The novel was published in 1954, by which time Amis had been a lecturer in
English literature at University College, Swansea, for five years. He ended
up there, he claimed, because Swansea made its academic appointments rather
late and avowed that he was lucky to get the job. But he stayed until 1961,
when he transferred none too happily to Peterhouse, Cambridge. Several of
his Swansea colleagues reckoned to have identified themselves, probably
quite correctly, in Jim Dixon's march through the pomposities and
incompetences of provincial academic life. But Amis survived the spleen of
those affected by his lampoons, just as Jim Dixon managed to survive being
classified (incorrectly) as one of the angry young men who were fast
becoming fashionable. Amis rather liked South Wales, returning to it often,
and found that some of those who lived there provided excellent raw
material. It was to be the setting of one of his funniest and sourest
novels, The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize in 1986. Amis treated the
award-giving dinner with appropriate dyspepsia. The success of Lucky Jim and
a legacy left to Hilly raised the Amis lifestyle above the subsistence level
given to a university lecturer.
Amis novels in the familiar yellow and black jackets of his first publisher,
Gollancz, followed every two or three years: That Uncertain Feeling (1955),
I Like It Here (1958) and, probably funniest of all, Take a Girl Like You
(1960). They were written with fine comic assurance and in some cases were
popular enough to be filmed, though not with any great success. The year
1963 brought One Fat Englishman, which drew on his experiences as visiting
lecturer at Princeton University, an episode also described acidly in
Memoirs. He was to return to America ten years later, in 1967, this time to
Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. On occasion he could be quite warm about
America, saying that he would have gone there more often had he been able to
overcome his fear of flying. But that he never achieved and as he got older
all forms of travel, including simple train journeys, filled him with
apprehension or so he said.
By the early 1960s Kingsley Amis was fully involved with the novelist
Elizabeth Jane Howard. They met for the first time at the Cheltenham
Literary Festival in the autumn of 1962. Amis made a pass at his blonde and
sophisticated fellow panellist and was straightaway accepted. He moved out
of the family home and in with the twice divorced Elizabeth Jane, whom he
married in 1965. It was in part a literary association: he helped her with
her novels and she helped him with his. But it also soon became a stormy
one. Neither seemed willing to bridge the gaps between them of taste and
class: she liked polished dinner parties and he preferred conversations in
pubs. There were regular arguments about Amis's drinking habits. Amis left a
record of the relationship in one of his most misanthropic novels, Jake's
Thing, and they separated for good in the early 1980s.
In the mid-1960s Amis moved from Gollancz to Cape (he was to end up with
HarperCollins) and branched out from his regular terrain of comic novels
with their strong underlying vein of censure. Colonel Sun: A James Bond
Adventure (1968), which took over where Ian Fleming left off, was a thriller
he published under the pseudonym of Robert Markham. Previously, and also
pseudonymously, he wrote The Book of Bond by ``Lt-Col. Tanner''. There was
an indifferent but larky collaboration with his friend Robert Conquest, The
Egyptologists. But Amis, the professional critic who analysed how others
wrote, was adept at mastering established genres. The Green Man (1969) was
an accomplished ghost story in M.R.James style, under-appreciated when it
first came out but winning some belated admiration when it became a
television serial in 1990. The Riverside Murders (1973) showed that he could
write a detective story along with the best of them. His fascination with
science fiction had already been displayed in New Maps of Hell (1961).
There was Amis the poet, a man who felt that his collections of verse were
underestimated, and Amis the editor of poetry with The New Oxford Book of
Light Verse. There was Amis the literary critic and Amis the expert on
Kipling, Kipling and his World. Most especially, there was Amis on drink.
Alcohol, usually consumed in large quantities, played an important part in
most of his novels and he wrote a number of books on the subject. He was a
wine bibber and a spirit bibber for that matter who knew what he liked and
was vituperative about what displeased him. His restaurant column for
Harpers & Queen was eccentric, diverting and long-lasting.
Beneath the clubbable bonhomie, regularly on display at the Garrick (or
Irving, as it became in The Folks that Live on the Hill, 1990), and the
talent to amuse with funny faces and well turned anecdotes, there was a
powerful vein of melancholy. Ending Up (1974) is one of his shortest novels
and one of his bleakest, a study of the viciousness the elderly show to one
another. Thames Television's attempt to put it on screen was much too soft.
Amis had only just entered his fifties when he wrote it and possibly he
thought it better in the future to put on the mask of the old curmudgeon.
Bile was replaced by anger in Jake's Thing (1978), directed at
psychiatrists, the monstrous regiment of women in general and Elizabeth Jane
Howard in particular.
Amis acquired the reputation of being a misogynist and there was plenty of
ammunition for his critics in Stanley and the Women (1984) and The Old
Devils. The latter was the masterpiece of his curmudgeon period. It was also
highly successful as a television series. He was no favourite of feminist
writers and was glibly dubbed "a man's humorist''. For a time that probably
pleased him: he knew quite a lot about women and delighted in the least
pleasant aspects of his knowledge. But he also knew that the tide of taste
was turning against him. You Can't Do Both (1994) has a hero, Robin Davies,
whose life resembles quite closely that of the young Amis. It carries a new
mood of half-regret for past misdeeds and, notably, it is dedicated to
Hilly. But even such realisations had not prepared him for the vituperation
which greeted The Biographer's Moustache. Like Maurice Allington in The
Green Man, Amis felt he was being haunted by some very unpleasant spectres.
Kingsley Amis was appointed CBE in 1981 and knighted in 1990. He is survived
by his three children from his first marriage (Philip, the novelist Martin
and Sally) and by both his former wives.
