Kingsley Amis, An Angry Middle-aged Man?

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32298, 16 May 1970, Page 4

Kingsley Amis, An Angry Middle-aged Man?

BY ’

SIMON KAVANAUGH

“For you, Mr Amis.” was all the gift tag said. Inside the parcel were four pots of pate from an expensive West End store.

Kingsley Amis, who had been bombarded with vituperative mail after publicly declaring his support for American intervention in Vietnam. sent the pots to the Public Analyst. There was nothing wrong with the pate.

The episode was more in character with the heir to lan Fleming's mantle than with the creator of “Lucky Jim.” But Amis was only 32 when his comic classic was published. The eye he turns on his fellow creatures at 47 is markedly more baleful. And some of the reaction to his Vietnam declaration has been ripe.

Kingsley Amis, in the decade and a half since “Lucky Jim” made an international public figure of him. has inspired a fair amount of ripe reaction—most of it misinformed.

In the early years of his eminence indignant establishmentarians were forever labelling him an “angry

young man.” He was of an age with John Osborne. His background was similar and they came to fame about the same time. But he was not, as Osborne was, an “angry young man.” A disrespectful, nose-thumbing, foible-thump-ing, radical young man. But noticeably un-angry.

Now it is the turn of the radical left to misinterpret Amis. Over the years he has veered from radical leftish to radical centre. The shift is the result of experience, observation and maturity. But to those who must see everything in terms of doctrinal commitment it is a sell-out; success, as they see it, has spoiled our “Jim.” When Amis agreed to take over the authorship of James Bond after lan Fleming’s death, the leftists would not have been surprised if the advance royalties had been paid in pieces of silver. But the Right has not found a recruit in Kingsley Amis. He seems to have lost faith in the capacity of politics—as the game is played—to provide answers and he keeps himself fastidiously clear of party political alignments: “The biggest struggle one has politically is to grit one’s teeth against the silliness of the Left and keep one’s eyes firmly on the wickedness and stupidity of the Right.” Life’s problems, as Amis sees them, are not going to

be solved by party politics: “I used to think that human beings could be made significantly happier by transforming their outward lives. Their real enemies are not landlords but cancer, not

capitalism but death, not warmongering but the power to kill people.” Of late, though, he has been much involved in an issue which is politically explosive in Britain—education. He co-authored a socalled “Black Paper” on the subject which in effect

attacked the present philosophy of spreading educational resources thin in the interests of social equality. It was not the sort of thing preached by vote-conscious party politicians. Education and class are inextricable in England and so the popular confusion about Amis has become worse confounded. If he is in favour of selective education then inevitably he regards himself as upper-crust and Ultra-Right. Amis, in fact, is neither: “I’m a lower class person. I don’t bother about my accent, my table manners. Life’s too short.” In fact, he is the son of a mustard company clerk, born in the faded gentility of South-east London, schooled (via scholarships) at the City of London School and Oxford —a prime example of what in England they call the meritocracy. He is also a disillusioned academic. His reaction against provincial universities—he was an English lecturer at Swansea—erupted into “Lucky Jim.” Later, when his name as an author was established, he quit Cambridge after four years as a director of English studies, proclaiming: “I thought that intellectually Cambridge would be a real swinging town: that the dons would have ideas on literature that they would want to exchange. In fact, all they

want to talk about is who Is getting whose chair.” It was in a way the heart cry of a man who sets great store by intellect and education: as was his chilly dismissal of today's young writers as “not as educated as they used to be.” Disillusion or exasperation —whichever it is—has crept through the pages of his more recent work. In “I Want It Now” he performed major surgery on the world of television "personalities” without the anaesthesia of sympathetic humour: and “The Anti-Death League”—an attack on the Christian God, according to Amis—revealed the dark side of the humourist.

There is a taunting bitterness too in some of his aphorisms: “The English are hysterical and passionate"; “Europe is politically sinister”; (of France) “Any bloody country that produces Laval and Petain has to be sinister.” He has criticised the French for their “Teutonic seriousness,” complimented the Germans on their “Gallic gaiety.” They come out sounding very much like the remarks of a man looking for an intellectual punch-up. Could it be that Kingsley Amis who was never an “angry young man” is becoming an angry middle-aged one?