A Checklist

Listed here are all Amis's works in book form, and a selection of pieces by and about him, including interviews, which have been extensively used in the preparation of this study. The checklist is organised in two sections: 1. Primary Sources; 2. Secondary Sources.

1 PRIMARY SOURCES

1.1 Novels

Lucky Jim (: , and New York: Doubleday, 1954). That Uncertain Feeling (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956). (London: Victor Gollancz, and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958). (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961). One Fat Englishman (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964). The Egyptologists (with ) (London: , 1965; New York: , 1966). The Anti-Death League (London: Jonathan Cape, and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). (as ''), (London: Jonathan Cape, and New York: Harper and Row, 1968). I Want It Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969). The Green Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). Girl, 20 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). The Riverside Villas Murder (London: Jonathan Cape and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Ending Up (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

243 244 Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist

The Alteration (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976; New York: Viking Press, 1977). Jake's Thing (London: Hutchinson, 1978; New York: Viking Press, 1978). Russian Hide-and-Seek (London: Hutchinson, 1980). (London: Hutchinson, 1984; New York: Summit, 1985). (London: Hutchinson, 1986; New York: Summit, 1987). The Crime of the Century (London: J. . Dent, 1987).

The novels are progressively being re-issued in a uniform edition (1976- ) which, sadly, is not free from error.

1.2 Stories

My Enemy's Enemy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963). (Contains 'My Enemy's Enemy' previously published in Encounter, 1955 and in Winter's Tales I (London: Macmillan, 1955); 'Court of Inquiry', Spectator, 1956; 'Moral Fibre', Esquire, 1958; 'Interesting Things', Pick of Today's Short Stories 7 (London: Putnam, 1956); 'All the Blood Within Me', Spectator, 1962; 'Something Strange', Spectator, 1960, Pick of Today's Short Stories 12 (London: Putnam, 1961) and The Magazine of Fantasy and , 1961.) Penguin Modern Stories II (with others) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). (Contains 'Too Much Trouble'.) Dear Illusion (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972). The Darkwater Hall Mystery (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1978). Collected Short Stories (London: Hutchinson, 1980). (Contains, in addition to stories specified above - but omitting 'Interesting Things' - 'The 2003 Claret', first published in The Compleat Imbiber, vol. 2 (London: Putnam, 1958); 'The Friends of Plonk', Town, 1964; 'Hemingway in Space', Punch, 1960; 'Who or What Was It?', Playboy, 1972: 'The House on the Headland', , 1979; 'Mason's Life', Sunday Times, 1972; 'To See the Sun' is first published here.) 'Investing in Futures - A Story', in Cyril Ray (ed.) The New Compleat Imbiber (London: 1986). Collected Short Stories was re-issued in 1987, as above, with the addition of 'Investing in Futures' and 'Affairs of Death'. A Kingsley Amis Checklist 245

1.3 Verse

Bright November (London: Fortune Press, 1947). A Frame of Mind (Reading, School of Art: University of Reading, 1953). Kingsley Amis: No. 22, The Fantasy Poets (: Fantasy Press, 1954). A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1956; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957). The Evans Country (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1962). Penguin Modern Poets 2 (with Dom Moraes and Peter Porter) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). A Look Round the Estate: Poems 1957-1967 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968). Wasted, Kipling at Bateman's (London: Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1973). Collected Poems 1944-1979 (London: Hutchinson, 1980; New York: Viking Press, 1981).

1.4 Recordings

Kingsley Amis Reading His Own Poems, Listen, 1962. Poems (with Thomas Blackburn), Jupiter, 1962.

1.5 Plays

Radio play

Touch and Go, BBC 1957.

Adaptations (not by Amis)

Something Strange, 1962. The Riverside Villas Murder, 1976.

Television plays

A Question About Hell, 1964. The Importance of Being Hairy, 1971. See What You've Done (Softly, Softly series), 1974. Dr Watson and the Darkwater Hall Mystery (from his own story), 1974. We Are All Guilty (Against the Crowd series), 1975. 246 Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist

1.6 Criticism

New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960; London: Victor Gollancz, 1961). The Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, and New York: New American Library, 1965). What Became of ? and Other Questions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Kipling and His World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976). 'Afterword' to Samuel Butler's Erewhon (New York: New American Library (Signet), 1960.

Amis has been a prolific reviewer of 's books. Rabinovitz*, pub. 1967, takes more than eight pages to list essays, articles and reviews written between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, many of them fiction reviews for . Though no longer an (almost-)weekly reviewer, Amis continues to comment on new work, most frequently in .

*(see Checklist 2.1)

1.7 Anthologies edited/introduced by Amis

Oxford Poetry 1949 (with James Michie) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949). Oscar Wilde: Poems and Essays (London: Collins, 1956). Spectrum: A Science Fiction Anthology (with Robert Conquest), 5 vols. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961-5; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962-7). G. K. Chesterton: Selected Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). Tennyson (Poet to Poet series) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Harold's Years: Impressions from the and Spectator (London: Quartet, 1977). The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (London and New York: , 1978). The Faber Popular Reciter (London: Faber and Faber, 1978). The Golden Age of Science Fiction (London: Hutchinson, 1981). The Great British Songbook (with James Cochrane) (London: Pavilion/Michael Joseph, 1986). A Kingsley Amis Checklist 247

1.8 Miscellaneous writings

Socialism and the Intellectuals (London: , 1957). 's Politics (London: Conservative Political Centre, 1968). Black Papers on Education (: Critical Quarterly Society, 1968-75) (d. Checklist 2.2). On Drink (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). An Arts Policy? (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 1979). Everyday Drinking (London: Hutchinson, 1983). How's Your Glass? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984).

1.9 Bibliography

Kinsman, Clare D. and Tennenhouse, Mary Ann (eds), Contempor- ary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Authors and Their Works (Detroit: Gale, 1974). Gohn, J. B., Kingsley Amis: A Checklist (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1976). (Gohn's book supplies bibliographical details of material under the headings of 'Unpublished Mate- rials', 'Published Materials' and 'Secondary Materials' that appeared before the end of 1975. Its modest hope to 'prove a useful tool for the future Amis scholar' has been abundantly fulfilled in my own case, and I am happy to record my gratitude to it.) Salwak, D. F., Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide (Boston: Hall, 1978). (Dr Salwak's book is indispensable as a guide to the variations in Amis's critical reputation, and has a list of American Ph.D. theses.)

A collection of Arnis's verse manuscripts is held at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

2 SECONDARY SOURCES

2.1 Books significantly mentioning Amis

Aitken, McIntosh, Pals son (eds), Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots (London, 1971). Bergonzi, B., The Situation of the Novel (London, 1970). 248 Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist

Davie, D., Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London and New York, 1972). Gardner, P., Kingsley Amis (Boston, 1981). Gindin, J., Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). Hewison, R., In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945-60 (London, 1981). Karl, F. R., The Contemporary : a Reader's Guide (New York, 1962). Lodge, D., Language of Fiction (London, 1966 and 1984). McEwan, N., The Survival of the Novel (London, 1981). Morrison, B., The Movement (Oxford, 1980). O'Connor, W. V., The New University Wits and the End of Modernism (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1963). Rabinovitz, R., The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960 (New York and London, 1967). Swinden, P., The English Novel of History and Society, 1940-1980 (London, 1984).

2.2 Articles

Some uncollected articles by Kingsley Amis

'The Curious Elf: a Note on Rhyme in Keats', Essays in Criticism', 1951. 'Ulster Bull: the Case of W. R. Rodgers', Essays in Criticism, 1953. 'Communication and the Victorian Poet', Essays in Criticism, 1954. 'New Novels and Some Observations', Spectator, 19 November 1954. 'Is the Travel Book Dead?', Spectator, 17 June 1955. 'At the Jazz Band Ball', Spectator, 28 September 1956. 'The New Sound', Observer, 30 December 1956. 'Anglo-Saxon Platitudes', Spectator, 5 April 1957. 'Laughter's To Be Taken Seriously', New York Times Book Review, 7 July 1957. 'How Not To Talk To A Texan', Observer, 3 January 1960. 'Definitions of Culture', New Statesman, 2 June 1961. 'Martians Bearing Bursaries', Spectator, 27 April 1962. 'What's Left for Patriotism?', Observer, 20 January 1963. 'Poets on the ', The Review, April 1968. 'Involvement: Writers Reply', London Magazine, August 1968. A Kingsley Amis Checklist 249

'Pernicious Participation', Critical Survey 4, No.1 (Winter 1969). 'The Anti-, Croquet-Playing, Statistic-Snubbing, Boyle-Baiting, Black Fascist Paper' (with Robert Conquest), Critical Survey 4, No.3 (Winter 1969-70). 'A Short Educational Dictionary' (with Robert Conquest), Critical Survey 5, No.1 (Winter 1970). 'Rondo for My Funeral', Sunday Times, 1 July 1973. 'Real and Made-up People', Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1973. 'Why Poetry?', Observer, 30 September 1973. 'Langham Diary', Listener, 21 February 1974. 'Writing for a TV Series', Listener, 19/26 December 1974. 'Sod the Public', Spectator, 19 October 1985. 'Godforsaken', Spectator, 18 April 1987.

