Friday 7 January 2011

Boozing with Kingsley Amis: On Drink (Jonathan Cape First Edition)

Having begun the year with Kingsley Amis – and, come to think of it, ended the previous year with him as well – I thought I'd round off the first week of this new decade with him too (unless of course tomorrow's Lewes Book Fair turns up a tome so knee-tremblingly exciting that I'm compelled to blog about it straight after), not least because it gives me another chance to plug Michael Barber's excellent essay on Amis. Mind you, given the subject matter of this particular book, it might have been more fitting to post this on New Year's Eve...


This is the UK hardback first edition of On Drink, published by Jonathan Cape in 1972. It's a collection of essays on all manner of booze-related matters, from alcoholic literature to drinks recipes, home bar advice to thoughts on wine, imbibing abroad to hangover cures, and more besides. It is, as you'd expect, caustic, witty, wry and amusing: the introduction, for example, deals with reasons for drinking  – "A team of American investigators," Amis writes, "concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War" – and the ruination of English pubs; "With some shining exceptions," he notes, "of which my own local is one, the pub is fast becoming uninhabitable." Plus ça change...

Elsewhere in its 112 pages, the chapter on 'Actual Drinks' offers both traditional and highly individual recipes. As a fan of Mad Men, I found the recipe for Don Draper's tipple of choice, The Old-Fashioned, instructive, while the one for 'Evelyn Waugh's Noonday Receiver' is a priceless piece of dry brevity:

1 hefty shot gin
1 (1/2-pint) bottle Guinness
Ginger beer

Put the gin and the Guinness into a pint silver tankard and fill to the brim with ginger beer. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the attribution, which I heard in talk, but the mixture will certainly revive you, or something. I should think two doses is the limit.

I love the "or something" there.

The photograph on the front cover is by John Goldblatt, who Amis worked with on journalistic assignments. According to The Economist's review of Amis's Zachary Leader-edited Letters (2000), "When a photographer called John Goldblatt is sent to work with [Amis] on a magazine assignment, Amis writes to [Philip] Larkin that Goldblatt 'ate a couple of pork chops unhesitatingly enough,' and thereafter refers to him as 'the pork-chop chap'." (The Economist piece identifies this as an example of Amis's "sniggering anti-Semitism".) Meanwhile, inside the book, scattered in amongst the prose pieces are illustrations – more cartoons, really – by Nicolas Bentley. Bentley was a very well known cartoonist in his day, and is fondly remembered even now. There's a brief biography of him here.


Amis actually had three books on alcohol published in his lifetime. After On Drink, in 1983 a collection of his essays for the Daily Express, Every Day Drinking, was published by Hutchinson, and the following year Weidenfeld & Nicolson issued a drinking quiz book, How's Your Glass? All three books were compiled into a single volume, Everyday Drinking, by Bloomsbury in 2008 – and quite by coincidence, Olman has just posted a review of it. Great minds think alike...

Let's sign off with a couple of relevant passages from Michael Barber's essay (go and read it if you haven't already):

For Amis, drink was inseparable from conversation and hilarity, without which life was not worth living; and these he found in the company of men. One of the reasons Jenny Bunn, the heroine of Take a Girl Like You, gets such high marks is that she doesn’t begrudge a man his sessions at the pub with his mates. Shy with strangers, Amis also found drink an invaluable social lubricant when he found himself among people he didn’t know well. Professionally it had its uses too, for while he couldn’t write when drunk, he did find a glass or two of Scotch helped when nerving himself to begin a novel. Above all, drink agreed with Amis. Like his character Maurice Allington he drank to experience “that semi-mystical elevation of spirit which, every time, seems destined to last for ever.”

[Amis] died on October 22 1995. Almost his last coherent words were, "For God’s sake, you bloody fool, give me a drink."

Thursday 6 January 2011

Parker Progress Report: A Review of Plunder Squad by Richard Stark

For the Parker completist, there's a lot to love about Plunder Squad. First published in 1972, the fifteenth novel to star Donald 'Richard Stark' Westlake's cold-hearted NFN heister sees not only the return of a couple of supporting characters from previous books in the series and the tying up of a loose end from The Sour Lemon Score (1969, Parker #12), but also a crossover with another book published in the same year – one not written by Westlake.

The possible downside of all these entertaining diversions and revisiting of unfinished business, however, is that Plunder Squad ends up being slightly staccato as a result, the plot advancing in fits and starts and branching off into dead ends – although for me that made the book more unusual and consequently more compelling. I liked some of the cul-de-sacs the story saunters down, and I liked the way Parker is persistently foiled throughout the novel, as his run of bad luck over the past few books continues.

By this stage in the series, it's almost as if Westlake is pretty much pleasing himself, doing whatever he feels like doing in order to keep himself interested, safe, perhaps, in the knowledge that it's a Parker, so it'll sell. For a crime thriller to start with a planned robbery that doesn't happen, move on to another planned robbery that also ultimately doesn't happen, take a detour for an encounter with a character from someone else's book, take another detour for a standoff with a different character from a previous book in the series... that's quite a lot to ask of a regular follower, let alone an uninitiated reader.

