KINGSLEY AMIS IN THE GREAT TRADITION AND IN OUR TIME
by Robert H. Bell
Kingsley Amis
Is famous.
His fame
Is partly due to his writing like an average bloke
With ordinary feelings. His joke.
--James Michie
The writings of Kingsley Amis provide unique pleasures and pose persistent challenges. Early and late, Amis is a virtuoso stylist, creating the inflections, accents, idiom that define and expose characters. He revels in linguistic follies, and endows ordinary language with vitality . His forte is cant and cliché, especially the descent into banality or stupidity. Despite his enduring reputation as a comic novelist, few Amis novels after Lucky Jim are purely or even predominantly comic. In most of his books, circumstances are gloomy, fate unconsoling. People live in a precarious Hobbesian state, vulnerable to mortal woes, prey to awful forces. The world of Amis is more disturbing and painful than amusing or reassuring. The funniest writer of our time is also one of the most troubling.
Amis's best novels--I'd cite Lucky Jim, Take a Girl Like You, Girl, 20, Ending Up, Jake's Thing, The Old Devils, and You Can't Do Both as the works of highest distinction and permanent interest--are richly entertaining and subtly provocative. In many ways he is a traditional moralist, exploring the demands of decency and the power of appetite. Yet Amis is also a twentieth-century writer alert to complexities of evaluation, loathe to simplify moral problems. His great vexing issue is sex, its origins in individual psychology, its perpetual implications for personal identity and relationships. Nothing is more characteristic of an Amis hero than the difficulties caused by his sexual desire and conduct. Though most of his protagonists would do better if they could, rarely do they reform. More likely the resolution is that uncertain feeling, ambivalence, or confusion produced by the inadequacy of the hero to the complexity of the situation. While the characters remain ambivalent, our perceptions of them differ and shift. Typically an Amis hero precipitates notoriously mixed reactions--volatile blends of compassion and indignation. The hero may have no more than vacillating sympathy for himself. Struggling fitfully, Amis characters achieve only partial self-awareness and may never grow substantially: their capacity for introspection and change is limited. Many of Amis’s heroes are notable Sham-Detectors, mockers of fools, phonies, and bastards; they may themselves also be, and remain, egregious bastards.
Amis's fiction has always provoked criticism, including some serious objections to his personal prejudices and his inability to transcend them in his art. The question of identification between author and characters, some of them objectionable, some obnoxious, has animated responses to Amis from the outset of his career. In many of his narratives Amis seems massively ubiquitous, his characters articulating the author's likes and dislikes. The multiplicity of experience is not always rendered or dramatized. In his expressed wish to tell "believable stories about understandable characters in a reasonably straightforward style," Amis depletes his imaginative resources and restricts his range of effects. His characters are sometimes flat, reduced to cartoon dimensions, viewed from the outside, with little sense of their subjectivity or interiority. Too often they appear deprived or incapable of agency.
In his intriguing mix of remarkable virtues and significant limitations, Kingsley Amis rewards comparison with the novelist he praised most often and most highly, Henry Fielding, "whose realism two hundred years have not dimmed and whose humor is closer to our own than that of any writer before the present century." Considering all that comes between Neo-classicism and Modernism, Amis and Fielding share a surprising number of values, traits, and inclinations. Both were vitally engaged with contemporary issues and zesty, pugnacious combatants in the cultural wars. Amis cherished Fielding's "moral seriousness . . . without the aid of evangelical huffing and puffing." They shared the classical conviction that literature should be dulce et utile, and they believed that, in Amis's words, "the satirist’s laughter is valid as a gesture--a gesture on the side of reason." Their traditional values prized candor, kindness, magnanimity, charity, and generosity of spirit. They enjoyed and represented camaraderie once termed robust or "manly," now more often regarded warily as "masculinist." Both mix high intellect with low tastes. They espouse clarity, accessibility, "a reasonably straightforward technique." Their craftsmanship was always precise, meticulous, and elegant. Both novelists were Humorists as well as Moralists, stressing human folly, especially our appetitive passions and self-exonerations. Their wit was inexhaustible and unsparing. Both Fielding and Amis eagerly, frankly entertained; neither refused to play the fool. Both highlight farcical antics, feature picaresque plots, and love to parody anything ludicrous, especially figures of pretense and fatuity. Amis and Fielding disorient readers with consistent ethical problems and lively irreverence toward authority, piety, and righteousness. Both affirm common sense and ordinary decency in ways sometimes regarded as too sentimental or simplified. And neither Fielding nor Amis conveys a convincing sense of sublime possibility or extraordinary capacity beyond the creation of the novel.
Both Fielding and Amis had remarkable early success. Lucky Jim (1954) is a perpetual fount of pleasures. It has pleased many and pleased long--enough in our fragmented times to declare it a classic. A great deal of the pleasure is provided by Jim Dixon, and it is frankly guilty. He is, as his adversaries declare, Philistine, unscrupulous, disgraceful. Incorrigibly adolescent, he painstakingly forges a letter to his enemy Johns in the voice of an outraged boyfriend of the secretary Johns has been eyeing, but he works and plays at foolishness with such precision, gusto, and joy! "This is just a freindly letter and I am not threatenning you, but you just do as I say else me and my palls from the Works will be up your way and we sha'nt be coming along just to say How do you can bet. . ." Just as characteristic of Jim as the forgery, made by holding the pencil like a butter-knife, is the nasty delight he takes in his own cleverness: "He read it through, thinking how admirably consistent were the style and orthography. Both derived, in large part, from the essays of some of his less proficient students." Some of what Jim wants and likes is disreputable. He is the Laureate of Liquor, but even more notable than his love of beer is his hangover, a paragraph devoted Amis fans recite from memory: "His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum."