2.3 Some interviews with Kingsley Amis

Twentieth Century, July 1961, with Pat Williams. Book World, 2 October 1968, with Dick Adler. Observer, 14 January 1968, and New York Herald Tribune 21 January 1968, with John Silverlight. Penthouse, October 1970, with Harry Fieldhouse. The Writer's Place: Interviews on the Literary Situation in Contemporary Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), with Peter Firchow. New Review, July 1974, with . Paris Review, Winter 1975, with Michael Barber. Listener, 20 February 1975, with Melvyn Bragg. Contemporary Literature, Winter 1975, with Dale Salwak. Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 17 September 1976, with Auberon Waugh. Listener, 15 February 1979, with Michael Billington. (13 October 1986), with .

2.4 Profiles of Kingsley Amis

Robert Conquest, 'Profile', Listener, 9 October 1969. Anon., 'The Defectors - 4. The Novelist as Provocateur', New Statesman, 14 February 1975. 'Pendennis', 'A Difficult Old Sod', Observer, 26 October 1980. Peter Paterson, 'Profile', BBC Radio 4, 1980. 250 Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist

Bryan Appleyard, ' in Old Age', The Times, 4 September 1986. Anon., 'The Old Devil Behind the Mask', Observer, 26 October 1986. Notes and References

Full details are given here only for items not listed in 'A Kingsley Amis Checklist' .

INTRODUCTION

1. Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 6 April 1973, pp.393-4. 2. Critical Quarterly, Spring 1965, pp.87-92; as a spoof exercise in symbol hunting and textual hyper-ingenuity, Conquest's article is itself a little comic gem, but as an incredulous editorial revealed in the Autumn number some readers responded to it straight. Satire has limited potency. 3. 'I don't believe in all this "major/minor" stuff. "Important?" No. "Good" novelist would do for me, thank you very much' (Channel 4, 13 October 1986). 4. 'Introduction', G. K. Chesterton: Selected Stories.

1 REAL AND MADE-UP PEOPLE

Unless stated otherwise, material quoted from Amis in this chapter is taken from the interviews cited in 'A Kingsley Amis Checklist' or from What Became of Jane Austen?

1. , Homage to Qwert Yuiop (London, 1986) p. 572. 2. The reviewer was Harriet Waugh, Spectator, 2 June 1984, p.26. 3. J. Silverlight, 'Kingsley Amis - the writer and the symbol', Observer, 14 January 1968, p.13 and New York Herad Tribune, 21 January 1968, p. 6; 'Pendennis', 'A difficult old sod', Observer, 3 February 1980, p.44. 4. 'Real and made-up people', TLS, 27 July 1973. 5. 'Farewell to a Friend', Observer, 8 December 1985; Larkin, Jill (London, 1964). This 'Yorkshire scholar' is one of a number of Mortmere-like in-jokes or private myths among the people who were associating at this time, and reappears as Hutchins in Hurry On Down. 7. Those interested should consult pp. 7-8 of the 'Introduction' to the 1966 re-issue of The North Ship and pp.30-3 of Derek Stanford's Inside the Forties (London, 1977). Caton (L. S.) is appointed in Lucky Jim to a chair at the University of Tucuman, and picks up the joke in Living in the Present (London, 1955) with a reference to

251 252 Notes and References

'some God-forsaken hole such as Tucuman'. How far one wishes to chase these connections is a matter of taste, but , born in , reappears in each of Amis's first three novels, there is the poem 'Berkhamsted', and Roger Micheldene is an old boy of Berkhamsted School; Take A Girl's small 'country town near London' is not a million miles away either (public school atop a hill, Roman remains in a neighbouring town). In the book Atkinson lends Dixon, the reference to pity moving like something or other sounds like The Heart of the Matter, and Greene's fondness for casting characters as dentists is remembered in the frequency in (early) Amis of dentists' mistresses, but this is also a Waugh strategy, as is the recurring-character business (for 'Caton' read 'Cruttwell'). In Lucky Jim there are quotations (Ulysses, The Meaning of Meaning and Auden's 'What siren zooming') from things Dixon 'had once read'. 8. In an 'Afterword' to the 1978 reprint of his novel Bradbury says: 'the book is not a roman a clef, but contemporaries have continued to recognise strongly drawn originals; Stuart Treece, for example, is more transparently A. R. Humphreys in some innocent respects than (part of) Welch may be Bonamy Dobree. Dobree has been linked with Welch a number of times, as is noted in, for instance, William Amos's The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction (London, 1985), but the fact is that Amis never met Dobree at any time. The arty-crafty element of Welch is related, if to anyone at all, to Amis's first father-in-law, whose interest was not madrigals but folk-danc- ing - a conference on which Dixon manages to avoid. 9. Larkin's remarks in this paragraph are quoted from Philip Oakes, 'The unsung gold medallist', Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 27 March 1965, p. 65; 'Poet on the 8.15', Guardian, 20 May 1965. See also 'Early Days at Leicester' in Larkin, Required Writing (London, 1983). Larkin says also: 'when friends of mine have promoted to paper things that I have said or written to them privately, I have not felt that my jokes sounded unworthy of their reputations' ('Not the place's fault', Umbrella, 1 (Summer 1959) p.111). Amis was not the only beneficiary of Larkin's editorial acumen; the preface to Holy Disorders by '' (that is, his Oxford contemporary and friend, Bruce Montgomery) thanks him for 'valuable sugges- tions'. 10. TLS, 12 February 1954, p. 101; Enright, Spectator, 3 February 1961, pp.154-5. Amis's own view of Provincial Life and its sequel, Scenes from Married Life, are in "What Marriage Did For Our Joe", Observer, 29 January 1961, p.28. 11. The phenomenon is fully illustrated and discussed in Robert Hewison's excellent In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945-60 (London, 1981) which is the definitive tratment; see also Harry Ritchie's 'The anger that never was', Times, 18 May 1985, and Amis, 'Myths About the "Angry Young Man" " Encounter, September 1968. 12. , Angry Young Man (London, 1951); Osborne, quoted Notes and References 253

from his contribution to (ed. , London, 1957). Amis's unhappiness about Declaration was perhaps vindi- cated by the fact that its successor, Conviction (ed. Norman MacKenzie, London, 1958) made no bones about its call for a re-energised socialism. And the difference between Osborne and Amis in respect of their writing is adequately defined in this Declaration comment by Osborne: '1 am a writer, and my own contribution to a socialist society is to demonstrate those values in my own medium'. 13. Blake Morrison's The Movement (Oxford, 1980) is the authoritative work in the field, not only for the wealth of material it makes available and makes sense of, but also for the shrewdness of many of its judgements. 1 am happy to acknowledge here my indebted- ness to it for parts of my own work on early Amis including the main features of this sketch of a Movement figure's Who's Who? entry, and d. pp. 193-4. 14. M. Green, A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons (London 1961), p.53; A. Alvar- ez, The New Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1962, rev. ed. 1966) pp. 24-5; P. Oakes" 'A new style in heroes', Observer, 1 January 1956, p.8; Larkin, Listen, vol. 2, no. 3. The biographical notes are based on Morrison, op. cit., pp.56-7. 15. Amis, Conquest and others have always denied that there was anything conspiratorial or collusive about this putative Movement they do not acknowledge. The 'pusillanimity' of this irritated Donald Davie considerably: 'we ridiculed and depreciated "the Movement" even as we kept it going. 1 don't know, but 1 should imagine that this would have been the most baffling thing about us to any Frenchman (say) or American who got into company with two or three of us. For in their countries, as far as 1 can see, writers who set out in concert to write a chapter of literary history don't have to pretend elaborately to be doing something else' [my italic~l, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (ed. B. Alpert, Manchester, 1977): p. 72. 16. W. Allen, New Statesman, 30 January 1954. It is under this academic-tough-guy guise that Amis figures in C. P. Snow's The Affair (London, 1960) as Lester Ince who gruffly addresses the rather fey Lewis Elliot as 'Lew': 'no one, living or dead, had been known to call me Lew before ... but though he was not really a lourdaud, he liked making himself a bit of a lout'; in this capacity, the character is given supposedly Amis-like lines such as 'we shall then get gently sozzled, and compare the later styles of the blessed Duke with such new developments as the trumpet of Miles Davis'. 17. Listener, 15 November 1956; Encounter, November 1953, p.66; Sitwell, Mightier than the Sword: the P. E. N. Hermon Ould Memorial Lectures, 1953-61 (London, 1964); Waugh, 'An open letter to the Honourable Mrs Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford)', Encounter, December 1955; Maugham, Sunday Times, 25 December 1955 - all cit. Morrison, pp. 58-9. A footnote in What Became of Jane Austen? tells this story:

