LUCKY HIM

...Nowadays we would call this attitude politically incorrect, except that nowadays, too, being politically incorrect is as fashionable as being politically correct...

...Jacobs places them in this order of importance, and he may be right...

...It is inevitably the last book we will get from Amis, and a suitable closer for a long career, full of the prejudices and punctilios that cheered his admirers and infuriated his critics...

...This was the explicit thesis of the best of Amis's later novels, The Russian Girl, published in 1992...

...Since there had to be a final Kingsley Amis book, it is fitting that The King's English is it...

...This solicitousness underlies every entry in the newly published posthumous volume, The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage...

...In his fifties he went to fat and kept getting fatter, until he had to have his clothes specially made...

...Even so, it was an odd endeavor for Amis to undertake, since he himself was an idiosyncratic stylist...

...Well, this is the downside to drinking, of course, but there's another side, too, which Amis preferred to dwell upon...

...The most revealing part of Eric Jacobs's biography comes at the beginning, in a chapter that takes the reader through a typical day-in-the-life during Amis's last years...

...Here were the makings of the Thatcherite Tory he eventually became...

...He was sympathetic to women as a class, believing they got the raw end of most deals in life, as wives or mothers or in work...

...Over the next forty years, there were subsidiary concerns, of course—Amis loved music, having a special taste for Mozart and 1930s jazz, and he wrote provocatively about politics, and with his first wife he had three children whom he seemed to like well enough...

...The near-universal success of Lucky Jim brought him often to London and offered an endless series of trysts, but he pursued his philandering closer to home, too, with students, faculty wives, and anyone else who had the misfortune to wear a skirt and cross his path...

...Amis's opinions, once thoroughly commonplace but now outrageously reactionary, were hard to dismiss because his own craftsmanship was of a very high order...

...He just didn't think that the conventions of plot and character had to be sacrificed to get to it...

...But neither should he write down to his audience or sink beneath his own intellectual level...

...This is not to say that his advice is always linguistically conservative...

...Both show why the artist and his sensibility are still worth thinking about, though it's not always pleasant to do so...

...The impotence must have been harder to deal with, for Amis had been a womanizer of heroic scale...

...And now, posthumously, we have two more Amis books, one by him, the other about him: Eric Jacobs's Kingsley Amis: A Biography and his own The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage...

...Here too, however, his biographer is eager to put the best face on things, with unintentionally comic effect...

...They were also uncontami-nated by the consensus of professors of Eng...

...Amis's women are either sweet and cute and rather perceptive in a childlike way, or they are shrieking bitches from whom men understandably flee into the arms of the sweet and cute ones...

...In it a professor of Russian literature, British of course, helps a young (and pretty of course) Russian poet named Anna circulate a petition entreating the Russian government to release a political prisoner...

...They are characterized by Amis's absolute refusal to apologize for his devotion to the bottle...

...sometimes in a paragraph of its own, will be readily dismissed as a piece of failed modernism, a vulgarity, a passé shock-tactic...

...What rough beast...

...He must not show off or be pretentious...

...Amis reacted to his "underpopulated" childhood in other ways, too: He craved social life, especially any that involved the consumption of alcohol, and he had a large appetite for hard work...

...The longer version will almost certainly take longer to identify, moving the reader's eye and attention through several lines of print before letting it be seen that there is no main verb within it...

...However heartfelt his respect for women as a class, his distaste for them in the particular rendered Amis, as a novelist, incapable of creating full-blooded female characters...

...He disliked enclosed spaces of any sort...

...No fiction, no art, just statements...

...by the end of his life he was gouty and bloated and incapable of walking more than a few yards at a time...

...Other than preparing a cup of tea and opening a bottle of whiskey, he found the simplest domestic tasks unfathomable, a failing that led him, in the last decade of his life, to set up house with his ex-wife, who cooked his meals and did his laundry, and her husband, who made his bed and cleaned his room...

...Here he is, for example, on one little stylistic trick still popular among the hyperliterary, the verbless sentence: The short kind (Night...

...Anna's position, her status, her simply being a writer are being used for politics," Kotolynov says...

...Just as important, he developed and refined his ardor for the three great passions of his life: drink, women, and literature...

...Most of these were leftists, and indeed Amis had been a Communist at Oxford and stayed a left-winger for the next fifteen years or more...

...What this means (I'm guessing) is that, as a stylist, Amis was not Updikean...

...Amis was famous for his attachment to the drinking life, and he wrote about it, as he wrote about most things, very well...

...The only edge the Tories have over the socialists from my point of view is that they at least are not out to do anybody any good except themselves...

...Oxford never seemed so meritocratic as it did during the war...

...A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse...

...He preferred A. E. Hous-man to T. S. Eliot, for example, and Kipling to the later Joyce...

...He was drawn to the Tory party because he came to see it as the "party of non-politics, of resistance to politics...

...In a pamphlet he wrote for the Fabian Society in 1957, he duly expressed the approved sentiments of the literary man—for nationalization and socialism, against the royal family and private schools— before letting slip a few misgivings: "I share a widespread suspicion of the professional espouser of causes, the do-gooder, the archetypal social worker who knows better than I do what is good for me...

