An English Life

It would have saddened Amis to know just how correct he would prove. Having finished doctoral studies at Oxford, Amis was then at his first teaching post, at the University of Swansea. On the one hand, he was a work-addicted literary scholar with a razor-sharp mind, who had won his way out of South London’s lower-middle class to a wide erudition, who spent much of his time composing verse in tricky metrics, and who grew bored when conversation drifted too far from English literature. On the other hand, he was — once he got the money to lead the life — a wild libertine and bottle-a-day man whose sexual recklessness, his novelist son Martin relates in the new memoir Experience, “often approached the psychotic.”

Lucky Jim became a bestseller in England and America, was translated into dozens of languages, and is still in print. It is widely, if not universally, considered the funniest novel written since the Second World War. While none of his two dozen later novels matched that success, Amis remained loyal to an exacting set of literary principles — honesty, clarity, propriety — and capable of carrying them out in any form, from literary novels to genre fiction (science fiction, mystery) to short stories to criticism to poems to theater to autobiography. Yet Lucky Jim imprisoned Amis in a public caricature. Since his most popular novels are full of seduction and drinking, he was sometimes taken as a mere yuk-yuk artist, a sort of proletarian and boozy Wodehouse, an Angry Young Waugh. With a few exceptions (Paul Fussell’s excellent critical study The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters is one of them), Amis has not been taken terribly seriously as a writer.

To read the newly published Letters of Kingsley Amis is to see just how unfair that verdict is. True, they display an explosive sense of humor at its broadest, but they also show one of the few genuinely independent-minded writers of our time, hewing tenaciously to his calling despite gargantuan obstacles, most of them self-imposed.

The obsession that defined Amis as both man and writer was a hatred of authority, particularly any authority that rested on pretense and posturing. This obsession may have been innate, or it may have arisen from a smothering upbringing as an only child under constant surveillance. Kingsley’s father thwarted his literary ambitions: Reading in company was rude, he held; reading in private was anti-social. Worse than that, according to Martin, Kingsley’s father “persecuted my father with boredom.” Amis came to hate boredom and bores with a crusading passion. Nothing less would do, he thought, because of what he called the “burning sincerity of all boredom.” Bores, meanwhile, were not just uninteresting, but evil, because they were opportunistic, selfish, and judgmental. A bore, Amis said, is “the sort that sits there looking at you and waiting for you to say something he/she will despise you for.”

Amis had two great friends in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, whom he met at Oxford during the war; and Robert Conquest, a London literary pal and light-verse poet who went on to become the century’s great Sovietologist. Larkin, too, hated pretense, liked to joke, and loved jazz. “I enjoy talking to you more than to anybody else,” Amis wrote in 1946, “because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, brutal, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful feelings that I don’t want anyone else to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when talking to you, and because you are savagely uninterested in all the things I am uninterested in.”

The correspondence with Larkin, which takes up almost all of the first three hundred pages of the Letters, is full of anagrams and riddles (“you old bugger” becomes “you old bugar” and then “oyu dol Barug,” until what Auden and Isherwood did together is described as “rugby”); private jazz jokes, like turning poets into solo performers or combos (including Geoffrey “Smoking Turd” Chaucer, and “Bill” Langland and his Ploughmen of Rhythm); and scatological humor, like the unspoken agreement — honored until the week Larkin died in 1985 — to end every letter with the word bum, in some silly context. (“Many wept for joy to see the Queen standing at last on her bum,” Amis writes in 1954.)

The lion’s share of their correspondence, however, was about literature. Larkin, too, was independent minded — but slightly more reverent and considerably more polite. Amis was absolutely ferocious, even rude, in the face of the English literature canon as it was handed down at St. John’s College, Oxford, in the 1940s. His proudest boast is, “All wrong-thinking people will agree with me.”

Amis could never rid himself of the idea that literary pedagogy was a Potemkin village, an illegitimate and authoritarian power structure that operated much like his family. “I always thought that Eng Lit ought to be good,” he writes Larkin after a year of graduate school. “I still think it, only it isn’t.” After reading all of John Dryden, “the dryden” became his currency of poetic overratedness: Samuel Johnson traded at .5 drydens, Keats at .4, Ben Jonson tied with Shelley at .85, and Milton was way up there, vying for the dryden laurels with “Smoking Turd” Chaucer at .9.