An acquaintance of mine told me how he once asked Waugh: 254 Notes and References

'What do you think of Kingsley Amis?' 'Ames: said Waugh. 'Amis, actually.' 'You mean Ames.' 'Look, I happen to know him, and he pronounces it Amis.' 'The man's name is Ames: said Waugh, so firmly that discussion of my works was broken off at that point.

18. Amis's attitude is noted by Davie in his poem 'Via Portello' (Selected Poems (Manchester, 1985) p. 26:

... Yes, my friend, I know you have decided for your part That poems of foreign cities and their art Are the privileged classes' shorthand

and Davie's annoyance with the apparent pose of philistinism shows in 'Pleasures of ruins', New Statesman, 19 May 1956, p.571: 'the new provincialism is showing its fangs ... There's a sort of snobbery about pretending that the really interesting things are in Basingstoke or Hull'. This rather misses the point Amis is making, which is a point about affectation not foreignness. Cf. Orwell's comment quoted in Chapter 2, note 28, and Larkin on reading foreign poetry: 'Foreign poetry? no!' ('Four Conversations', London Magazine, November, 1964, p. 76) and his 'Who's Jorge Luis Borges? The writer-librarian I like is Archibald MacLeish' (Paris Review, 1982, reprinted in Required Writing (London, 1983). 19. That Certain Revulsion', Encore 3 Gune-July 1957), p. 10; 'Editor's Notes', Spectator, 7 October 1955, p.459. 20. Wain, Mandrake (1953), reprinted in Preliminary Essays (London, 1957), pp. 180-5. 21. Triumphs of sound over sense in what he calls 'modem practition- ers of a chap-fallen Romanticism' are illustrated in two very early contributions to Essays in Criticism - The Curious Elf: a Note on Rhyme in Keats' (I, 189) and 'Ulster Bull: the Case of W. R. Rodgers' (III, 470). 22. Johnson, 12 January 1957, and d. Davie's 'Remembering the Thirties' (Selected Poems, p.15): 'A neutral tone is nowadays preferred', and certainly Larkin preferred the Hardy of 'Neutral Tones' to Yeats. 23. The Davie-Amis exchange is in Encounter, October and December 1969. 24. Holloway, too, was at the 'pornographer' meeting; see Davie in My Cambridge (ed. Hayman, London, 1977), p.92. Leavis on Amis, in our Time and the University (London, 1969) p. 56. Leavis has been disowned by the Movement people generally, and Morrison (pp. 263-8) points out that Enright, though the most loyal for the longest time, dethrones his former teacher in 'Standards' ('I am appalled to recall/his cold and silent and derivative sneer'). 'The Notes and References 255

Cure' also expresses reservations, and Davie, contending that Leavis 'expects too much of literature', has said: 'for me, as for many of my generation, Leavis is the god that failed' (The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, and TLS, 310ctober 1976, p.1233). Wain, in Sprightly Running (London, 1962) speaks of being a Leavisite as like being 'a Baconian or Flat-Earther'. See also Chapter 2 for implied attitudes to Leavis in I Like It Here. 25. Both quotes by Wilson in Firchow interviews (see Checklist, 2.3). 26. Conquest, Listener, 9 October 1969, pp.485-6.

2 FEELING UNCERTAIN

1. Wordsworth, 'A Poet's Epitaph'; used also as epigraph to John Wain's Hurry On Down (London, 1953). 2. And the womanliness of the woman is never in doubt. Mrs Korotchenko, with her 'enormous bosom' is an extreme instance of the type of desirable Amis woman - compare John Lewis: 'why did I like women's breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?' and Stanley Duke: 'I suddenly realised that her breasts were a size or two bigger than the rest of her ... adding up to one more out of place piece of her. Still, they were breasts'. Generally, as with Margaret Peel and Roy Vandervane's girl, 20, it's when they're scrawny that there's trouble. 3. Larkin, 'Toads', The Less Deceived (London, 1955). 4. A. C. Ward, Longman Companion to Twentieth Century Literature (2nd ed.), 1975. 5. 'Profile', BBC Radio 4, 1980. 6. Billington interview. 7. Lodge, Language of Fiction (London, 1966 and 1984). 8. Those with a forensic interest in these matters and a taste for television may recall Raymond Huntley as the family lawyer in 'Upstairs, Downstairs' saying (naturally? in character?) things like 'deliberatlam' and 'evidentlam'. Amis has said that he 'picked it up from a brother officer in 1944'; cf. Gardner, p.155. 9. The metaphor recurs in the account of Lewis's behaviour at the first Gruffydd-Williams party: 'no sooner would I have painfully crunched into third gear with one conversation than the sudden enforced switch to another would leave me misfiring, stalling even' . 10. A figure like Welch in this respect, a musician ominously named Johns, appears in That Uncertain Feeling; 'to be singled out like that by a chap whose grasp on phenomena external to himself was clearly so slight was a bit of a compliment'. 11. Dixon's faces have caused a good deal of bother. Naomi Lebowitz, 'Kingsley Amis: the Penitent Hero', Perspective, X (Spring 1959) p.131, argues that both the faces and Jim's public roles are 256 Notes and References

essentially 'a protective effort to feel the solidity of existence'. Ted E. Boyle and Terence Brown, 'The Serious Side of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim', Critique, IX.1 (1966-71, pp.100-7), join forces to reprove the lady for failing 'to differentiate sufficiently between Jim's public pose as ingratiating junior instructor and his private honest reaction - the faces'. Bruce Stove!, 'Traditional Comedy and the Comic Mask in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim', English Studies in , IV.1 (Spring 1978) pp. 69-80, identifies the faces as modern equivalents of comic masks, and points out that they make us laugh. All this (apart, of course, from the laughter which we had suspected all along) rather surprises those of us who had always assumed that, unable or afraid to spit, speak out or take violent action, Dixon had to do something, and he remembered the magical and therapeutic powers of infantile face-pulling. Amis himself describes the faces as 'the covert protest and tension-reducers of a man in enemy territory without effective allies' (,Real and made-up people', TLS, 27 July 1973, p.874). 12. 'All I was trying to do [in Lucky Jim] is amuse people with the kind of stuff that had amused me in the work of people like Eric Linklater, P. G. Wodehouse and some of ' (Observer, 17 September 1978, p.35), and 'I don't say I got this from P. G. Wodehouse, but I immediately recognized and saluted the idea when I read Performing Flea' Games interview). 13. Aristocrats make significant interventions in Take A Girl Like You and I Want It Now. 14. Wain, letter to Encounter, June 1955, p.69. So far is Amis from asserting the vigour etc. of provincial life that on at least two occasions he has used the excellent but much maligned Wigan (salve magna parens) as a byword for cultural backwardness. 15. Amis, 'Editor's Notes', Spectator, 7 October 1955, p.459. 16. Amis, Paris Review, 6 (Winter 1975) p.45; Wain, 'Along the Tightrope', Declaration, p.101, and Lumley's comment: 'I never rebelled against ordinary life; it just never admitted me, that's all'. 17. Larkin, 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', The Less Deceived (London, 1955). 18. James interview. 19. 'Webster, the Sub-Librarian, was going to Leicester.' 20. 'Lewis's language has the following characteristics: a recursive clause structure; an unusual degree (in one sentence) of repetition of lexical items; reflexive pronouns; balancing of negative and positive statements; pronominal "it" as a frequent anaphoric referent' (Norman Macleod, 'This familiar regressive series: Aspects of style in the novels of Kingsley Amis', in Aitken, McIntosh, Piilsson (eds) Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots (London, 1971». 21. John D. Hurrell, Critique, 11.1 (1958) pp. 39-53. 22. W. Somerset Maugham, letter to , 29 March 1956, Washington University Libraries, St. Louis, Mo., quoted in Ted Morgan, Somerset Maugham (London, 1980) p.509; attributed to George VI (quoted in W. H. Auden, A Certain World (London, 1971). 23. James interview. Notes and References 257

