One Fat Englishman

by Kingsley Amis

  KINGSLEY AMIS (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he went to the City of London School on the Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961 became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing and teaching (“I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day”). Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in 1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband.

  DAVID LODGE is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and A Man of Parts. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

  OTHER BOOKS BY KINGSLEY AMIS

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  The Alteration

  Introduction by William Gibson

  Girl, 20

  Introduction by Howard Jacobson

  The Green Man

  Introduction by Michael Dirda

  Lucky Jim

  Introduction by Keith Gessen

  The Old Devils

  Introduction by John Banville

  ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  Introduction by

  DAVID LODGE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1963 by Kingsley Amis

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by David Lodge

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art: Eric Hanson

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Amis, Kingsley.

  One fat Englishman / by Kingsley Amis ; introduction by David Lodge.

  pages ; cm. — (New York review books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-662-7 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PR6001.M6O5 2013

  823'.914—dc23

  2013015575

  eISBN 978-1-59017-689-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Introduction

  In 1963, when I was a young university lecturer, I published an essay in The Critical Quarterly entitled ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’, one of the earliest articles about the work of Kingsley Amis to appear in an academic journal, in which I discussed his four novels, from Lucky Jim to Take a Girl Like You. One Fat Englishman was published in the same year, too late to be included, but when I reprinted my essay in a book called Language of Fiction, in 1966, I did not extend it to consider that novel. The reason for this silence was that I was uncertain what to make of One Fat Englishman, and it certainly didn’t fit the general drift of my argument. I hadn’t really enjoyed reading it, and enjoyment was very much at the heart of my interest in Amis’s earlier fiction. Those books, I wrote, ‘speak to me in an idiom, a tone of voice, to which I respond with immediate understanding and pleasure.’

  Lucky Jim and its successors had that effect on many readers of my generation, who came of age in the 1950s, especially those from lower-middle-class backgrounds who found themselves promoted into the professions by educational opportunity, but who remained uneasy with and critical of the attitudes and values of the social and cultural Establishment. The heroes of those novels were quick to identify and satirically subvert any hint of pretension, affectation, snobbery, vanity and hypocrisy in public and private life. What they stood for is most simply described as ‘decency’, and when they didn’t live up to their own code, they felt appropriate remorse. John Lewis, for instance, in That Uncertain Feeling, returning home after a night on the tiles: ‘Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap, I got indoors, vigorously rubbing lipstick off my mouth with my handkerchief.’ The least ethical of these heroes, Patrick Standish in Take a Girl Like You, is partly redeemed by his attraction to the transparently decent heroine, Jenny Bunn, whose point of view complements and balances his.

  Roger Micheldene, the corpulent British publisher whose adventures on a brief business trip to America are chronicled in One Fat Englishman, is a very different character. He is rude, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, treacherous, greedy and totally selfish. While trying to revive an affair with Helene, the wife of a Danish philologist, he grabs every opportunity to copulate with other available women. His thoughts, and often his speech, are crammed with offensive observations about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals and Americans in general. He eats like a pig and drinks like a fish. He is quite conscious of these traits and habits, and perversely proud of them: ‘Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger.’

  The story punishes Roger for his sins by submitting him to a series of farcical humiliations, and eventually he is sent home with his tail between his legs. But he is the hero, or anti-hero, of the novel, whose consciousness totally dominates it and with whom the authorial voice is rhetorically in collusion. That is to say, his obnoxious opinions and reactions are articulated through the same distinctive stylistic devices that were associated with the earlier and more amiable Amis heroes. The reader may guiltily catch himself sniggering at lines like ‘At this evasion a part of Roger . . . wanted to step forward and give Helene a medium-weight slap across the chops’, or ‘A girl of Oriental appearance, who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye-sockets as well as eyes’. In 1963, knowing little about Kingsley Amis except through his writings, I was puzzled to know why he had taken such pains to
create this vividly unpleasant character. In my memory, many other fans of his work were equally baffled and disappointed. But in the light of Amis’s subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, One Fat Englishman seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel – also funnier, in its black way – than I remembered. It now seems obvious that Roger Micheldene was, in many respects, a devastating and prophetic self-portrait.