Part of what redeems Jim, or at least maintains our interested regard, is that in all his silliness he is surrounded by more profoundly objectionable fools whose outrages are hilariously revealed. There is Professor Welch, serving Jim "the smallest drink he'd ever been seriously offered," or discoursing professorially: "I expect you know his book on medieval Cwmrbydyceirw." And Bertrand, whose speech is annoying in more ways than you'd think possible: "And I happen to like the arts, you sam." Or Margaret, in her intimate mode: "All the barriers are down at last, aren't they?" And like a holy fool there is Jim Dixon, the hero of language, whose witty responses are uttered mainly to himself, for the sake of survival. "He's such a queer mixture," Christine says of Bertrand. "Naming to himself the two substances of which he personally thought Bertrand a mixture," Jim muses. Above all, Jim is an infallible Boredom Detector, alert to any solemn pomposity, as when he hears Margaret pretending to restrain herself "like a great actress demonstrating the economical conveyance of strong emotions."
The permanent pleasure and abiding virtue of Lucky Jim are its verbal wit, its richly textured observations and conversation, and its merciless cruelty, sparing nothing, least of all Jim himself. Though Jim is enabled by his wit, he is also hindered by his humorous instincts and attitudes, even when he is being very funny, reflecting on the strangely neglected topic of his article. His wit is too reckless and too nimble to be contained or focused; animosities invariably spill over, and frequently rebound upon himself. Jim is excessive, out of control, and beyond the pale: if Jim is a humorous hero, Lucky Jim is also a Rogue's Progress. The hero, like the novel, overflows with vitality: "As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock."
So engaging is Jim, so amply endowed with Amis's verbal resources that one hesitates to condemn his impropriety, laziness, and tastelessness, or to emphasize the novel's evident deficiencies. Problems exist, including plot contrivances, an overly convenient deus ex machina, narrow narrative empathy, prismatic perspectives, simplification of motives, and exterior or one-dimensional characterizations. But as Henry James said of Tom Jones, Jim Dixon has so much life "that it amounts, for the effect of comedy and the application of satire, almost to his having a mind, that is to his having reactions and a full consciousness." It may be argued, as James implies, that the limitations of Tom Jones and of Lucky Jim are intrinsic to comedy. While Henry James, F. R. Leavis, and I would not include Lucky Jim in the Great Tradition of English Fiction, one could do worse--could one do better?--than to begin a course on English Comic Fiction with Tom Jones and to end it with Lucky Jim.
That Uncertain Feeling (1955) resembles Lucky Jim in several ways, but is markedly less ebullient, far more reflective. The protagonist, John Lewis, is a restless, horny librarian who truly values his marriage to Jean and really craves an affair with Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams, an older, married lady of means and pretensions. He recounts his difficulties with some detachment, regret, and gusto: "why did I like women’s breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?" There are some splendid satirical elements, especially the wicked parody of Dylan Thomas in the person of Gareth Probert, who "sounded like an actor pretending with fair success on the whole, to be Owain Glyndwr in a play on the Welsh Children’s Hour," and the hero's farcical escape from the lady’s boudoir disguised as a Welshwoman. Like Jim Dixon, John Lewis is woefully, ludicrously misplaced and miscast whenever he is in more privileged circles. Overall, though, That Uncertain Feeling is neither persistently amusing nor especially compelling. Notable is Amis’s lifelong theme, the volatile, vexing nature of relations between men and women, and how, in a mixed, muddled character such as John Lewis, sincere compunctions compete with hypocritical self-justification. He vacillates, "feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not much liking myself for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself for it, and not liking myself for feeling rather a good chap." While John, resolving to mend his ways, does return to home and family, his future is dubious. The best he can imagine is, "Since I seemed to have piloted myself into the position of being both immoral and moral at the same time, the thing was to keep trying not to be immoral, and then to keep trying might turn into a habit." Amis leaves it to us to correct his hero’s deficient, refracted perspective and to speculate about his fate; some readers resist and resent such uncertainty, and fault the novelist’s dereliction of duty, or Amis's reluctance to separate himself from the protagonist.
I Like It Here (1958), a potpourri of picaresque adventures, travelogue, mystery, and satire, is regarded by nearly everyone including Amis as his least successful novel. It is most sympathetically seen as a self-reflexive, parodic text in the tradition of Tristram Shandy and Pale Fire. Writer Garnet Bowen, another put-upon, plain-speaking fellow, spends a fellowship year in Portugal, disliking and mocking most of what he experiences, except for an inspirational visit to the tomb of Henry Fielding, where he is reminded of what is most lovable and admirable in the grand old tradition of the English novel, "a moral seriousness that could be made apparent without the aid of evangelical puffing and blowing." Too often the plot seems to be a contrivance for hanging chips on shoulders and Bowen appears a mere mouthpiece for the author, a pale copy of Jim Dixon, grumping about furrin parts, occasionally scoring a palpable hit: "A couple of months [in Portugal] would be like learning to drive or making a determined start of Finnegans Wake–an experience bound in itself to be arduous and irritating." Though critics like Norman Macleod have found I Like It Here a subtle satire, exposing Bowen’s bluff English xenophobia, for most readers the novel does not travel well or endure vitally: "Amis abroad is Amis astray," concludes John Batts.