24. The reviews referred to (all 1958) are, in order: New Statesman, 18 January; Commonweal, 21 March; Atlantic Monthly 201 (April). A detailed account of the reception of Amis's books can be read between the lines of Dale Salwak's invaluable Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1978) which supplements and emends Jack Benoit Gohn's Kingsley Amis: A Checklist (Ohio, 1976). 25. Weaver, Queen's Quarterly, 65 (Summer 1958) pp. 189-91; Hogan, San Francisco Chronic/e, 13 February 1958, p.35. 26. Wright, 'Lucky Jim Abroad', Time and Tide, 39 (18 January 1958) pp.75-6; Spender, 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes', Partisan Review, 25 (Winter) pp. 112-3. 27. Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London, 1970) p. 155. 28. 'My Kind of Comedy', Twentieth Century, July 1961; Spectator, 8 July 1955, p.47, and d. Harold Hobson, Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 1958) p.11, arguing that it is obvious that Amis dislikes abroad and foreigners because Bowen's have a deep personal ring. (Gardner actually argues that Garnet Bowen's initials, as well as standing for Great Britain, are also significantly 'near [Amis's] own in the alphabet' (Kingsley Amis (Boston, 1981) p.50.) Morrison draws an interesting connection with Orwell's 'The English People', The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), vol. 3, p.18: 'travelling abroad, speaking foreign tongues, enjoying foreign food, are vaguely felt to be upper-class habits, so that xenophobia is reinforced by class jealousy'. 29. Allen, 'The Comic Trials of Being Abroad', New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 9 March 1958) p.12; TLS, 'Taking It Easy', 17 January 1958, p.30; Atlantic Monthly 201 (April); Philip Toynbee, 'Not So Lucky', Observer, 12 January 1958, p.14; Hough, 'Novels and Literary Commodities', Encounter, March 1958. Allen's idea of a pale copy of Lucky Jim got across the Channel and re-surfaced in an article charmingly called 'Kingsley Amis ou la Tunique de Nessus' which argued that Amis's curse was to go through life endlessly re-creating Dixon: 'lorsque l'aggressivite perd de son mordant .. . lorsqu'elle va meme jusqu'a disparaitre comme dans I Like It Here . . . Ie comique de K. Amis prend un caractere plus mecanique et des lors n'atteint ni ne merite Ie plein succes. Si l'on ajoute que la trame romanesque de ces deux recits devient mince et presque lineaire, on ne voit guere plus dans John Lewis et Garnet ~owen que des republiques pailes de Jim Dixon' (S. M. Haimart, Etudes Anglaises, XXV, 3 (1972) p. 30. 30. The complete list is a formidable Who's Who, with many figures mentioned more than once, making ninety-odd references in all, an average of one every other page or so: Graham Greene ('Grim Grin'), Malraux, Montherlant, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Shakespeare, Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Forster, Joyce ('Shem-Shoice'), Cervantes, Homer, Maugham ('Zumzit-Mum'), Byron, , Poe, Charles Morgan, Waugh ('lfflen-Voff'), A. J. Cronin (,Edge Crown'), Gide, Mauriac, Maupassant, Thucydides, Hall Caine, Henry James, 258 Notes and References

Marlowe, Jane Austen, two Eliots, Hardy, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Isherwood, O'Casey, , Wilde, Goldsmith, Farquhar, Hazlitt, B1ackmur, Burke, Rossetti, Elia, Edith Wharton, Meredith, Dickens, Powell, Granville-Barker, Binyon and, climacti- cally, Fielding, with additional references to the TLS, 'the national poet of ', 'the great Russians', 'a Chilean short-story writer', comic variations on 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' visited upon 'William Makepeace Longfellow', 'some piece of orang-utan's tOilet-requisite from the dawn of England's literary heritage - The Dream of the Rood, perhaps, or The Fall of the Angels' and F. R. Leavis. 31. This remark by Robert H. Hopkins (and its companions 'literary hanger-on' and 'fraud') occurs in his 'The Satire of Kingsley Amis's I Like It Here' (Critique VIII.3 (1966) pp.62-70) which, with Lodge's Language of Fiction, is the only previous piece to pay this novel any serious attention (though it is a pity that it refers throughout to 'Jane Austin'). 32. Lodge, Novelist at the Crossroads (London, 1971) p.25. If we accept this reading, it would add one more to the list of narrative genres and sub-genres in which Amis has worked, and put I Like It Here on the same shelf as, say, The Golden Notebook, A Burnt-Out Case, Pale Fire and The Ordeal of Gilbert Finfold. But if these novels are not chips off the writer's block, at least they are all concerned to some degree with manners of proceeding in fiction. 33. Cf. 'A Chromatic Passing-Note', Collected Poems 1944-1979. 34. Amis makes clear his disapproval of overblown writing in an early Essays in Criticism review, 'Ulster Bull: the Case of W. R. Rodgers' (III, 470), but has been firm in his denials that Probert is Dylan Thomas, though there is no denying that Thomas is the original of this first of many pastiches that are a feature of the novels. (Morrison interestingly points to a Movement tendency generally to revise rather than parody Thomas, and points to Enright's 'On the Death of a Child' and Larkin's 'I Remember, I Remember', setting them alongside, respectively. 'A Refusal to Mourn ... ' and 'Fern Hill' with the observation that both dampen down the impulse toward passion or sentimentality.) 35. Movement writing has often been thought to be-provincial as much in a precisely locational sense as in a metaphorical one, but, as Morrison points out, this is a very different matter from the regionalism which has the sort of sentimentalising dishonesty that Lewis objects to in Probert: 'And why did this Probert pretend to be so Welsh? I remembered that like me he'd been awarded nought for Welsh in School Certificate. Such a result in that language means an almost psychotic ignorance. It's standard practice, of course, with writers of Probert's allegiance to pretend to be wild valley babblers, woaded with pit-dirt and sheep-shit, thinking in Welsh the whole time and obsessed by terrible beauty etc., but in fact they tend to come from comfortable middle-class homes, have a good urban education, never go near a lay preacher and couldn't even order a pint in Welsh'. The point is made in fictional terms by portraying Notes and References 259

Probert as a charlatan and a bad writer, but the cultural point lies in the phrase 'so Welsh'. Similarly, Amis takes O'Casey to task for striking a pose with the 'Oirish' ('That Certain Revulsion', Encore, 3 (June-July 1957) p.11). It is this national stereotyping which contributes also to our sense of the callowness of Bowen's early attitudinising: 'he looked out of the window at what could be seen of France: a bit of a wall, a drum or tub of something, a van. But this appearance of inertia did not deceive him. He knew that they were all there really, all on duty demonstrating to one another their capacity for logic, their wit and grace, their responsible and informed interest in politics .. .'; on arriving in Portugal, 'Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, inarticulate understanding of death'. 36. Hopkins, cit. sup., draws some more or less convincing parallels of verbal detail between the Buckmaster passage and Victory and Under Western Eyes. 37. Fuller, London Magazine OS 5 (February 1958); Fraser, The Modem Writer and his World (London, rev. ed. 1964), chapter 11, but he does confuse Garnet Bowen with Patrick Standish. 38. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London, 1948). Reviewing Middleton Murry's Unprofessional Essays (Spectator, 11 May 1956), Amis speaks of 'the moral preoccupation that is, after all, to be discovered in Fielding'. He goes on: 'this, to be sure, is not the intense moral preoccupation which acts as an admit-bearer to Dr Leavis's Great Tradition, but it is none the worse for that. One might go further ... and add that it is probably all the better for that, considering how readily that intense moral preoccupation confuses itself - in the of Dr Leavis, say - with intense moral fuss'.

