Battalions of Women, Rivers of Drink

Kingsley Amis is generally thought of on this side of the Atlantic as a gifted and mordantly funny but ultimately minor novelist. In England, however, by the end of his life, he had become an object of veneration — his death made the front page of every major British newspaper. Zachary Leader’s “The Life of Kingsley Amis” (Pantheon, 1008 pages, $39.95) attests to this great love: His book is exhaustive, scrupulously researched, lit with numerous flashes of Amis’s brilliance and that of his equally brilliant circle, and crammed with detail both illuminating and extraneous.Amis was born in 1922 to William and Peggy Amis, in Norbury, a suburb of London. William, in a touch that might have come from one of Amis’s own novels, was a low-ranking corporate officer in a mustard company. Peggy was a pathologically overprotective but vivacious suburban matron. The circumstances of Amis’s life until the publication of his first novel “Lucky Jim” were unremarkable for an Englishman of his time, class, aspirations, and talents: He attended a second-rate public school in London (where he nonetheless received an education in English literature and classics that might be the envy of any contemporary graduate of the Ivy League) and went up to St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1941, where he met Philip Larkin and a number of other aspiring young writers.After three-year stint in the army, he returned to complete his degree at Oxford, and met Hilary Bardwell, his first wife. Following the birth of his two sons, Philip and Martin, Kingsley found a post at the University of Swansea (in Wales, a country he detested) and began what promised to be a fairly stable life as an academic, critic, poet, aspiring novelist, and third-time father: A daughter, Sally, was born in 1954. All this would change after he published “Lucky Jim,” the genre-founding satire on university life that would set him on the path to his eventual fantastic success. (And to lifelong, unrestrained enjoyment of his two favorite indulgences: rivers of drink and battalions of women.)“Lucky Jim” is one of those books for which the overused phrase “laugh-out-loud funny” seems to have been invented. The story of a young provincial academic engaged in open war against the hideous pretensions of his peers (and of his eventual triumph), the novel introduces brilliantly the antic sensibility that would become Amis’s signature mode. Amis had small hopes for his book, which he thought too British and too narrowly focused to have much commercial appeal, but it proved to be an international sensation — behind the Iron Curtain as well as in America.After the publication of “Lucky Jim,” Amis continued writing at a fiendish pace, publishing nearly one book a year until his death in 1995 (a trait in which he resembled his close friend the political historian and poet Robert Conquest far more than the famously blocked Larkin): More than 20 novels, several volumes of poems, uncounted book reviews, columns on boozing and the high life, an important anthology of poetry, and perhaps the most serious collection of scholarly essays ever written on science fiction. But he is, in England as in America, remembered primarily for his novels — including “Take a Girl Like You,” “The Anti-Death League,” “The Green Man,” “The Alteration,” “Jake’s Thing,” and the Booker-prize winning “The Old Devils.”Nearly all the novels are, as “Lucky Jim” is at its heart, stories of sexual and class anxieties and conquests; all are deeply concerned with the inner life of the bourgeoisie, whether of the philistine or intellectual persuasion; all are marked by a crushing wit and a dark humor (which further darkened as Amis aged), although by no means bereft of the possibility of real connection between the isolate members of the human race. (Amis’s greatest fear, by his own admission, was loneliness. And his lifelong pre-occupation with it forms the underpinning of almost all of his novels). His work influenced roughly three generations of novelists, from Tom Sharpe to David Lodge to his own son Martin to Nick Hornsby — to say nothing of Felix Dennis, the man behind the lad mag, a product designed explicitly for the sensibilities of would-be Kingsleys on both sides of the pond.No biography of Amis would be complete without ample inclusion of the demonic sense of comedy he was so famous for: His Basic English exchanges with Larkin, his unmatched brilliance in impersonations of both people and machines, his love of elevated wordplay and ironic obscenity. This Oxford anecdote of Larkin’s illustrates succinctly Amis’s sense of humor:Just as [Amis] was about to collapse on the piled-up laundry … he righted himself and trotted over to us. “I’ve been working on this,” he said, as soon as introductions were completed. “Listen. This is when you’re firing in a ravine.”We listened.“And this is when you’re firing in a ravine and the bullet ricochets off a rock.”We listened again … For the first time I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.As rich as it is in moments of hilarity, Mr. Leader’s book does not hesitate to turn its scrutiny on the underlying isolation and misery of Amis’s life. His methods of coping — compulsive drinking and philandering — appear with almost unbearable clarity in Mr. Leader’s book. Indeed, every imaginable artifact of his personality — from his childish squeamishness about food to his senile dementia — may be found in the book’s pages. The whole latter half of the book is a chronicle of the progressive dissolution of Amis’s life — the divorce from Hilly, his second marriage to novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, the affairs passing slowly from joyful to joyless, the prodigious consumption of alcohol. (And, of course, his rightward shift: Amis, who began life as an Oxford-Pledge-lite socialist, finished as a vocal anti-communist and a proudly unregenerate Tory—one of the few points about which Mr. Leader is at all censorious.)And this minute level of observation, perversely, highlights the central problem of Mr. Leader’s book. In attempting to encompass Amis as a figure, Mr. Leader loses all sense of scale. Things only remotely associated with Amis — Larkin’s tastes in pornography, the adventures of Hilly after the divorce — receive nearly the same weight as the most critical facts of Amis’s own life. “The Life of Kingsley Amis” is rich and rewarding reading, but its subject remains, in the end, a dense agglomeration of events, anecdotes, quips, triumphs, and humiliations, never quite becoming the psychologically whole figure one would expect from such an impressive, even magisterial book.A man’s life, even if he is a novelist, lacks form; and it remains a living question whether it is the task of a biographer to impart that form. Amis fans (and anyone interested in 20th century literature more generally) ought to be grateful for Mr. Leader’s book, whatever its flaws — and not solely because, in light of its absolute exhaustiveness, it seems impossible that another such will ever be written.Mr. Munson last wrote for these pages on the poet Peter Gizzi.

Battalions of Women, Rivers of Drink

Battalions of Women, Rivers of Drink

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