The Revolt of the Pendulum (7 page)

A deeper indication of Amis’s capacity for self-analysis on the matter of sexual attractiveness is that he was capable of making a subject out of what it might be like not to be
attractive: what it would be like, that is, to be not like him. In
Take a Girl Like You
, Jenny Bunn is the fully articulated version of Christine in
Lucky Jim
. Those who thought
Christine unreal would have twice the reason to think that of Jenny, but surely, in both cases, the combination of beauty and goodness is not impossible.

You might even say that the beautiful find it easier to be good. It is certainly true to life that Jenny, with her practicality and her sense of fun to go with her looks, would touch the heart
of any man, and especially a man like Patrick, who is heartless and knows it. But in the figure of Graham, the decent type who yearns for her hopelessly, Amis pushed analysis into a new area. There
had been radiant young lovers in English novels before, from Tom Jones and Sophia Western onwards. And there had been stumbling, hopelessly yearning dim bulbs before: Dickens is full of them.
Graham was not even the first of these to bare his soul: Leonard Bast in
Howards End
tells us what it might be like to be a loser. But Graham was the first to bare his soul with eloquence.
The scene where Graham tells Jenny what it is like to be a man who has no chance with a girl like her is like nothing else in literature before, and would alone be enough to establish Amis as the
moral writer that Dr Leavis said he wasn’t. (I was present at the Dickens lecture when Leavis, asserting that Amis had no interest in describing the behaviour of a gentleman, inadvertently
defined Amis’s central literary interest as exactly that.)

Jenny doesn’t want to hear about Graham’s despair, and then despises herself for not having wanted to hear. She has perfect moral pitch, but no intention of letting her life be
ruined by a quest for justice. In a just world, she would have married Graham. But she wants Patrick. She just doesn’t want to sleep with him until they are married. So Patrick, exercising
his charmer’s privilege, gets in early. To think that Amis does not condemn that privilege, you would have to be dense enough to think that Amis actually approves, in
Girl, 20
, of Sir
Roy Vandervane’s up-tempo urge to seduce women who get younger twice as fast as he gets older. You would have to think that Amis, when he gives us portraits of men who regard the
individuality of women as merely the temporary disguise of a common object, actually endorses that attitude. Instead, he loathed the idea.

He probably made a line out of saying so – sympathy works – but his scorn of the rampant clod was genuine. Leader is good at bringing out how Amis’s sensitivity on the subject
was one of the very things that made him attractive. Women were interested in him because he found women interesting. Hilly always found him interesting and would probably never have left him had
he not compelled it. She knew all about his weaknesses but adored him anyway. And he, despite everything, was basically uxorious and thought she was the one woman that counted. He thought that
early and he thought it late, but late was too late and much of his life story that we find truly disturbing happened in the stretch between his two me´nages with Hilly, on the path which at
long last led him back to that fateful fork in the road.

The philanderer often has a better chance of staying married than the man who is so bowled over by love that he not only marries on the strength of it, he wrecks his first home when love strikes
again. A measure of how hard Amis was hit by his love for the elegant and accomplished Elizabeth Jane Howard is that he behaved like an honest man and changed his circumstances. Finally we
don’t know the secret of what brings two people together and keeps them there. If it was sex, the chances were mathematically slight that Amis had run into something he had never met
before.

What he had run into was romance. The coarse language in Amis’s letters might seem to indicate the opposite of a romantic propensity, but indicates it so strenuously that it would be wise
to suspect a cover-up. Lucky Jim’s interior monologue when he dances in Christine’s arms for the first time (it beats even Larkin’s phrase about ‘the wonderful feel of
girls’) is surely a better testament of Amis’s true feelings. There are good reasons for thinking that the concept of sex with nothing else to it was foreign to his nature, and this
time there was a lot else to it. The history of the British Establishment can scarcely be told without due account of how it is continually replenished by people born outside its walls, but Jane
was an insider: she was the gifted interloper’s glittering reward. On the evidence presented by Leader we are permitted to conclude that the increasingly illustrious Amis had reached the
standard climacteric where the ascending cultural figure is ready to leave the vagabond life he has led so far and become a toff.

Not that he wanted to become a Tory: not yet. His politics had always been on the left. In fact he started out as a Communist, but his dislike of authority guaranteed that he would not remain in
the party long. His dislike of authority in the army shows up in his short stories: the title story of
My Enemy’s Enemy
is only one example. In his universities he abominated the
prospect of being presided over by an unfeeling hierarchy. (The abomination is incarnated in Professor Welch, and the precedents for it are outlined by Leader in convincing detail, to the extent
that you marvel at Amis’s conscientiousness as an academic: how could he have borne the drudgery?) Amis was a natural Labour voter. But he was always wistfully responsive to the prospect of
an elect tribe of upper-order males confidently at their ease. (He once told me that he admired the way they were ‘not bothered’.) Gore-Urquhart in
Lucky Jim
is one example, and
Julian Ormerod in
Take a Girl Like You
would be the moral centre of the book if Jenny wasn’t. (It is Ormerod who tells Patrick that he has not behaved like a gentleman.)

Kingers had a soft spot for a gent. Jane was a female gent: noblesse oblige on a pair of killer legs. She had everything, and she could do everything. While independently busy with her own
flourishing career, she also knew how to look after him. He liked that idea. It was a bit unfair on Hilly, who had travelled with him over some hard roads. (There are moments early in the book, as
Hilly cleans up the widely dispersed kiddy-food while Kingsley marks a towering pile of exam papers, that you wonder if Leader might not be getting it all out of George Gissing.) Hilly was elected
by fate to incarnate Cyril Connolly’s cruel principle about the woman with whom we share our early struggles rarely being the same woman with whom we wish to share our later successes. Or
rather, she was elected by Kingsley. He might have done otherwise. He could have stayed, and kept Jane for a mistress. According to the evidence here, Jane loved him so much she might have settled
for that. But he was too moral, or perhaps he was bored.

