A bit of a Boojum
Rupert Christiansen
LUCKY HIM: THE LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS by Richard Bradford Peter Owen, £22.50, pp. 432 ISBN 0720611172 There's a sting in the tail of Martin Amis's wonderful memoir Experience, and it takes the form of an appendix berating Eric Jacobs, the authorised biographer of his father Kingsley, for selling falsehoods and tittle-tattle to the newspapers without regard to the common decencies attendant on the funeral baked meats. A nasty little episode, for which Jacobs later apologised, but one over which Martin appears to remain unforgiving: six years on, he implicitly renews his attack by vigorously endorsing this new, potentially Jacobs-supplanting critical biography by a professor of the University of Ulster, Richard Bradford. His view that this ranks as an 'original and stimulating' study is puffed on the cover, though one wonders how closely he read it — it is odd, for instance, that nobody has picked up the blatantly erroneous assertion on page 416 that Martin served as 'book reviews editor' on the Sunday Times.
What Amis fits likes about Bradford's approach, a publisher's press release elaborates, is that it 'relates the life to the work ... proclaimedly, and with vigour'. Bradford does this relating to a fault, for my taste, insisting that Kingsley's fictional oeuvre can be interpreted as 'one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking autobiographies ever produced'. To validate this superlative, he trails through the novels, pursuing real-life parallels with pedantic persistence without ever convincing me that Amis's aesthetic use of his own life and the people in it was anything out of the ordinary. 'The truth', as Martin beautifully puts it in Experience, is that you can't put real people into a novel, because a novel, if it is alive, will inexorably distort them, will tug them out of shape to fulfil its own designs.'
With this reservation, Bradford's book can be recommended. It offers no startling revelations: although the author acknowledges helpful conversations with Martin, and Kingsley's second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard, there is nothing here that will be unfamiliar to readers of Jacobs' book, of Experience, or of Kingsley's own memoirs and letters. Nor does it present any major or energising literary reassessment of a figure whose reputation is already suffering the usual eclipse which follows a writer's death. There are new lads on the block now, they visit exotic places for their kicks, and the once shocking and enthralling antics of their progenitor Lucky Jim seem, for the time being at least. jejune and genteel.
Yet Bradford gives an intelligent and interesting account of Amis's life and work, written with an unstrident ease, lucidity and sympathy which would surely have pleased its subject. Bradford is particularly perceptive on the friendship with Philip Larkin, whose superior genius awed and inspired Amis, and who served as his imagined ideal of a reader. Did Amis ever write anything more funny or inventive than those uproarious, uninhibited letters to Larkin, and wasn't Larkin spot-on when he bemoaned to others 'the thinness of the imagination' which characterises Amis's novels and leave him irredeemably a second-rate artist?
Bradford also gives a fair account of the broad trajectory of the novels. Maybe the spiritual journey from his first major work. Lucky Jim (1954) to the last, The Old Devils (1986), was not a long or tortuous one (the contempt for the pretentious and established, the obsession with what Jim calls. the awful business of getting on with women', are only two of many constants), but it was one with several intriguing by-ways, and Bradford doggedly charts its stations, from the Gothic frissons of The Green Man to the bitterness and misanthropy of Stanley and the Women.
Perhaps Bradford is too indulgent to the last novels, product of Amis's return to the tranquil domestic bosom of his first wife and a surrender to sozzled Garrick Club old buffery. Efforts like The Folks that Live on the Hill and You Can't Do Both don't seem sufficiently, well, effortful in their retrospection, and here Bradford's insistence on their autobiographical roots is only too convincing. In 1969 Amis had excoriated D. H. Lawrence for the way in which he made it 'all right to supplement the deficiencies of one's personal life as source material, not by rearranging it, editing it and extrapolating from it, but merely by coating it with style and tone of voice'. 20 years later, this had become his own vice, and as a novelist he died of it.
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