3 THE HERO AS BASTARD

1. , The Rachel Papers (London, 1973). 2. Amis, 'Mightier than the Pen' and 'Against Romanticism', Collected Poems 1944-1979. 3. If the omission of the lovemaking scene from the film of That Uncertain Feeling ('') distorts the issue by making Lewis look merely priggish, the mildness with which it is shown in the film of Take A Girl fatally mitigates the physical and moral ugliness of what Patrick does. 4. Salwak interview! p.9; James interview, p.23. 5. S. M. HainauIt, Etudes Anglaises XXV, 3 (1972) pp. 367-84. 6. TLS, 23 September 1960, p.60S. 7. Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London, 1970) p. 166. 8. Larkin, 'Annus Mirabilis', High Windows (London, 1974). 9. James interview. 10. These comments on Amis-speak draw heavily on Norman Mac- 260 Notes and References

leod's 'This familiar regressive series' in Aitken, McIntosh, Palsson, eds, Edinburgh Studies in Scots and English (London, 1971). This is still the best linguistic description of Amis. Cf. Anthony QUinton's 'Philosophy and Literature' in Thoughts and Thinker (London, 1982) p. 55: 'Kingsley Amis, speaking, I think, on behalf of that generation of new writers of the Attlee period of whom he has proved to be the most fertile and successful, claimed an affinity between the work of himself and his friends and three bodies of doctrine: the literary criticism of F. R. Leavis, the social criticism of George Orwell and analytic philosophy. There undoubtedly are analogies between the fiction and poetry of his particular generation and the ordinary-lan- guage kind of analytic philosophy which, dominated by Ryle and Austin in Oxford, radiated out in the first postwar decade over the whole philosophical scene. Both movements were robustly suspi- cious of all varieties of established pretension, unwaveringly alert to the spurious, unwilling to entertain large hopes, addicted to the plainest of colloquial language, espoused concrete satisfactions (for Jim Dixon a nice girl and a good job, for Austin getting some muddles cleared up) in preference to expansive ideals (heroic achievement in life or an all-inclusive system of the universe),. This tendency may be thought to be not unconnected with England's historical situation, nominally victorious in a war that had extinguished its last pretensions to great-power status, any remnants of which were blown away by Suez. 11. 'I think that idea got started when I was in the army, at the OCTU in Catterick. In the cookhouse there was one of the most amazingly ugly girls I've ever seen. Small, tank-like, repulsive. Her job was to welcome you in and say "Good morning, Lieutenant Shagbag, the porridge is over there". I used to say "Good morning" and, after a while, "How are you?" After a week of that she said, "You going to the dance on Friday, then?" I gabbled something at her, such as I wasn't going because I was going with someone else. And I thought (a) you poor little bugger, and (b) what disgraceful creatures men are. All I'd done was treat her like a lift-man, and look at the gratitude. That was probably the first instance I remember of consciously wondering what ugly people's lives were like' (James interview, p.23). 12. Encounter, 15 (December 1960) p. 80. 13. Amis, 'The Huge Artifice', Collected Poems 1944-1979. 14. The academic setting of One Fat Englishman in the derisively named Budweiser made waves similar to those of Lucky Jim; it 'caused no end of trouble in Princeton. They were all busily trying to identify themselves'. This remark, bringing the reminder of Amis's having been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton in 1958-9 (and having, like Roger, a lecture script stolen there - after, not before,), no more makes Amis Roger than his trip to for Colonel Sun makes him James Bond. Details of Amis's American are in the James interview and in 'Who Needs No Introduction', reprinted in What Became of Jane Austen? Notes and References 261

15. Extract from a pantomime version of Sleeping Beauty quoted in lona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford, 1974); Martin Amis, (London, 1984). 16. The reviews quoted from are: 'In a buyer's market', TLS, 10 October 1968; Punch 255 (25 December 1968) p.931; 'Amis and enemies', Listener, 80 (10 October 1968) p.475. Ronnie's position as TV personality inevitably aroused speculation about some supposed original: '''Who were you getting at in that televison chap in your last one? Robin Frost? David Day?" Nobody; I made him up.' The use of the TV personality illustrates what Amis has recently (Channel 4, 13 October 1986) described as part of the writing process: 'it's all experience really, but experience exaggerated, intensified, then you stylise it'. The remark occurred partly in a discussion of Alun Weaver in The Old Devils who is the fourth media person in the novels; they are a useful type because so widely and so easily recognised as useful shorthand for egotism and compla- cency and so on. On this and on the general issue of models for fictional characters, see Amis's 'Real and made-up people', TLS, 27 July 1973, pp.847-8. Some of the feeling and detail of the 'Fort Charles' section will be based on his stint as Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; a poetic re-creation of the same experience is the poem 'South'. 17. New Statesman, 12 January 1957. 18. 'The Legion of the" Lost', -reprinted in What Became of Jalle Austen? 19. See note 18. 20. Spectator, 19 November 1954. 21. Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson, 3rd edn (London, 1982).

4 THE VOICES OF TIME

1. 'The Voices of Time' is the title of a story by J. G. Ballard that first appeared in The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (London, 1960), and is reprinted by Amis in The Golden Age of Science Fiction. 2. Firchow, pp.38-40. 3. 'Unreal Policemen' in What Became of Jane Austen? 4. James interview, p.28. 5. Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson, 3rd edn (London, 1982). 6. 'Introduction' to G. K. Chesterton: Selected Stories (London, 1972) p.12. 7. Quoted in McEwan, The Survival of the Novel (London, 1981) p. 81, which has an excellent chapter on the Englishness of Amis and his position vis-a.-vis tradition and experiment. 8. 'Dracula, Frankenstein, Sons and Co.' in What Became of Jane Austen? 9. W. Hutchings, 'Kingsley Amis's Counterfeit World', Critical Quar- terly, vol. 19, no.2 (Summer 1977). 10. Yeats, 'The Choice', Collected Poems, p.278; title of essay by 262 Notes and References

Chesterton in J. C. Squire, If It Had Happened Utherwlse (London, 1932). 11. James interview, p.28. 12. Carey, 'If', New Statesman, 8 October 1976, p.483. 13. 'Bobby Bailey' in Amis, Collected Poems 1944-1979, p. 120. 14. Clancy Sigal, 'Band of Outlanders', National Review, 27 October 1973, pp.25-6, reprinted in Carolyn Riley (ed.), Contemporary Literary Criticism (Detroit, 1975). 15. Firchow interview, p.29. 16. ibid. 17. 'Out of the Air', Listener, 6 September 1973, p. 310. The attention to period detail is an enactment of the view expressed in The James Bond Dossier, p.104, that 'a few mentions of (say) Nestle's condensed milk, Woodbines, Spinks's plum-and-apple jam, and Scotch and Apollonaris would have done The Waste Land a world of good. As it is, the poem, by setting out not to be limited to or by its immediate period, has no social-temporal context either, and has become just one more of the featureless lumps of cultural lumber it purports to be superior to'. One may compare the high incidence of brand names, real and fictitious, in Larkin (and in Betjeman, whom both Larkin and Amis admire). 18. JO/Ill Betjemall's Collectcd Poems (3rd edn, 1970), p.210. 19. Billington interview, p.263. 20. ibid. 21. See Encounter, October and December 1969. 22. The phrase is 's in a fine review, Encounter, November 1980, pp.58-9.

