User:Stephen Burnett/Amis
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Sir Kingsley William Amis (April 16, 1922 – October 22, 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He is the father of the British novelist Martin Amis.
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[edit] Biography
Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, South London. He began his education at the City of London School, and went up to St. John's College, Oxford April 1941 to read English; it was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, he was called up for Army service in July 1942. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, he had by then decided to give much of his time to writing.
In 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell, and they married in 1948. He became a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea (1948–61). Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of 1950s Britain. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim is a seminal work, the first English novel featuring an ordinary man as anti-hero. It was also the first British campus novel, setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobsen. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.
During 1958-9 he made the first of two visits to the United States, where he was Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University, as well as a visiting lecturer in other Northeastern universities. On his return, he felt that he was in a rut, and he began to look for another post. After 13 years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse at Cambridge (1961–63). He regretted the move within a year; he found Cambridge both academically and socially a disappointment, and he resigned in 1963, intending to move to Majorca. In fact, he got no further than London. [1][2].
In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis had been conducting an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. They separated in August, and Amis went to live with Jane. His divorce with Hilary was finalised in 1965, and he married Jane in the same year; they subsequently divorced in 1983. Amis spent his last years sharing the house of his first wife and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock. He had three children, including the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote of his father's life and decline in his memoir Experience.
Amis received a knighthood in 1990. In August 1995, he had a fall, and a suspected stroke. After an apparent recovery, his condition worsened and he was re-admitted to hospital. He died on 22nd October 1995. [3]
[edit] Literary Work
[edit] Novels
As Richard Bradford points out, Amis used his own life, and those of the people around him, as the raw material for many of his novels: "Amis did not invent his fictions; he fictionalised what he knew." [4] This was particularly true of the early work. Lucky Jim, for example, reflects Amis' own disillusioned view of academic life, his loathing of the dullness and the pretension that he found there. In That Uncertain Feeling he explores the actions of a man who loves his wife, but commits adultery - a plot which hinted at the state of his real-life marriage at the time. In Take A Girl Like You he was more explicit; the principal male figure is, like Amis himself, a prodigious libertine. [5] With One Fat Englishman, Amis created a character - Roger Hazeldene - who was "irretrievably nasty"[6], embodying many traits which Amis loathed, but also reflecting many aspects of Amis' own character. In Jake's Thing, he explored his own problems with sexual dysfunction.
Stanley and the Women
He wrote two novels depicting alternate history: The Alteration, an novel set in a twentieth-century Britain where the Reformation never occurred, and Russian Hide-and-Seek, an alternate history where Russia had conquered Britain after the Second World War. He also wrote the supernatural-horror novel The Green Man, which the BBC adapted for television.
Amis's novel about a group of retired friends, The Old Devils, won the Booker Prize in 1986. Like many of his novels it is a social comedy, embodying the author's pessimistic view of human relations and conduct, and his hostility to the false or pretentious.
[edit] Science fiction
Amis's critical interest in science fiction led to New Maps of Hell (1960), his interpretation of the genre's literary qualities. He was particularly enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell he coined the term "comic inferno", describing a type of humorous dystopia, particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. With the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, Amis produced the science fiction anthology series Spectrum I–IV, which drew heavily upon the 1950s magazine Astounding Science Fiction.
A tape-recorded conversation on science fiction took place between Amis, C. S. Lewis and Brian Aldiss in Lewis's rooms at Cambridge in December 1962, shortly before Lewis's death. A transcript appears under the title 'Unreal Estates' in the collection On Stories by C. S. Lewis.
[edit] James Bond
Kingsley Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond in the 1960s, writing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular The James Bond Dossier under his own name. That same year, he wrote, The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's Chief of Staff in many of Fleming's Bond novels.