Take a Girl Like You (1960) is a provocative, challenging, entertaining novel, a "serio-comic" treatment of sexual fidelity and promiscuity. There is an admirable ambition in this novel to investigate contemporary morality, to understand what is inherited and what can and should be forged anew; Amis regards morality as a problem. Take a Girl Like You recalls Fielding’s rival Richardson, in dramatizing the seduction of Jenny Bunn, a provincial virgin pursued by Patrick Standish, a winning, amoral rake, devoted to Eros but prematurely haunted by Thanatos. Amis is suspected of collusion with Patrick, whose ploys sometimes have authorial resonance if not sanction, as when he schools Jenny: "These ideas of yours. Jolly sound in 1880 and everything . . . There are two sorts of men today, those who do–you know what I mean–and those who don’t. All the ones you’re ever going to really like are the first sort, and all the ones those ideas of yours tell you you ought to have are the second sort. Oh, there wouldn’t be any problem of temptation there. The problem would come on the wedding night. And on all the nights after that. There used to be a third sort, admitted. The sort that could, but didn’t–not with the girl he was going to marry, anyway. You’d have liked him all right, though, and he wouldn’t have given you any trouble trying to get you into bed before the day. The snag about him is he’s dead. He died in 1914 or thereabouts. He isn’t ever going to turn up, Jenny, that bloke with the manners and the respect and the honour and the bunches of flowers and the attraction."
Patrick, like Richardson’s Lovelace, is presented vividly, from the inside, with considerable sympathy, and he displays a persuasive fluency. But Patrick’s charm and eloquence hardly exempt him from ethical scrutiny, though he escapes hanging. He is often, one would think manifestly, self-indulgent, rapacious, and malicious, and even his fellow rakes condemn his methods as reprehensible, when, "tired of fairness," Patrick takes Jenny drunk and defenseless. But he becomes increasingly (if inadequately) aware of his selfishness, often questioning and criticizing himself, experiencing at least "a tiny wisp of remorse." It is unclear why lack of explicit authorial evaluation, so typical of modern fiction, an absence of "evangelical huffing and puffing," disorients and dismays some readers. Take A Girl Like You is remarkably even-handed, devoting more than half its attention to Jenny’s point-of-view, endowed with innocence and goodness, but also vigorous force. We come to know both characters as they see themselves and as they are perceived by each other. A number of women reviewers noted the novel’s scrupulous regard for the heroine. The open-endedness of Take A Girl Like You surely inclines us toward sympathy for Jenny, regret for her fate, and apprehensions for her future: "Well," says Jenny, "those old Bible-class ideas have certainly taken a knocking, haven’t they?" Patrick: "They were bound to, you know, darling, with a girl like you. It was inevitable." Jenny has the last rueful word: "Oh, yes, I expect it was. But I can’t help feeling it’s rather a pity."
One Fat Englishman (1963) presents another flagrantly unappealing hero, Roger Micheldene, an obese Old School/Old Boy publisher, and a fish out of water, beached and bitching in America. At Budweiser College in pursuit of his former lover Helene Bang, Micheldene meets her linguist husband and is plagued by Irving Macher, a young Jewish writer. Though he himself is tellingly humorless, Micheldene’s dyspeptic reactions are amusingly hyperbolic and occasionally imposing: "Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth, and lust but distinguished in anger." Like several subsequent Amis novels centered around offensive figures, One Fat Englishman appeals to readers entertained by the hero’s nasty perceptions and/or persuaded that such nastiness is at least intermittently exposed rather than endorsed. (Studies in the psychology of laughter indicate that racist humor appeals to both the most and the least bigoted audiences). If Roger Micheldene, "his mammary development . . . acceptable only if he could have shed half his weight as well as changing his sex," collecting women as trophies, conjugating Greek verbs to delay climax, cannot be judged more sinned against than sinning, he is nearly as pained as he is abusive. His quest for Helene Bang is sabotaged by his own orneriness and horniness. Losing at Scrabble to a child, he deliberately upsets the board, and later in retaliation discards one of boy’s favorite toys. Most critics find One Fat Englishman disappointing, though a reader as canny as Christopher Ricks, perhaps thinking of Paradise Lost, admires the way the narrative tricks the reader into misguided sympathy for Micheldene in order to shame and teach us. Amis has said that his protagonist is "a bastard to a very large extent, and he understands it and yet he can’t be different. One isn’t asking for sympathy for him exactly, but we all have our crosses to bear and realizing it is a kind of cross which he bears."
