I bought Zachary Leader's gargantuan biography of Kingsley Amis on the day of its publication last year, and read it with intense interest. So intense, in fact, that I even attended a nerdy, bad-hair event at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury to hear Leader in conversation with Kingsley's son, Martin. I had already devoured Leader's equally gargantuan edition of Amis's letters back in 2000, and Martin's memoir, Experience, which appeared in the same year.
Why was I was going to this trouble? I admire many of Kingsley Amis's novels, but I haven't read one for years. His private life was packed with entertaining scandals, but that didn't explain it either. It wasn't until I re-read Leader's biography that the real reason struck me. I was searching for my father, who died nine years ago. This book reminded me of him powerfully—it was almost about him. I was using it as a kind of Rosetta stone to translate the lost language of the past.
My father, Basil Saunders, was nearly an exact contemporary of Kingsley Amis. The similarities between them, particularly in their early lives, seemed extraordinary. They just missed each other at Oxford after the war. They were both very funny, both did celebrated imitations of David Cecil and both were famously convivial. Both suffered depressive episodes, and at one time saw psychiatrists. Both rather disliked their mothers, which led to a generalised resentment of women. Both, in later life, took root in men-only London clubs—Amis at the Garrick, dad at the Savile.
There were differences, of course. My father made his career in public relations, which obviously is not at all like being a successful novelist. More than this, however, my father was a kind man; Amis was not. My father was happily and faithfully married to my mother for 40 years, while Amis made two wives very unhappy and committed adultery as if trying for the Olympics. And my father did not calcify into a magenta-faced, right-wing Blimp in his old age. His niceness did not always come easily to him, and he admitted that he often found the duties of common decency a chore. When I read about the childhood endured by Amis, and saw how similar it was in its atmosphere to my father's, I felt proud of my father because I could see more clearly what an effort it had been for him.
The land they came from has now vanished. Zachary Leader recreates it in such loving detail that I can smell the insides of the cupboards at my grandmother's house. He is sensitive to the hair's-breadth differences in the various subsections of the middle class between the wars. These are mostly forgotten now, a matter for scholars of ancient snobbery, but they matter if you want to understand men like Amis and my father.
To know all is to forgive nearly all. Amis's stifling, restricted youth explains, even if it doesn't excuse, the less attractive parts of his life and his fiction. Reading of the young Amis's constant frustration, I began to understand why my father sometimes seemed to be struggling not to run away. Sometimes he did run away. Once, when my grandmother came for Christmas, he shut himself in the bathroom and drank a quarter-bottle of vodka.
My father was given to tremendous rants against governments, shits, cunts, bores, elderly relations and women. There was a sense that he had spent his entire life resisting pressure to conform, to be a credit to his parents, to be satisfied with less than he wanted. It was as if he'd had to fight simply to be himself, without interference.
Like Amis, my father was one of the original angry young men who crowded into Oxford after the war, fresh from the services—in dad's case, the navy. The thing to remember about the angry young men is that they were sick of taking orders. Some of them weren't even all that young any more—my father had started to lose his hair. They had put up with years of taking orders from teachers, followed by years of taking orders from commanding officers. Now that they were free, nobody was going to tell them what to do, what to think or what to like.
My mother was also in Oxford after the war, working as a reporter on the Oxford Mail. The paper often carried stories about the rowdiness of the new breed of undergraduates. They had fought a war, my mother said; some of them had killed people. Their idea of a student jape was to overturn a car and set fire to it.
But they had one legitimate grievance: against the old people in charge of everything, who had spent the 1930s fretting about the dangers of mass literacy, and who now thought they saw its terrible result—the city of dreaming spires swamped by grammar school types with awful accents and no respect for their superiors. "This is a new class that has entered upon the scene," wrote Somerset Maugham, reviewing Amis's first novel Lucky Jim in 1955, "It is the white-collar proletariat… They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament." Evelyn Waugh described Amis and his contemporaries as "these grim young people coming off the assembly lines in their hundreds." Dad and Amis were both too old to benefit from the 1944 Education Act, and were products of minor public schools rather than grammars, but my father knew he only got to Oxford because the bar had been lowered to let in the ex-servicemen. (Amis got in on a scholarship in 1941, and studied for a year at Oxford before joining the army.) As far as the angry old men of that day were concerned, Jude the Obscure had been given a government grant, and now he was taking over.
