The Folks That Live on the Hill
Amis, Kingsley
THE FOLKS THAT LIVE ON THE HILL Kingsley Amis/Summit Books/246 pp. $18.95 James Bowman The title of this book makes ironic I reference to a lovely if not very well-remembered Jerome Kern song...
...Likewise, everybody complains about Harry's selfishness, but it is he to whom they turn in a crisis, he who makes things happen in their lives, because of an old-fashioned feeling of responsibility for those who have learned to look to him for help—even if, as so often, they have done so on account of their own moral feebleness...
...For it is one of the attractive things about Amis that he manages to write so well without making any concessions to the varieties of artfulness exJames Bowman is American correspondent for the Spectator of London...
...There has also been a degree of consistency over the years...
...It is a very egotistical way of writing, but Amis is essentially a pretty interesting guy: a wickedly funny observer of our favorite, late-twentiethcentury brands of humbuggery...
...S---, but you see what I mean...
...We do quite enough we know the reasons for without having to start worrying about what we do that we don't know the reasons for, in other words when we do something for a reason we don't know about it's the same morally as not doing it for that reason...
...That's what young people who, like the author, were getting married in the 1940s thought they had to look forward to in forty or fifty years' time...
...For some of the things he excoriated in the older generation in his youthful novels are the same as those that he attacks in the younger generation now...
...Now they continue to pass through their crises of identity while a few relics of the old world like Harry and Clare are left to pick up the pieces even as they remind each other that "nothing says we have to understand and so sympathise with and therefore somehow tolerate everybody...
...Among their neighbors, only the Pakistani shopkeepers, Howard and Charles, share this sense of decency with them...
...He is not a particularly even-tempered or understanding sort of person...
...We can follow his career under various assumed names, from the youthful Jim Dixon of Lucky Jim to the not quite elderly Harry Caldecote of The Folks That Live on the Hill...
...Same again...
...In all of them there is simply an Amis surrogate who speaks with the voice of his creator and round whom everything in the fictional universe revolves...
...Having learned it from their traditional culture, they now seem, as the saying goes, more English than the English—because Britain has ceased to be such a traditional culture...
...The answer is: not quite like the song's vision of love in age...
...Harry's sister Clare is one of those who has learned that you can't wait upon understanding: you understand people less as you get older...
...Well, now that time has come round, and he's here to take a wry look at how the youthful dream has turned out for his hero, Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian living amid the social inconsequence, if not chaos, of today's London...
...Freddie was one of those fifties poets who had set out to "forge a personal diction" which to Harry was just "the sort of thing that poets said they were going to do in those days to show what sound chaps they were...
...To put it more simply, you start thinking there's something in what Philippa says and you're f---ed...
...He too depends on Harry—to provide him with moments of escape from his prison of domestic entanglements...
...And we do see what he means...
...Now you're talking...
...Harry, who lives with his sister, is divorced from not one but two wives, his son, who is approaching middle age himself, is still sponging off him, while the daughter of one of his ex-wives and the niece of the other are constantly appealing to him for help in various sexual and alcoholic crises that they have managed to get themselves into...
...In 1990 it's Darby and Joan who have left each other and the kids who are still around, staring out at the view...
...When he was young he was constantly being rude about the old...
...Harry Caldecote continues to take responsibility for this bunch of moral and emotional cripples not out of tenderheartedness but with the sort of gruff sense of what is appropriate that we would expect of Kingsley Amis himself...
...Harry's advice to one of his young and rather tenuously attached proteges—the ex-husband of his ex-step-daughter—who is momentarily prey to self-doubt could stand as the motto not only to this book but to the whole of Amis's oeuvre: "Listen, sonny," said Harry, glaring and grating a little...
...It is that the attempt to understand or define or find ourselves is often just an excuse for the neglect of those duties that do not depend upon understanding but whose performance is the prerequisite of self-definition...
...Harry thunders at her: "If you think you can put pressure on me to go to this place by letting it get about that you put pressure on me to go by making me feel I'd been showing you were putting pressure on me to stay if I didn't go, then . . . " For a moment Harry contemplated the elastic cocoon he had spun about himself and finally made do by bawling, "You're wrong...
...Even Clare, whose own sense of decency leads her even to the point of (continued on page 49) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 47 (continued from page 47) looking tenderly after her deceased husband's dog although she dislikes the animal intensely, is not immune from the charge of manipulation when she tries a little too hard to persuade Harry to take a job offer from America that would make his fortune but break the social ties and obligations that are equally important to her...
...Like . . . like giving the Hun a taste of his own medicine...
...Yeah...
...Self-doubt has no place in Amis's universe, though a kind of self-mockery, as in the slurred punctuation there marking Harry's scamper across the brittleness of his own subtlety, is always welcome...
...That quasi-heroic pursuit of personal authenticity has now ended in the grim travesty of Freddie's utter thralldom to his wife...
...For Harry's brother, the failed poet Freddie, and his ghastly wife, Desiree, are there to remind us of how the sense of responsibility in traditional relationships can be used as a mere tool of manipulation...
...now that he has entered into a not particularly graceful old age he has turned his rudeness on the young...
...pected by the literary-critical crowd—who thus get very cross with him...
...Needless to say, he doesn't go, and the non-sexual (despite the insinuations of the unspeakable Desiree) ménage with Clare is preserved...
...There is no nonsense in his books about point of view or the ironic complexities of internal narration...
...now he is irritable about the fecklessness and irresponsibility of his juniors...
...Nor can we dismiss the novel as a curmudgeonly diatribe against the young—though it is that, among other things...
...And he knows a thing or two about women, too...
...These include above all the phoniness of the high-minded, whether they are older people mouthing platitudes to the resentful young or young people psychobabbling to the uncomprehending old...
...Thanks...
...Then he was full of impatience for the hypocrisy and stupidity of his seniors...
...Even the various hangers-on begin, for the thousandth time, to get their acts together by the end...
...W hat marks this old devil off from his young dependents, that is, is this sense of decency, a product of his age and class, which somehow, in all the urgency of the task of finding out who they were back in the sixties and seventies, the young neglected to acquire...
...And when the kids grow up and leave us We'll sit and look at that same old view, Just we two, Darby and Joan who used to be Jack and Jill, The folks who love to be called The folks who live on the hill...
...Here at last is something approximating Kern's idyll of "the folks that live on the hill," even though the folks have got there by a route they could never have foreseen in their youth...
...18.95 James Bowman The title of this book makes ironic I reference to a lovely if not very well-remembered Jerome Kern song that must have been a standard of Kingsley Amis's early adulthood: Someday We'll build a home on a hill-top high, You and I, Shiny and new, A cottage that two Can fill, And we'll be pleased to be called The folks that live on the hill...
Vol. 23 • October 1990 • No. 10
