Product Code Database
Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social criticism and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986). His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English of the second half of the twentieth century." In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. He was the father of the novelist Martin Amis. Amis was Knight Bachelor in 1990.
Amis's grandparents were wealthy. William Amis's father, the glass merchant Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Amis considered J. J. Amis—always called "Pater" or "Dadda"—"a jokey, excitable, silly little man", whom he "disliked and was repelled by". Memoirs (2004), pp. 1–5. His wife Julia "was a large, dreadful, hairy-faced creature ... whom Amis loathed and feared". His mother's parents lived at Camberwell. Her father George was an enthusiastic collector of books and Baptist chapel organist who was employed at a Brixton gentleman's outfitters as a tailor's assistantAmis & Son: Two Literary Generations, Neil Powell, Pan Macmillan, 2012, p. 5 and was "the only grandparent Amis cared for". Amis hoped to inherit much of his grandfather's library, but his grandmother Jemima—whom Amis already disliked for her habit of mocking her husband when he read his favourite passages to Amis, making "faces and gestures at him while his head was lowered to the page"—permitted him to take only five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's collection" on the flyleaf of each.
Amis was raised at Norbury—in his later estimation "not really a place. It's an expression on a map ... really I should say I came from Norbury station." Bookmark, BBC TV, "Kingsley Amis: The Memoirs". Having been educated first at St Hilda's, an "undistinguished, long-vanished local school ... an independent girls' school of the kind which also took small boys, before they became pubescent and dangerous", he then moved to nearby Norbury College.Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations, Neil Powell, Pan Macmillan, 2012, pp. 4, 9–10 In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.
In June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences".Martin Amis (2002). In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals. He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to writing.
He was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961.Leader, 2006, p. 452.
Days after Sally's birth, Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, was published to great acclaim. Critics felt it had caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s and ushered in a new style of fiction.Malcolm Bradbury, 1989, p. 205; Ritchie, 1988, p. 64. By 1972, its impressive sales in Britain had been matched by 1.25 million paperback copies sold in the United States. It was translated into 20 languages, including Polish, Hebrew language, Korean, and Serbo-Croat.Jacobs, 1995, p. 162. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis became one of the writers known as the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim was among the first British , setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.
In 1958–1959 Amis made the first of two visits to the United States, as a visiting fellow in creative writing at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer at other northeastern universities. On returning to Britain, he fell into a rut, and he began looking for another post. After 13 years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1961, but regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic and social disappointment. He resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca, although he actually moved no further than London. Memoirs, "Cambridge".Bradford, Ch. 10.
Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), was widely perceived as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s. It satirised the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history, and sparked the rise of the campus novel.
That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian and his temptation to adultery. I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous view of "abroad" after Amis's own travels on the Continent with a young family. Take a Girl Like You (1960) traces a young schoolmaster's courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine.
With The Anti-Death League (1966), Amis introduced speculative elements that continued in works such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternative history). His interest in science fiction dated to childhood and was reflected in his 1958 Christian Gauss Lectures at Princeton, published as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction.
Amis admired dystopian writers such as Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth and coined the term "comic inferno" to describe humorous dystopias, particularly those of Robert Sheckley. With Robert Conquest, he co-edited the Spectrum science fiction anthologies, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. His novels and poems of the period often engaged with themes of religious doubt and the value of everyday happiness.
Amis also continued to write comic realism in I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971), which depict the "swinging" atmosphere of late-1960s London and his amateur interests such as music.
His essays and criticism were collected in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Essays (1968), in which he reviewed books such as Colin Wilson's The Outsider, Iris Murdoch's début novel Under the Net, and William Empson's Milton's God.
Amis admired Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and in the late 1960s began composing works connected with Bond, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. He published The James Bond Dossier (1965) under his own name, The Book of Bond or, Every Man His Own 007 (1965) as "Lt Col. William (Bill Tanner", and the continuation novel Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym "Robert Markham".
Critics often called Amis's fiction misogynistic, notably Stanley and the Women (1984). Amis was a prolific womanizer who sometimes felt guilty about it and wrote about that guilt in books like Take a Girl Like You.
Amis edited The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), a revision of an original volume by his friend W. H. Auden. The Amis Anthology (1988), a personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in which he selected a poem a day and gave it a brief introduction.Fussell, The Anti-Egotist.
Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978), and The Old Devils (1986), the last of which won the prize. The Man Booker Prizes
In 2008, The Times ranked Amis 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 . The Times, 5 January 2008, accessed 8 February 2010.
Amis eventually moved further to the political right, a development he discussed in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967); his conservatism and anti-communism are visible in works like the dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).Neal Ascherson, "Red Souls" , London Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 10, May 1980. Retrieved 20 June 2019. In 1967, Amis, Robert Conquest, John Braine, and several other authors signed a letter to The Times titled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam", supporting the US government in the Vietnam War.John Wakeman, World Authors 1950–1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, pp. 448–448 . He spoke at the Adam Smith Institute, arguing against government subsidy for the arts.Madsen Pirie, Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute, Biteback Publishing, 2012, p. 140.
Amis's religious views appear in a response reported in his Memoirs. To the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's question, "You atheist?" Amis replied, "It's more that I hate Him."
In one memoir, Amis wrote, "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time". Memoirs: "Booze". He suggests this reflects a naïve tendency in readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. He enjoyed drink and spent a good deal of time in pubs. Hilary Rubinstein, who accepted Lucky Jim for Victor Gollancz, commented, "I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer.... I didn't know Kingsley very well, you see."Quoted in Bradford, Chapter 5.
Clive James commented: "All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the Garrick Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the taxi."Clive James, "Kingsley without the women", Times Literary Supplement, 2 February 2007. But Amis was adamant that inspiration did not come from a bottle: "Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work."
This matched a disciplined approach to writing. For "many years" Amis imposed a rigorous daily schedule on himself, segregating writing and drink. Mornings were spent on writing, with a minimum daily output of 500 words.Jacobs, 1995, pp. 6 and 17. Drinking began about lunchtime, when this had been achieved. Such self-discipline was essential to Amis's prodigious output.
Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct." His friend Christopher Hitchens said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health."Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008, editor's introduction.
In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis was having an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Amis separated in August and he went to live with Howard, divorcing Hilary and marrying Howard in 1965. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet, north London. She and Amis divorced in 1983.
In his last years, Amis shared a house with Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock, in a deal brokered by their sons to ensure he could be cared for until his death. Martin Amis's memoir Experience describes his father's life, charm and decline.
In August 1995, Amis fell after a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London."Sir Kingsley Amis Dies; British Novelist and Poet", Washington Post, 23 October 1995.Bradford, Ch 23. He was cremated and his ashes laid to rest at Golders Green Crematorium.
|
|