Divided up into the Parker novels' traditional four parts, most of the above actually takes place in Part One – which will give you some idea of how eventful Plunder Squad is. The first of those two abortive heists is waylaid by George Uhl, who gave Parker the runaround in The Sour Lemon Score and who Parker unwisely left alive at the end of that story. The second is interrupted by a certain Dan Kearny, a P.I. who comes knocking at the door of the house where Parker and crew are planning the score investigating a murder. Kearny has wandered in from a novel by Westlake's friend Joe Gores, Dead Skip, which, as with Westlake's own Slayground/The Blackbird crossover, shares the scene in Plunder Squad in which Kearny appears. I'll be reading Dead Skip for the next Parker Progress Report (what was that about being a Parker completist...?), so it'll be fascinating to see how that scene plays out in Gores's novel.

(There's actually more that the two books share. I own US first editions of the two novels, which were both published by Random House, using the same typeface, the same interior design – from the title pages to the chapter headers – and with a very similar extent, too: Plunder Squad is 182 pages long, while Dead Skip is 184.)

In Part Two, Parker finally catches up to Uhl, and the two find time to work through their issues (well, in a way...), so it's not until Part Three that we see the makings of a prospective third heist, one which does finally come off this time – a takedown of a truck carrying valuable paintings. Part Three is also the Stark Cutaway, and so we get to meet some of the other members of the string for this particular score, among them Stan Devers, last seen in The Green Eagle Score. In that novel, Devers was a neophyte thief, embarking on his first serious heist: he was very much a proto-Parker, a glimpse at how Parker might have been when he was starting out. In Plunder Squad, Devers is a bit more seasoned (if a little down on his luck), his criminal senses beginning to sharpen. I liked Devers in Green Eagle, and I was pleased to see him return in Plunder Squad.

But the fact that I was so willing to welcome back Devers gave me pause at this point in the novel. Something I've become fleetingly aware of before as I've progressed through the Parker series – although not to this degree – is that I've been so immersed in Parker's amoral world that I've found myself unconsciously complicit in his and his compatriots' actions. It's all too easy to forget that these are stories about bad men doing bad things – and that, I think, is part of Westlake's genius with these books, which is to make the stealing of money and goods and the violence that that entails seem everyday – mundane, even. Time and again in Plunder Squad – and in all the Parker novels – Westlake has us so wrapped up in events – Parker's hunt for Uhl, the assault on the convoy transporting the paintings – that we barely question the amoral nature of them. I suspect what he's doing is crediting the reader with enough intelligence to stop and reflect every now and then, which is kind of cool when you think about it.

Mind you, Westlake doesn't help matters by making a fair number of the cast of Plunder Squad damnably likable, in particular Ed Mackey, the ringleader of the third heist. But then, you could also make a case for Ed (and am I right in thinking 'Ed Mackey' is too close to 'Earl Macklin' from the 1973 movie of The Outfit for it to be a coincidence? Ed and Earl certainly share some characteristics...) being the Stark Stooge of the piece, particularly in light of events post-heist. In fact, thinking about it, Parker and thus far Grofield and Handy McKay aside, few of the occasional guest stars in the series have escaped unscathed. So maybe there's a morality at work in the novels after all. Whatever the case, for its awkward but beguiling structure, for its bursts of jolting violence, and for its convincing and charismatic characters, Plunder Squad is a real treat – both for hardcore Parker fans and the more casual enthusiast.

(NB: I discuss Plunder Squad again in this post, from the perspective of how events play out in Joe Gores's Dead Skip.)

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Lewes Book Bargain: Dead Spy Running by Jon Stock (Blue Door)

I've got a few Lewes Book Bargains – which, for any latecomers, are relatively cheap books wot I have bought in Lewes, the East Sussex town in which I live – still hanging around from last year, so better get on and write 'em up, eh? Although this first one I've sort of purposely avoided, as I wasn't sure I'd be able to find anything interesting to say about it. See, a lot of the time with these Book Bargains, I've yet to read the books I'm blogging about. These posts are more of a 'look what I found' deal than a 'look what I read' affair; that comes later. But if the book in question isn't particularly old or particularly scarce, what's there to add to what has already been written elsewhere online?

Now, I could, of course, simply decline to blog about those books that I buy that don't especially lend themselves to being blogged about. But that would, in a way – a weird, inexplicable way – be an abdication of responsibility. I feel I'd somehow be letting you down, dear reader (singular, obv). So instead, I generally do what I tend to do elsewhere in my life when faced with a problem or issue which requires some thought, which is to procrastinate for as long as I possibly can before eventually relenting and addressing it, whatever it may be – which in the case of Lewes Book Bargains, is whether the book in question might hold any blogging merit or whether I should simply hide it at the bottom of a pile or on a shelf behind some other books (out of sight, etc.).

