Lucky Amis

Oscar Wilde remarked that we begin by loving our parents and end by judging them. The knowingness of modern youth reverses the process. In his early teens, Martin Amis was the witness of his father’s abrupt desertion of the beloved wife, Hilly, whom he had promised his children he would never leave. Kingsley was the victim, so to say (or so he said), of a coup de foudre. At a literary festival in Cheltenham (a provincial town once symbolic of English propriety and a favorite retirement home for The Men Who Ruled India), Amis was struck by passion for Elizabeth Jane Howard. In the words of the kind of romantic formula he despised, “C’etait plus fort que lui.”

Jane--who, just before the consequent wedding, announced herself cutely to Martin as “your wicked stepmother”--was a siren whose callers included Arthur Koestler, Michael Ayrton, Kenneth Tynan and several other A-list celebs. She was also a novelist, with a somewhat elevated style, whose work Kingsley had to approve before deciding that they were a perfect match. Hilary--the mother of Martin and his tall brother Philip (two years his senior) and of their sister Sally--decamped to Mallorca, perhaps in the hope that Kingsley would follow. Martin remarks that his father was such a helpless traveller that he would not have known how to leave England, unless Jane--an improbable candidate for the job--had bought him a ticket and taken him to the airport.

The fatal year was 1963, a date which Philip Larkin was to identify as the moment when the world (that is, England) discovered Sex. It is an affliction from whose unsubtle symptoms it has suffered ever since. Larkin regretted that it had come too late for him (he was already past 40), though it clearly had not for his close chum, and regular, fawning correspondent, Kingsley.

Somewhat like Hemingway who, in his last years sought to recover early bliss with Hadley by seeking to detach her from her husband (and who, as do most addicts, blamed others for his own faults), Kingsley declared that he had always loved his first wife. He had also loved Jane Howard, but came so to detest her (when she ceased to tolerate all his vices) that he wrote a misogynistic novel, “Stanley and the Women,” which was known among the smirking classes as “Howard’s End.”

Thanks to Hilly’s and her third husband Lord Kilmarnock’s magnanimity, Kingsley lived his last fertile, and devotedly bibulous, years in a sort of menage a trois. We have, so far, been spared hints, or the auction for their serialization, of any sexual involvements with the Kilmarnocks. Kingsley was, it seems, more baby than cicisbeo (he greatly admired Byron’s “Don Juan,” in which the Venetian fan-carrying lover is satirized). Kingsley became increasingly clumsy, incontinent and lachrymose. Tearfulness--which he ascribed, in print, only to “queers” and similar low-life--was as common with him as with Bismarck, another storming and dranging tyrant who resorted to weeping when bluster failed to get him his way.

Hilly is clearly a woman of great heart, and stamina. A little like Sybil Burton, she refused to fade away after being displaced in fame’s bed. At present running a bar in Ronda, Spain, she has been all over the place, including Ann Arbor, Mich., where she once opened a fish’n’chip joint called Lucky Jim’s. If anyone did, she had the right to appropriate the title of Kingsley’s first novel, which broke the mold of postwar fiction, which was pretty moldy and oldy--and made its author both a bestseller and the captain of English letters.

He not only blew the dust (and plucked many of the feathers) off the local cocks of Frederic Raphael is the author of 20 novels as well as many story collections, biographies, screenplays (including “Eyes Wide Shut”) and translations from ancient Greek and Latin. His most recent novel is “A Double Life.” A native of Chicago, Raphael divides his time between London and southwestern France.

the walk, he was also a key member of The Movement, a loose confederation of anti-poetic poets who espoused Larkin’s sparse, unrhetorical tones. For a while it was headed by the dyarchy of Amis and John Wain, also a poet-critic-novelist from the same Oxford college, St John’s. At the time, W.W. Robson, another Oxford hotshot, remarked, “You can say one thing for Amis and Wain, they do have a sense of humor--except for Wain.” Kingsley first outshone and later dumped his partner, to Wain’s great anguish. Robson told me that Kingsley had stolen two of his best jokes and put them in “Lucky Jim.” His reward was to be bad-mouthed in Amis’ letters to Larkin. As for Wain, even when he went blind, there is no trace in all the vast compendium of Kingsley’s correspondence of a single word of commiseration.

One of the rules of literary self-advancement is to make the acquaintance of eminent practitioners. Kingsley went to Deya and called on Robert Graves in his late prime, as Martin did in the poet’s dotage. Distinction by association was later gained by Martin’s buddydom with Saul Bellow, whose every word Martin deems gospel. Graves did not, I think, remain enamored of Kingsley. It is said, among those who collect obiter dicta, that the poet once pointed across the room at a literary klatch and remarked, “That’s Kingsley Amis, and there’s no known cure.” Evelyn Waugh (another of Amis’ few admitted idols) put him down in more feline style by telling Kingsley that his surname should be pronounced “Aims.” (Waugh was also alone in calling Somerset Maugham “Doctor.”)