At one point Amis regarded his 1966 metaphysical spy story The Anti-Death League as "my favorite of my own books. Partly because of being more ambitious than anything before." Overtly grander in subject and scope yet severe in style, The Anti-Death League sustains narrative suspense and complicated relationships with no humorous filigrees or farcical interludes. The MacGuffin, the mysterious Project Apollo, is deadly serious, potentially fatal. There is little comfort to be found, certainly not with psychiatrists like Dr. Best, one of a bad lot. As the hero says, "You’ve probably heard of those things they call lethal nodes . . . Well, we’re in a lethal node now, only it’s one that works in time instead of space." God or Providential Design is relentlessly harsh, overseeing gratuitous suffering and not sparing even hapless L. S. Caton, that shadowy figure flitting through every previous Amis narrative, until dispatched here and for good. In this lethal node, a decent bloke like Moti Naidu is an unheeded Cassandra, and James Churchill’s genuine love for Catherine Casement is vulnerable, a feeble gesture against despair. Anthony Burgess characterizes The Anti-Death League as a "masque of ultimate bitterness." After this novel, Amis is never simply comic, and when he is predominantly humorous, it is to illustrate the closeness of the comic to the cosmic, or the similarity between humor and horror. Increasingly Amis creates nightmare worlds and individuals subjected to malign forces.
I Want It Now (1968) is almost an exception. It does recall Lucky Jim in its endearingly romantic plot and thoroughly enjoyable, merciless vivisections. Amis's cherished targets include smarmy television personalities, swinging 60s London, the Southern US, "the Ritz people," the idle, vacuous young, and other ridiculous annoyances. Ronnie Appleyard begins as a hypocritical Young Lochinvar of the airwaves, though "to be fair, he had no feelings for old people as such beyond a mild dislike, never wasted his time sweating about the H-bomb, and would not have cared a curse if the British army were to set about re-occupying the Indian sub-continent." His project, to procure "fame and money, with a giant’s helping of sex thrown in," is gradually and quite persuasively transformed into a benevolent mission. Ronnie saves Simona Quick (usually called Simon or Mona) from her tyrannical mother Lady Baldock, marriage to the loathsome Student Mansfield, and a life of promiscuity and frigidity. In rescuing Simon, Ronnie learns a surprising amount, enjoys being nice to someone, and is redeemed by love. "I was a shit when I met you," Ronnie says to Simon. "I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I’ve had to give up trying to be a dedicated full-time shit." For the last time in an Amis narrative, the wicked are exposed and the redeemable rewarded by love and, wondrous to tell, good sex. Malcolm Bradbury explains, "Some moral explorations have to be conducted before gratification comes. So, just as Take A Girl Like You depends on the principle of procrastinated rape, I Want It Now depends on the notion of deferred orgasm." Satire, comedy, and romance blend fluently in this sprightly and altogether appealing narrative. I Want It Now is a social comedy enriched by its explorations of individual decency and responsibility. Most fans of Amis put I Want It Now on the Amis A list.
One would be mistaken to dismiss The Green Man (1968) as a potboiler or expendable genre work. A satisfyingly unsettling ghost story, it is altogether serious and highly engrossing-- painstakingly realistic, densely plotted, and psychologically intriguing. Maurice Allingham is our narrator, the proprietor of an inn called the Green Man, who drinks, ruminates, conducts or misconducts an affair with the wife of his best friend. He seriously dislikes women, and uses sex as an antidote to the tedium of domesticity and the terror of mortality. Alcoholic, loveless, haunted by death, Allingham is visited by the evil spirit of Dr Thomas Underhill. The threat to Allingham’s teenage daughter compels the distant father to look deeper into his own heart of darkness and to recognize "something familiar" in Underhill's spirit. Like many Amis bastard-heroes, Allingham is diagnosed harshly and aptly by his wife as she leaves him. There is also a climactic exorcism and something of a purgation. The Green Man is a gripping, frightening tale, admired by many readers and several critics. When "The Green Man" became a popular British television series in 1990, the book enjoyed renewed popularity.
Girl, 20 (1971) is a triumphant return to the world of I Want It Now. In his element and on his home turf, Amis gleefully demolishes all he surveys. The hero is a trendy Lefty composer, Sir Roy Vandervane, avidly pursuing teenage girls like Sylvia Meers, who is sexually attractive, utterly vacuous, and unfeeling. Our point-of-view is provided by the narrator Douglas Yandell, of uncertain views and partial reliability, a music critic. Yandell sensibly disapproves of Sir Roy’s conduct, politics, and style yet reluctantly abets his adulterous capers, while caring for the man, his wife and family, and his art. Though Yandell’s viewpoint is insufficient, it is a complicated mixture of sympathy, impatience, amusement, exasperation, and outrage. Yandell has his own problems, including a mistress he regularly, willingly shares with another bloke, one indication of his problematic detachment. Certainly exceptionable, Yandell's narrative angle of vision is always engaging. Girl, 20 depicts hilariously awful characters whose follies and fates compel our attention. Particular delights are Sir Roy’s fatuous idiom (arse-creeping the young "be people," deploring the old "have people") his ludicrous exclamations ("Oh Puck-like theme!" "School of thought!"). His foolishness, intermittently silly and grievous, culminates in an experimental composition titled "Erection 9," performed at the Pig’s Out concert, where the eminent composer is booed and his beloved Stradivarius is trashed. Douglas Yandel laments disgustedly, "this lot positively disliked the idea of the difficult made to seem easy, seem anything at all, exist in any form . . . what they liked was the easy seeming easy." A richly textured tragic satire, Girl, 20 is one of Amis’s finest novels: it evokes laughter and pity for desperate, bleak, and terrible lives.