With this latest Bargain, however, I've elected to view it as a challenge, to see if during the course of writing this post I can come up with anything interesting about the book without having actually read it. Let's see how we get on.


That there is the first edition/first impression hardback of Jon Stock's Dead Spy Running, published by Blue Door/HarperCollins in 2009, bought in the Lewes Cancer Research charity shop at the bottom of the bafflingly named School Hill. It's a high concept thriller (the book, not the charity shop; the shop's a pleasant enough place but there's nothing terribly high concept or thrilling about it) about a suspended MI6 officer who, whilst running the London Marathon, spots a fellow competitor who's been strapped with explosives which will detonate if he drops his pace, killing all around him, including the US Ambassador to the UK. Kind of Speed on foot, then. Unsurprisingly, the rights have been snapped up by Hollywood and there are a couple of sequels in the works. As for Jon Stock, he's a journalist with three novels under his belt – Dead Spy Running being the third. He's been compared to John le Carre, but not having read Stock yet, I can't comment on that.

Hmm. Well I have to say, none of that was noticeably interesting, so let's turn to the dustjacket, which was designed by Henry Steadman. And here things get a bit more intriguing, because Steadman is quite a big name in contemporary book cover design, having created covers for editions of all of Dan Brown's novels, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Nicholas Evans's The Horse Whisperer, books by Karen Rose, Joanna Trollope, Bill Bryson, Gerald Seymour... it's an impressive client list. His covers are very 'now', very much in the school of design discussed here, but he's a photographer too, so he's a one-stop shop for publishers.

Perhaps more pertinently to Existential Ennui and my preoccupations, though, he also seems to have been behind the distinctive look of Orion's Crime Masterworks series:


And he designed a lot of covers for BBC Books' Doctor Who range of tie-in novels in the mid-2000s, both for the ninth and tenth Doctors (or Christopher Ecclestone and David Tenant to you, chief). I don't know to what extent he was responsible for the overall styling of the line, but I'd guess to a large one:


So there you have it. How did we do on the level of interest?

Monday 3 January 2011

Richard Stark's Parker Novels: The Allison & Busby Editions of Point Blank

It may be a new year – in fact, it is a new year; there's no 'maybe' about it, you blithering idiot – but so far as me 'n' this blog are concerned, 2011 will be much like 2010 in at least one respect: there'll be plenty of Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark posts over the next twelve months. I've got about ten Parker Progress Reports to get through – there'll be one on Plunder Squad along soon enough – plus around the same number of Dortmunder Dazes, and around the same number again of random Westlake novels. With all the other non-Westlake reading I plan on doing this year, that lot alone would see me well into 2012, and that's not even taking into account a Grofield File (on Lemons Never Lie), whatever cover galleries I can conjure up, and any further Westlake Scores over the course of the year.

That's right: brand new year, same old rubbish on Existential Ennui.

So, to begin what looks set to be as Westlakey a year as last year was, I thought I'd do something similar to that post on the development of the UK Coronet '60s/'70s paperback editions of the Parkers, except with the UK Allison & Busby editions instead. And with the aid of a cheeky cheapo Westlake Score or two (you see the lengths I go to for you? Buying editions of books I already own simply so I can write posts like this? I hope you appreciate it, you ungrateful wretches), one of them little-seen online:


I can demonstrate how Allison & Busby's various editions of the debut Parker novel, Point Blank (originally, of course, The Hunter) developed over twenty-plus years. Exciting stuff and no mistake.

To recap: here in the UK, just four publishers have issued Richard Stark's Parker novels in the nearly fifty years since the series began. Coronet/Hodder-Fawcett were the first of those, publishing all of the initial fourteen-book series beginning in 1967 and ending in 1977. And then in 1984 Allison & Busby picked up the series again, bringing many of the Parkers into hardback for the first time and issuing them in slightly larger trade paperback too. (The third and fourth publishers were Robert Hale and Quercus, who issued the later Parkers throughout the 2000s.) And as with the Coronet editions, the A&B editions went through a number of different styles of cover design, beginning with this design:


That's the 1984 hardback edition of Point Blank. As I showed in this post, Allison & Busby published eight of the Parker novels in hardback in this style in 1984/85, all with dustjackets designed by Mick Keates. Keates designed a good many covers for Allison & Busby in the 1980s, for novels including A&B's editions of Ross Macdonald's The Barbarous Coast and The Blue Hammer and Chester Himes's Cotton Comes to Harlem. He's still designing books today: his design for French Porcelain for English Palaces was commended in the 2009 British Book Design and Production Awards.