When starting up the snaky ladder of literary eminence, it is always prudent to adhere to a group whose aesthetic program includes the replacement of old Turks by young, old brooms by new and more sweeping ones. The New Wave editors of Cahiers du Cinema frankly announced, back in the ‘60s, that they would follow a politique des copains: push your buddies, knock the old guard. In England, this might be called the new pals’ act. The ambitions of Kingsley and his logrolling mates were passed off as zeal for the new and, above all, served notice on pretentiousness. His verse, which I admired more wholeheartedly than his novels, was traditional in form but subversive in tone and vocabulary. His lines proposing to Jesus that he stick around a bit longer, if He ever comes a second time, are irreverently suppliant: a small masterpiece.

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After Britain’s 1956 humiliation at Suez (when it was betrayed by the United States and mocked by the Gyppos), good manners became bad style: the irruption of Anglo-Saxon bawdiness was a mark of post-imperial frankness. What decorum had once required, the new disabused candor despised: Kingsley became renowned for unguarded eructation, much better known as belching, and for the brave use of four-letter words in mixed company. Among the in-crowd, the vocabulary of the barrack room replaced that of the drawing room. The fraternity (there were very few women in it) who now lorded it over English letters had almost all been in the services during the last years of the war or the first uneasy years of the peace. Larkin’s bad sight had spared him, but Lt. Amis never lost some of the commissioned snap of those once entitled to a Sam Browne belt and a swagger stick. Kingsley never saw guns fired in anger (the nearest he came, he told me, was to have heard a few) but, with nostalgia for patriotic goriness, he became a fan of James Bond (and a ghostwriter for his creator, the late Ian Fleming). Despite emotional upheavals and--later--abysmal downheavals, he also remained a prolific writer and winner of prestigious prizes.

As Kingsley would doubtless have reminded us (he resembled Anthony Burgess in the pursuit of etymologies and refilled glasses), the word “prestige” derives from the Latin praestigium, “an illusion, a conjuring trick, a deception, an imposture.” The speciousness of artistic awards has been lost on the newest generation of wunderkind who would, it seems, like nothing better than to clank like Hermann Goering with a chestful of vanities. Graves said that authors should not accept honors. Sir Kingsley, Sir David Hare, Lord Archer and Lord Bragg have hurried to the palace to collect handles which Yeats, Maugham, Shaw and others declined.

As for awards, Martin Amis does not hesitate (hesitation is not his most marked characteristic) to advertise his own chagrin at “The Information’s” failing to make the short list for the Booker Prize. His father won it a brace of times, for novels which I have not felt the vocation to read (the depiction of varieties of Welshmen was a specialty for which I never had any great appetite). Martin’s failure to make the cut was, he tells us, an occasion for loud gloating on the part of the English press (bastards all, almost, though he himself has made a pretty penny, and a tart reputation, by scribbling for the classier prints).

Young Amis belongs to a pettish even Newer Wave, for whom fame and fortune are nothing like reward enough for their mutually massaging genius. He, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens and Clive James were once such good friends that to offend one (by failing to applaud till your palms were red) was to risk abuse by all. Martin recalls, with swooning admiration, that James announced his own claim to the critical crown by declaring the ex-champ Tynan’s tauromachic “Bull Fever” to be “Bullshit.” Wow! How long did Clive have to stay up to compose (such a man does not merely write) so inspired a put-down? Of course, this cohort of crunch-tackling, hard-hitting critico-creators (like Kingsley in his day) is regularly devastated by the utter beastliness of any counter-punching from those they have spattered with cloacal epigrams.

Salman Rushdie (one of many famous friends, legates and leg-up buddies) has been deeply wounded, it appears, because he doesn’t win the Booker every year. This has given rise, on occasions, to prolonged wailing, though on others (for which small thanks are offered) he has won many awards including, I seem to remember, one for the best-Booker-of-the-quarter-century: the Bookest Prize, one might call it. Like the Roman generals who resented receiving only an ovatio rather than a full triumph, Martin is bewildered by mere adulation. By way of small compensation, he is, his memoir promises, often advised of how much casual passersby admire his work which has, one somehow gathers, had a seismic effect on English prose.

Thus Amis father and son have epicentral significance in the shake-up of Our Literature. Not since Dumas pere et fils, we are reminded, has such a thing happened. The younger Dumas reacted with something like distaste to the erotic frenzy of his father (who boasted--modestly maybe--of having spawned a hundred bastards). La Dame aux Camelias was the young Dumas’ tribute to romantic love and to the kind of woman whom his father might have loved but would soon have told to get lost. Young Martin is torn between honoring his father and seeing him for what he was: a serial adulterer even before Jane Howard swept him off her feet and into a suburban mansion where he was very happy with her until he was very unhappy with her and, as Larkin recommended, “just cleared off.”