The savage indignation of Girl, 20 is surpassed by Amis’s short satiric masterpiece, Ending Up (1974). This is a book, wrote John Betjeman, "to make one want to cut one's throat before getting old." Tupenny-hapenny Cottage is the idyllic name of a grotesque hell inhabited by five connected but estranged septuagenarians. Worst of the sorry lot is Bernard Bastable, one of the vilest bastards in Amis’s gallery of rogues, scheming to make his mates appear incontinent. Other members of this motley crew are somewhat less antipathetic, meaning more truly pathetic. Adela is a woman capable of loving but denied the chance "as the result of her extreme ugliness." Marigold speaks cutsey-wutsey baby talk, while aphasic George can't think of nouns. Ultimately, everyone in Tupenny-hapenny Cottage dies, victims of malicious fate and individual malevolence. Amis’s language, always incisive, is here especially sharp, cutting like a butcher's knife close to the bone. Told in forty brief, interlocking vignettes, Ending Up is a virtuoso performance, blending horrific comedy and satiric fervor. In this world, the quality of mercy is that the hateful Bernard, pursuing his cruel "Operations," brings about his own death before cancer claims him. Like Swift, another merciless satirist raging against the human condition, Amis provoked psychological diagnoses as well as literary criticism: "such a brutal and pointless apocalypse," opined the New York Times, makes it "difficult to avoid psychoanalytic speculations about the source of Mr. Amis's animosity." If we read Ending Up not as pathology but as satire, we may perceive how, as D. R. Wilmes comments, "we’ve been made to laugh, then made to realize that we’ve laughed with and at the dragon, who really isn’t very funny . . . The curse is directed at us, and it hurts." Ending Up was a finalist for the Booker Prize.
The Alteration (1976) is a "Counterfeit World," defined by one of its characters as "a class of tale set more or less at the present date, but portraying the results of some momentous change in historical fact." What if the Reformation never happened? Imagine instead that Henry VIII’s elder brother survived and spawned heirs with Katherine of Aragon, the Spanish Armada won a Holy Victory, and Martin Luther became the crude Pope Germanian I. In the world thus altered, Europe is still a Holy Roman Empire, England a totalitarian state, John Paul Sartre a Jesuit theologian and Heinrich Himmler a papal envoy. A neat twist on science-fiction is that this is a world without science. The drama is largely from the view of Hubert Anvil, a boy soprano whom clergymen wish to "alter" for the greater glory of God. The Alteration, at first droll, becomes a pretty exciting adventure, and a somber meditation on fate and free will. It won the Campbell Award for the year's best science-fiction.
Jake’s Thing was violently attacked when it appeared in 1978. It now seems to provide more delights and richer contemplation than was originally thought possible. What infuriated many readers was the suspicion that the author endorsed Jake's male chauvinism. It is probably true but only partially pertinent that Jake Richardson is less than kind and more than kin with his author. In character traits as well as name, he recalls Amis’s first hero (Jakes/Jim, Richardson/Son of Dick/Dixon). Jake's "thing" is, variously, his penis, his malaise, his impotence, his obsessions, and his particular, peculiar forte. He inhabits a deteriorating London providing little comfort but much grist for his dismal, acute observations: "You got your coffee out of a machine, and having done that you couldn't get it back in again." Commuting to Oxford to lecture on Classics, Jake shares the train "with younger persons for the most part, undergraduates, junior dons, petty criminals."
If life is unlivable, Jake is unlovable–an easily irritated, profoundly irritating figure: the satirist satirized. His favorite targets are women, especially intellectual women, yawn-enforcing academics, psychiatrists, Americans, snobs, the idle rich, the undeserving poor. "If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is." Anyone who likes this sort of thing can enjoy Jake’s Thing–without condoning Jake, who gives misogyny and misanthropy a bad name. The urgent intensity of his perspective becomes a problem: is Jake the source or the object of satiric scrutiny? Is he both? How sympathetic should one be toward what Jake himself terms his "contempt, hatred, weariness, and malicious hilarity"? Jake’s Thing, like several Amis novels, works dually or contradictorily, as Malcolm Bradbury notes: "it can be seen as a punishment vested on a presumptuous male chauvinist and a hero of prejudice, but also as a reverse satire, assaulting the modernization of the world."
As often in Amis, the plot of Jake's Thing is less important than its examination of character under stress. Jake’s marriage to Brenda is threatened by his sexual indifference and antipathy. Once a notable visitor of ladies, amusingly admired by Ernie the Porter as "a ruddy uncraned king you were," Jake at 59 has fallen mightily. He now undergoes grimly hilarious sexual therapy with stupid doctors, smothering jargon and casually humiliating treatment (nudity in front of strangers, "nocturnal mensurators" to measure erections, if any, during sleep). In a speech supposedly espousing coeducation to the Oxford faculty, Jake abandons text and sense to present a resoundingly classical anti-feminist diatribe even for a Classicist: "They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about."