Keates also created the second iteration of Allison & Busby's cover designs for the Parker novels, which began in 1986. These books comprised both new-to-A&B hardbacks and paperbacks of Parkers A&B had already published in hardback. But whether hardback or paperback, the styling was the same:


That's the 1986 paperback edition of Point Blank. Some of these second wave of cover designs incorporated movie stills, as on this edition, which uses a still from the John Boorman movie of Point Blank, acquired from image library The Kobal Collection. Only one of the covers from this period, for the 1987 edition of The Green Eagle Score, isn't credited to Keates; that one is credited instead to Aubrey Warner, even though the styling is almost identical to the other Keates-designed covers from the same era. Bit of a mystery that.

Anyway, almost all of the Allison & Busby editions of the Parkers fell out of print in the 1990s. (There was one final short-lived style of cover design, or rather cover illustration, around 1990/1991, which I'll be dealing with in a separate post.) I think Allison & Busby itself went under and was swallowed up by another publisher, although it still exists in some form today, as evidenced by our third and fourth styles of cover design for Point Blank. Because, while all the other Parker novels were abandoned by A&B, in 2001 they once again brought Point Blank back into print in the UK:


This 2001 Allison & Busby paperback uses the same still from Boorman's 1967 movie (again from The Kobal Collection), but the cover this time was designed by boxharry, who, bizarrely, seem to be a Brighton-based web consultancy. Annoyingly, the copyright and title pages were removed from this copy, so the only way I can determine the publication year is by gleaning the information from Amazon and AbeBooks, neither of which are always the most accurate of sources. I think I only paid about £2 for it though, including postage, so it's not worth complaining about. I'll be donating it to a Lewes charity shop shortly, so at least someone will get some use out of it. Keep an eye out for it if you live or work in Lewes.

Which leaves one last Allison & Busby edition of Point Blank, which is this one 'ere:


This paperback edition was published by A&B in 2008. I can't tell you who designed the cover of this most recent version, because even I'm not deranged enough to buy yet another edition of the same bloody book to find out. So if anyone has a copy and can fill in the blanks, feel free to leave a comment.

Saturday 1 January 2011

If Lucky Jim Could See Him Now: Michael Barber on Kingsley Amis, and Zachary Leader's Life of Amis

Welcome to 2011, a year in which I plan to pretty much carry on doing what I have been doing on Existential Ennui, except perhaps not quite so frequently; for one reason or another I'm not sure how feasible daily posts will be this year. Mind you, my posts have been getting longer and longer anyway – so instead of a post a day, I think I'll slow the pace down and simply ensure that what I do post is as informative and entertaining as I can make it.

Luckily, I didn't have to strive too much for this opening effort, because the bulk of it – everything following these introductory paragraphs, in fact – wasn't written by me at all.

I've been interested in Kingsley Amis for a while now, in particular that period in the 1960s and 1970s when Amis was experimenting with genre and generally stretching himself a bit. Connected to that is Amis's attitude towards genre, a subject I've blogged about before (more than once). I'm not entirely certain where I first learned that Amis was keen on genre fiction, on thrillers and SF and spy novels, but I do know that for me an early indication that that was the case came from an interview with Amis I read online. Conducted by literary critic Michael Barber for The Paris Review in 1975, it deals in part with Amis's interest in genre fiction, mentioning by name authors Amis appreciated, such as Gavin Lyall and Geoffrey Household, which in turn inspired me to investigate those and other genre writers.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when, quite out of the blue, Michael (who I don't know) left a comment on a post I'd written, not on Amis, but on Alan Williams and his novel about Kim Philby, Gentleman Traitor. Michael's comment was a treasure trove of added detail about Williams and Philby, but he ended it with a note mentioning he was intrigued by my Kingsley Amis posts and thought they might merit a separate comment. I replied that I'd be delighted if he wished to comment on them, but after some reflection Michael decided that the best way for him to respond was to send me a piece he wrote for The Hudson Review on Zachary Leader's 2006 biography The Life of Kingsley Amis, along with a suggestion that I might like to post it on this blog if I thought it would be of interest to Existential Ennui's readership (such as it is).

Naturally, I leapt at the chance. So, to begin a year in which I suspect we'll be hearing quite a lot about Kingsley Amis – and not just on this blog either – I'm pleased to present the full article. Enjoy.

. . . . . . . . . .

If Lucky Jim Could See Him Now, by Michael Barber

Women are hell. In lots of ways. A lot of them. A lot of the time.
                                                                                                - Kingsley Amis.

