Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

  KINGSLEY AMIS (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he went to the City of London School on the Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961 became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing and teaching (“I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day”). Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in 1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband.

  HOWARD JACOBSON is the author of eleven novels, among them Kalooki Nights and the Booker Prize–winning The Finkler Question. He writes a weekly column about culture for The Independent and has published several works of nonfiction, including Roots Schmoots and Seriously Funny.

  OTHER BOOKS BY KINGSLEY AMIS

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  The Alteration

  Introduction by William Gibson

  The Green Man

  Introduction by Michael Dirda

  Lucky Jim

  Introduction by Keith Gessen

  The Old Devils

  Introduction by John Banville

  One Fat Englishman

  Introduction by David Lodge

  GIRL, 20

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  Introduction by

  HOWARD JACOBSON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1971 by Kingsley Amis

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Howard Jacobson

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Eric Hanson

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Amis, Kingsley.

  Girl, 20 / by Kingsley Amis ; introduction by Howard Jacobson.

  pages; cm. — (New York review books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-663-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Girl, twenty.

  PR6001.M6G5 2013

  823'.914—dc23

  2013015573

  eISBN 978-1-59017-690-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  GIRL, 20

  Dedication

  1. Imperialist Racist Fascist

  2. Something Soft

  3. The Night of the Favour

  4. Great Wag

  5. Absolute Rock

  6. Christian Gentleman

  7. Copes’s Fork

  8. Pigs Out

  9. The Other Bloke

  10. All Free Now

  Introduction

  Girl, 20, Kingsley Amis’s ninth novel, was published in 1971, seventeen years after Lucky Jim, his first. In that time, by his own admission – in 1967 he published an essay entitled ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’ – Amis appeared to change from being a sharp-tongued radical, who enjoyed scuttling British dufferdom in all its forms, to being an even sharper-tongued satirizer of progressiveness. It’s easy to see this as a familiar descent (or ascent, depending where you’re coming from) from idealism into disillusionment, but one shouldn’t make too much of it politically, even if Amis himself decided to. In the first place, his radicalism was always soft and commonsensical, rooted in Anglo-Saxon decency, wary of too much change and suspicious of grandiosity. That almost goes without saying in a comic writer, for whom the fashionably new will always look as absurd as the unfashionably old. And, secondly, something happened between Lucky Jim and Girl, 20 that had nothing to do with Amis’s own temperament. That something was the 60s.

  The year before the publication of Girl, 20, the American hyper-journalist Tom Wolfe coined the phrase ‘radical chic’ to pillory the new sentimentalizing of extremist groups – in this instance the Black Panthers – by America’s white and wealthy intellectual elite. At the start of an essay for New York magazine, Wolfe wickedly imagines the great composer and conductor ‘Lenny’ Bernstein waking up in the early morning of his 48th birthday ‘in a state of wild alarm’. Groggy, he rises from his bed. Then, suddenly, he has a vision. He sees himself walking out on stage in white tie and tails and delivering an anti-war message to the adoring ‘starched white-throated audience’. He sits in a chair and picks up a guitar – that symbol of populism. ‘I love,’ he tells the concert hall.

  Any connection between Lenny Bernstein and Sir Roy Vandervane, the eminent composer-conductor, whose descent into voguish politics and youth-crazed philistinism Girl, 20 mercilessly charts, is probably coincidental; but they are both archetypal figures of the time or, to put that another way, they are both conjured out of the same nightmare – that, after the capitulation of educated men to the child-speak of the 60s, we will never inhabit a serious culture again. In this way, Amis’s novel and Tom Wolfe’s extended essay – it was reprinted in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers – deserve to be read in tandem, as twin comic indictments of the failure of the 60s intelligentsia to remember its function, its honour and its dignity.

  Running through the erotic possibilities that might still be left to him as a sexually incontinent, ageing man – homosexuality, beyond younger women, flagellation, etc. – Sir Roy Vandervane crosses ‘those other capers’, necrophilia and bestiality, off the list too. ‘No point in even discussing any of them,’ he says. ‘It would just be flogging a dead horse.’

  It’s one of those good, snortingly bad bar-room jokes you expect from Kingsley Amis. But that’s not quite the end of it. Amis is a novelist, not a comedian, which means that the jokes, when they come, are all about who makes them. This one is very much Roy Vandervane’s; we don’t doubt he has made it before and will make it again. As a serial philanderer and plunderer, everything he does, he does again, and everything he does, however questionable, he takes pride in. ‘Surely you got that?’ he says, wanting to be certain that the person to whom he has made the joke this time is alive to it. ‘Oh yes, I got it all right,’ that person replies. ‘I just wanted to make sure you had.’

