Needed,” 118; “On a Portrait of Mme RimskyKorsakov,” 117; “Science Fiction,” 116. See also Evans Country Lucas, John, 113–14 Lucky Jim, 36–45; and Anti-Death League, 131–2; criticism on, 36–8, 221–2n10, 231n1; as “Dixon and Christine” (original manuscript), 8, 47, 48, 225n2; and Englishness, 27, 37, 138, 221n10; and Jake’s Thing, 158; and Larkin, 5, 8, 24, 27, 29, 38, 41, 42, 46–7, 48, 49, 50, 69, 120, 126, 127, 211, 225n2; later works measured against, 139, 140, 166, 241n6; Merrie England address in, 40, 41, 93, 101, 122, 128, 158; and narrative voice, 27, 29, 109; and publisher, Caton, 28, 42–5; reception of, 5, 36, 46–7, 76, 94; revisions, 8, 47; and the role of the audience, 38–9, 41–2; and the Somerset Maugham Award, 59, 60; textual lacunas in, 44–5; and That Uncertain Feeling, 51; use of antimodels in, 4, 32, 38, 39, 42, 45, 54,



Index 275

68, 74, 136, 139; and Wain’s Hurry on Down, 34 Macleod, Norman, 61–2, 229–30n10, 244n5 magic realism, 249n9 Mann, Sargy, 150 Marston, Doreen, 220n3 Martin, Green, 139 Maugham, Somerset, 59, 70, 182, 183, 197 McDermott, John, 48, 113, 153; on Egyptologists, 121; on Ending Up, 241n4; on One Fat Englishman, 235n12; on Russian Hide-andSeek, 245n8 McEwan, Neil, 75, 89, 242n9 McGrath, Charles, 248n4 Memoirs (Amis), 57, 65, 184; accuracy of, 238n4; Cambridge in, 127; Cecil in, 218n7; Conquest and Larkin in, 125–6, 237–8n3; and critical misinterpretations, 17, 18; critical reception of, 217n2; Powell in, 64; Quennells in, 201–2, 203–4, 252–3n6; Wain in, 34–5 Meredith, George, 22–3 Merwin, W.S., 120 metafiction: Alteration as, 154; ­Biographer’s Moustache as, 253n7; Difficulties with Girls as, 7; Ending Up as, 7, 150–1; I Like It Here as, 59, 61, 69–70 Meynell, Alice, 23 Miller, J. Hillis, 44–5, 220n5 Miller, Karl, 54, 242n9 modernism, 18, 20, 21, 45, 89, 174, 212–14; and I Like It Here, 58–74; and That Uncertain Feeling, 5, 48, 55, 56, 108

Montgomery, Bruce: Amis’s criticism of, 126, 238n6; collaboration with Amis, 8, 24, 115; on Crime of the Century, 242n11 Morris, Jane, 118 Morrison, Blake, 18–19 Motion, Andrew, 254n11 Mount, Ferdinand, 234n5 Movement writers: Amis on the Movement, 106; negativism of, 51–2; and the provincial aesthetic, 108; Wain on the Movement, 34 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich, 117 narration: and Anti-Death League, 129, 131, 132, 155; female narrator in Take a Girl Like You, 84; homosexual narrator in Difficulties with Girls, 10, 96, 129, 179, ­180–1, 183; and I Like It Here, 61–2, 65, 132; and Legacy, 5, 8, 27, 29, 30; and Lucky Jim, 27, 29; narrators in Look Round the Estate, 107, 108, 112, 118, 120; and One Fat Englishman, 91–2; sardonic, 5, 27, 29, 84, 109, 120, 149–50; and Stanley and the Women, 166–7; and That Uncertain Feeling, 56–7, 143–4; unreliable, 48, 62, 65, 222n12 New Maps of Hell, 90, 242n11 Nokes, David, 200, 253n7 Old Devils, 171–9; and the Booker Prize, 9, 212; depiction of Wales and Welshness in, 9, 54, 171–7, 197, 198, 210, 212, 213, 214, 236n17, 247n2; manuscript of, 9, 11, 171–2, 174–5, 212, 213; and recurring negative stereotypes, 175;