Eventually Jake realizes he is not incapable so much as uninterested, a recognition which enables him to forswear women forever: "Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate . . . their fondness of general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him." In determining that nasty things can be nicer than nice things, Jake repudiates Jim Dixon’s pleasure principle and chooses to live outside the circle and beyond the pale. His wife Brenda, bailing out at last, gets her say, but however accurate her diagnosis of Jake’s problems, it somehow isn’t as quotable as Jake’s excoriations. This book solidified Amis’s reputation as a Tory Terror and a Truly Difficult Old Sod. Even admirers of Amis connected this novel to the author's psyche: Malcolm Bradbury said that Jake’s Thing was "written in what seems a masochistic rage." Short-listed for the Booker, Jake's Thing remains a vital novel, and a disturbing work likely to endure.
Stanley and the Women (1984) presents an even more odious viewpoint than Jake’s Thing. According to widespread reports, this book so troubled female editors at US publishing houses that it could not for some time find a publisher. Stanley Duke, a protagonist in dire straits, seems quite obviously unreliable, but his misogynist rantings were confidently identified with Kingsley Amis’s personal views. (Included in this collection are several reviews of Stanley and the Women.) "The root of the trouble," says Stanley, is that "we want to fuck them, the pretty ones, women I mean . . . And if you don’t want to she fucks you up anyway for not wanting to . . . [ Women today] seem to feel they can get on with the job of fucking you up any time they feel like it. That’s what Women’s Lib is for." Conspicuously missing from Stanley and the Women is the voice of any plausible female. All are ridiculous or unbalanced, especially Trish Collins, the psychiatrist treating Stanley’s insane son Steve. Most of the story dramatizes the effects of Steve's mental illness on Stanley and his first wife Nowell (Steve's mother), his second wife Susan, and his mother-in-law Lady Daly. Like Swift’s Gulliver, Stanley has had what feels to him like a blinding illumination–but as with Gulliver he may simply be blinded. A notorious passage in the novel is Dr. Nash’s response to one of Stanley’s rare moments of doubt: " ‘Not enough of a motive?’ His voice had gone very high. ‘Fucking up a man? Not enough of a motive? What are you talking about? Good God, you’ve had wives, haven’t you?" Etc.
The Old Devils (1986) is Amis at his best and most congenial. William Pritchard’s review in the New York Times was headed "Amis Behavin’." The novel was awarded the Booker Prize and garnered enthusiastic praise. Certainly the tone of The Old Devils is less sardonic outrage than mellow equanimity, though it is by no means sentimental, and its female characters are treated as considerately and tenderly (more so, actually) than its male figures. This a broadened, richened, and deepened view rewards multiple readings and sustained consideration. The action begins with a return. Alun Weaver, the BBC's professional Welshman, a "frightful shit," and his beautiful, appealing wife Rhiannon, have retired from London’s whirligig and returned to Wales, which, he declares, means "Many things grave and gay and multi-colored but one above all: I’m coming home . . . and the heart of a Welshman," and so forth. What it means really is an amazing amount of alcohol; Charles McGrath says "Amis is to booze what DeQuincey was to opium." The Weavers' return reactivates an extremely complicated history of sexual relationships (I needed a diagram), because nearly every male fell in love with Rhiannon and nearly every female was bedded or propositioned by the goatish Alun. The Old Devils is an ensemble without one dominating figure. The other sixtyish couples in South Wales are Charlie and Sophy Norris, Malcolm and Gwen Cellan-Davies, Peter and Muriel Thomas, Percy and Dorothy Morgan, and Garth and Angharad Pumphrey.
The Old Devils has an elegiac or autumnal tone, suggesting that life, even with abundant mortifications and inevitable infirmities, is not nearly so terrible as depicted in Ending Up. Still, no one could say the Presiding Old Devil has gone soft. Here is bilious Alun in a pub: " 'What is the vintage port? asked Alan. 'Port is a fortified wine from Portugal,' said the waiter, having perhaps misheard slightly, 'and the vintage port is made from--' 'I didn't ask for a bloody lecture on vinification, you horrible little man.' Alun laughed a certain amount as he spoke. 'Tell me the shipper and the year and then go back to your hole and pull the lid over it.' " Drinking early and steadily, one old sod muses, "Soon it might cease to be one of those days that made you sorry to be alive." There is plenty of gloom and terror but withal a suprising degree of light and tenderness. Poor Peter Thomas may be too fat to cut his own toenails, and dear Rhiannon can’t even remember the most exquisitely romantic moment of her former suitor's life, but one makes do with sharp toenails and dim memories. Like very few Amis heroines, including Jenny Bunn and Catherine Casement, Rhiannon remains attractive, decent, and wise. It’s better for her that her husband drops dead. And the heroine is in a way eternized by Malcolm's adaptation of an old Welsh epic with an interpolated Rhiannon, Malcolm's tribute to "the only woman who'd ever cried for him." The story ends with Rhiannon in an improved situation, attending her daughter Rosemary's reassuringly lovely wedding. But Amis never lets any such consolation pass completely unexamined or unscathed. Peter remarks of Alun's sudden death, "Oh fabulous . . . Well, that certainly softens the blow and no mistake. Blessing in disguise, really, looked at in that light." David Lodge says of The Old Devils, "Although the surface texture of the novel is amused and amusing, one feels that it is a very fragile integument covering an appalling abyss of pain, desperation, and anxiety . . . not so far removed from the bleak vision of Samuel Beckett as it might think, or as Mr. Amis might like to think."
