Memoirs

...is the classic elegy for an art bankrupted by its own preciousness and pretension, Amis's Memoirs flay both modern jazz and what seems to be modern culture as a whole: Good going, in a sense, to have got from Monteverdi to John Cage in—what...

...The same goes for people At a regimental reunion, Amis finds his old comrades "greyer, balder, fatter, uglier, older too, most of them...

...Of the novelist Stuart Sutherland, he writes: "Though pleasant enough, he failed to strike me as, say, somebody I would pick out of a group of strangers as likely to be the sanest present...

...strike avid readers of his comic novels as something of a cop-out--if he is nearly as introspective as some of his better-drawn characters, Amis's inner history is anything but dull...

...Well, not scaring others is good, Amis has discovered, particularly if you can make them laugh in the process...

...He now finds pacifism "morally abhorrent" and spoke out frequently about Soviet abuses in Eastern Europe...

...Still, his decision to write an autobiography about other people tells us a good deal about him: much of what we call English reserve has always consisted in hiding one's feelings by having a good, sadistic laugh at the mote in the other fellow's eye...

...Amis claims that it was only after Larkin's death that he understood the lines in Larkin's "Aubade" that run . . . Courage is no good...

...Then judging chaps' rights...

...He was reprieved on personal orders from Stalin, thanks to his mother-in-law's having (probably) had an affair with Stalin's puppet dictator in Hungary, Matyas Rakosi...

...Amis: "He made the ruler of Taiwan sound like somebody on a level with, say, Texas Dan...

...And his attitudes towards women are a bit less extreme when set against those of some of his contemporaries—Philip Larkin, for example, who explained that he didn't go on dates because he could get all he actually desired by himself in five minutes at home, save five pounds, "and have the rest of the evening to myself...

...The shine and cheerfulness of youth can appear at first blush very like real vitality, even wit...

...Nothing makes me feel more thoroughly old than to realise that there is nothing but a bloody great hole where quite an important part of my life once was...

...Actually, many women (and all American women) are likely to find Amis misogynistic in the extreme, particularly those who have made it to the infamous last page of Jake's Thing (1978) or read Stanley and the Women (1984), which was long blacklisted by New York publishers...

...Since 1954, when he gained wide renown with his send-up of British academe, Lucky Jim, Amis has published over forty books of fiction, non-fiction, and verse, along with a good deal of science fiction, some opera libretti, and a few anthologies...

...Szamuely was a Russian/Hungarianprofessor who had been thrown into a Stalinist prison camp for confiding to a friend that he thought prime minister Georgi Malenkov a "fat pig...

...25 Christopher Caldwell Most writers," says Kingsley Amis at the beginning of his Memoirs, "lead dull lives, whether or not those lives may be fun to lead, and are likely to be boring to read about in any detail...

...Then, in 1988, favorable references to it began to appear in the Soviet media...

...Dylan Thomas was "an outstandingly unpleasant man, one who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets" and "a very bad poet indeed...

...Perhaps his grace as a humorous novelist has been a necessity, a survival instinct for one who describes himself entering grade school with an "unpreparedness for how awful things are going to be, starting with human nature...

...Time will lay bare the disappointing truth . . ." If Larkin is thought of as the St...

...The Hot Five to Ornette Coleman...

...Worth mentioning though, is Amis's moving description of the courage with which Larkin, knowing he was dying, refused to have Amis visit him and chided him not to "get unduly alarmed" at the "tests" he was undergoing...

...Seven ages: first puking and mewling...

...Amis's poems (including the Betjemanesque "Instead of an Epilogue," which closes this volume) are frequently as morbid and nostalgic as Larkin's...

...Recently an American publisher suggested a new edition of the book...

...Indeed, the four months he spent teaching at Vanderbilt in 1967-68 seem to have been the most miserable of his life, thanks to galloping racism and the prevailing liquor-licensing laws, the latter of which lave vexed traveling English novelists since Dickens...

...But given his novelist's eye for boors, Amis is best at assassinating with anecdote, as he does John Braine, the intemperate (and incontinent) right-wing novelist and poseur: There was nothing well-controlled about his drunkenness on that occasion...

...What about a new title, Bob...

...His Memoirs are less egotistical than, say, Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography, but just as unsparingly venomous, much boozier, and only slightly less raunchy...

...That "the lefties were all liars" seems to be a lesson he learned from his friend Tibor Szamuely...

...Enough has been written about their friendship elsewhere...

...the tea-party scene in Larkin's novel Jill is as funny as anything Amis has written...

...his wife was dead of cancer, too, within the year...

...In England, he finished his magisterial The Russian Tradition, was naturalized, and died of cancer two years later at 47...

...More bluntly, I think most American literature is a disaster, one reinforced by its being taught in universities there to the virtual exclusion of British, or even the British classics...

...The two men are more alike as writers, and may have been more alike as men, than either would have acknowledged...

...It's worth noting, though, that of all the friends he deA good number of Amis's relatives are Americans, and apparently an eccentric bunch...

...and the Oxford professor Lord David Cecil's son is recorded as answering, when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, "I'm going to be a neurotic like Daddy...

...Then f--ks...

...We won't pretend it's a new book, but a new title would be good...

...Forty years...