276 Index

use of antimodels in, 7, 132–3, 149, 172–3, 177, 178–9; and the use of doubles, 140–1 One Fat Englishman, 90–105; Amis on Roger Micheldene, 91–2, 101, 233–4n3; and Amis’s travels, 59; and Englishness, 6, 90, 91, 98–105, 138, 159, 173, 179, 199; and competition, 6, 32, 100, 101–2, 103, 105; criticism on, 233–4n3; homosexuality in, 95–6, 103; and ­Howard, 94; narrator in, 91–2; nastiness and negativity in, 71, 96–7; manuscript and prenovel notes, 9, 77, 240n13; Roger Micheldene as a “wanker,” ­102–3, 104; and Swinburne, 21, 90–6, 104, 105, 130, 137; title of, 91, 98; use of antimodels in, 90, 92–3, 136, 148; and the use of doubles, 140–1; and Waugh, 52, 96–8, ­104–5, 130, 137–8 “On Staying Still,” 239–40n11 Orwell, George, 99–100, 102, 107, 235–6n15 Oxford University: Amis at, 33; Amis’s Oxford parodies, 19–21, 26, 108; battles among Oxonian intellectuals, 35; Yevtushenko’s bid for the Chair of Poetry at, 191. See also “English Non-Dramatic Poetry, 1850–1900, and the Victorian Reading Public” (BLitt thesis) Patey, Douglas Lane, 96 Poburko, Nicholas, 51–2, 106, 114 “Poet and the Dreamer” (essay on Keats), 81, 109, 111 Portugal, 58, 59–60, 68, 74, 207, 228n5

postmodernism, 21, 237n6, 246n12; Amis’s fiction as postmodern, 44, 89, 118, 119, 222n12, 240n1 Powell, Anthony, 70, 191, 200, ­252–3n6; Amis on, 64, 238n4, 254n12; Amis’s review of Acceptance World, 207; on Larkin, 224n1; on Russian Girl, 191 Powell, Violet, 217n2 Press, John, 51, 108, 114, 116 Princeton University, 90 Pritchard, William H., 19, 94, 113, 116, 194 Pritchett, V.S., 47 Propp, Vladimir, 78–9 provincialism, 51, 56, 59, 60, 68–9, 106–20 psychiatry, 4; in Amis’s post-1970 novels, 7, 133, 138, 140, 158–9, 161, 167, 170, 246n11, 247n12; in Anti-Death League, 129, 133; and One Fat Englishman, 214n13 Punch, 60 Quennell, Marilyn: Amis’s repeated attacks on the Quennells, 252n5; and Biographer’s Moustache, ­140–1, 201–4, 207, 253n9; and Folks That Live on the Hill, ­140–1, 249–50n13; in Memoirs (Amis), 201–2, 203–4, 252–3n6 Quennell, Peter: and Amis’s anti-­ modernist bias, 213; Amis’s repeated attacks on the ­Quennells, 252n5; and Biographer’s Moustache, 7, 140–1, 200–5, 206, 207, 208–9, 253n9; and cats, 205, ­253–4n10; and Folks That Live on the Hill, 140–1, 185, 200; and Memoirs (Amis), 201–2, 203–4,

Index 277



252–3n6; and Powell, 252–3n6; Wanton Chase (memoirs of), 202, 203, 204 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 69, 80, 231n3 “Real and Made-Up People,” 200 realism: Amis as realist writer, 3, 21, 89, 153–4, 214, 215; Amis’s departures from, 166–7, 215; as interpreted by Amis and Greene, 62, 66 reciprocity. See under audience religion/the divine: in Alteration, 155, 156, 243n16; Amis and the Catholic trio of Greene, Waugh, and Chesterton, 137–8; in Anti-Death League, 6, 129–31, 138, 140, 143, 156, 162–3, 239n9; and “Godforsaken” (“Why There Must Be a Church”), 239n9; in Green Man, 6, 140, 143, 144–6, 156, 212; and Thomas’s poetry, 87 Richardson, Samuel, 21, 78, 231n3 Ricks, Christopher, 233n1 Ricoeur, Paul, 220–1n5 Riverside Villas Murder, 4, 242n11 romanticism, 18, 28; critiqued in Biographer’s Moustache, 205, 206; critiqued in Evans Country, 82, 106–7, 108–14, 119, 153–4; critiqued in Take a Girl Like You, 81–2, 108, 153. See also Keats, John Ross, Alan, 25 Rossen, Janice, 94 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 22, 23, 24–5, 219n9 Roth, Philip, 92, 234n4; Amis’s review of Portnoy’s Complaint, 230n11

