Sir Kingsley Amis, CBE, novelist and poet, died yesterday aged 73. He was born
in south London on April 16, 1922.
Kingsley Amis was an essentially private man who spent a great deal of his
life in the public eye and managed rather to enjoy it. His first published
novel, Lucky Jim, won him immediate acclaim in 1954, as well as the Somerset
Maugham Award. It established him as a master of invective and a man well
able to raise a guffaw from his readers, especially the male ones. For the
next 40 years Amis produced a regular flow of books which established him as
the leading British comic novelist of his generation. The tone varied
considerably but Amis picked his targets carefully and his aim was deadly
accurate. He wrote about what he knew well and made sure that he did not too
much like what he saw about him.
In March 1991 the limelight became especially strong with the publication of
his Memoirs. As he moved through his sixties Amis deliberately put on a
cantankerous face to the world: the old buffer became the old curmudgeon. He
had developed a reputation, only partly deserved, of being rude to those who
disturbed his wellbeing, such as incompetent waiters, and to those whose
opinions he derided, notably of the political Left. The image he cultivated
was much enhanced by his Memoirs, which blew up a fine old literary dust.
No book he wrote, not even Lucky Jim, attracted so much publicity on its first
appearance. In a spate of profiles Amis, usually photographed in his shirt
sleeves with his baggy trousers supported by massive braces drawn up
somewhere around his sternum, managed for the quality press many a glare
that would have done credit to Evelyn Waugh himself. Word quickly got around
that Kingsley Amis had done another demolition job, this time of well-known
names not only among the dead but also among crime of crimes the living. One
leading newspaper called the book morally repugnant and thoroughly
vindictive.
Only when that dust had settled did Memoirs become recognised at least by some
for what it was, an assembly of highly collectable anecdotes which would
have entertained any dinner party (not comprised of maiden aunts) or
literary saloon bar. The storyteller was back at work, but revealing very
little about himself apart from his dislikes: reluctance by others to stand
their round of drinks came very high on the list. Indeed, in the preface
there was a warning sentence: ``I have already written an account of myself
in 20 or more volumes, most of them called novels.'' The limelight was
there, but amidst the profiles in print and on television the private person
remained hidden.
Amis could well have argued that there was not now a great deal to hide. By
the time he entered his seventies his life had become rigidly set. During
the week he moved between his home in Primrose Hill, which was the
self-contained ground floor of a house shared with his first wife Hilly (now
Lady Kilmarnock), and the Garrick Club. At weekends, when the Garrick was
closed, a pub down the road called the Queens substituted. Amis wrote in the
morning, arrived at the Garrick about 12.30, never sat down to lunch there
before 2pm, had a few drinks afterwards, wrote again a little in the late
afternoon and very rarely went out in the evening.
His hatred of travel, if anything, magnified. He only left London in August to
holiday with friends in Swansea when the Garrick was closed. Kingsley Amis,
who had regularly played at being an old man, had at last become one.
Trouble with his legs and feet prevented him from walking more than a few
yards; the bouts of melancholia, which had been with him off and on for much
of his life, increased, often prompted by the death of another old friend.
That usually meant the loss of one more drinking companion.
A little of the limelight returned when it emerged that he had agreed for a
biography to be written despite the publication of Memoirs a couple of years
back. The author was Eric Jacobs, a journalist and fellow member of the
Garrick. Amis was probably encouraged by the fact that the "research'' would
involve a number of convivial lunches both at the Garrick and the Queens.
Despite his infirmities and persistent hypochondria Amis was still able to
take in a good quantity of wine and whisky without apparent ill-effects.
Jacobs more than once complained that he had difficulty in keeping up with
his quarry in alcohol.
Kingsley Amis came out earlier this year but already its subject's reputation
was in decline, especially among the younger, liberal-leaning literary
critics. Their venom was fiercely directed against The Biographer's
Moustache (1995) which Amis, ever ready to turn recent experiences to good
use, published shortly after the Jacobs study. The story of a literary hack
commissioned to write the biography of a Grand Old Man of Letters, who
spends more time hobnobbing with dukes than adding to his oeuvre, attracted
some splenetic reviews. By Amis standards the book was slight, but he was
sharply wounded by the mauling he received. The bounce and self-confidence
began to evaporate.
Kingsley Amis was born in Norwood, south London, into a family that had in his
own words come down a bit in the world and "slipped a rung''. He began his
education at Norbury College, which "only had two famous alumni. Me and
Derek Bentley.'' (Bentley was executed on a murder charge.) He went on to
City of London, his father's old school, and won an exhibition to St John's
College, Oxford, where he arrived "in impeccably proletarian style'' in
1941. Military service, in the Royal Corps of Signals, intervened.
At Oxford, after the interruption of his war service, he formed a number of
crucial friendships. The first was with Hilary (Hilly) Bardwell, who was an
art student and then a model head only, no stripping at the Ruskin School of
Art. A two-year affair ended in an Oxford marriage in 1948 when Hilly was
already pregnant with Amis's first son, Philip. They remained together,
despite peccadilloes on both sides, until the early 1960s and were divorced
in 1965. Amis draws on Hilly as a principal character in two of his novels.
The married period features in Take a Girl Like You and the reunion under
the same Primrose Hill roof is thinly disguised in The Folks that Live on
the Hill.
The second great Oxford friendship was with the poet and librarian Philip
Larkin, one of the few people apart from Hilly for whom Amis had almost
unreserved admiration "the best poet I know apart from Housman''. Larkin and
Amis were united in a love of jazz and their glee in debunking other
writers, especially those on the Oxford syllabus. Larkin went through early
drafts of Lucky Jim suggesting alterations, he was the dedicatee of the
finished product and a street where he lived for a time even provided the
surname of the hero, Jim Dixon. The friendship of the two men was to remain
until Larkin's death and Dixon was to become recognised, quite quickly, as
one of the great comic creations of 20th-century fiction.