The Bible enjoins us, strongly, not to look upon the nakedness of our fathers (after drunken Noah’s sons did it, the old antediluvian lost his primacy). Martin looks at Kingsley through eyes which, if now and again blurred with filial tears, are too schooled in accurate observation (“caress the details,” Nabokov rightly advised) not to recognize that Kingsley--whom Martin Green once ranked with George Orwell as your typical “decent Englishman”--was in many ways a self-regarding, self-indulgent hedonist and literary operator. Does a “decent man” open the door of his London hideaway to his young sons and say “I’m not alone”? Does he get pissed and then savage those who find drunkenness a disgusting daily condition? Does he, in the guise of “Memoirs,” publish lists of friends who have, allegedly, been tight with a buck and then sponge on strangers and never return their hospitality? Back in the ‘60s, he and Jane dropped in on the Cycladic island of Ios, cadged food and drink(s) and never asked us back. Would I mention things like that in public?

Martin’s attitudes are, like those of Dumas fils, in vigorous, almost outraged contrast with his father’s. Kingsley wrote a notoriously disparaging review of Nabokov’s “Lolita” (which just happened to have been sponsored by Graham Greene, a ranking heavyweight whose crown was set slightly askew by his junior’s irreligiosity), whereas Martin is a great admirer of Volodya (the first team is all on first-name terms) and of Jorge Luis Borges, whom his father never read (he preferred Anthony Powell). Nevertheless, Martin seems genuinely to believe that all of dad’s later novels were literature for the ages. He has doubts merely about an unfinished work which Kingsley himself chose to abandon. The Great Man saluted his son’s genius only with the tips of his fingers. When visiting us on Ios, he was moaning about what a lousy student the boy was. He was moaning about everything, except the unduly effusive review I had given to “The Anti-Death League,” in which tenderness broke out, briefly, as a result of his new love and later be^te noire, Jane.

“Experience” teaches us that Martin was an unprecocious prodigy. Though trendy enough, as a good son of the ‘60s, to use the cult adjective “f---ing” in his letters home from school, he had to work very hard, especially at Latin, to gain entrance to Oxford, where his father had been such a star. Martin came late and came good; he was given a deserved first-class degree in English. When roused by ambition and emulation, he could concentrate with protracted enthusiasm. He came to know almost as much poetry as Kingsley who, even in his cups, was always able to quote his own golden treasury of English verse.

One of Wain’s forgotten novels was entitled “Strike the Father Dead.” The temptation--unresisted by Philip Roth in his “Patrimony”--is to wait till the father is dead and then strike him. Edmund Gosse and Samuel Butler are eminent examples of this. Young Martin has waited for his father’s demise to perform an act of affectionate redemption. He makes Kingsley as likable, as human-all-too-human, as a complacent dipsomaniac backbiter could well hope. Mutatis mutandis, he does much the same for himself: He is a 50-year-old kid whose bad teeth and murdered cousin, Lucy (cut in pieces 20 years ago by a vile English serial killer called Frederick West), are used, just a little too blatantly, to secure our sympathy (for him). His bad teeth have clearly given him hell (I just may write a trilogy about what I suffered when I had piles and about the fundamental surgery they required) but they have also put him among the stars: Joyce and Nabokov, both men of genius, had very similar dental trials. Which only goes to show . . . or does it?

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There is in Martin a truly endearing ignorance of the effect he is having. He too has dumped early wives, and kids he still cherishes, for brighter, better women; he too has shagged to good effect (a literary editor here, an Israeli there) and, in the modern style, holds no kiss worth a damn unless the tale can be told. “Experience” is at once artful and artless: Holden Caulfield meets Herzog, and it is good. Saul Bellow has anointed Martin a goyische Jew (and, since Kingsley’s demise, his adopted son). As a Bellow quasi-by-blow, nothing offends Martin more than the allegation that “Time’s Arrow” was anti-Semitic--even at the time of publication, a committee of honor testified, in a postface, to its kosher-ization--unless it is that he is an overpaid opportunist with a weak backhand. He gives us the precise results of many of his tennis victories, which should take care of that problem. (Since Martin’s ragbaggy compendium of old letters, grievances and nicely turned elegies is starred and daggered with footnotes, many longer than the page they illuminate, may I append the remark that what was wrong with “Time’s Arrow,” if anyone really wants to know, is that it was a display of stylistic antics danced on a million graves, but who’s counting, and who cares? A hit is a hit.)

I liked “Experience” sometimes (for its wit) and I was touched sometimes: It is truly elegiac when it comes to Kingsley’s boozer’s death. I disliked its spleen, smugness, resentment and lack of self-knowledge, the marks of the pampered and the overpraised down the ages.