by David Lodge
Experience is, then, not just an exploration of the father-son relationship, but also of what it is to be a writer—more specifically, what it is to be a writer in a culture obsessed with the idea of celebrity. The interest of the mass media in literary novelists seemed to intensify suddenly in the 1980s, just as Martin hit his stride as a writer, and he has been in the public spotlight ever since. “I have seen what perhaps no writer should ever see: the place in the unconscious where my novels come from,” he says at the outset of his book. “I could not have stumbled on it unassisted. Nor did I. I read about it in the newspaper.” The deliberate bathos of the last sentence thinly disguises a deeply felt grievance. In 1994–1995 the obsessive interest of the British press in what another age would have regarded as his private life reached fever pitch. “My teeth made headlines.” One of the motives behind Experience is a certain settling of scores with the fourth estate, or at least a setting straight of the record. (No journalist, one hopes, who reads Martin’s graphic account of what was done to his teeth and jaw will ever make a sneering joke about “cosmetic dentistry” again.)
When Philip Larkin’s Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite, were published posthumously in 1992, they caused a good deal of consternation and controversy, duly whipped up by the media, because of the poet’s privately expressed illiberal opinions and revealed penchant for soft pornography. Martin, who was reviewing the book, had a conversation with his father at this time which nicely evokes the sparring relationship that existed between them:
—And I suppose your Letters are going to be even worse.
From the PC point of view. There’ll be even more fuss.
—But I won’t be around for that.
—I’ll be around for that.
—Yes you’ll be around for that.
And so he was, but more involved than Kingsley could have guessed. Martin read Zachary Leader’s edition of the letters in typescript or proof while he was writing Experience, and he occasionally comments on them, as well as on the life events to which they refer, and sometimes comments on his comments in footnotes. On the whole he is relieved that the letters are not as offensive as he had feared they might be, and concludes that in the many fierce, exhausting arguments they had about nuclear disarmament, race, gender, and politics, his father was often deliberately “winding me up” (all’s fair in the Oedipal struggle). The letters are certainly going to give offence, however. Kingsley Amis was often brutally dismissive in his comments about people, especially about other writers and their works. Many of them are still alive; some believed they were on friendly terms with him; and all will be hurt to some extent by what they read here. Since it is clear that Amis was writing with posthumous publication in mind (“what a treat is awaiting chaps when we’re both dead and our complete letters come out”—Amis to Larkin, September 1956), one infers that he intended this effect, or at least didn’t care about it. But then the old devil never went out of his way to be liked.
These Letters are not going to change the minds of people who have already decided that the man who wrote them was boorish, bigoted, sexist, and overrated. All the more reason to read them in tandem with the son’s memoir, in which exasperation and outrage are tempered by affection and intimate memories. For example, one of the most troubling of Kingsley’s character traits in later life was an obsession with Jews and their prominence in public and artistic life. “What’s it like being mildly anti-Semitic?” Martin asked him one day. “It’s all right,” Kingsley answered, in typical sparring mode. But of course it isn’t all right, not in the light, or darkness, of modern history, and one is glad to know that Martin harried him on the topic. On another occasion Kingsley found Martin with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. “What’s that you’re reading? Some Jew?” Keeping his back turned as he fixed a drink, Martin summarised Levi’s description of being rounded up with other Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. When he turned around, Kingsley’s face “was a mask of unattended tears.”
He said steadily,
—That’s one thing I feel more and more as I get older. Let’s not round up the women and the children. Let’s not go over the hill and fuck up the people in the next town along. Let’s not do any of that ever again.
I for one am grateful for that anecdote.