He disliked modernism (his favorite poets were Shakespeare, Tennyson, Betjeman, Graves, and of course Larkin), and was even harsher on modern writers. “Honestly, can you see anything in [Ezra Pound]?” he writes. “Buggered if I can. I can’t see what people mean who say he’s good. I mean, good in any way at all.” Gerard Manley Hopkins is simply “a bad poet.” Robert Bridges is “a bum-block of the first order, . . . his silly private language annoys me — ‘what I am in the habit of calling inscape’ well getoutofthehabitthen.”

Of Nathanael West, he tells Larkin: “What a stupid liar the man is; I feel when reading him as I do with Virginia Woolf: I want to keep saying ‘No he didn’t’, ‘No, it didn’t happen as you describe it,’ ‘No, that isn’t what he thought,’ ‘No, that’s just what she didn’t say.'” Ted Hughes, meanwhile, “is as ABSOLUTELY DEVOID OF ANY KIND OF MERIT WHATSOEVER as his late wife [Sylvia Plath] was, isn’t he?”

Wagner, Lawrence, Lillian Hellman, Seamus Heaney — they’re all phonies and poseurs. But the all-surpassing modern pseud is Dylan Thomas — later “Mr. Thos” and thence “Mr. Toss”: “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 about his GONORRHEIC RUBBISH, and end up by WALKING ON HIS FACE and PUNCHING HIS PRIVY PARTS.” (In a cruel posthumous twist, Amis, perhaps because he was the most famous writer living in Wales, would be named one of Thomas’s literary executors.)

Nor did Amis like W. H. Auden. After reading Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety, written in Beowulf-meter, Amis writes: “I have read some of The anxiety, by that crazy Awdon type, and find it Impossible piss plashing in a pot, Shameful shagbaggery, and shite surely.” Such parody might not have bothered Auden, who once wrote that the best form of criticism — and the only one he would permit in his “ideal university” — was parody. If Auden is correct, then Amis is one of the great critics of the century, for these letters are filled with dashed-off, pitch-perfect sendups (the best of which is of Thomas Hardy’s “Afterwards”). Such exercises, along with the writing of pornographic novels, were Larkin and Amis’s favorite hobby. They called it “horse-pissing,” the goal of which was “denigration-by-obscene-accretion.”

Both were pessimistic. Their only difference was in temperament. Where Amis was a carpe-diem, lust-for-life sort, Larkin had an ascetic leaning, an “emotional parsimony,” as Amis put it, that would harden into a lifestyle in early adulthood. “You have never, I feel, forced yourself on people in the way I have,” Amis wrote Larkin in 1948. “You appear to me as far less irresponsible than I am. But at the moment I’m in a better position than you are. It’s a pity that nothing can be done to redress the balance, except by my vague offers of hospitality that isn’t much use to you.” Larkin assumed that their different lives had more to do with the fact that women found Amis strikingly attractive and Larkin frumpy. Whatever the reason, at a certain point, Amis started living life, and Larkin didn’t.

In one of the most gripping letters, written in January 1948, Amis gives Larkin a blow-by-blow of the fiasco surrounding the pregnancy of his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Hilly. After convincing her to get an abortion, Amis paid £ 100 to “the nasty man,” as he describes the abortionist. (The incident is fictionalized in Amis’s You Can’t Do Both.) When told by a friend that Hilly would be rendered sterile by the procedure and could well die, he proposed to her. The first of their three children, Philip, was born seven months later.

Martin Amis, born barely a year after that, assures us in Experience that Kingsley was a loving, even doting father, in a gruff way. Less than half of Martin’s absorbing book deals with Kingsley, but all of it is wise, and — judging by his father’s letters — clear-sighted. Kingsley Amis’s marriage was difficult from the beginning. By July 1949, he was well launched on adultery, writing to Larkin about taking the first steps toward seducing a fifteen-year-old girl (“This is true, but I don’t expect you to believe it” — a locution he uses with such frequency that he comes to abbreviate it to TITBIDEYTBI). He soon adds: “Two of my girl pupils told me the other evening that I am alpha-plus for women, and that they wish I wasn’t married, so you see what a strain it is to stay vertical with them.” Months later, he writes: “That old winged boa-constrictor, sex, still has me in his coils.” Hilly discovered his adulteries and began committing her own.

In 1963, Amis took a three-week vacation with his new mistress, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and returned home to find Hilly and the children had cleared out. He would later look on the episode — it’s almost as if he mislaid his marriage — as the biggest mistake of his life. He and Howard married, and he sought to get his habits under control. Trying to cut down on drinking, he boasted of a “light” weekend: “Fell from grace on Saturday night — and thus held a public quarrel in a pub on the Sunday evening. But otherwise good: yesterday’s score: 1 sherry, 2 beers, 3 gins, 1/2 bottle Beaujolais.” Hilly, meanwhile, moved to Ann Arbor and opened a fish-and-chip shop called Lucky Jim’s — a detail so sad it would sound implausible in a novel.

