SOON after John Betjeman's death in 1984, Kingsley Amis wrote to a friend: "Wherever I go nowadays I hear tales of what a shit Betjeman was to his secretaries, swearing at them, making them cry, having to have a new one every few weeks." Nonetheless, the poet would go down in history, Amis said, "as a genial teddy bear figure beloved of all while a nice old softie like me will be taken as a curmudgeonly old shit". In Eric Jacobs' wickedly funny biography, Amis emerges neither as softie nor curmudgeon, but as leftist rebel evolving into right wing old rip. It is, you feel, exactly how Lucky Jim would have ended up.
The book was written while Amis was still living, and the first chapter is both hilarious and, because he is dead now, rather touching. It uses the excellent device of describing the writer in old age throughout a typical day. He lives - if one may claim a historical present tense - with his divorced first wife, Hilly, and her current husband. Or perhaps they live with him, since they are the lodgers. While Hilly prepares his breakfast, the husband - Lord Kilmarnock, no less - makes Amis's bed. He works, then sips a Macallan as his reward, takes a taxi - walking is difficult; he has circulation problems and is grossly overweight - to the Garrick for lunch and drinks with the "chaps". Like most, if not all, clubmen, Amis has never entirely grown up. Men's clubs are, after all, places in which one hides from women.
He has phobias. He dislikes being alone. He is a hypochondriac. He is afraid of flying, of driving a car, of being trapped in a lift. When he returns home from the Garrick, he sleeps his lunch off in a high backed armchair, then works some more. In the evening, he watches television. He is addicted to Coronation Street and The Bill - it is one of his admirable qualities that he is utterly free of artistic snobbery. He, takes a final Macallan and retires for the night, with a bucket (for emergencies) beside the bed. His life is splendidly complacent. At any rate, it is nice to begin the second chapter of a biography aware of one's final destination.
The journey begins in 1922 in Pooter country - i.e. Norbury, in south London. Amis was an only child. His mother was indulgent; his father, a clerk, could not believe that the younger generation could possibly hold opinions which were contrary to his - in other words, he was pretty much like fathers everywhere. And yet one accepts Mr Jacobs' contention that Amis pere et fils were "never so close as when they were at each other's throats". When he won a scholarship to Oxford, was his father dismissive or proud? - one would like to know.
He brought with him to Oxford a talent for mimicry, and he became an excellent raconteur. His best friend there was Philip Larkin, and their closeness endured until Larkin died in 1985 ("I enjoy talking to you more than to anyone else," Amis wrote, "because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous and generally shameful feelings that I don't want anyone else to know about"). Amis became a communist, but not from a passion for ideology. Perhaps he pre echoed Osborne's Jimmy Porter who, years later, would complain: "There aren't any good brave causes left. If the big bang does come and we all get killed off - it'll just be for the Brave New nothing very much thank you."
Amis was never one for isms or literary fads. His opinions, as time passed, were to be pragmatic and independent of fashionable context. Towards the end of his life he would be awarded a knighthood, but he was never deemed deserving of even one honorary doctorate (Larkin was awarded seven). One suspects that he lacked the desired gravitas. His needs were elementary: booze, birds, blokes and books. Until old age and debility, cancelled out the birds, his priorities never wavered.
He met and fell in love with Hilly - for Hilary Bardwell - when she was 17. He was 23 and had returned to Oxford alter army service. When, in time, she became pregnant (another thorn in the flesh of Amis Senior), they married. In all, they had three children, Philip, Martin and Sally. (Martin would, of course, become a novelist, and one defines oneself culturally by choosing between father and son.) Amis became a lecturer in Swansea, where he made enduring friendships. Already, while on a visit to Larkin at Leicester University, he had caught a glimpse of commonroom life at a "red brick". For a would be novelist, it was a virgin world, ripe for the ravishment, and the result would be Lucky Jim.
Amis's hero, Jim Dixon, speaks dismissively of "filthy Mozart", which caused Somerset Maugham to anathematise the new jumped up breed of academic as "scum" - ironically, the novel was to win for Amis the Somerset Maugham Award for 1955. At any rate, it remains the funniest book of its time, rather like Wodehouse scaled down from farce to the dimensions of comedy although the cigarette burns in the Welches bedsheets are worthy of Bertie Wooster. Probably Amis, who never really had a flag to wave or a drum to beat, was amused to find himself press ganged into the ranks of the Angry Young Men the term was actually the invention of the Royal Court Theatre press officer, assisted by a canny John Osborne.
The success of Lucky Jim did not at once enable Amis to give tip the "day job". He taught at Princeton and Cambridge and expressed a few maverick opinions which would today be deemed "politically incorrect". Meanwhile, marriage did not dowse his compulsive philanderings, and lame enabled him to spread his net Hilly, too, had affairs, probably in retaliation. There is a photograph, reproduced here of Amis in a swimsuit, sleeping on a Yugoslav beach. His enraged wife punning on the title of his latest novel, has written on his back in lipstick and large capitals: "1 FAT ENGLISHMAN - I FUCK ANYTHING". Probably, he did.
In time, he met the novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard. She was not quite upper crust, but patrician enough to excite whatever social climbing instincts lurked within the clerk's son from Notury. She had been twice married, and described herself as a "bolter", meaning that whenever a relationship went sour, she took off. Amis was quite besotted, and the affair gathered momentum until, squalidly, his schoolboy sons arrived unexpectedly at the flat where he and his mistress were enjoying each other.
Amis's snobbery where his new wife was concerned did not last, and certainly it was not reflected in his work. He compiled The James Bond Dossier and the first serious survey of science fiction, New Maps of Hell. Meanwhile, he was moving further away from the left and towards blimp hood. He was too fond of life's good things to commit himself to a political abstraction, such as a cause, but even he was shaken by the bigotry he found in Nashville while on a teaching stint.
His second marriage ended in divorce. It is a truism that the very qualities one adores in a loved one will become the most intolerable irritants when the relationship goes sour. For whatever reason, not only did desire ebb and die on Amis's part, but he came actively to detest his wife.
Once again, she "bolted", agreeing to return only if he promised to give up drink completely and for ever. In response, he offered to forsake spirits - except at weekends.
SHE was not impressed; probably, she guessed that an Amis weekend was apt to last from Wednesday to Tuesday. After the ensuing divorce, the wheel of his life came full circle. His two sons engineered a meeting with their mother, Hilly, and after 20 years the family was reunited, with the difference that now it was a kind of menage a trois, with the fourteenth Earl of Kilmarnock taking up the slack. Which is where we came in.
A writer's work tends to be his autobiography, once deciphered, and Mr Jacobs pilots us neatly through the shoals of most of 20 books. There are a few curious omissions; for example, Amis won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils, and yet it gets barely a mention.
Often Mr Jacobs' style is worthy of Amis himself; his book, in short, has a dry wit. What is most impressive is that, this being an authorised biography, the subject did not seek to erase the warts in what emerges as very much a Cromwellian portrait. Possibly he thought they were beauty spots.
Or it may be that here, as in much of his life, he simply did not give a toss. One's eye catches a throwaway reference to Amis showing his biographer the door: "not usually. I think, from exasperation, but so as to watch The Bill on television". First things first.