Kingsley was born in Clapham, in 1922, and spent his childhood in a succession of small suburban houses in Norbury. His father, William Amis, worked as a clerk for Colman's Mustard. His mother, Peggy, was the daughter of a tailor in Brixton. They were enormous fusspots, and, if they could, would have climbed inside their son's brain to make sure he was having the right thoughts. William Amis gave tedious, embarrassing lectures about self-abuse and the danger of locking the door when having a bath, but Peggy was equally controlling. "Mother did everything for me," Amis later recalled. "It was rather like being the colonial state of a more powerful nation."
This was the burden of nearly all my father's complaints about his childhood—the feeling that your parents expected your thoughts always to be on display, so that they could be judged and checked for flaws. It was all about class, of course. My grandfather, Ted, was an officer in the navy, but he had been one of the very first officers to enter the senior service from a state school. Marjorie was the daughter of a Methodist lay preacher. They had stepped up a rung, from trade to gentry, and dreaded not fitting in. "Dread" is not too strong a word here: it is hard for postwar generations to appreciate the deep social anxiety of that time, particularly among the middle classes. The smallest gains and losses of caste were felt acutely. A single doily could make or break you.
Doilies were actually banned from our house, as symbols of everything dad was in revolt against. If one of us happened to bring one home as part of a school art project, my mother would say: "Don't let your father see that—or we'll have to hear the doily-speech again." Like Amis, dad was not merely indifferent to his surroundings, but angrily opposed to any kind of suburban embellishment. Our house, as a consequence, was incredibly untidy, meanly furnished and so dirty that the mice left in disgust.
Certain things were despised simply because they reminded dad of his mother (Ted was killed in action in 1941, and his memory was sacred). Granny wasn't the easiest company, but even as a child I did at times think dad was too hard on her. I wondered why their relationship—loving as it was—contained so much anger on one side and disappointment on the other.
How intriguing, then, to study Kingsley's fraught relationship with William Amis, which inspired some of his funniest and meanest writing. Kingsley's children did not inherit the animosity. His oldest son, Philip, told Leader that his grandfather "was just sad and lonely and frightened, and my father was very rude to him." The three Amis kids simply loved the old man, and couldn't see what was supposed to be the matter with him. In his memoirs, Kingsley wrote: "As I came to sense the image in which my father was trying to mould my character and future… I began to resist him, and we quarrelled violently at least every week for two years." Martin quoted this in Experience, ruefully adding: "And I can see it, I can hear it, like a bad marriage, Gramps, who wielded so little power in the external world, attempting by mere iteration to impose his will."
My father would have understood this, and I just about do. Constant dripping will wear away a stone. Once my father had decided my grandmother's social anxiety was nonsense, he stopped hearing anything except the nonsense (and there was a lot of it—she told me once that "only parlour maids write on lined paper"). "They're very nice, your parents," Philip Larkin observed, after meeting the senior Amises, "but they never leave you alone, do they?"
Kingsley wanted more than his fair share of everything. Unlike my father, he didn't know when to stop. "Stupid unselfishness" is an Amis phrase you can't help remembering. His self-centredness, his infantile greed, plus his lifelong amazement that women you fucked expected you to be civil to them, made him the difficult, brilliant old bastard he was. Geniuses are traditionally excused from being nice, and Kingers may well have been a genius. Lucky Jim is still unmatched as an exposure of the kind of arty-farty middle class types who use culture as a veil for snobbery. Martin Amis has memorably called such people "middle class whiteys." My father called them "ceramics." The principle is the same. Whiteys/ceramics are still a menace. In 1984, a year before his death, Philip Larkin wrote: "What I don't believe about art is that it should require some special knowledge or special training on the part of its consumers."
Dad would have fully agreed with this. All his life he hated what Zachary Leader calls "distinctions between high culture and low." What's "high" about it, dad would demand, if nobody likes it or understands it? He relished the work of Kingsley Amis because this writer, above all others, was the enemy of bullshit and the advocate of a passionate, full-blooded, non-precious approach to literature. A man who could describe Henry James as a "turgid, windy and pretentious old arsehole" was all right by dad.
In fact, it's the sort of thing I might say myself. Now I know to blame my upbringing. I often hear my father's sayings coming out of my own mouth these days, and I wonder if Philip or Martin Amis hear Kingsley in the same way.
