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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 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