  The character’s promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources. For the novel’s American setting, Amis was drawing on his experience as a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 1958–9, when, he informed his friend Philip Larkin in a letter on his return, ‘I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time [. . .] On the second count I was at it practically full-time [. . .] you have to take what you can get when you can get it, you sam.’ (This substitution of ‘sam’ for ‘know’ was part of the private language in which they communicated.) Zachary Leader’s definitive biography, The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), reveals that Amis was not exaggerating. He and his wife Hilly joined a set of younger faculty at Princeton who were into partying in every sense of the word, and soon they were setting a pace that astonished their new friends. According to one of them, Betty Fussell, they ‘inspired a whole year of husband- and wife-swapping’, though Kingsley was the main instigator, propositioning every attractive woman he met. ‘It was compulsive,’ one observer later recalled. Hilly was a more hesitant, and sometimes critical, participant in this bacchanalian lifestyle.

  University College Swansea, where Amis was a lecturer in the English Department, must have seemed a dull and deeply provincial place to return to from Princeton, and a year later he accepted the offer of a teaching Fellowship at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. The move, however, was not a very happy one: though the college was hospitable, the English Faculty, which had no hand in his appointment, was generally unfriendly, and the fault lines were growing in his marriage to Hilly. In 1962, by which time he was writing One Fat Englishman, he met the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard at the Cheltenham Literary Festival (appropriately, they were co-members of a forum on Sex in Literature) and commenced a passionate affair with her. Shortly after Hilly discovered this, she accompanied Kingsley on a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia, and when he fell asleep on the beach one day, she wrote on his exposed back in lipstick: 1 FAT ENGLISHMAN – I FUCK ANYTHING. (A photograph of this vengeful graffito was reproduced in Eric Jacobs’ biography of 1995.) Before the novel was published, the marriage had effectively ended, and in due course Amis married Jane.

  Although, as the photo shows, Kingsley was not really fat at that time, he became so later, and as gluttonous as Roger Micheldene. But whereas for Roger this is an appetite that competes for priority with the sexual (at one point, having picked up a girl at a bring-your-own-picnic, he worries about ‘the problem of retaining contact with Suzanne without giving her anything to eat’), for Kingsley, according to his son Martin, in his memoir Experience, it displaced sex: ‘getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980 [. . .] a complex symptom, repressive, self isolating. It cancelled him out sexually.’ It is clear from the biographical record that Jane left Amis for much the same reasons as Helene (not before time, the reader may think) finally rejects Roger in One Fat Englishman. Jane read the novel in manuscript as he was finishing it, in the summer of 1963, and recalled later that ‘The awfulness of Roger Micheldene really shocked me. Apart from it being funny, it was so horrible.’ They were sharing a mutually enjoyable working holiday at the time, and she evidently did not suspect that Amis was projecting an extreme version of the man he would turn into.

  The parallels are ideological as well as personal. One Fat Englishman was written on the cusp of Amis’s movement from Left to Right, written almost exactly halfway between the Fabian pamphlet of 1957, in which he declared his allegiance to the Labour Party, and the 1967 essay ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, which announced his conversion to Conservatism. As time went on he became more and more notorious for his politically incorrect opinions on such topics as education, war, women and race, and, domestically, he enjoyed winding up his son Martin in this way. Many of his prejudices were anticipated by Roger Micheldene, but in the novel they have an ambivalent import. It is as if Kingsley Amis, conscious in the early 1960s of the way his values and opinions were changing, and, half-appalled himself at the process, projected them into a fictional character he could simultaneously identify with and condemn. In a curious and interesting way, Roger is similarly divided about himself. ‘Why are you so awful?’ Helene asks him at a moment of post-coital candour. ‘Yes, I used to ask myself that quite a lot,’ he replies. ‘Not so much of late, however.’ She finds this honesty disarming, which is exactly the effect he calculated – but it is not just calculation.

  Roger is really full of self-hatred – it is the source of the vitriolic anger he directs at almost everything and everybody in the world around him – and it is hard to disagree with the judgement of the American Catholic priest, Father Colgate, absurd figure though he is: ‘You are in acute spiritual pain.’ That Roger is a Roman Catholic of an idiosyncratic kind, who addresses God familiarly in prayer, between breaking as many commandments as possible, is one of the ways in which Amis distanced himself from his anti-hero – but not so far as it might seem. Roger’s rejection of Father Colgate’s counsel is a theological harangue: ‘Has it never occurred to you that we’re bound to God by ties of fear and anger and resentment as well as love? And do you know what despair is like?’ In 1962, Amis met Yevgeny Yevtushenko. ‘You atheist?’ the Russian poet asked him. ‘Well yes,’ Amis replied. ‘But it’s more that I hate him.’

