The W. C. Fields of English Literature
Roger Lewis
THE AMIS COLLECTION: SELECiED NON-FICTION 1954-1990 by Kingsley Amis
Hutchinson, £16.99, pp.400
Criticism, being a declaration of taste, may be the most autobiographical of forms. In concentrating upon other authors and their ravings, the rivulets of a chap's own perception are displayed; a geography of predilections and prejudices reveals itself. So what manner of self-portrait emerges from Sir Kingsley's rounded-up reviews and feature-essays? On the evi- dence of this rich and bracing collection, he is the W.C. Fields of English letters — a super-articulate growler who'll brook no balderdash, and who stands as a (neces- sary) corrective to anything flash, showy, pretentious or sentimental.
Just as Fields's comedy grew from his proficiency as a juggler and acrobat — the slurred delivery had behind it all the basics of timing and craft — so does Amis demonstrate the importance of good gram- mar, rhyme schemes and other rudiments, without which language and meaning grow apart. There are many sensible essays here on linguistics and education, all going to show how Amis's keen eye and exact ear have been, as it were, technologically trained — a process which began when he was a beef-faced chorister in the Denmark Hill baptist community. Such skills as euphony and clarity are not accidental. Amis's devotion to anthologies (as a com- piler and reader) and to dictionaries furth- er suggests the technical study he subjects himself to — `I have never come across any lexical work with so many references to drink as this one contains,' he says appro- vingly of an OED supplement.
His opinions, therefore, are never whims; there is a deep foundation of knowledge — so like Fields's, Amis's scorn is magnificently earned, and unarguable. It is true that Max Beerbohm makes 'not a single claim to importance of any kind'; indeed, Edward Lear is `one of the great nadirs of our national intellect and feeling'; and his dismissal of Poe (`Could he have been taking the piss?') is simply an act of charity, the laying to rest of an over- inflated reputation.
Amis's disparagement of hypocrisy and cant (for instance, his demolition of Dylan Thomas as a sponger and an expert only in stage-welshmanship) gives his non-fiction a powerful moral edge — and we can see how much his own art has learned from these critical encounters. For whatever else his novels are about (my wife won't let me read them in bed because I laugh too much), Sir Kingsley's fables are evocations of frauds and (his favourite word) shits. The academics, publishers, editors, jour- nalists and assistant personnel manage- ment trainees who crowd the pages of his novels are, like Beerbohm, Lear etc men of straw precisely because, like William Empson's critique of a poem, they leave things fuzzier than they found them. To win Amis's approval you must, like A.E. Housman, be devoted 'to the discovery of truth and nothing else.' All else is obfusca- tory, vague, clumsy, deceitful . . .
What puts Amis into the front rank as a critic (and as a novelist), however, is his inability to be completely disdainful. His comic spirit takes care of that. Things he claims to hate (Christmas, Americans, fancy restaurants) prove to be of worth if only because they provoke little master- pieces of irony out of him. And he is never completely curmudgeonly about any indi- vidual person (with the exception of Dylan Thomas). 'We all like people we dis- approve of,' he says, and this fact is 'one of the injustices of life that at the same time help to make it bearable'. Ponder that. His
`Whatever von do, don't drink the water.'
novelistic shit-heroes are proof of the idea; in this book, Victor Gollancz is a character whom Amis can't help but see from every side: he was `a monster of egotism, vanity and self-delusion who was also entirely capable of disinterested generosity both moral and monetary, genuine warmth of heart and readiness to go to endless trouble on behalf of those he valued.'
Those Amis himself values are similarly complex and contradictory. Tennyson, the poet of sadness and resignation, is brilliant- ly discussed. The essay on Kipling's under- standing of pain, waste, loss and horror and the unargued stoicism that outlasts them,' is perfection, as are the apprecia- tions of Philip Larkin: the poetry begins in ordinary events and makes 'an electrifying swoop into the midst of most things that matter: death, solitude, loss, change, the past, our relationships with others, reli- gion, nature . .
It can be seen from these brief quota- tions that Amis homes in on themes and issues pertinent to his own novels; to his own temperament, too. 'Immediacy, den- sity, strength' — the words of praise he selects for Larkin's verse are also virtuous quantities, and they are attributable to Sir Kingsley — who is at his best when throwing in saloon-bar asides, trying to pull against his tenderness. Of Robert Graves's Majorcan exile — 'I still cannot understand this removal, at the time a most unusual step for a heterosexual not wanted for fraud'; of a bit of Bach, so good it `made me forget to pick up my drink'; of the Norman Douglas/Laurie Lee school of travel writing, it is 'self-congratulatorily sensitive in the old wanker's mode'; of a sight seen in Portugal — 'There could hardly be a better example of what I think should not be encouraged than a fellow taking a tiger along a street on purpose'; and of foreign holidays — `I think the whole thing is got up by the women. All holidays are. And not only . . . Sorry, where was I?'
Amis has created a prose-style capable of crotchetiness and rich affection, a uni- que blend. (Television has thus been help- less when adapting his work, for the appeal is all in the writing. Both John Mills in Ending Up and Albert Finney in The Green Man failed to find the necessary multilayerings.) Amis is often compared with Evelyn Waugh, but there is none of the savagery and plain madness of Waugh; and to say they share an interest in social and moral disintegration is meaningless what novelist ever hasn't? Certainly not Amis's son Martin, the former child actor, whose own rumbunctious and ultra- modern books gloriously overturn his father's rules, prescriptions, hunches, as depicted throughout this current collec- tion. I can see already how commentators in the next century will be kept busy pondering the nature v. nurture debate. It will be as though Fields directly sired a metaphysical trickster like Ezra Pound.
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