The Amis we need: not Martin, but Kingsley
by
Ian Oakley
The news on the 21st May that Martin Amis had died two days previously was shocking to people of a certain age. Amis had been a fixture on the literary scene since the 1970s. He was seen as the defining literary novelist of the 1980s. His death at the relatively early age of 73 marked the end of an era.
The sad thing is that, for all the respectful obituaries Martin Amis has received, his literary star had already faded compared with his contemporaries Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. What he wrote in the last twenty years has aged about as well as his friend Christopher Hitchens’ predictions for the success of the invasion of Iraq, i.e. badly. That Amis died in Florida was fitting for someone who looked so much to the American novel.
The fact he died at the same age as his father and fellow novelist, Kingsley Amis, is also somehow surprising. In Kingsley’s case it was drink that brought about a relatively early death, in Martin’s it was smoking. And it is Kingsley whose work is likely to outlast his son’s. Not Martin but Kingsley Amis is the type of literary novelist the 2020s desperately needs and is not likely to get.
Kingsley Amis wrote one of the truly great comic novels of English Literature: Lucky Jim. It is a novel that is the equal of Vanity Fair or Decline and Fall. It was Kingsley’s first novel and based on his experiences teaching at Swansea University. A brilliant satire on the absurdities of 1950s university life; the world is crying out for a modern version. Think of the potential that exists today: woke, censorious students, resentful, underpaid academics on short term contracts, and overpaid, cowardly university bureaucrats, presiding over both. Yet I doubt that Lucky Jim is on any university English degree course these days. Not so much because it is too close to home, but rather because its author is so political and culturally beyond the pale.
Kingsley Amis was a paradox. He was a literary intellectual who was seen as a right-wing philistine by his critics when he died in 1995. The great thing in his favour was his honesty. When asked about one of his son’s novels, he admitted not being able to finish it. In the age of the nepo baby it is nice to have an honest answer to such a question. I am sure Kingsley Amis would have not been surprised that his son’s obituary for the BBC was written by its Culture Editor, Katie Razzall, daughter of the Lib Dem peer Lord Razzall.
Kingsley Amis’s great crime in the age of “MeToo” and “Toxic Masculinity” is that, after two divorces, he found most women annoying — to say the least. Even in his own time, his later novels 1978s Jake’s Things and 1984s Stanley and the Women, were criticised as harsh and anti-women. The truth is that Amis senior was no more misogynist than any man of his time and place; he was just honest in expressing his views. In an age where the slogan “believe all women” has led to false accusations against men, we could do with a literary figure to make fun of the phoney fashions of our age. The other irony is that while Kingsley Amis may be denounced as a misogynist now, it is an inconvenient fact that he was one of the few literary figures to publicly support Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher.
The thing about Kingsley was he took no prisoners. After Lucky Jim his best book is his 1991 Memoirs. He sticks it to both Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, noting that the British people might not know much about politics but knows a couple of nutters when they see them. He also sticks it to his old teacher, Lord Hugh Cecil, a member of the Cecil family who appears to have been the worst Oxford tutor the place has ever produced. What is less well known about the memoir is how he discusses his horror of racism in America in the 1960s, where he taught for a period. He also discusses how he responded to various homosexual approaches — including from Francis Bacon — with a polite no, which for the time was positively progressive.
The terrible truth is that in the age of Twitter, sensitivity readers and victim culture, Kingsley Amis would be very lucky to be published, although one hopes he would have found a readership somehow.
One final irony that Amis senior would have enjoyed. In feminist literary circles The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is practically a holy text, a warning of the terrible sexism of a theocratic patriarchy. Its sequel was a joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. When published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale was on the Booker Prize shortlist — but did not win. The winner was instead The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis. Margaret Atwood’s vision of the patriarchy was beaten by a comic novel about a bunch of ageing Welsh male borderline alcoholics. How the old devil himself would have chuckled if he knew the fury that knowledge must now arouse among the woke. Rest in peace, Martin Amis, but it is a new Kingsley Amis that we really need today.
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