5 SEX, MADNESS AND DEATH

1. Title of article by Bruce Cook, The National Observer, 29 January 1972, p.23. 2. Remarks by George Parrot in I Want It Now; 'Kipling Good', in What Becameoflane Austen?; Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 10 June 1818. 3. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels (London,1984). 4. James interview, p.25. 5. ibid. 6. Encounter, July 1966, pp.59-62. 7. James interview, p.25. 8. Salwak interview, p. 7. 9. Title of story by M. R. James in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London, 1904. 10. Listener, 9 October 1969, p.489. 11. Salwak interview, p.5. 12. See note 11. 13. Rochester, 'A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover'; Yeats, Notes and References 263

Collected Poems (London, 1967) p. 388. 14. Salwak interview, p. 16. 15. James interview, p.27. 16. Paris Review interview, p. 182. 17. Robson, Modern English Literature (London, 1970) p. 154, quoted in McEwan. 18. The remark is confected by McEwan from phrases in the novel. 19. James interview, p.27. 20. Larkin, 'The Old Fools', High Windows (London, 1974). 21. The reviews referred to are, in order: Timothy Foote, Time, 30 September 1974, p. 93; Anatole Broyard, New York Times, 5 October 1974, p.29; Paul A. Doyle, Best Sellers, 34 (15 October 1974) p.320; Jonathan Raban, Encounter, 43 (November 1974) pp. 87-8. 22. Matthew Hodgart, New York Review of Books, 20 March 1975, p.32. Gardner, Kingsley Amis, resorts to a different model: 'in formal terms, the many small chapters, apportioned laterally between groupings of characters as well as inching forward in time, resemble the progress of a ballet or an opera: arias, duets, trios, choruses, as the characters separate and rejoin on their various short-range errands' (p.99). 23. See, for example, Publishers' Weekly, 206 (28 October 1974) pp. 6-7, and 'Real and made-up people', TLS 27 July 1973, pp.847-8.

6 CHIPS FROM A NOVELIST'S WORKBENCH

1. 'Introduction', Collected Short Stories. 2. Salwak interview, p.13. 3. 'Introduction', Collected Short Stories. 4. 'Paris Review' interview, p. 176. A further similarity is evident from Archer's vision of an acceptable post-war England as 'full of girls and drink and jazz and books and decent jobs and being your own boss', which is also (as Amis puts it) 'very much how I felt. And when I voted Labour by proxy in 1945, this is what I had in mind. I didn't expect the Government to bring me girls, but I did share in the general feeling of optimism and liberty abroad at that time'. 5. TLS, 24 October 1980, p. 1190. 6. Published in Listener, 20 December 1973, and reprinted as 'The Green Man Revisited' in English Short Stories of Today, Fourth Series, selected by Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1976).

7 A NOBBLER OF PEGASUS

1. Schmidt, 'Introduction', Eleven British Poets (London,1980) p.6. 2. 'City Ways' in What Became of Jane Austen? 264 Notes and References

3. Jill was published by the Fortune Press, which also published Amis's Bright November, and in its 'mysterious and elusive proprietor' (Larkin's phrase in Required Writing) he found the 'Caton' of the early novels. Just as Jill found its way into a Soho shop, shelved between Naked and Unashamed and High-Heeled Yvonne, the sexual preferences of its publisher saw to it that the dust jacket of The Less Deceived advertised such titles as Climbing Boy, Barbarian Boy and A Diary of the Teens, by a Boy. Some Amis titles, too, might arouse false expectations in Soho. 4. Salwak interview, p. 15; James interview, p.27. 5. Davie, letter to London Magazine, March 1954, p. 74. 6. Fraser, The White Horseman, eds J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece (London, 1941) p.14. 7. Amis, 'The Day of the Moron', Spectator, 1 October 1954, p.408. 8. TLS, 2 April 1954, p.28. 9. Poets of the 1950s (Tokyo, 1955) pp.17-8. 10. The stanzas quoted are from 'A Slice of Wedding Cake', Graves, Collected Poems 1965 (London, 1965) p.245. Readers locked into a view of Amis as misogynist will resist the suggestion that the question asked later in the poem applies as much to 'the scourge of ' as to the Muse-man of Deya: ... do I always over-value woman At the expense of man? Do I? It might be so. 11. See also Bateson, 'Auden's (and Empson's) Heirs', Essays in Criticism, VI (1957) pp. 79-80. 12. Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London, 1973). 13. Davie describes 'The Evans Country' as 'wretchedly badly written'. This not only misses the expressive intention of what is contrived to appear clumsy in the sequence, it also comes ill from the writer of, say, 'Epistle to Enrique Caracciolo Trejo' or 'July 1964'. 14. 'On Hobbits and Intellectuals', Encounter, October 1969, pp.87-92. Amis's bemused reply is in the December issue. 15. Davie, Thomas Hardy, p. 104. 16. Salwak interview, p. 15. 17. Betjeman was a co-dedicatee of Collected Poems. 18. Larkin, Required Writing (London, 1983) p. 129.

8 KINGSLEY AND THE WOMEN

1. Amis, 'A Bookshop Idyll', Collected Poems 1944-1979. 2. Sunday Times, 17 September 1978, p.41. 3. Gardner, Kingsley Amis, Twayne English Authors Series (Boston, 1981) p.105; interview with Auberon Waugh, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 17 September 1978, pp.33-6. Notes and References 265

4. Spectator, 25 November 1978, p. 18; ibid., 23 September 1978, p. 81; Listener, 21128 December 1978, p.839. 5. 'Pendennis', 'A Difficult Old Sod', Observer, 3 February 1980, p.44. 6. Keith Wilson, 'Jim, Jake and the Years Between: the Will to Stasis in the Contemporary British Novel', Ariel RIEL, January 1982, pp. 55- 69. 7. TLS, 16 November 1984, p.1310. 8. Brophy, quoted in Observer, 25 October 1970. 9. James Lasdun, Encounter, September/October 1984, pp.49-50. 10. Russell Davies, Listener, 24 May 1984, pp.23-4. 11. Burgess, Observer review reprinted in Homage to Qwert Yuiop(Lon- don, 1986) pp. 514-6.

9 THE OLD DEVIL

1. , Eating People Is Wrong (1959); Anon., New Statesman, 14 February 1975, p. 202-3; ,Alan Brien, New Statesman, 7 July 1967, pp.15-6; S. M. Haimart, Etudes A nglaises , XXV (1972); Bruno Schleussner (Bonn, 1969); Edmund Wilson, New Yorker, 24 March 1957, pp. 140-7; Anon., TLS, 20 November 1970, pp.134-9; Adriaan van der Veen, Vlamse Gids, April 1960, pp.232-6; Philip Toynbee, Observer, 22 April 1962, p.20; W. S. Merwin, New York Times Book Review, 17 March 1957, p.33. 2. A list (already daunting in 1976) of the names of writers to whom Amis has been likened could be compiled from Salwak's Reference Guide. 3. Gene Sculatti (ed.), COOL, A Hipster's Dictionary (London, 1983) pp. 71-2. For what Amis thinks of Kerouac in particular, see 'Who Needs No Introduction' in What Became of Jane Austen? 4. Contemporary Novelists ed. James Vinson,'3rd edn (London, 1982). 5. Frederick R. Karl, The Contemporary English Novel (New York, 1962). 6. Spectator, 7 October 1955, p.459. 7. Bradbury, The Contemporary English Novel Stratford-on-Avon Studies No. 18 (London, 1977), pp.9-1O. 8. Todd, Iris Murdoch (London, 1984) pp. 13-4. 9. Murdoch, 'Against Dryness', Encounter, January 1961, pp.16-20, reprinted in Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today (London and Manches- ter, 1977) pp. 23-31. 10. Murdoch in Magee, Men of Ideas (London, 1978) p. 231. 11. Emmon Bach, 'The Syntax of Holderlin's Poems: 1', Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2 (1960-1) pp.383-97, cited in Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots. 12. Appleyard, Times, 4 September 1986. 13. Channel 4, 'The ', 22 October 1986. 14. Spectator, 2 May 1958, p. 565. 15. Emerson R. Marks, The Poetics of Reason (New York, 1968). 16. Burgess, Observer, 14 September 1986. Index