Difficulties With Girls is the only book by Amis which revisits characters from an earlier novel. Here we return to, or rather follow, Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish, who were mated and matched, equivocally, at the end of Take a Girl Like You. Now it is seven years later, deep in the swinging sixties, or Amis’s heart of darkness: they are still married, uneasily, with Patrick working in publishing and Jenny teaching party-time in a children’s hospital. Older, wiser, sadder, unable to conceive the child she desperately wants, Jenny is the picture of "resignation, disappointment, and loneliness." She continues to be an attractive and appealing person, almost saintly in her endurance and compassion. Patrick has fared much less well. He’s easily, quickly bored which provides him sufficient justification for adultery, and he mollifies his guilt by trying to manipulate Jenny into an affair she doesn’t really want. Jenny’s voice is sharp, clear, and potent, most markedly when she exposes Patrick’s selfish games and manipulations.
Jenny speaks as it were with Fielding on her side or with comparable authority. Here she cites passages Patrick had marked in his copy of Tom Jones: " 'Uncanny, isn't it. Really gets you to a T. . . I bet you imagined old Henry Fielding winking at you when he said that. But now for the clincher. It looks as though you've underlined it heavier than the others, but there's probably nothing in that. 'Though he did not always act rightly, yet he never did otherwise without feeling and suffering for it.' " She adds, "So that's all right, isn't it, Patrick." When Patrick asks, "What am I to do," she replies, "Well, for a start you could try reading some different books."
Sexual relations, actions, feelings, and sufferings, continue to be Amis’s precious lode, or mine field, and not because he has many funny things or only one boring thing to say. At times, his sense of the ridiculous is sublime indeed. Has any one been more outrageously amusing about the cost of sex, what Patrick terms the "cock tax"? Here is Wendy Porter-King's post-coital blither and Patrick's reaction: " 'The sky is blue, and I feel gay.' She never knew how close she came to losing her front teeth for that. Taken off guard again, Patrick again spoke too quickly. ‘Are you an American?’ " Sex in Amis is often dear and rarely valuable. Difficulties with girls, or sex troubles generally, are endemic (in a porn shop, the clerk inquires, "was it bondage, Sir?"). Another character who endures them, for quite different reasons, is Tim Valentine, a likable chap but a Darling Dodo flim-flammed by his therapist into believing he must be suppressing his homosexuality. Another relationship under severe strain is that of the gay neighbors, where the Fem member of the homosexual couple causes the difficulty, according to Erik, the Butch member: "it's the clash between male and non-male that causes all the trouble. They're different from us. More like children. Crying when things go wrong. Making difficulties, just so as to be a person."
For me Difficulties With Girls is a good book, limited not so much by its imbalanced sexism or programmatic rigidity as by its relative lack of humor. It's a savage assault on male egocentricity and their terrible treatment of women. In the end, Patrick's obliviousness cannot conceal the truth, even if it protects him from realizing it. Jenny has finally become pregnant. "How wonderful," he said. "For us both . . . You clever little thing . . .You've done it. Changed everything. You've saved us." Patrick is incorrigible and self-deluded, which even dear Jenny recognizes as she concentrates her loving attention on her child-to-be: "Jenny was happy. She was going to have him all to herself for at least three years, probably more like five, and a part of him for ever, and now she could put it all out of her mind." That's about as sad as anything one could say.
By the 1990s Amis had become, depending on one’s values, either an English institution or an outrageous anachronism. Knighted in 1990, renowned or notorious, Amis continued to produce lively fiction regularly until his death in 1995. The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990) is a version of his life in his seventies, when, oddly but apparently satisfactorily all around, he moved into the home of his first wife Hilly and her third husband, where he found friendship, creature comforts, and quiet stability. The hero of The Folks That Live on the Hill is Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian, content to be involved in the lives of family, friends, and acquaintances, mindful that while marriage has some advantages, "Many or even most of them . . . seemed to be at least adequately supplied by having one’s widowed sister housekeep for one." Shepherd's Hill in North London is jarring, cacophonous, reliably awful. Here live a house full of unhappy souls related or connected to avuncular Harry: The widowed sister is Clare; Fiona Carr-Stewart, an alcoholic; Bunty Streatfield, Harry's daughter, a gay woman separated from her husband Desmond and now involved with Popsy; Freddy Caldecote and his virago wife Desirée, with no secrets or discretion; and Harry's son Piers. At the center of this circle is a recognizably Fieldingesque good man, Harry Caldecote--not only decent but actively benevolent. Or, to compare Harry to another Eighteenth-Century figure, he resembles Samuel Johnson, minding his Streatham menagerie of old, infirm, and pathetic people. More remarkable still, Harry's beneficence is recognized and appreciated. Though much of what Harry hears is infuriating, or confounding, or ridiculous (the pub-keeper describes himself as "A dime breed. Dine out like the dinosaurs"), and most people neither realize nor care how they sound, one thing Amis always affirms is the power of language. A telling contrast between early and late Amis is the comparison between Jim Dixon's game endurance of a hangover and Fiona's dreadful description of alcoholism.