  It’s all very childish and rude in the way that clever men who are friends and on the half-loose will be childish and rude with one another – straight-faced and quick, and no limits placed on
subject matter, but with an undertow of undeclared seriousness. The recipient of Sir Roy Vandervane’s preposterous speculations about the nature of desire is the music critic Douglas Yandell, the novel’s narrator, a bachelor at a bit of a sexual dead-end himself, and a friend and admirer of Sir Roy’s, called in by the composer’s wife to dissuade him from his latest escapade, which, while it does not embrace necrophilia or bestiality, does entail a younger woman – not Girl, 20 but Girl, Something Even Worse: Girl, 17. What Douglas wants to make sure Roy has ‘got’ is not only his own good bad joke but the dire consequences, to all parties, of dating Girl, 17 when you’re Man, A Hell of a Lot Older Than That. The joke, in other words, is no joke at all.

  That essentially – the joke of Sir Roy Vandervane’s incorrigibility turning out to be unfunny and even tragic – is the story, and it’s plenty to be going on with. Kingsley Amis can make a lot happen with moral indignation. ‘Irresponsibility’, he once said in an interview, ‘is what Girl, 20 is about.’ That’s a heroically plain, not to say solemn statement for a comic novelist to make. But then, from his very first novel, Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis always did operate at the more homespun, moralizing end of the comic-writing spectrum, his satire a check on humanity’s outlandishness, a defence of fair play and honourableness, rather than a revelling in selfish appetite and disorder – more Fielding, in other words, than Rabelais.

  Which is not to say that taking on irresponsibility as a subject precludes having fun with it. Sir Roy Vandervane’s irresponsibility is of monstrous proportions, and not a single murky alley-way of the deviousness he employs to get his way is left unexplored: the ‘favours’ he exacts from his friend Douglas, to whom he as good as pimps his daughter; the egregious language of self-justification he employs; his energy for deception; his ‘arse-creeping to youth’; his raging at ‘absent or largely imaginary foes’; the slurring of his speech on political and arse-creeping grounds (‘Spot of corm beef,’ he orders faux-democratically for lunch, and ‘some tim pineapple’); not to mention the baffling charm of the man, that ‘system of total permissiveness towards himself that made him such agreeable company’ – all this is rendered with so good an ear for his idiosyncracies, and such fondness-in-disgust, that we feel we know what it’s like just to cross the street with him, never mind to become complicit, as Douglas allows himself to be, in his affairs.

  And if he is (at times lumberingly) witty in himself, he is also, like Falstaff, the cause that wit is in others.

  ‘I don’t know anything at all about her,’ his wife says of the new girl in her husband’s life – she was, of course, the new girl herself in her time – ‘but they’ve been running at about twenty to twenty-two over the last three years or so. Tending to go down. Getting younger at something like half the rate he gets older. When he’s seventy-three they’ll be ten.’

  The fact that these calculations point to an eventual criminality, if Sir Roy keeps going long enough, doesn’t make them any the less absurd. Fascinated by the grotesque mathematical trajectory, Douglas Yandell keeps up the game: ‘And when he’s eighty-three,’ he throws in, experimentally, ‘they’ll be five.’

  Sir Roy Vandervane has done the sums himself, but that doesn’t stop him deciding to leave his wife and family for Girl, 17, a decision which Douglas Yandell tries to counter with some unblinkingly cynical advice: ‘Why can’t you just stay put officially and see a lot of Sylvia on the side?’

  Not just see her, notice, but see a lot of her. How much fairer can one be?

  ‘No,’ says the besotted Vandervane. ‘I’ve had enough of that. So’s she.’

  Which is the cue for the great ‘decency’ speech one expects in every Kingsley Amis novel, the moment when the comic gloves come off and the necessary home-truths are delivered with a plainness that seems to belong to a different sort of work.

  If you’ve had enough of it, then pack it in. And how do you mean, had enough? You talk as if you’ve the spent the last couple of years fighting in the jungle. What you’ve had getting on for enough of, no doubt, is making other people’s lives a misery while you’re watching . . . Do you understand what I’m saying?

  That’s Douglas telling it like it is, but Amis is too good a novelist not to allow Vandervane a biting riposte. ‘I’ll take criticism’, he answers, ‘from chaps who’ve been in my situation and chosen differently. No one else.’

