Lives in Writing Read Online Free Page B

Marie-Françoise Allain (2004); Shirley Hazzard,
Greene on Capri: A Memoir
(2000).

THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE AND FALL OF KINGSLEY AMIS
     
    ZACHARY LEADER’S BIOGRAPHY of Kingsley Amis 1 runs to more than 1,000 pages, including ninety-seven pages of notes, many of them substantial. Did its subject deserve this enormous biographical effort and corresponding demand on the reader’s time? Answers to that question would depend very much on the respondent’s age and nationality. For English readers and writers born in the 1930s (like myself) or a little before, Kingsley Amis was a key figure in post-war British culture, whose importance and influence cannot be measured simply by the intrinsic merit of his books. In America he acquired a small band of fans, mostly Anglophile academics, but the wider reading public never really embraced him with any warmth.
Lucky Jim
, a critically acclaimed bestseller in the UK, sold only 2,000 copies in the US in its first two years. According to Zachary Leader, it was not until Edmund Wilson reviewed Amis’s second novel,
That Uncertain Feeling
, in
The
New Yorker
in 1956, comparing him to Evelyn Waugh, that he began to be taken seriously in America, and even so, Leader observes, ‘Amis never sold well there.’ Leader says nothing about translations and foreign sales of his work, but my impression is that Amis’s fiction, like warm English beer, is a taste that Continental Europe never acquired.
    Why was this so? It was, I believe, because Amis’s distinctive and original attitudes to literary tradition, to class, to morals and manners, were mediated in a style, a tone of voice, the expressiveness of which was fully appreciated only within his own English speech community. With his friend Philip Larkin, of whom the same might be said, Amis led a consciously insular movement in English writing in the 1950s, sometimes unhelpfully called ‘the Movement’ and sometimes conflated with the more journalistic concept of the Angry Young Men. Amis publicly disowned these labels, but he was well aware of the new trend in English writing in the 1950s which they designated and his own crucial role in it. In aesthetic terms it was anti-modernist – a very different category from postmodernist – being conservative as regards literary form. Amis and his associates challenged the cultural prestige of high modernism (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Woolf,
et al.
) and deplored its continuing influence on English poetry and literary fiction. In their criticism and by example they opposed experimentalism, obscurity, exiguous plots, exotic settings, and borrowings from what Philip Larkin derisively called ‘the myth kitty’. They wrote about ordinary blokes (they themselves were mostly male) having ordinary experiences in ordinary places, like English provincial towns and redbrick universities. They voiced the feelings of a new generation of lower-middle-class youth pushed up the social ladder by free secondary and tertiary education in post-war Britain, who felt to some extent alienated from their roots but also resented and resisted the assumptions and prejudices of the established professional class into which they had been promoted.
Lucky Jim
struck a nerve in this generation, a nerve of delighted recognition and vicarious wish-fulfilment, but what made it stand out was Amis’s prose style, which may be represented by Jim Dixon’s famous reflection on the title of his scholarly article, ‘
The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques,
1450
to
1485
’
:
     
Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began.
This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?
     
    John Lewis, the narrator of
That Uncertain Feeling
, describes returning home after an amorous extra-marital encounter in