KINGSLEY begat Martin, as nearly everyone must know by now, and these two books delve deep, in their different ways, into the fate of the House of Amis. Those who resent the attention that father and son have received, and who can't be doing with the father's abrasive opinions, should steel themselves to experience both books. Martin Amis - Kingsley's "pale, posturing shadow", according to his old-devilish fan, Julie Burchill - has come up with a terrific memoir which includes a consummate review of his father's letters and of his books.
"What a feast is awaiting chaps when we're both dead and our complete letters come out." This refers to Amis senior's correspondence with the poet Philip Larkin: the Amis end of that occupies almost all of the early part of this book of more than a thousand pages. The Kingsley Amis disclosed in the early letters is full of confidence, and full of fear, and full of fun. The letters to Larkin are one long sustained word-play, youthful, wicked, infinitely clever, indefatigably rude, all yelling capitals, mistypings both inadvertent and intentional, groans and grues, ughs and aarghs (on a later occasion an och is flung at myself for being Scottish). There are bums galore and each letter to Larkin signs off with one, in lieu of a "Yours sincerely", as in "Epipsychidion bum, Kingsley".
The letters to Larkin contain statements of the literary approach which the two of them worked out for themselves, and for others. Amis writes in 1950: "I feel the time for originality has gone by; what we want to do is to purge English po: of offences against metre, decent humility, meaning (ie, stop verbal music bum and inchoate image bum) . . . Above all, let there be no self-indulgence in po:" "Po:" is short for poetry, you see. Six years later, he called his novels "primarily comedies", and then complained of being rated, by English reviewers, "either a farcical comedian or a kind of seedy immoralist", or a social commentator. It does no harm to see his works of art as discursive farces, meant to give pleasure and to teach lessons. He was keen on pleasure. Not keen on pain. Pain was for enemies.
Save for his relations with his children, all aspects of his devoted and disciplined, while also wild and phantasmagoric, life are exposed in these selected letters. Marriage, remarriage, and a late return to the same roof as his first wife, Hilly. Writing, drinking, jazz, jealousies, the adulteries he "lived for", according to his son, "in his manly noon". The move from left to right, which didn't happen overnight: as late as 1962 he was still denouncing the "ex-liberal anti-liberal cynic" he was presently to become. The epistles to Larkin, love letters though they can read like at times, contrast sharply in tone and texture with a series of impassioned letters to his second wife. Irony, not to mention obscenity, has gone. A certain simplicity descends. She is his "dearest first-class bird". "Jane had been around, and at a high level - higher than my father's," reports Martin. Kingsley wrote, of his no longer feeling drawn to other women: "When you've had champagne and orange juice a glass of South African red isn't so appealing. And thanks to you I have dismissed for ever any lingering doubts about masculinity and all that."
The break with Jane Howard brought bitter words from him, and a time when the partly put-on paranoid and misogynistic sentiments of the past seemed to have entered the soul. This bad time affected his fiction. Then came a return to form, with the autobiographical You can't do both, one of his best books. The face-pulling mimic of his early days was sometimes to wear, in old age, the face of a baleful Evelyn Waugh baby and colonel. The Kingsley of earlier times had been debonair, kind, and considerate, while also the opposite. In being vulnerable he could often be frightening. Masculinity is like that.
Not all his known letters are here, and Martin Amis did not preserve those he received from his father. The editor has done well in shepherding a complicated text: the anti-Modernist of Kingsley Amis's Movement days was capable of epistolary passages that remind you of Finnegans Wake. There are a few footnotes too many, but no-one would want to be denied the note that reads: "Amis has typed the stems of the three exclamation marks after 'Feelrump' in black (using the singe quotation key) and the three dots in red; after 'BULLPIZZLE' the stems are red and the dots black."
Amis did not wish to be thought seriously anti-Semitic, and had Jewish friends, but he didn't mind talking about "Yids". Of former friend, the unreliable Henry Fairlie, he writes: "The only thing I can't quite accept about Henry is that he isn't an Irishman. Still, he is a Scot, and that, I suppose, is the next best thing, what?" That colonel-like "what" might suggest irony, but it's clear that the Scots were among the many peoples whom he saw as aliens. This did not stop him writing the words for a musical, Coronation Ode, performed in 1953 in Glasgow.
The authority wielded in their youth by Amis and Larkin has a parallel in the ascendancy of two devilish Scots journalists who wrote for Blackwood's in the early nineteenth century - Lockhart and John Wilson. In much the same vein as Amis did, Blackwood's attacked Keats, viewed in Edinburgh as a despicable Cockney. Having read his letters, Kingsley, a bit of a Cockney himself, declared: "I know now that Keats was a boring, conceited, self-indulgent silly little fool . . . as well as an incompetent, uninteresting, affected, non-visualising, Royal-Academy-picture, salacious, mouthing poet." Salacious? Both duos specialised in "cutting people up", in conspiring against the conspiracies around them.
Kingsley Amis spoke against short people, and his son Martin has never been all that tall. And he spoke against, and didn't always finish, Martin's novels. In the light of such information, Martin's memoir might seem a miracle of forbearance, but what comes across is more in the nature of a candid and finely qualified generosity of heart. Martin Amis is strongly filial and strongly paternal, but this is not a special-pleadingly filial book. It is subtly understanding of Kingsley's compulsions. This successful and masterful chap was gripped by colourful phobias: unable to suffer fools, or to fly, loth to be in the house at night alone, or to leave it alone on expeditions. He found very little in the way of champagne in the work of other writers: "He didn't like Nabokov either," writes his son, "or anybody else, except for Anthony Powell."
The memoir concentrates on Martin Amis's life as a son and remarrying parent, on the murder, by Frederick West, of Amis's cousin, Lucy Partington, on the discovery of a grown-up daughter, Delilah Scale, and on his teeth: the extended nightmare evocation of the fight to deal with chronic dental problems ends with a devastating glance at the story of his squandering on "cosmetic" surgery a fortune in publishers' advances.
The memoir moves in a mysterious way, mingling early and late, and circling back to this or that key episode. And it is hung with footnotes, which carry important material and which can give the impression that the book has been hurried into print along with its afterthoughts. This is hardly a major hazard, though it takes some getting used to. Kingsley once questioned Virginia Woolf's ability "to describe an event in terms that make it clear what actually took place", and he felt the same way, in his desire for plain speaking, about some of his son's descriptions. Martin Amis leaps, and takes risks. He can be fanciful. Step forward, as inspiration, the unconscious mind. Father and son diverge in matters both of style and of novelistic structure, as Martin's friendship, strangely intense, with the now very old, but still fecund, American novelist Saul Bellow might almost seem designed to proclaim.
Martin Amis believes that in the modern novel a revolutionary turn towards "the higher autobiography" has come about. His father forswore fictional autobiography, while also practising it on occasion, after his own fashion; forswearing it went with his taste for character, plot, and plainness. Martin once blamed Philip Roth for being autobiographical: "Writing about writers, writing about writing: his compulsive self-
circlings, I felt, were stifling his energy and his comedy. Something was missing: other people." His drift here is that he then came to feel somewhat differently. The novelist Martin Amis has certainly proved closer in a number of ways to Roth, and to Bellow, than to his dad.
This is not meant to convey that a choice has to be made between father and son. At my local bookshop the memoir is currently outselling the letters. To each his own. But to exalt one of these two books at the violent expense of the other is an act of brutality, one which eager reviewers were never going to lose their opportunity to commit.
KARL MILLER
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