Reading the Letters, one wonders how different the development of postwar English writing might have been if Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin had not happened to meet as undergraduates in war-time Oxford and become close friends. In due course they introduced a new style, a new tone of voice, a new stance towards reality, in poetry and prose, which quite simply changed the literary landscape and redefined the concept of the writer’s vocation. It was very much a collaborative enterprise, in which they tutored and counselled and encouraged each other through the years of apprenticeship and obscurity, but it was conducted mainly by correspondence because, after Kingsley was called up in 1943, they never lived in the same place. As Martin observes of these letters, “It was love, unquestionably love on my father’s part.” Indeed, many passages could have been lifted from real love-letters. After one of their rare reunions Kingsley “was amazed as I always am to find how much we had to say to each other. I enjoy talking to you more than to anybody else because I never feel I am giving myself away” (14 June 1946). “I have a feeling that what we say to each other is more or less inexhaustible” (24 June 1946). Amis acknowledges and at the same time defuses the intensity of his devotion to Larkin by jokingly addressing him as “dalling,” on occasion, while urging his diffident friend to fornicate as enthusiastically as himself and collaborating in the composition of a pornographic serial about lesbian schoolgirls.
It is fascinating to observe in these letters the gradual formation of what might be called the “poetics of the Movement” (do I hear a derisive snort from the spirit world?), using that phrase to cover prose as well as verse; and also to observe the development of Amis’s own distinctive verbal style. Looking back in a late (October 1985) letter to Larkin, he said, “I think it’s all to do with Mandarin vs. Vernacular, was it, as Cyril C put it?” and indeed Cyril Connolly’s celebrated distinction in Enemies of Promise is a useful shorthand account of what Amis and Larkin stood for—and against—in literary culture, especially as glossed by Amis in the same letter: “You know, art novel, Pickarso, European thought, bourgeois conscience, Tuscany, Beckett, we haven’t got a television set, lesson of the master and nothing happening. (Adapt Kojak’s sneer: Who reads ya, baby?)” As Zachary Leader reminds us in one of his exemplary footnotes, Connolly said that Mandarins tend to “make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel.” This precisely sums up Amis’s objections to Dylan Thomas and the Apocalyptic school of poets, and to the decadent work of older writers who had once been exponents of Connolly’s New Vernacular style. Amis’s comment on Stephen Spender in a letter of September 1946 is characteristic:
I used to think that he knew how to put down good words. And now I have been reading Ruins and Visions, a poetry book. And I find in the words of this book there is a lot of poll lis sill ab bick fuss sin ness (“the total generosity of original unforewarned fearful trust”), and a lot of ad dough less scent sew dough mith oiler gee (“Oh, which are the actors, which the audience?”), and a lot of Europe-falling-about-our ears and Oh-my-dearest and playing with abstractions . . . because HE CAN’T THINK WHAT TO SAY.
The youthful Amis may have acquired the habit of sceptical close-reading in part from Scrutiny, but the carnivalesque, polyphonic style in which he makes his analysis is worlds away from the earnest severities of Leavisian criticism. (A decade later, it blew like a refreshing breeze through the review columns of the New Statesman and Spectator.)
Right from the beginning of the correspondence there is a fascination with puns, homophones, misspellings, and mispronunciations of words. When Amis makes a typing error, for instance, instead of emending or crossing it out, he swears typographically, as it were, by fusing an expletive with the mi
sprinted word, before typing the intended word correctly. For example: “Log fog Longmans sent the Legacy back of course” (9 March 1949; The Legacy was his first attempt at a novel). This kind of wordplay often seems quite Joycean (“I want to be the . . . pee-tea coach at a girls’ school” [20 June 1950])—perhaps surprisingly in view of Amis’s anti-modernist prejudices; but in fact he always respected Joyce’s virtuosity, and in any case the verbal fooling predated his acquaintance with the Irish master’s more experimental work. If there was a literary source, it was Frank Richards’s Billy Bunter stories.
