There are some people you are always glad to see
There are certain people one is always glad to see. For instance, if I go into a room and find Henry Kissinger there, or if he comes into a party I am attending, I am delighted. For I know from long experience that, even in a short conversation with him, I will learn something I did not know and which is worth knowing. In a gregarious lifetime, I have accumulated a list of such stars. I don’t suppose there were ever more than 20 names on it, and many are now dead, alas. Most were included not because they added to my grasp of events, like R.H.S. Crosman, or my perception, like Harry Lee of Singapore, but because they made me laugh. We are weak creatures — I am, anyway — and prefer to have our spirits lifted to having our minds enlarged. Thus, pleased as I always was to see Isaiah Berlin in a room, it was because I knew I would soon be laughing rather than in anticipation of becoming wiser (though he could sometimes do both).
Who could be relied on to raise a laugh or set the table on a roar? Precious few, ever. It is the rarest of gifts, this dependability in fun-making. Did Ben Jonson have it? Or John Selden? Or Mark Twain? If you went to a London dinner party between, say, 1810 and 1840, and found Sydney Smith there, you could be pretty sure your tummy would soon be aching with mirth. He was never ‘prepared’ like Conversation Sharpe and other providers of ‘a good thing’, but much better — could seize upon a topic which cropped up in the desultory chat and turn it into a prolonged comic fantasy which had them all gasping and rolling.
This is quite different to the art of the bon mot and the anecdotalist. Nancy Mitford could make a funny remark, and often did, and Paddy Leigh Fermor still can tell a tale which has you in convulsions, but the fantasy-weaver is a special kind of verbal artist. I have known Ken Tynan pull it off occasionally. Peter Ustinov and Stephen Fry are other examples, but both were or are subject to a strict law of diminishing returns, with laughs subsiding sharply after an hour or so and yawns yawning just round the corner. The maestro in this field in the last generation was undoubtedly Cyril Connolly. When in the mood he could mesmerise, which explains why so many discriminating people were prepared to forgive his staggering awfulnesses. But when I knew him, towards the end, his magic moments, though they still came, were punctuated by long, sullen and silent pauses.
The performer who made me laugh most often, even painfully, was Kingsley Amis, not so much in company but face to face, especially (in my experience) with George Gale making up a trio and contributing his contemptuous grumbling noises. As a laughmaker, Kingsley exercised great art and occasionally flashes of inexplicable genius. This is something the immensely long biography of him, published last year, largely omits, and it leaves a huge hole in the heart of the book, so that future readers who never knew the man, or knew those who did, will wonder what all the fuss was about. For Kingsley, like Cyril Connolly (or Jean-Paul Sartre for that matter; a similar case) was a pretty dreadful fellow by any normal standards of personal morality. He was an only child of the worst type. Of course this predicament, as he told me, was an asset in one way, for his childhood was lonely and he learnt to tell himself stories. It made him a novelist. But it also made him incorrigibly self-centred and — not the same thing — a monster of selfishness. He could be thoroughly unpleasant and rude in both a sly and a downright way, sometimes simultaneously. He had horrid habits. But none of this seemed to matter once he got you laughing.
Kingsley was not exactly witty, though he could produce the neat phrase. ‘More will mean worse’ stuck in the mind. So did dons busy with ‘pseudo-research into non-problems’. There were plenty like that. More important, at the written level, was Kingsley’s brilliant and wholly personal manipulation of the English language, into which he put a great deal of care and ingenuity. Like Mark Twain, it was not so much what he wrote as the way he wrote it, his comedy of grammar. But whereas Twain got his effects through punctuation, the written equivalent of timing in the theatre, Amis used syntax. His most effective comic sentences combined a Ciceronian concern for correctness with an apparent, but on close inspection, artificial use of conversational demotic. He invented this cunning form of syntactical running gag in Lucky Jim, and no one has been able to do it properly since.
Kingsley combined this trick with imitations. The two are closely connected. I am not sure that he was the finest mimic I have ever heard (leaving aside that superb young professional who went off his head). I think the prize there must go to Jeremy Thorpe, before disaster overtook him. Thorpe could do not just the voice but the content, with devastating ferocity. Amis could do the content too, of course. That is what made his Lord David Cecil such a winner, with subtle distinctions between Cecil lecturing and giving a tutorial. However, Amis’s strength lay in his range. Here he had much in common with Kipling. Old Kippers, as Amis called him, could do Asians as well as Europeans, and he could make animals talk convincingly, and even machines. The ability to animate and anthropomorphise anything was a central part of his genius.
Kingsley could certainly make what he called ‘wog speech noises’. I recall a multivoice Cabinet meeting in Léopoldville for example, circa 1960, fuelled by material supplied by George Gale, who had been there. He could do animals too, such as Jane’s King Charles spaniel, Rosie, ‘asking for more’. But his greatest imitation of all was trying to start by hand an antique Belgian lorry during the Ardennes campaign in the winter of 1944-45. This masterpiece really took it out of Kingsley and he would rarely do it. By begging and feeding him with trebles I got it out of him three times. But he could also do the special twaaangg noise from Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, which occurred whenever the waiters went through the door to the kitchen in the pension. And fight noises. Kingsley had a marvellous dual imitation of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy having a drunken quarrel after a party, on the subject of who should put out the rubbish. This was a masterpiece of literary invective culminating in a bout of fisticuffs, thwacking, slapping, screams and roars. In short, with Kingsley around, ‘the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.’ God rest the old devil.
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