Throughout Amis’s correspondence, there is a sense that sex and, to a lesser extent, booze are taking him to a place he hadn’t intended. “I feel in a sense that ‘they can’t stop me now,'” he wrote Larkin, “except when I take up my new novel and feel how easy it will be for me to stop myself.” Amis grew increasingly self-absorbed, in a way that is noticeable even as early as the first days of Lucky Jim’s success. When Amis received from Larkin a draft of “Church Going,” one of the half-dozen towering poems of the twentieth century — so obviously so that when the Times Literary Supplement first published it, the paper bannered on its cover: “A Wonderful Poem By Philip Larkin” — Amis replied only: “It seems okay on the whole. . . . Sorry I forgot your bithrayd.”

The two passed each other on the way to different genres and lives. Larkin stopped writing novels after publishing two in his early twenties. In 1961 Amis became a fellow in English at Peter-house, Cambridge, and kept writing poetry, but found it minor. In a letter to Larkin he described “that tight-reined sadness that’s your strong suit and which I can’t hope to touch.” A sullen distance grew up between the two of them. When Amis quit Cambridge to write full-time, and gave a series of sour newspaper interviews before leaving for the Mediterranean with Elizabeth Jane, Larkin complained to Robert Conquest: “I think it wd have been more graceful of K. to glide out of Cambridge without all this public posturing. If he made a mistake in thinking he could write there that’s his fault, not anyone else’s: no need to try to put them in the wrong. I can’t imagine Majorca will be any better. Whose flat will he borrow there? Who’ll he screw?”

Robert Conquest shared with Amis a love of racy verse and a sensible anti-communism. Amis had been a Communist when he arrived at Oxford in the 1940s. (The first entry in the Letters takes a fellow Red to task for bolting the party.) But since his politics, like his literary values, were formed around the central idea of anti-authoritarianism, communism could never have held him long. With the invasion of Hungary in 1956, Amis came to feel he’d been duped and in his resentment began addressing irate letters to all the papers he read. These would continue to the end of his life. In 1975, he wrote to the Times to attack the high-ranking Labourite Tony Benn: “Mr. Raymond Fletcher seriously misrepresents me. I have never written that Mr. Wedgwood Benn has gone off his head. What I said was that he looks and sounds as if he is off his head. I feel sure he is not; but as one without training as an alienist, I offer this view with due humility.”

Amis’s right-wing dyspepsia was provoked not just by Communists and Labour politicians, but progressives of every stripe. In the Daily Telegraph he expressed his “warm approval of the Post Office plan to abandon alphabetical order in its directory listings. . . . Among the advantages of such a change would be the following: 1. It would be a change. 2. The existing system works perfectly well. 3. A great deal of expense and trouble would be called for. 4. There would be chaos during the period of change-over. 5. Nobody wants it. 6. Nobody would benefit.”

In the 1980s, he summed up the progressive philosophy as “Sod the Public,” and dismissed its exponents as “F — ing Fools.” His son Martin was one of these. Being a F — ing Fool didn’t mean you were stupid; it just meant you ought to know better. When Martin informed him he was at work on a book about nuclear weapons, Kingsley replied, “Ah, I suppose you’re . . . ‘against them,’ are you?” Kingsley angered Martin with his frequent and strident disparagement of Nelson Mandela. It wasn’t until Martin read the Amis letters and saw Mandela wasn’t mentioned at all that he realized his father had merely been baiting him, and hadn’t cared much about Mandela one way or the other.

The same goes for Amis’s liberal use of ethnic slurs and stereotypes. Describing a photographer who will be coming to visit Larkin, Amis remarks, “He’s a decent sort of shag. John Goldblatt by name — though he ate a couple of pork chops unhesitatingly enough.” This kind of language has led some to condemn Amis as racist and anti-Semitic, but it’s fairer to consider it a reluctance to leave any humorous stone unturned. Anti-Semitic jokes, he wrote to Anthony Thwaite, were “not my style, I hope.”

Two trips to America drove him even further right. The American academics he met were “all very un-American,” he wrote Larkin from Princeton in 1959. He wrote Conquest from Vanderbilt in 1967, “I met one chap who was solid on V Nam. His wife has enormous tits so he’s clearly the sort of ally one wants.” Amis was a passionate pro-American on Vietnam, wrote letters to expose the North Vietnamese use of flame-throwers, and sincerely believed that marijuana was a Soviet plot to weaken American morale. The 1980s were thus a happy time. “US intellectuals and lefties must be in a state,” he wrote Conquest, “just over Reagan generally. Good show.”