...He singles out Peter Fleming and Malcolm Muggeridge as the only English journalists of the 1930s to have written honestly on the Soviet Union...

...But Virg's slip wound up making Amis's evening, and he is particularly fond of American manners, which he considers better than the English...

...Conquest often writes light verse, much of which Amis has anthologized...

...T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pdlars of Wisdom is "a piece of pretentious bulls--t...

...The following year, instalments of the full text started coming out in the official publication Neva...

...Three are dead...

...Then very pissed off with one's schooling...

...Conquest has also written a number of extremely bawdy poems, some with Amis's help, which are quoted amply...

...Presumably Amis was knighted (in 1990) before his description of Princess Margaret as having "no mind at all" saw print...

...It's a charge that would be hard for Amis to refute (as if he'd care to), and his account of joining Malcolm Muggeridge on a (drink-foiled) orgy with George Orwell's widow Sonia, once known as "Buttocks" Brownell, will do little to stay anyone's choler...

...One specimen, a pithy elaboration of the Seven Ages of Man, is particularly memorable: scribes, the only one he could be said actively to champion is the neglected English novelist Elizabeth Taylor...

...rehabilitated...

...Of these Amis says, "Women readers are likely to find such undertakings childish in the extreme...

...The two met at Oxford during the war as fellow jazz fans (rare) and fellow proletarians (rarer...

...Here he sounds like Philip Larkin, Amis's best friend until Larkin's death in 1985...

...Complaining about the liturgy at her funeral, Amis writes: But none of that was anything after one of the most harrowing sights imaginable, that of the two young orphaned children, Helen and George, there at the top of the church steps to greet the mourners, standing completely alone, with no kin in this country and none anywhere else in the world they could go to...

...All in all, he says, I have remained strongly pro American in my attitudes . . . even after a glimpse of an episode of Dallas, a glance at a novel by Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov, or a conversation with one of those people that AmeriTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 45 The elegiac tone of much of this memoir reminds one that even the funniest of Amis's novels have been in some measure elegiac, almost fey...

...A]mong the wondrous multi-coloured lights of the New Jersey Turnpike, at that time unparalleled at home—by then I knew that the lefties, European and American alike, were all liars and this was my second country and always would be...

...Granted, he reached this epiphany on a visit to New Haven, when his host handed him a dry martini before he'd taken off his overcoat...

...The next morning he was found there with the electric fire full on and near enough to the bed to have caused it to burst into flames, had he not rendered the sheets non-inflammable...

...That he has waited until now to settle some scores made the book a cause athbre when it was published in England earlier this year...

...and sent to teach at a guerrilla school in Ghana, from which he defected with his family and his library...

...He was put to bed in an attic room (normally that of my son Philip), there being no question of his returning to London that night as he had planned...

...It means not scaring others...

...For what must be more than one reason . . . writers and artists in that country seem destined to be or become stricken deer, misfits, assorted victims and freaks, drunks rather than drinkers, hermits, suicides...

...Then sitting in slippers...

...On an excursion to Washington, D.C., he met his Uncle "Virg," a tattooed bohunk in overalls, who brazenly invited himself along when Amis went to meet Walter Lippmann, and embarrassed his nephew by asking the journalist his opinion of "Shanghai Shek...

...then drooling...

...Bob answered in terms that get a lot of his character into small compass...

...De mortuis nihil nisi verum: Groucho Marx is "the most embarrassingly unfunny comedian I have ever encountered...

...As a self-described "little lefty fart," Amis briefly joined the student branch of the Communist party at Oxford, where "the only useful lesson I learnt, for later, was the cunning and the unquenchable assiduity with which Communists infiltrate other groups, non-political (religious, for instance) as well as political...

...But there are fewer scathing portraits here than tender ones, the fullest of which is of the Sovietologist, poet, and prankster Robert Conquest...

...cans themselves mysteriously call "liberals...

...Well, perhaps I Told You So, You F--king Fools...

...Even from a writer who has always looked humorously outward while others were looking ponderously inward, this tactic will Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...and then fights...

...Anyone who has read Amis's lam- pooning of American academic poseurs at "Budweiser University" in One Fat Englishman (1963)—based on a teaching stint at Princeton in the late 1950s, where he rented the house of a man he describes as "the illustrious `liberal' journalist Murray Kempton' would imagine that Amis is anti-American as well, in the robust English tradition...

...Jer- ome of modern poets, it is worth remembering that, at Oxford, it was Amis who was the aspiring poet, Larkin the aspiring novelist...

...I have had seven great friends in my life," Amis writes at the end of the Szamuely chapter...

...What do you say...

...Just as Larkin's All What Jazz...

...Amis thinks our literature stinks, too, speaking of that sad rift between British and American literature which has done so much to impede our common cultural understanding, unless that sounds too horribly solemn...

...Amis describes the neglect of Conquest's The Great Terror, the authoritative book on Stalin's purges: For many years The Great Terror was ignored where possible or dismissed as propaganda...

...How's that...

...So he has instead concentrated on his friends, who form the core of a fecund British artistic generation— one that thrived despite having been on the fiddler-paying end of what Noel Annan calls "Our Age...

...Whole groups get it, too, such as the Czechs, who exude "the heaviest gener44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 al concentration of body-odour I have ever come across...