towards a post-Christian morality in the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis

282 Pages·2012·4.26 MB·English

Beyond realism and postmodernism:
towards a post-Christian morality in the
works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and
Martin Amis.
Thomas Edward Francis Chatfield
St. John's College
University of Oxford
D.Phil. thesis in English Studies
Trinity Term 2006
Approx. 86,000 words
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Abstract
"Beyond realism and postmodernism; towards a post-Christian moralitv in the
works of Philip Larkin, Kingslev Amis and Martin Amis."
Thomas E F Chatfield D.Phil, in English Studies
St. John's College Trinity Term 2006
This thesis evaluates and re-evaluates the relationship between the works of Philip
Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis through a detailed examination of their
published works, and attempts to locate this relationship in the context of the central
moral uncertainties of post-1945 British fiction.
Most previous critical studies of these authors have tended to discuss the
relationship between Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis in terms of an opposition
between the father's realism and the son's postmodernism, and have debated Philip
Larkin's influence upon Martin Amis only tangentially. Against this trend, this thesis
argues that these three authors share a commitment to literature as a public, moral act,
and, in particular, that their works share the intention of articulating a number of
closely related secular 'human values' which map out a potential post-Christian
morality in British society.
The thesis also examines a common tension within their oeuvres inimical to
such hopes - the fear that the possibilities of rational self-scrutiny and of becoming
'less deceived' have been discredited by the history of the twentieth century, and that
this history instead evidences the dominance of irrational and self-destructive
tendencies in the human. These fears, it is further claimed, are implicated in the
works of all three authors in a tendency towards the construction of Edenic myths,
deterministic simplifications, and despairing devaluations of the value of human life.
Overall, this thesis makes the case for the significance of the common
concerns of Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's works in the context of
contemporary literary studies: their efforts to create in art an unpretentiously 'public
space' for the address of burning moral and existential issues, and their unresolved
struggles with the question of what it might mean to live a good life in a society
which no longer possesses religion as a common moral language.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the support and advice of my supervisor, Professor
Valentine Cunningham, the love and support of my fiancee, Cat, and the generous
funding of St. John's College, Oxford, without which this doctorate would have been
impossible.
Contents
Introduction
i. Critical background 7
ii. Historical and theoretical background 11
iii. The 'human' in literature 22
Chapter One. Philip Larkin
i. Joy and night 27
ii. The role of complaint 32
iii. Poetry as public space 43
iv. Modernism and modernity 49
v. Politics and sex 58
vi. Comedy and sanity 68
Chapter Two. Kingsley Amis
i. Lucky Jim and Philip Larkin 74
ii. Literary criticism and the public role of writing 84
iii. The decline of Christianity 93
iv. Will and self-abandonment 102
v. Sanity and comedy 109
vi. The problem of love 115
Chapter Three. Martin Amis - attitudes to writing and fiction from The Rachel
Pavers to Money
i. Beginnings 126
ii. Good writing, permanence and difference 132
in. Pornography, invasion and control 147
iv. The lago-figure and Dead Babies 157
v. Doublings, twins and Success 167
vi. Martina Twain, Other People and literature as salvation 176
Chapter Four. Martin Amis - from Einstein's Monsters to Yellow Dos
i. Responsibility and causation: Einstein's Monsters and
London Fields 191
ii. A respite from entropy: from London Fields to Time's Arrow 203
iii. Humiliation and The Information 216
iv. Suicide and Night Train 226
v. Recent history: Experience and Koba the Dread 232
vi. Patterning the present: politics, journalism and Yellow Dos 250
Conclusions 264
Bibliography 270
Standard abbreviations are used throughout this thesis - page & pages (p. & pp.), line & lines (1. & 11.),
compare (cf.), volume (vol.), chapter (ch.), editor (ed.), from the same text as previously cited (ibid)
7
Introduction
i. Critical background
Discussions of the relationship between the writings of Kingsley Amis and Martin
Amis - by critics, reviewers and fellow-authors alike - tend to be framed in terms of
an opposition between the realism of the father and the postmodernism of the son.
David Hawkes, for example, writing for Scribner's British Writers: Supplement IV in
1997, argues this dichotomy through a comparison between Kingsley's Lucky Jim
(1954) and Martin's The Rachel Papers (1973), claiming that:
. . . while Jim Dixon [Lucky Jim] is a realistic character, Charles Highway
[The Rachel Papers] is a postmodern character . . .
Eric Jacobs - Kingsley's official biographer, and participant in a notably acrimonious
dispute with Martin after Kingsley's death2 - sketches a similar divide, presenting
Martin as its chief source:
The difference between their novels was something of a puzzle to Amis
senior, since their methods seemed to have so much in common . . . Martin
was inclined to think that the novel had simply moved on into postmodern
forms, leaving his father behind stuck in-old fashioned realism. Any
suggestions of that kind were apt to rouse snorts of derision from his father.3
Julie Burchill's review of Kingsley's selected letters4 in The Guardian is typical of
many media accounts, meanwhile, and shows the degree to which questions of
personality have infiltrated those of literature in these comparisons:
Even in his grave the old devil leads the way, with his human, all too human,
self-expose; the son still seems a pale, posturing shadow, with one eye on the
mirror and the other on posterity.
1 David Hawkes, 'Martin Amis (1949-)', from George Stade and Carol Howard eds. British Writers:
Supplement IV (New York, 1997), p. 28.