Many years ago I interviewed Christopher Sykes about his biography of Evelyn Waugh. At one point he said, with great emphasis, “He was always an actor!” I was reminded of this when reading Professor Zachary Leader’s very long and searching biography of Kingsley Amis.[1] Like Waugh, Amis was a performer, his genius for mimicry acknowledged by all. And like Waugh he became so identified with what John Bayley called his “fantasy persona” that it was difficult to tell them apart. In 1975, the year Amis’s second marriage began to crumble, Nick Garland did a cartoon of his younger self asking his older self, “Are you making your tragic mask face or do you always look like that nowadays?” Increasingly – or so it seemed to those who saw only the public Amis – the mask, or masks, became indistinguishable from the man.
That Amis could wear an agreeable face I can vouch for myself. We had some very enjoyable lunches together and professionally speaking he could not have been more helpful. But no one reading this book could doubt that he was, as the critic D.J. Taylor puts it, an “intermittently horrible man” who belonged in the dock with monstrous characters of his like Patrick Standish, Roger Micheldene, Barnard Bastable and Alun Weaver. For instance in 1982 the Observer, for whom Amis had reviewed since the fifties, gave a sixtieth birthday dinner in his honour. Responding to the editor’s “fulsome toast”, Amis began by calling the Observer “a bloody awful paper”, and then gave them chapter and verse. No wonder people grew wary of him. Leader recounts how he once complained that for twenty minutes he’d sat at the bar of his club “and nobody came near me.” His companion replied: “Kingsley, doesn’t it strike you that it could be because you can be so fucking curmudgeonly?” Something similar happened to Waugh at his club. “Why are you alone?” asked a fellow member. “Because no one wants to speak to me.” “I can tell you exactly why; because you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig.”[2]
So should one ask of Amis what he asked of Waugh: If he hadn’t been such a shit, would he have written half so well? After all, he admitted that “a good source of material” was to take an aspect of his character he wasn’t particularly proud of “and push it to the limit.” Leader does not address this question directly, but in his introduction he drops a broad hint when he refers to Amis’s “lifelong obsession with egotism,[3] selfishness, inconsiderateness, qualities he acutely anatomises and censures in his writings even as they threaten to overwhelm him in life.”
In Britain, effrontery of the sort that Amis excelled at is usually thought of as an upper-class trait. But as he told his second wife-to-be, Elizabeth Jane Howard, “I’m not posh – like you.”[4] His father was a City clerk and he grew up in the nondescript south London suburb of Norbury, speaking with a London accent. Though he soon learnt to speak “proper” and ended his days as “Sir Kingsley”, a pillar of the Garrick Club, Amis remained as wary of nobs as Stanley Duke, the “underbred” narrator of Stanley and the Women; hence his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter who fought battles for which grandees had no stomach. Again, although Jane Howard’s being posh was part of her appeal, he held it against her when things went wrong.
An only child whose parents were reluctant to let him out of their sight, Amis amused himself from an early age by writing as well as reading. “I wanted to be a writer,” he told Eric Jacobs,[5] “before I knew what that was.” He was lucky enough to receive a first-class education at City of London School, a large London day school which was well enough endowed to offer bursaries to clever boys like him whose parents could not otherwise have afforded to educate them privately. In April 1941 he entered Oxford as an exhibitioner to read English and almost immediately met Philip Larkin, who was to become his close friend and collaborator. Both were mad about jazz; both loathed the English syllabus, with its emphasis on “filthy” Old and Middle English, and both had a very low boredom threshold. Though Larkin was not, like Amis, a performer (he had a bad stammer), they shared the same savage, anarchic sense of humour, preserved for posterity in their correspondence. A few years later Amis would pay Larkin this compliment: 

I enjoy talking to you more than anyone else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, brutal, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful things that I don’t want anyone to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when talking to you . . .