The Amis “vernacular style,” then, was by no means a reversion to the stylized simplicity of Hemingway, or the cool elegance of early Waugh, or the I-am-a-camera realism of Isherwood (though Goodbye to Berlin was one of his favourite books, which he reread continually throughout his life). Amis’s writing was more ludic, and it made elaborate use of obscenity and scatology. This began as a laddish private game between himself and Larkin, but gradually extended itself into their criticism, verse, and prose. An example would be their habit of concluding letters with a valediction ending with the word “bum.” At first “bum” is merely an all-purpose word standing for, and thus mocking, official jargon related to events previously described in the letter, for example, “With reference to your application for the post of Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Bum.” But in a more developed form it can have a punning logic or surreal appropriateness to the context, generating hilarious Rabelaisian comedy: “No doubt the matter has escaped your bum.” “Amis asked for the Court’s discretion in respect of his bum.” “There is something disconcertingly unreal about Mr Amis’s bum.” The trope eventually found its way into Amis’s fiction in I Like It Here (1958), and its supreme epiphany in the telegram the hero receives from his mother-in-law: “‘KEEP PHOTOGRAPHICAL BUM TO SHOW ON RETURN . . .’ There is a God, Bowen thought.”
Another feature of Amis’s fiction that he developed and perfected in his letters to Larkin was the observation and description of human behaviour, especially the mannerisms, meaningless remarks, thoughtless clichés, unconscious self-contradictions, petty pretensions, and the like that pervade all social life and social discourse. He found the father of his first wife, Hilary, Leonard Bardwell, particularly irritating in this respect (“He’s gone out to-day to see how much he remembers of the geography of Swansea; those are the ipsissima verba. Now why, I wonder does he want to do that? What will he do if he remembers a lot of it? And what will he do if he finds he doesn’t remember a lot of it?”). Amis relieved his exasperation by basing the character of Professor Welch in Lucky Jim on “Daddy B,” while himself taking on the role of Jim. (For example: on meeting him at Swansea station: “As the train drew in I began swearing in a whisper and very fast, like a man about to go to a concert who pisses as much as he can beforehand, even though he may not want to at the time.”) Some of the funniest passages in the Letters express Amis’s violent hostility to this harmless and innocent man (whom his grandson, incidentally, tells us he “loved”).
Up to 1954, Amis’s letters air two other constant complaints: his poverty, and his failure to get published. “Oh I’m so poor, I’m so poor,” he wails in June 1952. And, in February of the same year: “If only someone would take me up, or even show a bit of interest. If only someone would publish some books by me, I could start writing some books.” The successful publication of Lucky Jim early in 1954 did not make him rich overnight, but it did initiate a steady improvement in the family’s quality of life. More important, he found himself recognized as an original new voice, and quickly began to network with other young writers of similar orientation. He was always rather disingenuous on this subject, repudiating the label of Angry Young Man, and pooh-poohing the idea of a coherent “Movement” or literary school to which his work belonged. In practice he plunged into literary politics with some relish. He befriended John Wain, whom he never really liked, and whose work he despised (his demolition of Living in the Present in a letter to Larkin in July 1955 might have silenced Wain forever if he had read it), because he recognized Wain’s power and influence. “With you as general,” Amis writes to him shortly before the publication of Lucky Jim, “the boys could move right into control.” And a few weeks later: “It’s a branch of business, that’s what it is, the writing game. A branch of business.”
The Letters tell a personal as well as a literary story, but, as always with writers, the two were intertwined. Amis’s wooing of Hilly in Oxford as reported to Larkin (“We have been arguing for the past week about sleeping in the same bed as each other”) was clearly the source for Take a Girl Like You (1960). In due course Hilly “yielded” and then became pregnant. Amis arranged an abortion (illegal, of course) but, to his credit, cancelled it at the last moment because of fears for Hilly’s safety, and married her instead. The story is told with amazing candour in a long letter to Larkin, and would be told again nearly half a century later, barely altered, in the novel You Can’t Do Both (1994). A very similar phrase, “You can’t have it both ways, you see,” occurs in a letter of December 1959, where it refers to the irreconcilability of marital stability and serial adultery, but this was a principle Amis found difficult to put into practice. The enhancement of his life-style, reputation, and self-esteem that came with literary success brought numerous opportunities for dalliance, which he seized greedily. There was something compulsive, and even desperate, about his philandering, as there was later about his drinking and eating. “I found myself at it practically full-time,” he told Larkin on returning from a visiting appointment at Princeton. “You have to take what you can get while you can get it, you sam [sic].”