Ackroyd, Peter, 207 writing 1-7, 14, 26, 29, 45-8, 49, Allen, Walter, 25, 27 51,94-6,133-7,143-6,162,164- Alvarez, AI, 16,23, 195 6, 176, 189-90, 196-7, 206, 219, Amis, Kingsley 220, 238, 240, 261. LIFE: birthplace 7; parents 8; at NOVELS: x, 5, 40, school 10-11; goes up to Oxford 137-43, 147, 165, 173, 175, 206; 11-12; The Legacy 11, 14, 15, 1d~, The Anti-Death League 9, 13, 14- 288; meets Larkin 12; returns to 15, 48, 57, 106, 123, 131, 135, 153, Oxford 14; postgraduate 15; 154-9, 160, 163, 181, 186, 201, appointed to Swansea 15; meets 109, 137. Colonel Sun 131, 133, Conquest 16; origins of Lucky 206; The Crime of the Century 244; Jim 17-18; Lucky Jim published The Egyptologists 13, 16, 181-2; 19; of Lucky Jim 20; Ending Up 55, 110, 115, 118, 121, '' 20-1; 'the 145, 173, 175-80, 211, 212, 240, Movement' 22-5; wins Somerset 241; Girl, 20 7, 36, 48, 129, 138, Maugham Award 26; reception 150, 152, 156, 164-75, 206; The of Lucky Jim 27-8; influence of Green Man 9, 133, 135, 145, 153, Suez and Hungary 34-6; 159-64, 167, 174, 177, 187, 201, abandons socialism 34-9; 208, 209, 212, 236, 237; I Like It teaching in USA 39, and Here 26, 29, 40, 48, 63, 86-103, Cambridge 42, 45; at Princeton 105, 118, 133, 145, 215, 238; I 39-40; gives up teaching 45; Want It Now 41, 48, 104, 124-32, publishes Colonel Sun 46; on 133, 152, 156, 164, 168, 182, 186, Longford Committee 47; 212; Jake's Thing 3, 48, 49, 63, reputation as xenophobe 88, 109, 121, 169, 170, 175, 179, 180, misanthrope 175, misogynist 181, 204, 206-17, 236, 237, 239; 206-10; wins Booker Prize 239. Lucky Jim ix, x, 1, 3, 6, 14, 17, 18- SUBJECTS: abroad 28-9, 39, 87-9, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 44, 207; America 2, 3, 4, 39-40, 119; 48, 51, 53-73, 78-81, 85, 101, 124, 'Angry Young Men' 20-1,252; 126, 130, 133, 138, 152, 155, 158, boredom 69, 109 121; 164, 165, 166, 168, 175, 179, 180, censorship 47; culture 28-30, 207, 208, 210, 218, 231, 256; The 40-1, 45-7, 49, 71, 87-90; Old Devils 166, 239-42; One Fat education 2, 4, 39-45; feminism Englishman 2, 41, 55, 104, 118- 2, 206-10; jazz 24, 29, 40-1, 203- 23, 133, 153, 154, 168, 179, 207, 4; language 49,61-2,66,68,206; 236; The Riverside Villas Murder x, 'the Movement' 22-5,253; 7, 133, 135, 137, 143-7, 173, 175, music 4, 10; permissiveness 2, 4, 186; Russian Hide-and-Seek 49, 47-8; presentation of sex 47-8; 137, 147-51, 153-4, 173, 206, 216; religion 9-10, 136, 153-4; Take A Girl Like You 5, 19, 48, 74, Romanticism 15, 192-5; science 79, 86, 103, 104-17, 131, 154, 165, fiction 29, 40,136; socialism 34-9, 169-70, 177, 179, 183, 194, 201, 129, 147, 253; Vietnam War 3, 34, 229, 233, 259; That Uncertain 37-8, 155-6, 206; Feeling 29, 32, 50, 63, 73-86,

266 Index 267

Amis, Kingsley - continued 'Their Oxford' 204; 'To Eros' 31; 94-6, 101, 167, 168, 177, 182, 183, 'Wrong Words' 193, 195. 215, 236, 239, 255, 259. OTHER WRITINGS: 'Anglo-Saxon STORIES: 'All the Blood Within Platitudes' 13; A Question of Hell Me' 186; Collected Short Stories 5, 47; The Faber Popular Reciter (ed) 182-8; 'Court of Inquiry' 183; 47; 'Godforsaken' 10; G. K. 'The Darkwater Hall Mystery' Chesterton: Selected Stories (ed) 47; 187; 'Dear Illusion' 5, 186, 205; The Golden Age of Science Fiction 'Hemingway in Space' 187; 'The (ed) 40, 47; The James Bond House on the Headland' 187; Dossier 134; Lucky Jim's Politics 'Interesting Things' 183; 'I Spy 34, 129; New Maps of Hell 40; New Strangers' 183, 184-5; 'Moral Oxford Book of Light Verse (ed) 47; Fibre' 74, 183; My Enemy's 'On Christ's Nature' 9, 10; 'Pater Enemy 12, 181, 183; 'My Enemy's and Old Chap' 146; 'Real and Enemy' 183; 'The Sacred Rhino made-up People' 6, 207, 261; of Uganda' 11, 181, 183; Socialism and the Intellectuals 34, 'Something Strange' 159, 186; 35, 129; Spectrum (ed. with 'The 2003 Claret' 12, 187; 'To See Conquest) 47, 182; What Became the Sun' 187; 'Who or What Was of Jane Austen? 16; 'Why Lucky It? 187. Jim Turned Right' 2. POETRY: 'A Bookshop Idyll' 28, Amis, Martin, 26, 53, 119, 207 191, 195, 196, 208; A Case of Anderson, Lindsay, 21, 71 Samples 190, 196; 'A Dream of Amazing Science Fiction, 41 Fair Women' 16, 198; 'A.E.H.' 'AngryYoungMen',l,17,19,20,53 201; A Frame of Mind 16, 17, 22, Arendt, Hannah, 40 195; 'After Goliath' 25, 199; Arnold, Matthew, 134 'Against Romanticism' 16, 28, Arts Council, 4, 206 193, 195, 196; A Look Round the Auden, W. H., 16, 17, 36, 189, 190, Estate 198-200; 'A Poet's 196, 197, 199, 252 Epitaph' 31, 196; 'A Point of Austen, Jane, 230; Emma, 236 Logic' 201; 'A Reunion' 202; 'A Austin, J. L., 112, 260 Song of Experience' 198; Ayer, A. J., 193 'Beowulf' 13-14, 190; 'Bobby Bailey' 7, 203; Bright November Bailey, Paul, 176 14, 15, 190-1, 195, 197; Collected Bainbridge, Beryl, 5 Poems 1944-1978, 15, 16, 190, 196, Bateson, F. W., 15, 16, 33, 193, 195; 202; 'Delivery Guaranteed' 202; Essays in Criticism (ed), 15, 193; 'Equal Made' 204-5; 'Farewell , 33, 195; 'The Anti- Blues' 203; 'Fforestfawr' 212; 'In Romantics', 193 Memoriam W.R.A.' 201-2; Bellow, Saul, 39 'Larger Truth' 201; 'New Bennett, Arnold, 24 Approach Needed' 201; Beowulf, 13, 41 'Nothing to Fear' 201, 212; 'a Bergonzi, Bernard, 88, 106, 108, Captain! My Captain!' 191-2; 131, 187 'Ode to Me' 203; 'Release' 197; Berkhamsted, 153, 252 'Senex' 202; 'Something Nasty in Betjeman, John, 146, 203, 205, 262 ' 28, 191; 'South' Billington, Michael, 38, 147 41; 'The Evans Country' 199, Blackmur, R. P., 39 200; 'The Huge Artifice' 201; Black Papers, 16, 44, 182 268 Index