Rush, Jack, 25, 224n21 Russian Girl, 191–5; and Amis’s dogmatic approach to poetry, 212; and argument against politicizing art, 185, 190, 194–5; and Conquest, 141, 181, 191, 211; and Girl, 20, 191; manuscript of, 9; and petition as fictional centrepiece, ­191–2; and the problem of translation, 192–3, 211–12, 251nn18, 20; use of the antimodel in, 7, 132–3, 144, ­147–8, 157, 185, 190, 194, 215; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Russian Hide-and-Seek, 161–6; as “counterfeit world” novel, 161, 162; and Conquest, 141, 181, 211; criticism on, 245n8; and Englishness, 161–2, 164–5, 166; pessimism and lack of balance in, 7, 154, 160–1, 162; and the problem of translation, 211–12; and the role of the audience, 55, 161, 162, 164–6; sado-masochism in, 245–6n11; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Salwak, Dale, 48, 76, 237n2; on Alteration, 242n12; Amis’s assessment of, 225n3; on Clowes, 249n12; on Egyptologists, 121; and Ending Up, 150, 241n4; on free choice in the Amisian world, 232n12; on Legacy, 219–20n1; on General Tomski’s Army, 191–2; Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist, 225n3; on Lucky Jim and Jake’s Thing, 244n4; on Russian Hideand-Seek, 245n8; on That Uncertain Feeling, 227n13 satire: of academia, 4, 38, 41, 108, 116, 127–8, 238n7; and Amis’s

278 Index

depiction of women, 244n5; Amis’s Oxford parodies, 19–21, 26, 108; antimodels used to satirize Amis’s personal situation, 216; of bores, 84; of the Catholic trio of Greene, Waugh, and Chesterton, 137; “horse-pissing,” 19–20, 26, 41, 108, 136, 138, 149, 211, 218n6, 249n10; I Like It Here as “aesthetic satire,” 61; of Larkin’s profession, 5, 46, 47, 48–9, 50, 57, 141; of military life, 131; of modernism, 66, 89, 174; of privileged classes, 69, 134, 138; Waugh’s brand of, 52, 97, 137; of Welshness, 17, 55 science fiction, 105, 124, 150; Amis on, 90, 116, 242n11. See also Alteration Scott, J.D., 106 Second World War, 37, 52, 106 Sexton, David, 252n3 Shaffer, Brian, 119 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 182 Showalter, Elaine, 37, 222n12 Sims, Robin, 240n1 Sinclair, Andrew, 106 Smith, Joan, 17 “Song of Experience,” 114–15 Spender, Stephen, 35 Stanley and the Women, 166–70; as alternative world novel, 1 ­ 66–7; criticism on, 18–19, 169, 170; depiction of women in, 170, 191, 214; and Howard, 141, 168, 211; manuscript of, 11–12, 166, 168–9, 214; narrator in, 166–7; pessimism and lack of balance in, 7, 154, 160–1, 170, 210; and provocation of readers, 9, 247n13; psychiatry

in, 7, 11–12, 133, 140, 167, 170; and the use of doubles, 140–1 Stevenson, Randall, 100 Stovel, Bruce, 221n10 Strang, Patsy, 46–7, 50 Swansea, 28, 35, 55–6; depiction of Swansea’s architecture in Evans Country, 106–7, 111, 115, 118–19, 135. See also Wales and Welshness Swinburne, Charles Algernon: and Amis’s BLitt thesis, 21, 23, 90, 93–4, 95, 219n9, 254n11; and Folks That Live on the Hill, 250n14; and One Fat Englishman, 21, 90–6, 104, 105, 130, 137; parallels between Amis and, 90–1, 93, 94–5; and Victorian flagellation literature, 234–5n9 Swinden, Patrick, 44, 48, 222n11, 226n8, 234n3 Take a Girl Like You, 75–89; and ambiguity, 5, 31, 75–6, 84–5, 86, 89; Amis on Julian Ormerod, 77; Amis on Patrick Standish, 77; Amis’s goal in writing, 76; attack on pseudo-originality in, 80–1; and coercion, 75, 78; criticism on, 75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 89, 231–2nn4, 5; and Difficulties with Girls, 7, 79–80; and Empson, 5–6, 31, 75–6, 85–9, 233n13; ending of, 45, 75, 78, 79, 83–4, 243n16; female narrator in, 84; humour in, 77–8, 83, 84; lack of antimodels in, 75, 80, 84; pre-novel notes, 9, 78, 231n3; and Richardson’s Clarissa, 78, 231n3; romanticism critiqued in, 81–2, 108, 153; use of recurring character types in, 76–7