  We take leave of Roger weeping tears he is unable to explain as his ship slides out of New York harbour, and resolving to lift his mood by surveying the shipboard totty. ‘Something in him was less than enthusiastic about this course of action but he resolved to ignore it. Better a bastard than a bloody fool, he told it.’ Father Colgate would call that maxim ‘Obstinacy in Sin’, while Jim Dixon would have turned it the other way round. One Fat Englishman is certainly a much less comfortable read than Lucky Jim, but no longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought. To write a novel entirely from the point of view of a totally unsympathetic character is a very daring and difficult undertaking, but Amis manages to bring it off by making Roger’s transgressive awfulness the engine of anarchic comedy. The reader’s inclination to recoil in disgust is invariably checked by an irresistible impulse to laugh, though the laughter is always uneasy.

  David Lodge

  ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN

  To Jane

  One

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll find him pleasant enough, I should imagine. Very ready to laugh. Not much sense of humour, though. He’s a bit fiercely Danish.’

  ‘You mean that’s why he doesn’t have much sense of humour? Because of this being fiercely Danish?’

  ‘Not necessarily, but no doubt there’s some connexion. The Scandinavians are dear people but they’ve never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they? Any more than the Germans. Still, what I really meant was, he’s apt to get sort of extra Danish when his wife’s about. Which is most of the time. I suppose he feels he has to work at the Danish thing. You see, she thinks she’s American, but according to him she’s Danish.’

  ‘Which of them is right?’

  ‘Well, in a way they both are. Legally she is. She was born in Denmark and her parents brought her over here when she was about ten. They settled down in Idaho or Iowa or somewhere. Then when she was twenty-one or -two she went back on a visit and met Ernst and stayed on and married him. That was just about the time he was starting his job on what you would call the faculty at the university in Copenhagen. Then he got sabbatical leave and got a year’s appointment at Budweiser and of course brought Helene and the kid with h
im. So she’s an American citizen who’s spent well over half her life in another country, the one she was born in. It’s a curious—’

  ‘Does it matter which she is, Danish or American?’

  ‘Oh, I think so, don’t you? Don’t you think that sort of thing always matters terribly? Anyway, it certainly does in this case. She wants them to stay on over here, he says. He wants them to go back to Copenhagen when he finishes at Budweiser next summer. If not before. He doesn’t like it much.’

  ‘At Budweiser?’

  ‘Over here in general. He finds himself strongly—’

  ‘How long has he been in the United States?’

  ‘Six weeks, about, but—’

  ‘First trip?’

  ‘Yes, but you must try to remember, Joe, that these days people know really quite a bit about America before they ever arrive here, what with films and television shows and these little things who sing and even the odd book I suppose you’d have to say, and visiting Americans and all the—’

  ‘Know? Quite a bit? How true a picture do you think is given by this kind of stuff?’

  ‘Well . . . it’s an introduction, anyway.’

  ‘Would you like some more in there?’

  ‘Thank you, just a small one.’

  The man who had been asking all the questions, a tall thinnish American of fifty called Joe Derlanger, moved some yards off. The man who had been giving all the answers, a shortish fat Englishman of forty called Roger Micheldene, sat and thought for a moment. Then he removed his tan-and-slate tweed jacket.

  Even in the shade of the trees by the swimming-pool it was very hot, much hotter than it had any right to be in the last week in October. Sweat crawled and tickled among the thin wisps of red hair on the crown of his head. There was a small trough of it in the fold behind each knee. He creaked with it whenever he moved. He would have liked to take off far more than his jacket, but knew he was the wrong shape for this. For instance, his mammary development would have been acceptable only if he could have shed half his weight as well as changing his sex. The lateral fusion of his waist and hips made the wearing of braces necessary. After more thought he removed these too and stuffed them into a pocket. A couple of inches broad, scarlet with royal-blue silhouettes of fish, they had gone down rather satisfactorily at home, but over here might seem no more than affected.