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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Every country's difficult literary guys are different, and you know from experience how to handle the kind you've grown up with. Reading Geoffrey Wolff's excellent biography of the truly ornery American writer John O'Hara, you sense that you could have managed him, for one night, with a mixture of office-adultery gossip and writerly mumblings about advances and sales. But when you come to the super-ornery English novelist Kingsley Amis you realize that you have no idea what you could possibly have said to get through an evening. Office gossip would be bound to hit a clunker, publishing talk would seem vulgar: this is a writer who devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs to the minor American Jewish humorist Leo Rosten in order to tear him apart, because, on the one evening Amis spent with him, Rosten (a) didn't give him enough to drink and (b) misused the English expression "local" to mean a nearby restaurant instead of a neighborhood pub. With someone like that, you just hide under the sofa, or hope you never run into him at all.
The bewildering thing is that, after having seen all his cussedness catalogued and inventoried--friends insulted, children ignored, wives betrayed, with maximum pain inflicted whenever possible--everyone on his side of the pond still regards him with backhanded affection: wonderfully wicked, magnificently rude, hilariously horrible, and so on. The orneriness becomes ornamental. (Americans do the same thing, of course, though more often with college-basketball coaches than with writers.) Then again, you can't entirely hide from Amis. In 1954, with "Lucky Jim," he more or less invented the modern English comic novel--the small-scale satiric inspection, flavored with sexual malice, that dominates English fiction from Lodge and Bradbury to Tom Sharpe and beyond. And he was part of a triangle that included the historian Robert Conquest and the poet Philip Larkin; for that one undeniably great English poet of the past half century, he was the source of a comic style, or at least an attitude, not to mention the nearest thing he ever had to a friend.
Zachary Leader's "The Life of Kingsley Amis" (Pantheon; $39.95) is a better biography than many bigger writers have had: detailed, sympathetic, unsparing without being unkind. Amis, Leader makes clear, had to work earnestly to become as bilious as he became. Born in 1922, Amis came from a tight, suburban lower-middle-class family, the accoutrements--small house, small money, paper-thin walls--closer to what Americans think of as poor, but the attitudes firmly respectable-professional; his father, whom he called "the most English human being I have ever known," was a clerk in the office of Colman's, the mustard-makers. This was probably, at least from a literary point of view, among the most oppressed classes in human history, or at least had the worst inferiority complex: never self-lionized, like the working classes, permanently snubbed and mocked by the uppers and even the upper-middles.
Amis comes fully alive when he gets to St. John's College, Oxford, in 1941, and meets his fellow-student Philip Larkin, then a stony boy with an oblique sense of humor and a gift, which Amis did not miss, as a lyric "Lawrencian" poet. Larkin, in turn, admired Amis for his cool, his natural flair with girls, and his abilities as a mimic: he could do whole movies, complete with sound effects....
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