Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  That novel went through several drafts over several years, guided by extensive comments from Philip Larkin, especially when Amis was rewriting the penultimate version, entitled ‘Dixon and Christine’, which was submitted to and rejected by the publisher Michael Joseph. Leader gives a detailed and fascinating account of this revision process, during which Amis constantly consulted Larkin, who assisted him to a remarkable extent, suggesting significant changes in emphasis and structure which Amis invariably adopted. ‘The help Larkin gave Amis with Lucky Jim was crucial to its success, as Amis fulsomely acknowledged, both in public and private,’ says Leader. Larkin could not, however, conceal from other friends some jealousy of the literary fame Lucky Jim and its successors brought to Amis, and developed a grievance against him on this score. Leader observes: ‘In later years Larkin would sometimes grumble about not being properly credited for the amount of help he gave Amis with Lucky Jim. He once told Maeve Brennan . . . that Amis had “stolen” Lucky Jim from him. He cannot, though . . . have meant this seriously.’ The success of the novel did, however, significantly affect their friendship, as did Amis’s reports of his ever-accumulating sexual conquests, which Larkin received with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and envy that he put into a poem, ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’, which he wrote in 1959 and revised at intervals up till 1970. He was never completely happy with it, and by his own wish it was not published in his lifetime. It begins:

  After comparing lives with you for years

  I see how I’ve been losing: all the while

  I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.

  Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well.

  And it ends:

  It’s strange we never meet each other’s sort:

  There should be equal chances, I’d’ve thought.

  Must finish now. One day perhaps I’ll know

  What makes you be so lucky in your ratio.

  One of those ‘more things’, could it be? Horatio.

  The last line, which identifies the poem as a letter from Horatio to Hamlet, alluding to a famous speech in Shakespeare’s play (‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .’) seems an obvious afterthought designed to disguise its biographical and autobiographical sources.2

  Amis’s philandering, and Hilly’s less promiscuous infidelities, seem to have reached a kind of peak during the latter part of a year spent in America at Princeton University in 1958–9, where he gave the Gauss Seminars at the invitation of R.P. Blackmur (choosing science fiction as his topic, on the shrewd assumption that his audience would not know much about it) and taught creative writing. Leader describes it as ‘the wildest year of their marriage’. Amis and Hilly had simultaneous affairs with their neighbours the McAndrews, and according to one observer, Betty Fussell, they ‘inspired a whole year of husband-and-wife-swapping’ at Princeton, though Kingsley was the main instigator, propositioning every attractive woman he met regardless of her marital status. ‘It was compulsive,’ commented another Princeton friend. Amis’s own explanation, or excuse, was that for him sex was a way of exorcising the fear of death, and this theme can be discerned in his fourth novel, Take a Girl Like You (1960), whose hero muses in characteristic Amis style:

  All that type of stuff, dying and so on, was a long way off, not such a long way off as it had once been, admitted, and no doubt the time when it wouldn’t be such a long way off as all that wasn’t such a long way off as all that, but still. Still what?

  Take a Girl Like You describes the long campaign of the cynical and selfish Patrick Standish to overcome the old-fashioned moral principles of the heroine, Jenny Bunn, and take her virginity. It was a carefully crafted novel of acute social observation, a kind of elegy for an era of sexual decorum and restraint that would soon be superseded by the permissive society, and that Amis had already left far behind in private life.