While at Oxford Amis joined the Communist party. This was partly out of conviction: belief in the brotherhood of man and the need to build the Just City; partly to bate his father, with whom he had quarrelled continually since puberty, and partly to meet girls, whom he thought, erroneously, might go in for free love. He kept his party card until 1956, a detail overlooked by Leader and also, in 1958, by the American consul who had to vet him before he could teach at Princeton.
               Drafted in July 1942 Amis spent his next three years in the Army, serving as a subaltern with the Royal Corps of Signals. Not exactly a happy warrior, he was willing to do his bit and afterwards nursed a substantial grudge against those, like Dylan Thomas, who had dodged the column. His unit took part in the liberation of northern Europe, and although Amis himself saw no action, he did witness the “terrible litter of German dead” around Falaise, the stench of which haunts Maurice Allington in The Green Man. Equally obnoxious was the attitude of some of his superiors – Rotarians in civvy street – who objected to the presence of an irreverent young commie in the Mess. Conscious of the grief they could give him on duty, Amis had no option but to put up with their jibes. Here, I think, is the source of the impotent rage Jim Dixon directs towards Welch, his boss. More to Amis’s taste, particularly as a connoisseur of “types”, were the old sweats – warrant officers and NCO’s – who knew just how far they could go without committing an offence. “Shorty” in Ending Up is one such.
Amis also provoked the stuffy Rotarians because he was frank about having an active sex life. Promiscuity was rife on the home front – “We were not really immoral, there was a war on”,[6] explained one British housewife – and Amis, who lost his virginity during his first year at Oxford, was a beneficiary. He was carrying on with a married woman, while helping himself to whatever else was on offer, the range and quantity of which increased once he crossed the Channel. So by the time he was demobbed Amis had grown accustomed to philandering. And although moralists were demanding a return to sexual continence, he was not disappointed when he went back to Oxford to complete his degree. One of the girls he seduced was a pretty 17-year-old art student called Hilary (Hilly) Bardwell, who informed him, shortly before his Finals, that she was pregnant. Amis didn’t want a “filthy baby”, but neither did he want any harm to come to Hilly, which it might well have done had they gone through with the (illegal) abortion he contemplated. So, “faute de mieux” he married her. Their first son, Philip, was born in August 1948; their second, Martin, a year later. Shortly afterwards, Amis was appointed to an assistant lectureship in English at University College, Swansea, the last job of its kind available that year.
Amis once said that “any proper writer ought to be able to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout”.[7] That he was capable of this himself is apparent from the breadth of his achievement.[8] But although he showed early promise as a poet, it took him a while to find his voice as a writer of prose. His first (unpublished) novel, The Legacy, begun during his last year at Oxford, was rejected by about fourteen publishers – deservedly, said Amis, because it was “full of affectation [and] modernistic tricks”. He needed to put more of himself into his writing, the course urged by Philip Larkin, who knew, better than anyone, how brutally funny Amis could be. After reading the rather tame first draft of Lucky Jim (which would be dedicated to him), Larkin urged Amis to “sod up the romantic business actively”, meaning that Jim should have a real battle on his hands with regard to Christine, which he could only win by taking the offensive against Welch and Co. He also wanted “more ‘faces’ – ‘Sex Life in Ancient Rome’ and so on” and less “unnatural” dialogue. “This speech makes me twist about with boredom” he wrote beside one passage.
Writing is an envious trade and Larkin, who had given up fiction in favour of poetry, could be forgiven for minding the huge success of a book to which he had contributed so much. Amis was undoubtedly aware of this and it is a measure of the store he set on their friendship that when That Uncertain Feeling appeared the following year he would tell Larkin, whose input had been nil, how relieved he was that he liked it: “You’re the one whose opinion counts, as you know.” Within a month or two Larkin would make his own mark with The Less Deceived; and if he never enjoyed the reclame that attached to Amis in the beginning, by the time he died his reputation was, if anything, higher. In one of his last letters to Amis he wrote, “I think we’ve done something of what we hoped when unknown lads.” This letter also contains the last of very many private jokes they shared, a reference to “ole Ay, Merde, och” (Iris Murdoch), arrived at via the story of “Two Scotchmen in Paris. ‘What deed he say–merde?’ ‘Ay, merde.’ ‘Och!’ (shocked silence).’[9]
Meeting Larkin was one of two turning points in Amis’s life, the other being his marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Before examining this and its baleful consequences, we ought to consider his first marriage, which lasted for seventeen years. It was, by any standards, irregular. Not only was Amis undomesticated (as indeed was Hilly), he was also a compulsive adulterer, determined to impale as many women as possible on his “pork sword.” That he managed this so often even before he became famous, in a provincial city, Swansea, not noted for its promiscuity, prompts one to ask the question, how? And answer came there none, because Amis’s many girlfriends are one source Leader had difficulty in tapping. The only clue is provided by Paul Fussell’s first wife, Betty, who refers to “Kingsley’s irresistible combination of comedy and sex.” If he did amuse the pants off his conquests, Hilly did not see the joke. She began to take lovers herself, one of whom probably sired Sally, her daughter. Amis was not bothered by this and always treated Sally as his own, which in early days was not saying much. “You never stop being a parent,” he once complained to me. But reading this book you might feel that he had a lot of ground to make up. His children came a poor third behind work and play, only welcome, according to Hilly, “as long as they didn’t get in his way.”
Betty Fussell met Amis at Princeton, where he spent the academic year of 1958/9 as Lecturer and Resident Fellow in Creative Writing. Recalling his stint there, Amis said that he “was bowled over by the amount of talent” he encountered. He was referring to the students, but it could have been the faculty wives, through whom “he cut a swath a mile wide.” Despite her domestic responsibilities, which included Amis’s recently widowed father, Hilly scored too. Indeed it was their disregard for conventional morality that made the Amises such a hot ticket: “They seemed to have no verbal or sexual inhibitions at all,” said Betty Fussell. But eventually the pace began to tell. Hilly feared “a terrible fall” in which a lot of people would get hurt and Amis, uniquely for him, could not strike a balance between work and play. So he turned down the offer to stay two more years and returned home to Swansea.
Princeton is depicted as Budweiser College in One Fat Englishman, whose gross hero, Roger Micheldene, is one of Amis’s most loathsome creations. Intended as an egregious exponent of the strident British anti-Americanism that Amis then deplored, Micheldene was mistaken by many readers for the author’s mouthpiece. Although at pains to disabuse them, Amis admitted that he’d “quite enjoy a couple of drinks with Roger”, arguing that in real life it was possible to like people of whom you violently disapproved. But Leader maintains that Amis and Roger would certainly have agreed about women. What makes you want them? Roger is asked. Under his breath he gives this answer: 

A man’s sexual aim . . .  is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

