Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), novelist, poet, critic, polemicist, screenwriter, and editor. Sir Kingsley Amis was the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the 20th century and a dominant force in the writing of the age.

Kingsley Amis was born on April 16, 1922, in south London and educated, on scholarship, at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford. At St John’s he read English, as did Philip Larkin, whom he met a week after arrival; their friendship, quickly established, was to become a crucial shaping influence on the literature of the post-war period.

Amis’s undergraduate education was interrupted by the war, in which he served as an officer in the Royal Signals (1942-1945). Shortly after his return to Oxford, he met Hilary Bardwell, who was to become his first wife and the mother of his three children: Philip, Martin, the novelist, and Sally. In 1947 he published his first book, Bright November, a volume of poems, and in 1949 he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University College of Swansea, where he was to live and teach for the next 11 years. After a brief period as a fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1961-1962), he supported himself and his family as a freelance writer.

Amis’s first published novel, Lucky Jim (1954), was an immediate financial and critical success and deeply influential. According to Amis, the novel’s success derived in part from Larkin’s advice and encouragement, in part from traditional comic ingredients: “A young man at odds with his surroundings, and trying to make his way, and suffering comic misfortunes, and getting the girl.” To the novelist David Lodge, it heralded important social changes, encouraging writers of the next generation “not to be overawed by the social and cultural codes of the class to which we had been elevated by education”.

The success of Lucky Jim coincided with Amis’s growing visibility not only as a poet but as a literary journalist and polemicist. He was an astonishingly prolific writer, the author of 25 published novels, 7 books of poetry, 11 works of non-fiction, 17 edited volumes, several dozen short stories, 9 television and radio plays, over 1,300 pieces of journalism, and almost 2,000 letters. A man of alarming appetites and energies, the funniest man most people had ever met, or the cleverest, or the rudest, he was everywhere quoted in newspapers and periodicals. In his youth he was an outspoken communist; after Suez and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he moved steadily to the right, partly out of principle, partly to annoy.

Amis’s career as a novelist can be divided into three periods. The best, and best-known, of the novels of the early period are Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You (1960). From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, he embarked on a period of formal experimentation, alternating predominantly realistic novels with reworkings, updatings, and imitations of popular fictional genres (a ghost story, a classic detective novel, a James Bond novel, two science fiction novels, a romance). The most interesting of these middle-period works are Girl, 20 (1971), The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), Ending Up (1974), and The Alteration (1976).

The break-up in 1980 of Amis’s second marriage, to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, marked a low point in his life, resulting in novels of exceptional darkness and aggression, especially towards women. His return to creative health owed much to a chaste reunion with his first wife, Hilly, with whom he set up house (together with her third husband, Lord Kilmarnock, and their son, Jaime). In 1986 Amis published The Old Devils, a work every bit as darkly comic as its predecessors, but suffused with regret and affection. It won the Booker Prize and issued in Amis’s third period, of novels of comparably serio-comic character. These novels were marked also by a change in style, principally a gathering syntactical complexity.

Amis died in London on October 22, 1995, after a fall and suspected stroke. At his death he was hailed as the funniest and most gifted English novelist of his age.