  Swansea must have seemed even more of an academic backwater on their return from Princeton, and Amis seriously considered settling in America, but the offer of a fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge kept him in England. He was, however, never really comfortable in this post. It was a college appointment in which the University’s English Faculty had no say, and Amis was cold-shouldered by some of the latter’s members. F.R. Leavis famously remarked that Peterhouse had hired ‘a pornographer’ (revealing complete ignorance of Amis’s novels or pornography, or both, for Amis’s fictional treatment of sexual intercourse is notably reticent). Peterhouse was hospitable but not much interested in literature as a subject. (It was symptomatic that an economic historian among the Fellows couldn’t see what was funny about the title of Dixon’s article in Lucky Jim.) Also Amis’s tutoring duties, which he carried out conscientiously, were quite taxing. In 1962 he met Robert Graves, the visiting Professor of Poetry at Oxford, whose work he had always admired, and this led to a visit to Graves’s home in Deya, Majorca, that summer, which was so enjoyable that Amis decided to resign his fellowship in 1963 and spend a year with his family on the island. It was a surprising decision for a writer who had famously attacked the literary cult of ‘abroad’, in I Like It Here, and Leader plausibly speculates that Amis had reached some kind of dead end in his life from which he was desperate to escape, like the anti-hero of the novel on which he was then working, One Fat Englishman. I shall return to this interesting novel.

  The planned year with the family in Majorca did not happen. At this juncture Amis met the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, appropriately and fatefully at a literary festival seminar on Sex in Literature. Jane, as she was known familiarly, was posh, talented, and beautiful, in her second unhappy marriage. They began a passionate affair, perhaps his first real love affair, which eventually brought about the end of both marriages. Hilly went to Majorca with the children and Amis moved in with Jane in London. In due course they occupied a rather grand house on the northern outskirts of London called Lemmons and looked after Amis’s two boys, Philip and Martin, while Hilly had custody of Sally. For a while everything went swimmingly. Amis continued to turn out novels every two years or so, some of them clever exercises in genre fiction, like The Green Man (1969) a ghost story, The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) a period whodunit, and The Alteration (1976) an alternative-world tale. Over the same period Amis renounced his early socialist leanings and – partly under the influence of his old friend the historian Robert Conquest (whose First Law was ‘everybody is reactionary on subjects they know about’) and partly out of a mischievous delight in bucking the cultural trend – became a notorious media pundit of right-wing views, supporting the American war in Vietnam and opposing the expansion of university education with the slogan, ‘More will mean Worse’. Meanwhile Jane bore the brunt of maintaining a country house lifestyle without adequate funds, and got very little writing done herself. Fault lines developed in the marriage. Amis was drinking heavily, with damaging effects on his libido which sex therapy failed to cure – an experience he explored with astonishing candour in Jake’s Thing (1978). Reading this book Jane came to the conclusion that he not only didn’t love her any more, but didn’t much like her, and after a couple more years of increasingly acrimonious relations, she left him.

  Amis’s physical health and morale declined steeply. Only the lifelong discipline of writing every morning between breakfast and the first drink at noon kept him going. Even so, it took him four years instead of his usual two to produce a new novel, and Stanley and the Women (1984) proved so bitterly (and craftily) misogynist that some women publishers in America did their best to suppress the book. To excessive drinking he added excessive eating, and grew obese. He had a fall and broke his leg. He desperately needed someone to look after him, and providentially Hilly, now married to an impecunious member of the House of Lords, Alastair Kilmarnock, was willing to take on the job in return for living rent-free with her husband in Amis’s house. Martin attributes to Hilly’s return his father’s recovery from the slough of despond into which Jane’s departure had pitche
d him, evidenced by the more balanced (though still quite dark) treatment of sexuality and gender in The Old Devils (1986), and Difficulties with Girls (1988).

  With the award of the Booker Prize for the first of these books and a knighthood in 1990, Sir Kingsley Amis was set up to become a grand old man of English letters, but his last years were not serene. He developed a ‘late style’ which was almost as syntactically intricate as Henry James’s, but without the latter’s compensatory poetic eloquence or the wit of his own earlier novels, and previously loyal readers began to desert him. Drink continued to damage his body and could not exorcise his inner demons. His final illness was a distressing combination of physical collapse and mental derangement. Martin recalled that he and Philip, keeping watch beside the hospital bed of their apparently comatose father, were startled to hear him suddenly say, ‘I am in hell.’ Fundamentalist Christian moralists would no doubt see his unhappy end as divine punishment of an impenitent sinner, but his case was more complex and more interesting than that.