It is widely claimed that after Fleming died in 1964 following completion of an early draft of The Man with the Golden Gun, the publisher commissioned Amis and possibly other writers to finish the manuscript. Bond historians and Fleming biographers have in recent years debunked this theory, indicating that no such ghostwriter was ever employed, though Amis did provide suggestions on how to improve the manuscript, later rejected. [See here for more on the controversy]
In 1968 the owners of the James Bond property, Glidrose Publications, attempted to continue the series by hiring different novelists, all of whom were to publish under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". In the event, Amis's Colonel Sun was the first and only Bond novel to be published under that name. It is widely believed that Amis had planned to write a second Bond novel but was talked out of it. Colonel Sun was adapted as a comic strip in the Daily Express in 1969. In a 2005 Titan Books reprint volume of the comic strip, an introductory chapter indicated that Amis planned to write a short story featuring an elderly Bond coming out of retirement for one last mission, but Glidrose refused him permission to write it. Amis was unsuccessful at persuading EON Productions to adapt his novel as a film. According to the Titan Books introductory chapter, Amis was told that Harry Saltzman (co-producer of the Bond series up until 1974) had "blackballed" any use of Colonel Sun as a Bond film, apparently in response to Glidrose having rejected the publication of the post-Fleming Bond novel, Per Fine Ounce by Geoffrey Jenkins, which Saltzman had championed. In 2002, however, Colonel Sun was clearly referenced in the James Bond film Die Another Day in which the villain was named Colonel Tan-Sun Moon.
[edit] Hangover Cure
From the Hangover Handbook [1](1981) by David E. Outerbridge, attributed to Kingsley Amis:
"If your wife or other partner is beside you, and (of course) is willing, perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can. The exercise will do you good, and - on the assumption that you enjoy sex - you will feel toned up emotionally. WARNINGS: (1) if you are in bed with somebody you should not be in bed with, and have in the least degree a bad conscience about this, abstain. Guilt and shame are prominent constituents of the Metaphysical Hangover, and will certainly be sharpened by indulgence on such an occasion. (2) For the same generic reason, do not take the matter into your own hands if you awake by yourself."
[edit] Personal life
As a young man, Kingsley Amis was a vocal member of the Communist Party, although he later claimed this was in part a stance designed to irritate his father, and partly to satisfy a need to be part of an "embattled minority".[7]. In any case, he became disillusioned with Communism, breaking with it when the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Thereafter, Amis became anti-communist, and conservative. He discusses his political change of heart in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967), and it percolates into later works such as his dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).
Views on educational standards
Amis was skeptical about the existence of a benevolent deity, although he showed little hostility towards organized religion. In novels such as The Green Man and The Anti-Death League, and in poems such as “The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment” and “New Approach Needed,” Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with such cruelty and injustice. The matter of Amis’s religious views is perhaps best summed up by his response, reported in his Memoirs, to the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s question, in his broken English: “You atheist?” Amis replied, “It’s more that I hate Him.”
In his memoirs, Amis wrote "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time"[8]. He suggests that this is due to a naive tendency on the part of his readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. This was disingenuous; the fact was that he enjoyed drink, and spent a good deal of his time in pubs. Hilary Rubinstein, who commissioned Lucky Jim, commented "I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer ... I didn't know Kingsley very well, you see"[9]. Clive James comments: "All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the Garrick Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the taxi. " [10] Amis was, however, adamant in his belief that inspiration did not come from a bottle: "whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work."[8]. According to Clive James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social, and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour toward Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately ... it seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct."
Like Philip Larkin, Amis was a keen jazz fan, with a particular enthusiasm for the American musicians Sidney Bechet, Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell [about whom Amis and Larkin corresponded extensively. [11]
[edit] References
- ^ Memoirs, "Cambridge"
- ^ Bradford, Ch 10
- ^ Bradford, Ch 23
- ^ Bradford, Ch 9
- ^ Bradford, Ch 9
- ^ Bradford, Ch 10
- ^ Bradford, Ch 1
- ^ a b Memoirs: Booze
- ^ Quoted in Bradford, Ch 5
- ^ "Kingsley without the women", by Clive James, TLS February 2nd 2007
- ^ Letters
[edit] Further Reading
1. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis, Richard Bradford, Peter Owen, 2001.
2. Kingsley Amis: Memoirs, Kingsley Amis, Penguin, 1992.
3. The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader, HarperCollins, 2000.
[edit] Partial bibliography
- 1947 Bright November
- 1953 A Frame of Mind
- 1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits.
- 1954 Lucky Jim
- 1955 That Uncertain Feeling
- 1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956.