...He believed his obligation to his readers was to give pleasure, and he treated the task with the utmost seriousness...

...Throughout his own writing career, Amis always worked with an imaginary audience in his mind, constantly looking over his shoulder and asking them: does this make sense, is it boring, does it work...

...Amis wrote for several hours every day and never drank while he wrote...

...At the same time, he wanted his books to be about "the life and death of individuals . . . pain and remorse and courage and all that embarrassing stuff...

...It was no accident, he believed, that the decline of British fiction, which he dated to the 1890s, coincided with the rise of literature as a subject of academic study...

...Artistic experimentation, the quest for novelty in novel-writing, is more often than not simply a rationale for laziness—a particularly dishonorable escape from the formal demands of making sense...

...Probably the most famous passage in all of Amis's work is the hangover description from Lucky Jim: He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning...

...he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again...

...Hiroshima and Watergate and Vietnam and Wounded Knee, not forgetting Cambodia, and fascism and racism and male chauvinism and homosexuality, not just one or two or three of them at a time but all of them at once, and Hollywood and consumerism and whatever they call it now...

...He flew only once, as a young man, and ever after declined to get on an airplane...

...You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes, as you propose to do...

...He expressed himself on this subject only as a means of annoying the literary establishment...

...In prose, as elsewhere, he detested showiness...

...Not surprisingly his first marriage crumbled under the weight of his misbehavior, and also not surprisingly Amis had adulterous husbands figure prominently in almost all his novels, with varying degrees of sympathy...

...It was a matter of sensibility...

...He once tossed aside a novel by his son Martin, a master manipulator of words, with the comment, "Dear God, can't he write one straightforward sentence...

...But Amis blazed the trail...

...But Amis was no philistine: his likes and dislikes were passionately held and reinforced by a vast erudition...

...But his personal and professional lives are best understood amid this triangle of preoccupations...

...You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we've all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying...

...As well as any of his novels, it distills what a pompous critic might call Amis's authorial personality—yet another term that would cause him to reach for his favorite epithet, booming out at top volume...

...He was pleased when one instead called it "agreeably unliter-ary...

...And though he didn't understand women, Amis did understand men, especially that large percentage of men who don't understand women...

...Unable to create believable women, Amis often resolved the conflicts of his stories in a kind of romantic haze: naughty boy meets good girl, boy loses girl, boy gets tangled up with shrieking bitch, and boy eventually wins back good girl...

...Above all, he detested the politicization of literature, which he believed to be largely a project of liberals and leftists...

...In a blistering review of an Amis novel, John Updike wrote: "It is a rare sentence of his prose that surrenders to the demons of language, that abdicates a seat of fussy social judgment, that is there for its own sake, out of simple awe, gratitude, or dismay in the face of creation...

...As a sometime reviewer, he went out of his way to praise the craftsmanship of novelists, like Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, who were routinely scorned by academic critics...

...Jacobs summarizes what he calls Amis's "literary program": The writer must avoid obscurity...

...In more than one Amis novel, True Love wins out in the end, which may not be realistic but can at least be refreshing and satisfying...

...LUCKY HIM The Life and Language of Kingsley Amis By Andrew Ferguson Good thing the British novelist Kingsley Amis is dead, because I want to write about his sensibility—just the kind of lit-crit buzzword that would have caused him to hurl this article across the room and denounce its writer as a F—ING FOOL (his favorite epithet, always capitalized but without the dash...

...The lack was often taken as philistinism by his many critical enemies...

...The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did...

...He was also a world-class boozer and skirt-chaser who produced, over the course of a forty-year career, an enormous body of work with a range rivaled by few of his contemporaries: two volumes of short stories and three of poetry, four books of literary essays, a book-length study of Rudyard Kipling and another of Ian Fleming, a Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Amis studied with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Lord David Cecil, and began his greatest friendship, with the poet Philip Larkin...

...The great man refuses to sign the Russian girl's petition...

...Kotolynov sums up the corrupt contemporary attitude toward fiction: If there has to be a novel, please nothing about the life and death of individuals, or growing up and falling in love and getting married and being bereaved, or loss and grief and pain and remorse and courage and any of that old embarrassing stuff...

...Kingsley's views were more interesting, more likely to surprise...

...But The King's English demonstrates again that he was a likable writer and a moral one, too...

...Amis was early on tagged by literary journalists as one of Britain's Angry Young Men of the 1950s...

...Terrified of the dark, he made girlfriends walk him home after dates...

...Even more than laziness and ignorance, the enemies of good writing are pomposity and affectation—the desire to be, as he put it, "posher than posh"—and he knew, as God knows and everyone else does, too, that many conservatives wear pomposity like a birthmark...

...After the publication of his second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, in 1955, Amis wrote to a friend that he had feared some reviewers might call it "sensitive...

...about guess what...

...In a lovely Amis touch, however, this turns out to be untrue: We soon learn that the world-famous Andrei Kotolynov continues to write—murder mysteries, under the pen name Andrew Cottle...