  Not long before his death in October 1995 I spoke at a provincial literary festival a day or two after Kingsley Amis, and read by chance an interview with him in the local newspaper in which he shocked the young woman journalist by his aggressive, alcohol-fuelled responses to her innocent questions, snarling at one point: ‘There is no God and life is absurd.’ At his memorial service, Martin recalled his father’s encounter with the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who said, ‘You atheist?’ and Kingsley replied, ‘Well, yes, but it’s more that I hate him.’ In a 1987 essay entitled ‘Godforsaken’ he declared that ‘human beings without faith are the poorer for it in every part of their lives’. Putting these disparate sentiments together we might deduce that Amis saw the world as a very dark place which was intolerable without transcendence, in the possibility of which he could not believe. The novel in which he explored most frankly the personal implications of this metaphysical double-bind was One Fat Englishman.

  In 1963, when I was a young university lecturer, I published an essay in the Critical Quarterly entitled ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’, one of the earliest articles about the work of Kingsley Amis to appear in an academic journal, in which I discussed his four novels, from Lucky Jim to Take a Girl Like You. One Fat Englishman was published in the same year, too late to be included, but when I reprinted my essay in a book called Language of Fiction, in 1966, I did not extend it to discuss that novel. The reason for this silence was that I was uncertain what to make of One Fat Englishman, and it certainly didn’t fit the general drift of my argument. I hadn’t really enjoyed reading it, and enjoyment was very much at the heart of my interest in Amis’s earlier fiction. Those books, I wrote, ‘speak to me in an idiom, a tone of voice, to which I respond with immediate understanding and pleasure’. Their heroes were quick to identify and satirically subvert any hint of pretension, affectation, snobbery, vanity, and hypocrisy in public and private life. What they stood for is most simply described as ‘decency’, and when they didn’t live up to their own code they felt appropriate remorse. The least ethical of these heroes, Patrick Standish in Take a Girl Like You, is partly redeemed by his attraction to the transparently decent heroine, Jenny Bunn, whose point of view complements and balances his.

  Roger Micheldene, the corpulent British publisher whose adventures on a brief business trip to America are chronicled in One Fat Englishman, is a very different character. He is rude, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, treacherous, greedy and totally selfish. While trying to revive an affair with Helene, the wife of a Danish philologist, he grabs every opportunity to copulate with other available women. His thoughts, and often his speech, are crammed with offensive observations about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals and Americans in general. He eats like a pig and drinks like a fish. He is quite conscious of these traits and habits, and perversely proud of them: ‘Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust, but distinguished in anger.’

  The story punishes Roger for his sins by submitting him to a series of farcical humiliations, and eventually he is sent home with his tail between his legs. But he is the hero, or anti-hero, of the novel, whose consciousness totally dominates it and with whom the authorial voice is rhetorically in collusion. That is to say, his obnoxious opinions and reactions are articulated through the same distinctive stylistic devices that were associated with the earlier and more amiable Amis heroes. The reader may guiltily catch himself sniggering at lines like: ‘At this evasion a part of Roger . . . wanted to step forward and give Helene a medium-weight slap across the chops’ or ‘a girl of Oriental appearance who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye sockets as well as eyes’. In 1963, knowing little about Kingsley Amis except through his writings, I was puzzled to know why he had taken such pains to create this vividly unpleasant character. In my memory, most other fans of his work were equally baffled and disappointed. But in the light of Amis’s subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, One Fat Englishman seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel – also funnier, in its black way – than I remembered on first reading it. It now seems obvious that Roger Micheldene was in several respects a devastating and prophetic self-portrait.