2 cf. Martin Amis, Experience (London, 2001), pp. 373-377 &n. As Martin Amis notes, the editorship
of his father's collected letters passed to Zachary Leader from Eric Jacobs following Jacobs's decision
to offer his diary of the last year of Kingsley's life to two Sunday newspapers just three days after
Kingsley's death, and without consultation with his family.
3 Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis, A Biography, (London, 1995) p. 345.
4 Kingsley Amis, The Letters of Kingsley Amis ed. Zachary Leader (London, 2000).
8
Even the most lengthy investigation of Kingsley and Martin's relationship so far
published - Gavin Keulks's Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the
British Novel since 1950 (2003) - leaves this oppositional stance largely intact,
presenting Amis father and son as a paradigm of 'the twentieth-century's war over
mimesis' via several extended comparisons between novels. In a chapter titled The
Amises on Realism and Postmodernism', Keulks argues that Stanley and the Women
(1984) and Money (1984) exemplify this conflict:
A novel that intentionally scoffs at fantasy and fabulation, Stanley and the
Women asserts the primacy of conventional realistic norms. A forum for
Martin's postmodern precepts, Money directly confronts Kingsley's realistic
*j
and paternal critique.
James Diedrick is one of the few major commentators to have diverged from this
position, opening the second edition of his monograph Understanding Martin Amis
with the acknowledgement that:
It is no exaggeration to claim that every aspect of [Martin] Amis's career - his
hard-edged persona, his stylistic virtuosity, his patriarchal assumptions, his
compulsively expressed devotion to the work of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul
Bellow - is grounded in his uniquely charged relationship to his father.8
Despite this claim, however, Diedrick does not seriously challenge the 'anxiety of
influence' model espoused by Keulks and others, and his account remains governed
by the gulf between:
Kingsley, whose fiction conforms to the mode of 'classic' (as opposed to
modernist) realism ... [in which] The author seeks to fade into the
background as the reader is immersed in narrative detail.. . 9
and Martin, who is:
5 Julie Burchill, 'The Old Devil', review of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, from The Guardian, 20 May
2000, online at www.guardian.co.uk
6 Gavin Keulks, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950
(Wisconsin, 2003), p. 184.
7 Ibid, pp. 183-4.
8 James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis, second edition (Columbia: South Carolina, 2004), p. 11.
9 Ibid, p. 14.
. in many ways a postmodern Jonathan Swift, wielding the weapon of what
Northrop Frye has called 'militant irony' with the same controlled, merciless
precision as Swift himself.10
All of these commentators' observations are rooted in fact. A war of techniques and
ideas has indeed been waged between much of Martin and Kingsley Amis's writing,
and has been acknowledged and analysed by both parties - as is effectively
demonstrated by the battery of quotations included in Diedrick's 'Introduction'. This
thesis, however, will argue the importance of a radically different emphasis in
analysis of the Amises' relationships both with each other and with twentieth century
literature: an emphasis on their common literary objectives, fears and ambivalences,
and on their shared commitment to literature as a public, moral act in a post-Christian
society.
In particular, the works of Philip Larkin - often discussed alongside
Kingsley's work but usually mentioned only in passing in discussions of Martin's -
can hugely extend our sense of the common ground between Amis father and son.
Despite some vitriolic critical assaults in the last decade11, Larkin belongs to the
pantheons both of great and of enduringly popular twentieth-century writers. His
famously self-isolating lifestyle and the disarming lucidity of his poetry often,
however, leave the question of his influence on others rather muted. Andrew
Motion's mammoth biography is typical, praising Larkin's work precisely because it
seems to exist outside of 'literature' itself:
It is part of his [Larkin's] poems' strength to speak directly to most people
who come across them. He makes each of us feel he is 'our' poet, in a way
that Eliot, for instance, does not - and each of us creates a highly personal
12
version of his character to accompany his work.
10 James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis,, p. 22.
11 Exemplified by Tom Paulin's letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 6 November 1992;
discussed in part VI of my first chapter.
12 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (London, 1993), p. xx.
10
Motion's language sharply traces the limits of his discussion. The question of how
work this 'direct' and 'personal' might have impacted upon the British literary
landscape is left unasked, let alone answered. This is probably how Larkin, who
devoted most of his career to reaching the reading public with as little participation in
the establishment as possible, would have wanted it. The problems with Larkin as
'our' poet are manifold, however - and, since his death in 1985, the details that have
emerged about his life have frequently been seized upon as explanations of his poetry
with a dangerous literal-mindedness. As Richard Bradford puts it in his 2005
biography, First Boredom, Then Fear: the life of Philip Larkin:
Larkin is one of the most superbly talented practitioners of English verse.
Moreover he is a traditionalist who undermines the long-standing
preoccupation of the literary and academic establishment that without
innovation writing is hidebound . . . Academics hate him because he is not
self-indulgent. He makes language work for him and the reader, not for them .
. . For other creative writers he is regarded with a mixture of respect and
contempt: to acknowledge quite how good he is would invite comparisons
with their own work - so better to dismiss him as, at worst, a racist and, at
best, a pitiable eccentric.13
The Larkin addressed in this thesis is very much this 'superbly talented practitioner of
English verse': a poet who grappled with the deepest issues of his times in terms both
of literature and society, and who was profoundly committed to literature in a manner
quite distinct from his distrust of academia. I will argue, furthermore, that for both
Kingsley and Martin Amis, Larkin's demands for precision, self-awareness and
honesty have served as an inspiration and a kind of literary conscience - and that
these, along with Larkin's person, have constituted a defining component in their
negotiations with ideas of audience, art and value in the second half of the twentieth
century.
13 Richard Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear: the life of Philip Larkin (London, 2005), p. 19.