...This inability to represent half the species with any kind of variety or surprise is, as you might think, a serious artistic defect...

...But the novels have their strengths, too...

...The Russian novelist goes on to say that he has given up writing novels altogether, since as a famous exile every word he writes will be interpreted politically...

...Three years after his death in 1995, at age seventy-three, Amis is probably best known to readers under forty as the father of Martin Amis, a novelist-celebrity who possesses all the currently approved sensitivities about class and race and war and capitalism, as well as the lust for experimentation that his father disdained...

...Which gives you some idea of his sensibility right there...

...The stories move along at such a winning clip that the care taken in writing them is easily obscured—a high compliment, in Amis's view...

...Both needs were satisfied at Oxford, where he won a full scholarship in English literature...

...His novels are expertly plotted...

...A young man from the lower middle class might have been expected to feel left out among the university's rigid class system, but the Second World War was on, and the traditional distinctions of wealth and title made little difference at a time when no one could spend any money since there was nothing to buy...

...He refused to stay alone in a house overnight...

...In fact, though, Amis was not much interested in politics as politics...

...Whatever their failings in matters of the heart, as works of social observation they are quite often accurate about things that contemporary novelists are seldom accurate about...

...His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum...

...Thus he rails against "anti-split infinitive fanatics" and even defends the use of role model, a bugbear of snooty lexicographers everywhere...

...He was strongly pro-American and anti-Communist, and vocally supported American involvement in the Vietnam war—the equivalent, in the literary circles of the day, of coming out for cannibalism...

...In such cases [readers] have been made to pause without profit, and no self-respecting writer should make a reader do that...

...Before too long, he was famous...

...hilarious and gossipy memoir, and— the crux of his achievement—more than twenty novels, including a ghost story, a futuristic fantasy, two science-fiction novels, two murder mysteries, and a welter of social comedies beginning with the great Lucky Jim in 1953...

...This I will not countenance...

...Genre writers, Amis believed, were at least fulfilling what he took to be the novelist's primary duty: the telling of engaging stories...

...As Jacobs notes, he thought obscurantism in literature was a form of snobbery—a way of fencing off the pleasures of poetry and narrative from ordinary readers...

...By the 1960s, he had rejected the Left absolutely...

...That sensibility was of a complicated kind not often found these days...

...Amis's variety of misogyny was partial and qualified," Jacobs writes, really he does...

...And he was a lifelong victim of that most incurable disease, hypochondria...

...A dozen or more of his novels deserve to last, because they are funny and entertaining and beautifully, if idiosyncratically, written...

...Amis enjoyed his several excursions into genre fiction—detective novels and science fiction—but unlike, say, Graham Greene, who wrote potboilers of his own, Amis never divided his "entertainments" from his "real novels...

...He meticulously avoided the rich and gorgeous in favor of the plain and concrete...

...Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other...

...And his already rickety second marriage, to the novelist Jane Howard, finally collapsed when he refused to stop drink-ing—no loss to him, since by then he had become impotent, this too a consequence of all that malt whiskey (and vodka, gin, claret, brandy...

...Kings-ley Amis sits at a table upon which rests a glass of whisky," reads the first sentence, describing the writer at lunchtime, and it's bottoms-up from there...

...He was an only child and a mama's boy, and he carried with him throughout his life the crotchets of the type...

...he was by no means sympathetic to all of these fellows either...

...The characters—the male characters, anyway—are various and sharply drawn, and they reveal themselves in dialogue that contains not a single false note...

...Amis was born in South London— the wrong side of the river—to a doting mother and a demanding father who worked as a company clerk...

...He married at Oxford and moved with his young family to Wales, where he got a job as lecturer in a provincial university and began his career as a novelist...

...Amis's own sentences were not to everyone's liking...

...He was a populist and a Tory, an arch-traditionalist who despised snobbery in every form, a story-teller consumed in the mysteries of sex who nevertheless denied his characters any hint of emotional exhibitionism...

...That's right—politics...

...Among other things, this is an inside joke on Amis's own lack of literary snobbery...

...Like most men who obsessively pursue women, Amis didn't much like them...

...His three books on the subject are very funny and quite serious in their practicality: drink recipes, hangover cures, tips on choosing bar tools...

...It's hard to imagine any other literary celebrity of the present age writing such defiant passages as this, from On Drink: "Leaving aside dipsomaniacs, most or many of whom are born, not made, I feel that there is very little we can safely add, in discussing our motives for drinking, to the poet who said we do it because 'we are dry, or lest we may be by and by, or any other reason why.' " Amis insisted that drink never took a toll on his work, and Jacobs, the most sympathetic biographer imaginable, agrees...

...But even as a leftist he was unorthodox...

...April in Paris...

...He wanted them all to be entertainments...

...The two seek out Andrei Kotolynov, a world-famous novelist exiled by the Soviet regime during the Cold War, now living in the English countryside...

...But the drinking had its costs...

...He should be amusing—not the same as comic...

...If writers can be said to have any common purpose it is above all to communicate with an audience...

...As his biographer makes plain, Amis was not a particularly moral man and surely not a likable one...