  The character’s promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking, as we now know, had autobiographical sources. On his return to England from Princeton Amis boasted in a letter to Larkin: ‘I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time . . . On the second count I was at it practically full-time . . . you have to take what you can get when you can get it, you sam.’ (This substitution of ‘sam’ for ‘see’ was part of the private language in which they communicated.) He was writing One Fat Englishman when he met Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1962. Hilly soon discovered the affair, and accompanied Kingsley on a pre-arranged trip to Italy and Yugoslavia in an unhappy mood. When he fell asleep on the beach one day she wrote on his exposed back in lipstick: ‘1 FAT ENGLISHMAN – I FUCK ANYTHING’. (A photograph of this vengeful graffito was reproduced in Eric Jacobs’s biography.) Jane read the novel in manuscript as he was finishing it in the summer of 1963, and recalled later: ‘The awfulness of Roger Micheldene really shocked me. Apart from it being funny, it was so horrible.’ They were enjoying a working holiday in Spain at the time, and she evidently did not suspect that Amis was projecting an extreme version of the man he might turn into.

  Although, as the 1962 photo shows, Kingsley was not really fat at that time, he became so later, and as gluttonous as Roger Micheldene. But whereas for Roger this is an appetite that competes for priority with the sexual (at one point, having picked up a girl at a bring-your-own-picnic, he worries about ‘the problem of retaining contact with Suzanne without giving her anything to eat’), for Kingsley, according to Martin in Experience, it displaced sex after his marriage to Jane ended: ‘getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980 . . . a complex symptom, repressive, self-isolating. It cancelled him out sexually.’ It is clear from the biographical record that Jane left Amis for much the same reasons as Helene finally rejects Roger (not before time, the reader may think) in One Fat Englishman.

  The parallels are ideological as well as personal. One Fat Englishman was written on the cusp of Amis’s movement from left to right, written almost exactly halfway between the Fabian pamphlet of 1957 in which he declared his allegiance to the Labour Party, and the 1967 essay ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’ which announced his conversion to conservatism. Many of his prejudices were anticipated by Roger Micheldene, but in the novel they have an ambivalent import. It is as if Kingsley Amis, conscious in the early 1960s of the way his values and opinions were changing, and himself half-appalled by the process, projected them into a fictional character he could simultaneously identify with and invite the reader to condemn. In a curious and interesting way Roger is similarly divided about himself. ‘Why are you so awful?’ Hele
ne asks him at a moment of post-coital candour. ‘Yes, I used to ask myself that quite a lot,’ he replies. ‘Not so much of late however.’ She finds this honesty disarming, which is exactly the effect he calculated – but it is not just calculation.

  Roger is really full of self-hatred – it is the source of the vitriolic anger he directs at almost everything and everybody in the world around him – and it is hard to disagree with the judgement of the American Catholic priest, Father Colgate, absurd figure though he is: ‘You are in acute spiritual pain.’ That Roger is a Roman Catholic of an idiosyncratic kind, who addresses God familiarly in prayer between breaking as many commandments as possible, is one of the ways in which Amis distanced himself from his anti-hero – but not so far as it might seem. Roger’s rejection of Father Colgate’s counsel is a theological harangue that anticipates Amis’s remark to Yevtushenko in 1962 about hating God: ‘Has it never occurred to you that we’re bound to God by ties of fear and anger and resentment as well as love? And do you know what despair is like?’

  We take leave of Roger weeping tears he is unable to explain as his ship slides out of New York harbour, and resolving to lift his mood by surveying the shipboard totty. ‘Something in him was less than enthusiastic about this course of action but he resolved to ignore it. Better a bastard than a bloody fool, he told it.’ Father Colgate would call that maxim ‘Obstinacy in Sin’, while Jim Dixon would have turned it the other way round. One Fat Englishman is certainly a much less comfortable read than Lucky Jim, but no longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought. To write a novel entirely from the point of view of a totally unsympathetic character is a very daring and difficult undertaking, but Amis manages to bring it off by making Roger’s transgressive awfulness the engine of anarchic comedy. The reader’s inclination to recoil in disgust is invariably checked by an irresistible impulse to laugh, though the laughter is always uneasy.