Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist

279 Pages·1989·25.96 MB·English

by  John McDermott (auth.)

KINGSLEY AMIS: AN ENGLISH MORALIST
Kingsley Atnis: An
English Moralist
John McDermott
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
© John McDermott 1989
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-44969-1
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First published 1989
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LID
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
McDermott, John, 1948-
Kingsley Amis: an English moralist.
1. Amis, Kingsley-Criticism and
interpretation
I. Title
823'.914 PR6001.M6Z/
ISBN 978-1-349-19689-0 ISBN 978-1-349-19687-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19687-6
To
the memory of my mother
and to
my father
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction ix
1 Real and Made-up People 1
2 Feeling Uncertain 52
3 The Hero as Bastard 104
4 The Voices of Time 133
5 Sex, Madness and Death 152
6 Chips from a Novelist's Workbench 181
7 A Nobbler of Pegasus 189
8 Kingsley and the Women 206
9 The Old Devil 227
A Kingsley Amis Checklist 243
Notes and References 251
Index 266
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the author and to the following for permission to
quote from copyright material by Kingsley Amis: to Victor Gollancz
and Doubleday for Lucky Jim; to Victor Gollancz and Curtis Brown
for That Uncertain Feeling and I Like It Here; to Victor Gollancz,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Curtis Brown for Take A Girl Like
You; to Victor Gollancz and Jonathan Clowes for One Fat
Englishman, The Anti-Death League and My Enemy's Enemy; to
Jonathan Cape and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for I Want It Now
and The Green Man; to Jonathan Cape and Jonathan Clowes for Girl,
20 and The Riverside Villas Murder; to Jonathan Cape and Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich for Ending Up; to Jonathan Cape and A. D. Peters
for The Alteration; to Jonathan Cape, Jonathan Clowes and A. D.
Peters for What Became of Jane Austen?; to Century Hutchinson and
Viking Press for Jake's Thing; to Century Hutchinson and Jonathan
Clowes for Russian Hide-and-Seek, Collected Short Stoties and Collected
Poems 1944-1979; to Century Hutchinson and Simon and Schuster
for Stanley and the Women and The Old Devils. Thanks are due also to
Clive James for permission to quote from his interview with
Kingsley Amis. Part of Chapter 8 first appeared, in a slightly
different form, in Critical Quarterly (Autumn 1985). Frances
A. Arnold of Macmillan and Brie Burkeman of Jonathan Clowes
have smoothed many paths for me, and Kingsley Amis was
generous with his time, information and hospitality.
My greatest debt is to my wife, Anne, never too busy with her
own more demanding labours to spare time for help, encourage-
ment and advice: "pretty dear creature".
viii
Introduction
There is a puzzle about Kingsley Amis. For all that he is one of
Britain's best known literary personalities and (which is not the
same thing) one of its best-selling novelists, there is little tendency
to take him seriously. As that late-twentieth-century phenomenon,
a 'personality', he is dismissed by people with left-wing attitudes
('Lefty' is a word Amis borrowed from Clifford Odets to apply to
them) as a hopeless reactionary, and derided as a caricature of
hierarchic, elitist, fascist, etc. blimpishness, and this with a
particular venom for his having publicly articulated his reasons for
abandoning positions they still hold; for them, he is the betrayer of
socialism. Similarly, those who try to engage with his novels
without being unduly distracted by extra-literary considerations
are not quite sure what to make of him. Though nearly all the
novels have been favourably reviewed as they have appeared,
assessment of them has not often moved beyond the formulaic
adverb-plus-adjective blurbishness that suggests the facile com-
partmentalisations of the jargon-generator: 'devilishly cunning',
'hugely enjoyable', 'shamelessly entertaining', 'wickedly funny',
and usually expressing the view that each is 'his funniest since
Lucky Jim'. Yet, all this praise notwithstanding, his work has been
continually passed over when (to take one measure of esteem)
prizes have been up for grabs, and he has had to wait over thirty
years for anything as valued, and valuable, as the Booker Prize.
Some possible reasons for this suggest themselves. For one
thing, Amis's forthright but rather disingenuous declarations that
his work is traditional disaffect those who are committed to radical
experiment as a sign of continuing vitality in the novel. Again, the
recurring tag, 'the author of Lucky Jim', fixes in readers' conscious-
ness the twin ideas that Amis is basically a one-book man and
