Life with Kingsley
by NIH literary editor St. Clair Carr
Reviewed in this article:Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography, St. Martin's Press
Kingsley Amis, Memoirs, HutchinsonYou may have noticed that reviews on this site often compare books. This review, for example, is going to compare two. The NEW IMPROVED HEAD literary staff like to compare books because we don't have a lot of ideas, and stunts like comparing books help us to come up with ideas for reviews.
Paucity of ideas did not afflict the subject of this week's review, though. He was rarely at a loss for something to write. He had ideas up the wazoo. For he was Sir Kingsley Amis.
Kingsley Amis wrote twenty-two novels and co-wrote another. He published seven collections of poetry and five works of criticism, plus plays, short stories, records, and on and on.
Some of his work is very good, some is very bad, but on the average his work is more accomplished and more intellectually respectable than most. We in the literary department have always admired his style, which is notably clear, unaffected, and effective. He even shares NEW IMPROVED HEAD's distaste for phonetic transcription of dialogue (discussed in an earlier article). We also admire his provision of intellectual content in his novels. Although we often do not agree with his ideas, we much prefer reading something which appears to have been written by someone with an active intellect to reading the typical contemporary literary work.
So I was of course interested when I found a copy of Eric Jacobs' 1995 biography of Amis in a remainder bin recently. If you are familiar with the reviews on this site, you know that the literary department has a special interest in biography. That interest isn't great enough for us to pay list price for a so-called authorized biography, but $6.99 (Canadian) was an attractive price, so I bought it.
The book turned out to be an elaboration of Amis's memoirs, published four years earlier. Jacobs incorporated large amounts of material from the memoirs and then tried to fill in the gaps Amis had left. Well, it's a plan and it works pretty well, at least in producing a thorough account of Amis's life outside of writing.
It turns out that most of the gaps were filled by teaching, marrying and divorcing twice, raising a family, womanizing, and drinking. His oeuvre is all the more impressive for having been written in what must have been only brief intervals between these other activities.
Jacobs was a friend of Amis's, and his biography is an authorized one. Probably as a result he presents an amateur psychological analysis of Amis's womanizing which is relatively sympathetic to Amis, resolutely ignoring more obvious and less flattering interpretations. Even if Jacobs' analysis were persuasive, though, one would still wonder why one should care.
Knowing why Amis couldn't keep it in his pants is of no possible value to me. I didn't even know the man. I didn't even know he couldn't keep it in his pants. I didn't even need to know that.
It turned out, however, that Jacobs was following the example of his friend and subject. After reading Jacobs I read the book on which it so depended, Amis's Memoirs. A more accurate title for this book would be Bar Stories.
In the preface Amis described his book as a collection of essays or sketches. "Sketches" is much the more appropriate word, sketches of the type you hear from the bore at the bar who regales you with embarrassing anecdotes of important people he has known – oh, that Philip Larkin, he was a cheap one; oh, that A. J. Ayer, he was a vain one; oh, that Leo Rosten, he was a cheap and vain one.
To be fair to Amis, much of the book consists of gracious and balanced tributes to people he had known, but the problem is that more of it consists of unbecoming and unbalanced slagging. It is a disappointing performance from someone with his talent and mind. On the whole it has too many unpleasant moments occasioned by the retailing of irrelevant and embarrassing anecdotes, especially about the dead. The sketches generally contribute nothing to our understanding of the people sketched. And when compared to the sprightly anecdotal work of our own Mavis W., the book just seems malicious, irrelevant, and clumsy.
There are also some sketches on more general topics (the army and the USA, for example) which are largely uninformative – I know that because two days after reading them I can't remember a word of them. The problem with both books is that they are not really about the important topics, to the general public, in Amis's life. These topics are his development as a writer, as a literary critic, and as a social critic.
For example, his first novel, Lucky Jim, is very entertaining but it is at bottom formula fiction. Within a few years Amis was writing much more accomplished work, but nothing is said which might explain that development, or most other literary developments in his career.
His slow drift from the left wing of the Labour party to the centre-right of the Conservative party is also only sketchily documented and poorly explained. Since Amis was known for his highly important observation that the only guide to politics should be self-interest (an observation which NEW IMPROVED HEAD endorses), one might have thought that Jacobs would investigate the role of self-interest in his political thought. One might have thought that the high priority which Amis placed on maintaining a good school system would also have been examined to see how it conflicted with the priority he claimed to assign to self-interest. If one had thought that, one would have been disappointed.
Contemporaries are often badly mistaken in assessing the careers of writers. Amis does not seem to me to be a great writer, although fifty years from now history may have shown that judgment to be hasty. He is, though, certainly a very good writer, and a critic with forthright, bold, unaffected, and useful opinions. He deserves a biography which concentrates on how he became such a writer and critic rather than on the drunken escapades of his illustrious chums or on his obsession with having sex with every attractive woman he saw.
Life with Kingsley © John Fitzgerald, 2002
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