Blake William, 194 Dick, Philip K., 137 Bone, Gavin, 13 Dickens, Charles, 97, 144, 230 Booker Prize, ix, 4, 239 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 187 Boyars,7 Drabble, Margaret, 216 Boyd, William, 119 Duchess of Malfi, The, 47 Bradbury, Malcolm, 18, 104, 119, Dyson, A. E., 44, 45 252; Eating People Is Wrong, 18; Stepping Westward, 119 Eco, Umberto, 135 Braine, John, 20, 56, 78; Room at the Eliot, George, 97, 144 Top, 72, 129 Eliot, T. 5., 13, 95; The Waste Land, Brophy, Brigid, 218 189, 228, 262 Burgess, Anthony, x, 124, 154, 155, Empson, William, 17,22,153,189,197 176, 207, 216-17, 219, 223, 242 Enright, D. J., 5, 19, 22, 117, 196, Butler, Marilyn, 239 197,254 Butor, Michel, 136 Essays in Criticism, 15, 193 Byatt, A. 5., 156 'The Fantasy Poets', 17, 23, 195, Cambridge, 39, 42, 45, 48 196,200 Carey, John, 140 Fenton, James,S Caton, R. A., 14-15 Fielding, Henry, 63, 66, 100, 102, Chekhov, 182 105, 137, 227, 230, 259; Joseph Chesterton, G. K., 50, 51, 135, 181 Andrews, 63 Christie, Agatha, 133 Fleming, Ian, 46, 133 Clowes, Jonathan, 217 Flew, Anthony, 16 Coleridge, s. T., 194 Ford, Ford Madox, 181 Connolly, Cyril, 20 Fortune Press, 14 Conquest, Robert, x, 15, 16, 24, 36, Fowler, Roger, 234-5 38,43-4,49, 181-2, 195, 196; The Fowles, John, 138, 216 Great Terror, 36 Fraser, G. 5., 23, 102, 192 Conrad, Joseph, 96, 97, 99, 181, Frost, Ernest, 19 207, 233; Under Western Eyes, 98; Frost, Robert, 39 Almayer's Folly, 188 Fuller, Roy, 15, 102 Cooke, Alistair, 138 Cooper, William, 19, 20, 26, 161; Gardner, Philip, 207, 255, 257, 263 Scenes from Provincial Life, 19, 26 Gasset, Ortega y, 144 Cox, C. B., 44 Gindin, James, 229 Critical Quarterly Society, 44 Golding, William, 2, 40, 207, 216,229 Gollancz, Victor, 19, 40 Darkness at Noon, 3, 151 Gordon, D. J., 16 Davie, Donald, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, Graves, Robert, 16, 196-7, 264 30-1, 37, 42, 54, 151, 192, 198- Green, Benny, 41 200, 253, 254; Purity of Diction in Green, Martin, 23 English Verse, 30-1; 'Lucky Jim Greene, Graham, 15, 96, 141, 153, and the Hobbits', 198 157, 182, 188, 252 Davies, Russell, 207 Gulliver's Travels, 162 Declaration, 21, 30, 71, 253 Gunn, Thorn, 17, 22, 24, 30 Deeping, Warwick, 146 Deighton, Len, 47, 136 Hardy, Thomas, 198; Tess of the de Vries, Peter, 39 D'Urbervilles, 188 Index 269

Hartley, Anthony, 22, 23, 116, 195 Fools', 176; High Windows, 176; A Hartley, L. P., 147 Girl in Winter, 176, 189 Hayes, Alfred, 19 Laski, Marghanita, 6 Hewison, Robert, 41, 252 Lawrence, D. H., 6, 24, 33-4, 48, Hitchens, Christopher, 217 97-8, 140 Hodgart, Matthew, 176 Leavis, F. R., 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 34, Holloway, John, 22, 24, 72, 254 35, 42, 45, 96, 98, 102, 254-5, 259 Hoult, Norah, 19 Le Carre, John, 47, 136 Housman, A. E., 17, 189, 201 Lee, Laurie, 29 Hungarian uprising, 34-6 Leicester (University College of), Hutchings, W., 136 17-18, 53 Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 7, 201; Leishman, J. B., 16 Odd Girl Out, 7 Lodge, David, 55, 59, 65, 67, 90, Huxley, Aldous, 27, 105; Point 119, 229, 232-3; Changillg Places, Counter Point, 27; Crome Yellow, 105 119 Logical Positivism, 22, 25, 260 James Bond, 2, 3, 38, 46, 133-5, 144 London Magazille, 3, 41 James, Clive, 37, 114, 119, 134, 155, 176, 190, 205 Macdonald, Dwight, 40 James, Henry, x, 96, 97, 98, 99, 138, Macmillan, Harold, 53 230, 233, 238; The Aspern Papers, Macspaunday,53 87; The Portrait of a Lady, 98, 188; Mailer, Norman, 39, 228 The Ambassadors, 98 Mansfield, Katherine, 6, 182 James, M. R., 145, 159 Maschler, Tom, 21 Jazz, 24, 29, 40-1, 203-6 Maugham, W. Somerset, 2, 19,26, Jennings, Elizabeth, 16, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 54, 56, 64, 66, 86, 96 195 Maupassant, Guy de, 182 Johnson, Pamela Hansford, 119 McCarthy, Mary, 40 Johnson, Paul, 36, 129 Mellors, Oscar, 22 Johnson, Samuel, 41, 50, 241; The Milton, John, 154 Vanity of Human Wishes, 51 Mitchell, Julian, 119 Joyce, James, 229, 233, 235; Montgomery, Bruce (,Edmund Finnegans Wake, 41, 233; Ulysses, Crispin'), 16, 252 228,252 Montherlant, Henri de, 144 Morrison, Blake, 22, 23, 24, 31, 252, Karl, Frederick R., 229 257 Keats, John, 15, 193, 194 'The Movement', 14, 16, 17, 22-5, Kermode, Frank, 16, 195 27-8,30,41,53,71-2,83,94,196, Kipling, Rudyard, 182, 187, 188, 230 206, 219 Murdoch, Iris, 2, 26, 229-31; Ullder the Net, 26 Larkin, Philip, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23,24,27,40-1,53, 107, 112, 176, Nabokov, Vladimir, 33; , 33 189, 194, 195,205,262; Jill, 12, 14, 'New Apocalypse', 192 15, 19,48,83, 189; The North Ship, New Lines, 16, 28, 196 15, 191; XX Poems, 19; The Less New Poems 1952, 16 Deceived, 19, 22, 27, 189; All What Jazz, 41; Required Writing, 41; 'The Oakes, Philip, 23 Whitsun Weddings', 72; 'The Old Odets, Clifford, ix 270 Index

Oppenheimer, Robert, 40 Snow, C. P., 28, 253 Orwell, George, 24, 25, 151, 257; Softly, Softly, 47 1984, 40, 151 Spark, Muriel, 176 Osborne, John, 20, 21, 253; Look Spender, Stephen, 23, 27, 36, 87 Back in Anger, 34 Stoker, Bram, 187 Suez crisis, 2, 34-6, 214 Parker, Charlie, 41 Swansea, 17, 18, 42, 200-1 Paul, Leslie, 20 Poe, Edgar Allan, 133 Tennyson, 17, 189 Poets of the 1950s, 28, 296 Thomas, Dylan, 15, 24, 31-2, 33, , Alexander, 177; Dunciad, 176; 95, 192, 258; 18 Poems, 15; Windsor Forest, 194; The Rape of the Collected Poems, 15; A Prospect of Lock,235 , 32 Pound, Ezra, 29, 31, 37, 41 Thwaite, Anthony, 17, 239 Powell, Anthony, 52; What's Become Todd, Richard, 230 of Waring?, 87 Tolkien, J. R. R., 14, 198-9 Price, Jonathan, 17 Tolstoy, Leo,S, 149 Proust, Marcel, 229 Toynbee, Philip, 20 Pynchon, Thomas, 228 Trevor, William, 176

Quinton, Anthony, 260 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 3 Updike, John, 39, 176 Raban, Jonathan, 176 Rabinovitz, R., 228-9 Verne, Jules, 136 Raine, Kathleen, 23 Vietnam war, 3, 34, 37-8, 46, 214 Reed, Henry, 191 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 136 Wain, John, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, Roberts, Keith, 138 24, 25, 26, 32, 53, 71, 112, 193, Robson, W. W., 168 195, 230, 251, 255; Hurry on Rodgers, W. R., 15, 192, 193 Down, 14, 22, 25, 26, 53, 72; Mixed Roth, Philip, 6, 39 Feelings, 16 Rubinstein, Hilary, 19 Waugh, Evelyn, 4, 27, 28, 227, 230, 252,253-4,256; DeclineandFall,27; Salgado, Gamini, 117 The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 220 Scott, J. D., 22 Wells, H. G., 227; The History of Mr Scott, Paul, 185 Polly, 52, 63 Schmidt, Michael, 189 Wilde, Oscar, 189 Sciascia, Leonardo, 136 Wilson, Angus, 41, 45, 133 Science Fiction, 29, 40-1 Wilson, Colin, 20, 130, 168; The Scrutiny, 42 Outsider, 20, 21, 130, 168 Shaw, G. B., 228 Wilson, Keith, 216, 265 Shelley, P. B., 193 Wodehouse, P. G., 66, 115, 148, Sillitoe, Alan, 20, 21; 227,256 Nightand Saturday Morning, 21,129 Woolf, Virginia, 229 Sinclair, Andrew, 119 Sitwell, Edith, 17, 23, 27, 192 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 37