The Russian Girl (1992) is the story of another unexceptionable, decent man, Richard Vaisey. Now in his forties, a professor of Russian literature in the London Institute of Slavonic Studies, Vaisey has been married for a decade to rich, loathsome Cordelia (pronounced by her as "Nggornndelia"). A fine twist is that the Gonerilian Cordelia, besides supporting Richard in the manner to which he has become accustomed, is terrific in bed. Their sex life reminds Richard of "a wartime Resistance chief in German occupied France and the local Gestapo commandant who, finding they shared a love of Mozart's operas, had met periodically to play the gramophone records under a mutual guarantee of safe conduct that was never broken." Many good writers could labor a lifetime without producing such a sentence. With this awful human being, if she is a human being, Richard copes in Amisian ways: eventually Richard ceased noticing Cordelia's prepostrously affected accent, "more than a couple of times a day, and for years had given up speculating what speech-sounds she might make if, for example, he were to creep up behind her and fire a loaded revolver past her ear." Into this volatile situation comes the Russian Girl, Anna Danilova, a visiting Russian poet and dissident. Anna's mission is to organize English protest on behalf of her imprisoned brother, and of course to discombobulate Vaisey's life. He is deeply torn, not so much between desire and duty as between true love and authentic taste, for though Anna is a warm, lovable person, she is a wretched poet. Their love affair is dramatized with keen satire and affectionate warmth. What to do with his unbearable wife and his poetic principles, especially when Anna urges him to sign a petition falsely characterizing her as a major Russian poet, is Richard Vaisey's dilemma, and our delight. His ordeal includes a farcical vengeance taken by his irate, forsaken wife ("Vug of, uzz haul," says Nggornndelia the areezdongrannd). The Russian Girl is a thoroughly enjoyable, admirable blend of humor and realism.
You Can’t Do Both (1994) is by any standard a remarkable achievement, a novel I rate among Amis’s top six or eight. Evidently if not frankly autobiographical, it is the story of Robin Davies. Like Amis, Robin grows up in a modest London suburb in the 1930s, excels at school, wins a scholarship to Oxford, pauses for military service in World War II and returns to Oxford, marriage, and an academic career. What distinguishes You Can’t Do Both is extraordinary precision in evoking that Jamesian quality of "felt life," the texture of daily experience, and a subtle, fascinating account of a sexually errant hero who usually means well and rarely does well for long. Partly because the novel is dedicated to Hilly, and partly because its details are so obviously autobiographical, one can’t help seeing it as a sort of apologia, an interpretation I find ingratiating but inadequate to the book’s complexities, as I argue in my contribution to this volume.
The Biographer’s Mustache (1996) is Amis’s last publication, and another artful use of and comment upon life. Amis had authorized a biography by an acquaintance named Eric Jacobs, and the results were a workmanlike life story and strained relations between author and subject. Typically, Amis’s response was to make another novel, The Biographer’s Mustache, zestfully caricaturing the rather dull biographer and satirizing even more savagely the pompous, second-rate author, who is more devoted to aristocrats' parties than literary endeavors. There is also an engaging sexual triangle, involving the author’s Decidedly U wife and the Non-U, younger biographer. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and intelligent novel, treated shamefully by British reviewers, some of whom seemed impatient for Amis to hush and die like a good chap.
Amis published his Memoirs in 1991, and it is a great pity that it is not truly worthy of the author. Even by Amis's standards of provocative egocentricity it an odd performance, a series of disconnected essays and portraits, with hardly anything on writing or his work. The Old Devil in his anecdotage does continue to entertain, exasperate, and appall. He discloses that Margaret Thatcher excited his amorous propensities. He debunks and dispatches nearly everybody he's ever encountered, with a few notable exceptions like Philip Larkin and Anthony Powell. He delivers some breathtaking hyperbole: "Freudianism has probably been instrumental in fewer deaths than Naziism or Marxism, though it is surely one of the great pernicious doctrines of our century with its denial of free will and personal responsibility." Too often, though, his targets are fish in a barrel, famous people who are too cheap to stand drinks. When Amis aims his sights on ephemeral writers like Leo Rosten, he seems to be attacking mosquitoes with automatic weapons. There is precious little about Amis beyond his childhood and youth. He explains that "I have already written an account of myself in twenty or more volumes, most of them called novels."
Amis had always, or at least intermittently, acknowledged the connections between his personal experiences and his art: "All my heroes, and other principal figures, have a great deal of me in them." But he also regularly insisted that readers naively overestimate the degree of identification between author and characters. He stressed that not only the heroes but any character may have bits or elements of Amis in them. What seems true and most important to a consideration of Kingsley Amis, humorist and moralist, is that rarely if ever is the voice or perspective of the protagonist, however powerfully presented, permitted unchallenged sovereignty; competing viewpoints rise and shine. Even when a figure such as Jim Dixon or Jake Richardson dominates the discourse, he is subject to irony or vulnerable to critique. If such made-up people are to some extent authorial agents, they are also vehicles of self-criticism. Amis says, "by that very act of distancing, by projecting himself into an entity that is part of himself and yet not himself, he may be able to see more clearly, and judge more harshly, his own weaknesses and follies." While that formulation may be too tidy and affable a version of more elusive, contrary personal reactions, it is a fairly complicated and nearly aptly equivocal comment on two things that will surely endure, human folly and the fiction of Kingsley Amis.