Hilly was hurt by his infidelities, but she had affairs of her own, and at one point Amis feared she might leave him for the journalist Henry Fairlie. This provoked a remarkable letter from Amis to Fairlie, tense with controlled anger and anxiety, in which he eloquently argues that a second marriage based on the illusion of romantic “love,” and on the destruction of a first marriage, would be inherently unstable and unlikely to last. This proved to be eerily prophetic of his own future. Hilly’s affair with Fairlie ended, and the Amises were reconciled; but a few years later, by which time Kingsley had taken up a fellowship at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, he met and fell in love with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard (appropriately, the occasion was a seminar on sex in literature). His love letters to Jane at this period, tender and rhapsodic, are like nothing else in the correspondence, and testify to the intensity of his romantic passion. One remark also suggests that there was some psychosexual insecurity behind his previous philandering: “Thanks to you I have dismissed for ever any lingering doubts about my masculinity and all that,” he writes to her on 29 April 1963. He still wanted to have it both ways, with a wife and family in Cambridge and a mistress in London; but Hilly’s patience finally snapped, and the marriage ended in a rather confused and messy fashion in 1963.
After the divorce, Kingsley married Jane, and for a while all was well in their rather imposing country house on the northern outskirts of London. Martin remembers Lemmons as a house “strong in love” at this time. But after a few years the seams of the marriage began to strain and split under the stress of temperamental differences, Kingsley’s drinking, and sexual problems which proved unresponsive to the therapeutic treatment amusingly chronicled in Jake’s Thing (1978). In December 1980 Amis informed Larkin that Jane had left him: “Not with anyone, just buggered off. She did it partly to punish me for stopping wanting to fuck her and partly because she realised I didn’t like her much.” The cruelly blunt language seems to imply “and good riddance,” but he adds with characteristic honesty, “trying to take in that she never will be around is immeasurably crappier than having her around.”
In this mid-life period, Martin believes, Kingsley was in “moral retreat.” There was an exceptionally long silence (four years) between Jake’s Thing and the next novel, which was the designedly misogynistic Stanley and the Women.
And it was about this time that Kingsley’s political opinions, which had been moving to the right ever since the mid-1960s (having been communist as a student, and Fabian socialist in young adulthood), became increasingly rigid and extreme. A certain cooling of the friendship with Larkin is also observable. Robert Conquest takes his place as Amis’s favoured correspondent for posterity, but the humour of these letters is coarser and more mechanical, the discourse less dialogical, than in the letters to Larkin. Amis seems at times to be turning into a caricature of himself.
Eric Jacobs’s authorised biography of 1995 disclosed that behind the bluff and often aggressive public manner there was in fact a timid man, subject to numerous phobias about flying, travelling on the Underground, being alone in a house, and so on. The Letters and Experience reveal that this neurotic streak in his character went back further than one might have guessed. Martin recalls his father’s panic attacks in the night in their Swansea years, and how Hilly would lead Kingsley to his bedroom to be calmed by his young son. Zachary Leader records in a note that Kingsley was consulting psychotherapists as early as 1946. I can’t help wondering whether the source of all this isn’t to be found in Kingsley’s military service in the Royal Signals. It has always surprised me that he made so little direct use of this experience in his fiction—just three short stories. The letters that Amis wrote to Larkin at the time, like the stories, portray a life of boredom, depression, and petty intrigue which make Amis seem more like a National Serviceman in peacetime than a soldier who joined the Allied forces in Normandy only three weeks after D-day, and followed the advancing British army across northern Europe until the conclusion of the war. Whole literary careers have been launched on the back of such material, especially in America, and yet Amis made no explicit use of it. In a letter to Larkin of May 1953, wondering what to write about after Lucky Jim, he says “the Ormy [sic] is more or less out of the question—I didn’t do any fighting and I’ve forgotten what I did do.” Could there be some denial or repression of traumatic experience in that last clause?