simply an entertainer, or just a funny writer. Funny writers don't
win prizes, however better written their books may be than others
which, however shapeless, gimcrack or merely shoddy, establish
their acceptability by being 'committed' or by going about their
business in conspicuously extraordinary ways. Finally, Amis
disappoints those who want him to go on re-writing his first novel
(and of course he has been criticised for doing so) and are
ix
Introduction
dismayed by his willingness to turn his hand to a variety of kinds
of novel; clearly, no such jobbing writer can be a serious one.
The Riverside Villas Murder, for example, a detective story
following inter alia a ghost story, a James Bond book and a couple
of attacks on trendies, was Amis's twelfth novel (and being prolific
doesn't help, either, as Anthony Burgess has also found out). The
Times Literary Supplement (TLS) reviewed it under the heading 'The
Turns of a Plain Man', and although the James allusion might make
Amis wince the first sentence is a classic distillation of the problem
of defining his achievement:
It has been suggested that, so far from there being any figure in
the Kingsley Amis carpet, there is not even actually any carpet,
but only a collection of discordantly-coloured rugs loosely
stitched together. 1
Anyone striding boldly forward to discuss Amis seriously risks
having one of those rugs, or the carpet, pulled from under him,
and indeed much of the comparatively little academic criticism of
his work has been leaden and otiose. The very titles of some
articles - 'Class and Consciousness ...' , ' ... the Penitent Hero',
'Comedy and the Comic Mask ... ' - are daunting and, as the boy
says in The Alteration, 'make something very interesting sound silly
and heavisome'; Robert Conquest's 'The Christian Symbolism of
Lucky Jim' is a warning that has not always been heeded.2 At the
risk of taking a pratfall, the chapters that follow are an attempt to
show that, without making heavy weather of things, Amis's novels
are serious as well as funny, and have consistently addressed
moral issues in a manner which, distinctively English, is also
distinctively his own. The intention is primarily expository, to
disengage the fiction from the non-literary issues with which it has
sometimes been entangled; to show, as clearly as may be, simply
what is there. Evaluation is not at the forefront of the exercise, but
implicit throughout is a confidence that, when judgements of value
come to be made in a less fraught atmosphere, Amis will be found
to be not only a more artful writer than he pretends to give himself
credit for but also (though he disparages such terms)3 one of the
few important novelists writing in his time. He has said that 'the
first test of any critic [is] that of being able to praise convincingly, to
extend the grounds on which some author or work can be
enjoyed'.4 That is the test this book submits to.
x
1
Real and Made-up People
The reality of fiction is not the reality of reality!
Kingsley Amis is a serious comic novelist, yet throughout his
career his literary personality has been associated with non-literary
controversy which has obscured in some measure the quality and
extent of his achievement. Much of the responsibility for this lies
with a contemporary avidity for paraphrase that is unliterary at
best, and at worst anti-literary. Literature, as no other (he feels), is
a field in which 'any fool can have an opinion. Nearly any fool,
plus many non-fools in their weaker, more fatigued, less attentive
moments, would rather read a book as a puree of trends and
attitudes than as a work of art having its own unique, unpara-
phrasable qualities'.
Thus, in the tedious publicity mayhem of the 'Angry Young
Men' period, he 'would meditate on how nice it would be if one's
novels were read as novels instead of sociological tracts':
any decent writer sees his first concern as the rendering of what
he takes to be permanent in human nature, and this holds true
no matter how 'contemporary' his material. Now and again he
may feel - we should perhaps think less of him if he did not ever
feel - that there are some political causes too vast or urgent to be
subordinated to mere literature, and will allow one or other such
to determine the shape of what he writes. But by doing so he will
have been guilty of betrayal. He will have accelerated the arrival
of the day on which it is generally agreed that a novel or a poem
or a play is no more than a system of generalizations
orchestrated in terms of plot and diction and situation and the
rest; the day in other words, on which the novel, the poem and
the play cease to exist, and that is the worst prospect of all.
The 'contemporary' element referred to here has operated on his
reputation in two principal ways.
The first is that from Lucky Jim (1954) onwards critics who have
1