  What’s at stake, though, in the great musician’s arse-creeping after youth is more than an infatuation with a fool of a girl for whom he is prepared to ditch his family, there is also the small matter of Elevations 9 (grossly echoing Girl, 20), a chamber concerto for violin, sitar, bass guitar and bongoes that Sir Roy has written in a parallel attempt to get the young to love him. And it is here that Douglas Yandell’s speeches on behalf of decency take on a wider cultural application and grow more bitter. As Vandervane descends into a farcical musical underworld, it occurs to Douglas that he has finally lost him, that he no longer ‘cares’, that he has made his peace with a culture that positively dislikes ‘the idea of the difficult being made to seem easy’, a culture that doesn’t care about the difficult seeming anything at all, come to that, that likes, in so far as it knows what it likes, ‘the easy seeming easy’.

  That, in the end, is the indictment that really matters – not Sir Roy Vandervane’s misjudged passion for a near-minor, but his defection from the difficult to the easy, from accomplishment to celebrity. He was a serious musician and now he isn’t. You’ll . . . be helping to make music look like just another fun thing and now thing,’ Douglas tells him. ‘And that’s a disgraceful thing to do.’

  There are times when Amis’s attacks on the culture of the young, the music they like to hear and the places they like to hear it in – ‘ruffianly ululation’ in ‘abodes of muck’ – feel distinctly Bufton-Tuftonish. That particular battle has been fought too many times, and forty years after Girl, 20, has been well lost. But the picture of a cultivated man and his family going to the dogs remains powerful, because of the novel’s gathering moral and intellectual bleakness, expressed through Douglas Yandell’s own unravelling. His decency, too, is lacklustre; his downward spiral into a sort of slack permissiveness, hating what Vandervane is doing to himself but always half conniving in it, is described in almost comic Dantesque imagery, as Vandervane, like an anti-Virgil, takes him down into a succession of deep, dark, hateful cellars and disused warehouses dedicated to what’s ‘fun’ and what’s ‘now’. Douglas Yandell doesn’t lose grip on his indignation, but the claustrophobic sense of hellish pointlessness that seizes him is of another order of distress. The final chapter is entitled ‘All Free Now’. Never has the word ‘free’ been made to sound so desolate.

  —HOWARD JACOBSON

  GIRL, 20

  To Mary and Mike Keeley

  One: Imperialist Racist Fascist

  ‘Is this chap really as good as you say?’ asked Harold Meers.

  ‘Well yes. He may be even better. In the sense that it’s a bit early to tell. At his stage you can’t be sure whether—’

  ‘You mean technique and that sort of thing.’

  ‘More than that,’ I said. ‘It’s . . . He understands the music he plays. You’ll see there that I’ve—’

  ‘I should have thought they all did that.’

  ‘They all don’t, believe me.’

  ‘By definition.’ Harold added suddenly, as if in simple wonderment, ‘He’s from East Germany.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘One of the most backward and corrupt and tyrannical regimes in the world. Outside black Africa, of course.’

  ‘No doubt. It hasn’t stopped Kohler being a cracking good pianist. Perhaps it should have done, but it hasn’t.’

  ‘As you know, I had reservations about running a music column in the first place. People don’t go to concerts any more, they buy records. All part of the stay-at-home culture. We deal with them already. And the whole thing goes on here, anyway. Manchester. Birmingham. Once in a bl
ue moon. You’ve heard me say this isn’t a London newspaper, it’s a national newspaper. Is he a Jew?’

  Harold said all this at his usual regular pace and level pitch, his small hands (joined on to small arms and by way of them to small shoulders) loose and palm upwards on his desk, the weak sunshine gleaming tranquilly on his nearly bald head. His style of discourse, with the mild strain it laid on his hearer’s attention and powers of recall, was as usual too. One item, indeed, had strained my lot to breaking-point. I had not known that he had had reservations about my having become, a few months previously, the paper’s music critic, or rather musical-events reporter. He had told me then that this innovation, dreamed up by him alone as the first blow in a campaign to raise cultural standards in journalism generally, had been fought through by him alone in the teeth of opposition from his proprietor, his features editor and perhaps the liftman. Facing him now in his large, modern and shabby office, I answered his question truthfully.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Do we need to advertise these bastards? What about the do where there was that dust-up, you know, that Bolivian song-and-dance lot last Friday? People read about the hooligans busting in and being arrested and so on, but what about the actual stuff? A bit less esoteric than Telemann and Prokofiev and who’s this other chap?’

  ‘There was Beethoven too. I heard the Bolivians rehearsing, and I didn’t think they really—’

  ‘A critic ought to go easy with his superlatives.’ Harold dropped his lustrous brown eyes to my copy that lay before him, and for a moment I thought he was reading it. ‘We didn’t put politics into art,’ he went on very soon. ‘They did. You do realize, don’t you, that this chap’s only allowed abroad because he’s a loyal and trusted servant of that bloody awful regime? A walking advertisement for it?’