Amis wrote that shortly after falling for Elizabeth Jane Howard, of whom it could justly be said that in addition to being beautiful, intelligent and posh, she was also “cool, dry, calm, etc etc.” But there was more to their relationship than sex. Aged forty, Amis had had his fill of teaching and wanted to write full time. In Jane, one of the few women novelists he enjoyed reading – he could never have married her, he told me, had that not been the case – he thought he had found the perfect partner, a combination of lover, colleague, helpmate and housekeeper. In fact Jane’s responsibilities extended far beyond the domestic: she drove the car, found schools for her stepchildren (without Jane’s involvement it’s doubtful whether Martin would have got to Oxford), and, with the help of a good accountant, rectified Amis’s chaotic finances. Politically Amis and Jane were compatible too, which would not have been the case earlier. She was a moderate Tory, he was a lukewarm Labour voter whose belief in Marxism as a progressive cause had been shattered by the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Thereafter he moved inexorably to the Right on foreign policy, even advocating the use of British troops in Vietnam, while remaining liberal on social issues like race, abortion and hanging. Both he and Jane agreed that the bigotry they encountered in Nashville, where Amis lectured at Vanderbilt University in 1967, did the conservative cause a disservice.
So what went wrong? The short answer is drink, which played an even larger part in Amis’s life than it did in his novels. For Amis, drink was inseparable from conversation and hilarity, without which life was not worth living; and these he found in the company of men. One of the reasons Jenny Bunn, the heroine of Take a Girl Like You, gets such high marks is that she doesn’t begrudge a man his sessions at the pub with his mates.[10] Shy with strangers, Amis also found drink an invaluable social lubricant when he found himself among people he didn’t know well. Professionally it had its uses too, for while he couldn’t write when drunk, he did find a glass or two of Scotch helped when nerving himself to begin a novel. Above all, drink agreed with Amis. Like his character Maurice Allington he drank to experience “that semi-mystical elevation of spirit which, every time, seems destined to last for ever.”
Allington is a well-adjusted alcoholic – well-adjusted in that despite drinking a bottle of Scotch a day for the past twenty years he runs a popular country pub whose restaurant is in the Good Food Guide. Equally remarkable, he can still cut the mustard, his ambition being to enjoy a threesome with his wife and his mistress. Amis was also a well-adjusted alcoholic: no matter how much he’d drunk the night before – it was not unusual for him to have to crawl up the stairs to bed – he would be at his desk the following morning. And for many years, despite an intake to rival Allington’s, he too remained sexually active; indeed one of his recommended hangover cures was to “perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can”.[11] But in his fifties he began to lose interest in sex, a predicament heralded, says Leader, by his genre novel The Alteration, whose hero is a young chorister threatened with castration to preserve his sublime treble voice. The chorister loses his balls and Amis lost his libido, almost certainly as a consequence of drink. His “heroic” efforts to recover it via therapy found their way into his next novel, Jake’s Thing, about an Oxford don, formerly a great ladies’ man, who suffers from the same dysfunction as Amis. Eventually we learn that Jake’s real problem is that he’s never really liked women, only wanted to sleep with them. Was this also true of Amis?
A feminist would rest her case on Stanley and the Women, the most venomous of Amis’s novels,[12] in which the narrator’s best friend says he’s amazed that only twenty-five per cent of violent crime in England and Wales is husbands assaulting wives – “You’d expect it to be more like eighty per cent.” Could the same man have written “Women are really much nicer than men / No wonder we like them”? Yes, but that was in another country. At the time he wrote Stanley and the Women, Amis was trying to come to terms with losing not only his wife, which he minded terribly despite disliking her, but also a sizeable chunk of his wealth – all earned, as he was at pains to point out. That Jane had helped him earn it, by ensuring that all he had to do at home was write and pour the drinks, he chose to ignore. But there was another reason why Amis was so bereft. This most combative of men, whose last, unpublished poem begins “Women and queers and children / Cry when things go wrong . . . ” was a cry-baby himself who would literally howl the house down when one of his many phobias got the better of him. The dark gave him his worst moments; he could not bear to be alone in the house at night. So when Jane left him, his sons had to take it in turns to “Dadsit”, as Martin puts it.[13]
Stanley and the Women is dedicated to Hilly, the first of many such gestures that a contrite Amis would make. Leaving her, he now admitted, had been the biggest mistake of his life. And it was Hilly and her third husband, Ali Kilmarnock, an impoverished Scottish peer, who provided a long-term solution to the Dadsitting problem. In return for a roof over their heads in London, which they could not then afford, and a modest stipend, they undertook to move in with Amis and keep an eye on him. It was not an ideal solution because, as Amis told Larkin, “They have a little boy of 9. Yes, but he’s very nice. No, but there it is. Oh well.” There were other tensions too. Amis was a needy man at the best of times and the hurt he suffered over his “Rolls-Royce” divorce from Jane made him even more demanding. Hilly had a cuckoo in the nest. When she broke her hip, Anthony Powell commented in his journal “no doubt worked to death”.
But much to everyone’s surprise this peculiar ménage, “like an Iris Murdoch novel”, lasted fifteen years under three different roofs. Though Amis sometimes behaved intolerably he knew a cushy billet when he saw one and never went too far – well, not very often. More to the point, once Stanley and the Women was done he no longer wrote as if suffering from a chronic metaphysical hangover,[14] the symptoms of which had been apparent since Ending Up in 1973. The Old Devils, while giving off a strong whiff of memento mori, was his first mainstream novel since I Want It Now to have an upbeat ending. And it was noticeably more sympathetic towards women, which must have weighed with the Booker Prize jury, four out of five of whom were female.
Winning the Booker gave Amis a second wind. In the nine years that remained to him he wrote five novels, his Memoirs and The King’s English, a typically provocative guide to modern usage. He also became a restaurant critic, which given his preference for fry-ups and curry was, as Leader says, “dumbfounding”. Equally dumbfounding was the amount of drink he continued to put away – dumbfounding, because his iron constitution had long since started to rust. He was grossly overweight, unsteady on his feet and a martyr to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (fearing he might disgrace himself at his investiture, he took so much sealant beforehand that his family thought he might be permanently blocked up). More worryingly for someone who had already experienced a brief period of madness when, in 1982, he broke his leg and was stuffed full of drugs instead of drink, he began to have “funny moments”, in which he spoke nonsense. This was a portent. His brain no longer matched his liver.
In August 1995, while staying with friends in Wales, Amis fell down some steps and hit his head. On returning to London he spent a week in hospital and then went home, where it was soon apparent that he was deranged. Over the next few weeks he went rapidly down hill and, back in hospital, mercifully contracted pneumonia. He died on October 22 1995. Almost his last coherent words were, “For God’s sake, you bloody fool, give me a drink.”
Zachary Leader never met Kingsley Amis (or if he did he doesn’t say so), but having edited Amis’s Letters, and being, moreover, a friend of Martin’s, he was the natural choice to write an authorised biography. British reviewers have applauded both his thoroughness and his even-handed approach, particularly with regard to Elizabeth Jane Howard, but almost all of them have complained that at more than 1000 pages, the book is too long. I agree. An academic writing a biography for the general reader needs to strike a balance between critical appraisal and narrative, and this Leader does not always manage, particularly in the first 500 pages, which are overloaded with explication. On the other hand he establishes beyond doubt that while Amis certainly made things up, he also drew copiously from life, which he always denied – probably because his most autobiographical novel, I Like It Here, was a flop.
By way of a little prep for this piece I reread Ending Up, not opened for at least twenty years, and found myself laughing so much that my wife tried to smother me (we were in bed at the time). Leader’s declaration that Amis was “the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century” seems unchallengeable, though I think that “serio-comic” is a better description of him as a writer. As Simon Raven once noted, Amis’s jokes are like Shakespeare’s jokes about the pox; “they make you laugh on the other side of your face.” But what was not funny at all was how seriously Amis came to take himself towards the end of his life, as Leader is obliged to relate. So to show that he could still laugh at himself I will finish with an anecdote he told me at one of our last meetings. He’d been out to lunch with an old Oxford mate who was in the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street and who had at his disposal a large chauffeur-driven motor. When they got back to No 10, somewhat the worse for drink, Amis’s mate ordered the chauffeur to drive Amis home to Primrose Hill. As he was dozing off in the back, Amis had a sudden thought: “If Lucky Jim could see me now!”