Index 279

Taylor, D.J., 19, 240n14 Teachout, Terry, 161, 231n4, 244–5n6 That Uncertain Feeling, 46–57; and Amis’s artistic development, 46; and Amis’s artistic uncertainty, 48; depiction of Wales and Welshness in, 46, 48–9, 50, 51, 53–6; and emptiness, 17; ending of, 56, 83, 84; and Englishness, 54; humour and horror in, 49; and Larkin, 5, 46–50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 121, 141, 228n1; and modernism, 5, 48, 55, 56, 108; and narrative voice, 56–7, 143–4; and poetic exhibitionism, 21; pre-novel notes, 9, 49, 55, 96; reception of, 67–8, 241n6; and Thomas, 5, 26, 46, 50–7, 58, 108, 227–8nn14, 15; title of, 48; use of the antimodel in, 21, 26, 46, 50–5, 56, 68, 74, 129, 137, 139, 145, 147, 173, 181, 188, 216; and the use of doubles, 140–1; use of unreliable narration in, 48; and Wain’s Living in the Present, 34 Thomas, Dylan: Amis’s account of audience’s negative reaction to, 227–8n15; and Amis’s anti-­ modernism bias, 213; Amis’s rejection of, 46, 52–3, 56, 85, 109, 117–18, 137, 222n11; and Caton, 42; Empson on, 86–7; and Movement writers, 106; and Old ­Devils, 174; and Russian Girl, 192; and That Uncertain Feeling, 5, 26, 46, 50–7, 58, 108, 227–8nn14, 15; and Welsh nationalism, 55–6, 174. Works: “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines,” 227n11; Map of Love,

53; “Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire, of a Child in London,” 87 Trevelyan, Lady Pauline, 23, 94 Turner, Jenny, 252n3 Venturi, Robert, et al., 119 Wain, John: Amis on, 32, 33, 34–5; compared with Amis, 5, 27, 31–6, 37, 66; concern for class, 33, 34, 35, 221n8; and Empson, 31, 221n6; on Larkin’s authorship of Amis’s books, 58; on the Movement, 34; and Oxford, 33, 35, 221n9. Works: “Ambiguous Gifts: Notes on the Poetry of ­William Empson,” 31; “Eighth Type of Ambiguity,” 31; Hurry on Down, 5, 27, 31–3, 34; Living in the Present, 33, 34; Samuel Deronda, 34; Sprightly Running, 36; Waugh on, 96 Wales and Welshness: Amis’s antiWelsh sentiments, 17, 217n1; Amis in Swansea, 28, 35, 55–6; depiction of Swansea’s architecture in Evans Country, 106–7, 111, 115, 118–19, 135; and Old Devils, 9, 54, 171–7, 197, 198, 212, 213, 214, 236n17, 247n2; and That Uncertain Feeling, 46, 48–9, 50, 51, 53–6; and You Can’t Do Both, 7, 197–8, 199 “wankers.” See under “berks and wankers” Waugh, Evelyn: on Amis, 96; brand of satire, 52, 97, 137; Marilyn Quennell on, 204; and One Fat Englishman, 52, 96–8, 104–5, 130, 137–8. Works: Brideshead Revisited, 97; Decline and Fall,

280 Index

98; Handful of Dust, 97, 235n12; Officers and Gentlemen, 52, 97; Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 96; Put Out More Flags, 97 “Who Else Is Rank,” 53, 118, 131, 218n6 Wilde, Oscar, 23, 219n9 Wilmes, D.R., 241n2 Wilson, Keith, 244n2 Wodehouse, P.G., 33, 229n7 Wolcott, James, 232n10

Womack, Kenneth, 221n10 Woodring, Carl, 52 Wright, Stuart, 19, 217n2 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 191, 251n19 Yezzi, David, 242n10 You Can’t Do Both, 196–99; Amis’s self-exploration in, 197; Wales and Welshness in, 7, 197–8, 199 Zola, Emile, 17–18, 90