- 1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals. A Fabian Society pamphlet
- 1958 I Like it Here
- 1960 Take A Girl Like You
- 1960 New Maps of Hell: a Survey of Science Fiction
- 1960 Hemingway in Space (short story), Punch Dec 1960
- 1962 My Enemy's Enemy
- 1962 The Evans County
- 1963 One Fat Englishman
- 1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest).
- 1965 The James Bond Dossier
- 1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (pseud. Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner)
- 1966 The Anti-Death League
- 1968 Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure (pseud. Robert Markham)
- 1968 I Want It Now
- 1968 A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957-1967
- 1969 The Green Man
- 1970 What Became of Jane Austen?, and Other Questions
- 1971 Girl, 20
- 1972 On Drink
- 1973 The Riverside Villas Murders
- 1974 Ending Up
- 1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World
- 1975 The Crime Of The Century
- 1976 The Alteration
- 1978 Jake's Thing
- 1978 The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (ed.)
- 1979 Collected Poems 1944-78
- 1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek
- 1980 Collected Short Stories
- 1983 Every Day Drinking
- 1984 How's Your Glass?
- 1984 Stanley and the Women
- 1986 The Old Devils
- 1988 Difficulties With Girls
- 1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill
- 1990 The Amis Collection
- 1991 Memoirs
- 1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories
- 1991 We Are All Guilty
- 1992 The Russian Girl
- 1994 You Can't Do Both
- 1995 The Biographer's Moustache
- 1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage
- 2001 "The Letters of Kingsley Amis", Edited by Zachary Leader
[edit] Poets in The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988)
Richard Aldington - Kenneth Allott - Matthew Arnold - Kenneth Ashley - W. H. Auden - William Barnes - Oliver Bayley - Hilaire Belloc - John Betjeman - Laurence Binyon - William Blake - Edmund Blunden - Rupert Brooke - Robert Browning - Robert Burns - Thomas Campbell - Thomas Campion - G. K. Chesterton - Hartley Coleridge - Robert Conquest - W. J. Cory - John Davidson - Donald Davie - C. Day Lewis - Walter De la Mare - Ernest Dowson - Michael Drayton - Lawrence Durrell - Jean Elliot - George Farewell - James Elroy Flecker - Thomas Ford - Roy Fuller - Robert Graves - Thomas Gray - Fulke Greville - Heath - Reginald Heber - Felicia Dorothea Hemans - W. E. Henley - George Herbert - Ralph Hodgson - Thomas Hood - Teresa Hooley - Gerard Manley Hopkins - A. E. Housman - Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey - T. E. Hulme - Leigh Hunt - Elizabeth Jennings - Samuel Johnson - John Keats - Henry King - Charles Kingsley - Rudyard Kipling - Philip Larkin - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - John Lydgate - H. F. Lyte - Louis MacNeice - Andrew Marvell - John Masefield - Alice Meynell - Harold Monro - William Morris - Edwin Muir - Henry Newbolt - Alfred Noyes - Wilfred Owen - Thomas Love Peacock - George Peele - Alexander Pope - Frederic Prokosch - Walter Ralegh - John Crowe Ransom - Christina Rossetti - Siegfried Sassoon - John Skelton - Robert Southey - Edmund Spenser - Sir John Squire - Robert Louis Stevenson - Sir John Suckling - Algernon Charles Swinburne - George Szirtes - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Dylan Thomas - Edward Thomas - R. S. Thomas - Francis Thompson - Anthony Thwaite - Chidiock Tichborne - Aurelian Townsend - W. J. Turner - Oscar Wilde - John Wilmot, Lord Rochester - Roger Woddis - Charles Wolfe - William Wordsworth - W. B. Yeats - Andrew Young
[edit] External links
- "Kingsley without the women", by Clive James, TLS February 2nd 2007
- "Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998.
- Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
- The Paris Review interview, with downloadable PDF
- "The Serious Comedian", by Tom Chatfield, Prospect Magazine, a review of Zachary Leader's biography.
- "The old devil" - article on Amis by Mark Steyn in The New Criterion
| Preceded by Ian Fleming 1953-1964 |
James Bond writer 1968 |
Succeeded by John Pearson 1973 |