Michael Barber interviewed Kingsley Amis for The Paris Review (“The Art of Fiction LIX”). He is the author of biographies of Anthony Powell and Simon Raven.

[1] THE LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS, by Zachary Leader. Pantheon. $39.95
[2] The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. by Michael Davie (London 1976) p786
[3] The Anti-Egotist (Oxford 1994) was the title Paul Fussell gave to his exemplary study of Amis as man of letters.
[4] Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream: A Memoir (London 2002) p339
[5] Author of Kingsley Amis: A Biography (London 1992)
[6] John Costello, Love, Sex and War (London 1985) p17
[7] “Writing for a TV Series”, The Listener 19/26 December 1974, p 813
[8] 25 novels, 7 volumes of poetry, 11 works of non-fiction, several dozen short stories, 9 radio and television plays, over 1300 pieces of journalism and almost 2000 letters.
[9] Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London 1992) pp 752/3
[10] Amis thought American men were deprived in this respect. “Where do they go to get away from the wife and kids?”
[11] On Drink, (London 1974) p 91
[12] The quote at the head of this piece is from an interview I did with him at the time.
[13] Martin Amis, Experience (London 2001), pp 306/11
[14] In On Drink Amis distinguished between the physical hangover, characterised by headaches, nausea etc., and the “incomparably more dreadful” metaphysical hangover, recognisable by the profound feelings of doom and gloom it generated.