For his part, Conquest — the pseudonymous author of some of the bawdier lyrics in Amis’s New Oxford Book of Light Verse — pressed Amis not to be indiscreet. By this time, Conquest was advising Margaret Thatcher on foreign policy. The last thing he needed was for some Soviet sympathizer to remark: “and we understand that Mrs T is taking foreign policy advice from a gentleman whose man claim to fame is as the author of A Young Engine Driver Called Hunt.”

Along the way, Amis had picked up an entire menu of phobias. He had been terrified of flying since childhood, refused to spend a night alone in a house, wouldn’t travel alone, and was prey to panic attacks. Hilly would often walk Kingsley into Martin’s bedroom in the middle of the night after he’d had nightmares about “leaving his body.” Her rationale was that, in front of the children, he wouldn’t allow himself to appear as scared as he really was.

These phobias were something he almost never spoke about, except to Larkin. By the early 1970s, life had worn Amis out physically. Just turned fifty, he sounds like an old man: “No real news here: all the exciting things seem to be happening to Bob. I just prod at the sodding keyboard, more and more every month, running like buggery to stay somewhere near the same place. Off to Wopland like a fool at the end of the week — not for long. Just the feeling you want to do what you won’t be able to do again, ever, in a year or two.” By 1979, he was writing to Larkin: “On my self-pity themes, don’t tempt me, son.” At fifty-five, this great sybaritic machine had ground down.

In 1980, Jane Howard gave Amis a Johnnie-Walker-or-me ultimatum, and Amis replied: Johnnie Walker. Left without companionship, he began to eat for consolation (“It seems to calm me down”), and over the remaining fifteen years of his life grew “absolutely, tremendously fat.” His children quickly came up with a solution to his solitude. He would pay the mortgage on a house that Hilly and her third husband, then short on funds, could move into. So Amis spent the last fifteen years of his life in a chaste menage a trois with the woman he increasingly felt he should never have left.

And he began writing Larkin again, with the same puns, imprecations (“you burag you”), sign-offs ending in “bum,” and salacious humor mixed with literary wisdom — as when he explained to Larkin why he had decided to give up work on a novel with a gay narrator:

Of course since only about 17 people in the country know what a novel is, the rest will think I must be one of the boys myself. And I don’t need that, do I? . . . See, most people forget that the novelist is continuously trying to fool them into believing he’s really felt what his characters feel. So when they come to an extra convincing bit of queer’s feelings they’re going to say, “He couldn’t have invented that, he must be writing out of personal experience, the dirty . . . sodomising bugger.”

In 1985, Larkin wrote his last letter to Amis before disappearing into the hospital for treatment of an inoperable cancer. It ends: “You will excuse the absence of the usual valediction, Yours ever, Philip.”

In Experience, Martin Amis is particularly sensitive to the way the correspondence in the last decade of Larkin’s life picks up where it left off before Lucky Jim. It is the same adolescent friendship, but without the disparity in animal magnetism that took the friends on such different paths. “They are finally equal,” Martin writes, “equal before God and a godless death, and also physically and — for the first time — sexually equal.” After Larkin’s death in 1985, “the remaining decade of my father’s life, as seen here, could almost be considered detachable, like an addendum.”

Amis was far from worn out mentally. The last decade of his life was his most productive. He cranked out novels at the rate of one a year, including a half-dozen of his very best. A big problem was that Amis fell down a lot when he was drunk. After one such incident, his mind remained cloudy and he began to fail. “He keeps typing the word ‘seagulls,'” Hilly worried in 1995. “He gets up at 5 in the morning and types is and os.” Martin arrived one day to find him with a notepad filled with misremembered phone numbers, next to one of which he had written, “COMPLETELY RELAHIBLE.” His mind — surely a hellish place to inhabit for a lot of the time — had given out. He died a few days later.

For an anti-authoritarian like Amis, the difficulty lies always in discriminating between the times one is making an important stand for one’s freedom and dignity (whether as an artist or a person) and the times one is just engaging in adolescent ego-indulgence. Amis wasn’t much good at such discrimination — but then, not many people are. If he sought a portion of sensual excitement greater than the normal lot, he was unusually clear-headed about the price: a portion of trial and unhappiness greater than the normal lot. “Well, it’s all experience,” as Amis wrote to Conquest in 1989, “though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.”

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.