A book of this length can have few hidden texts, but there is at least one, and it starts with the breaking up of his first marriage. The alteration distorted his life, but he lacked the steel
to be unworried. All the subsequent troubles, and a lot of the art left still to be accomplished, flowed from the great man’s reluctance to be a complete swine. The born scoundrel never
causes more trouble than when he turns sincere. Against his convictions, Amis had taken an artist’s privileges, and like most men who unleash such damage he tried to save his conscience by
convincing himself that he was facing facts. The disintegration of his family had consequences for the children which Leader explores with tact, but there’s enough to make you shake your
head. (His predecessor as a biographer, the late Eric Jacobs, though he was rather better than Leader at evoking anything funny, would undoubtedly have been less sensitive about anything that
wasn’t, so it’s a blessing that he is no longer on the scene, from which he departed pursued by the curses of the entire family.) But you might say that Amis’s new glory became
punishment enough in itself for his having reinforced its outward show with a conspicuous change of wives.

Superficially his circumstances were now ideal, and the book gives ample evidence that the couple were creatively fruitful both separately and together. At the end of the day’s work they
would read each other what they had written, like Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry. Jane, who had a history of accepting burdens and being treated badly, seemed well capable of getting on
with her work while doing all the other work as well. Cosseted by a heaven-sent helpmeet cum soul mate, Kingers lived a king’s life: nothing was allowed to disturb his concentration. One is
reminded of Thomas Mann at home in Munich, where the children had to play at the other end of the garden.

Amis had always been suspicious of the artist who demanded ideal conditions but he knew what they ought to be and was glad enough to accept them when they came. One of his ideal conditions had
always been plenty to drink. Jim Dixon dreamed of being able to smoke as much as he wanted. His creator had dreamed of being able to drink as much as he wanted. In his role of squire, Amis made
sure that this wish was fulfilled on a scale that it had never been before: there was a keg of upmarket Scotch in his study. All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the
Garrick Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the cab. And this was a man famous for never showing the effects. Visiting him for
a long lunch, those of us who were famous for showing them blessed our frailty. With a light head instead of a hollow leg, he would have lasted longer.

The depths of his drinking were achieved after Jane left him, but the bathysphere was well on its way down while she was still there. The low point of his catabasis took time to reach, but the
steadily descending trajectory is hard to miss. We don’t have to look for it in what seemed to confuse him. We can find it in what he seemed sure of. Though he continued to turn out novels
with clearly defined themes, the prose in them – once the initial attraction – became less clearly defined all the time, and eventually, as it was bound to do, this deficiency eroded
his comic invention. John Carey was right to say that Amis’s style became an instrument for evading meaning instead of conveying it. He might have said ‘Amis’s style, of all
people’s.’

All his life, Amis was a stickler for correct English, but the time came when he turned correctness into a kind of spiked truss: his putatively comic prose could hardly walk for its attention to
its own detail. By no coincidence (an academic phrase that would have made Amis howl) his attitudes hardened to match the progressive sclerosis of his fictional style. This stylistic petrification
did not show up so much in his non-fiction, but that was often because the opinions conveyed by his journalism had become wilfully simplistic. His anti-Communism, for example, became a hunt for
reds under the bed. The perpetual dimwit-left consensus will disgust any liberal eventually, but the trick is to reclaim the democratic centre, not to take refuge in the illusion that the
traditional right-wing prejudices were a system of thought all along.

Once, Amis had been an effective polemicist, made more so by his winning capacity to disclaim expertise in advance. Now he became an over-confident dogmatist, an advanced instance of what
Jean-Francois Revel identified as the tendency of those who had once believed the wrong thing to claim a monopoly of rectification on the grounds that those who had never believed in it could not
have been serious. It was as if Amis had come to find a reasonable position so boring that mania was more interesting. In his long-running friendship and verse-trading double-act with Robert
Conquest, the zealot was Kingers, not Conkers. Conquest, whose book
The Great Terror
probably did more than any other single publication from either side of the Iron Curtain to bring down
the Soviet Union, was unfailingly polite in controversy. Amis accused honest men of bad faith. This book does not record how thoroughly Amis managed to alienate Karl Miller – who had once
given
Take a Girl Like You
one of its most thoughtful notices – by calling him a Communist sympathiser. It might usefully have done so. Miller was only one among many admirers of Amis
who were forced to conclude that his public stance had become explicable only by pathology.

Amis the erstwhile enchanter developed a strange capacity to alienate anyone, almost as if he wished to. The notorious incident when he managed to drive Julian Barnes and Pat Kavanagh from the
dinner table is recorded here. Pat Kavanagh, who had spent most of her life in protesting exile from apartheid in her home country, was not disposed to hear Amis’s late-festering opinions
about how the blacks were ruining South Africa. He even developed similar opinions about Jews, though he must have known that this was a form of intellectual suicide.

Proof that he knew this was provided by Martin Amis’s story, told in his book
Experience
and duly rehearsed here, of how, after reading aloud from the passage in Primo Levi about
the deportees drying their babies’ nappies beside the train tracks, he turned around and found his father in tears. To tell this story was a decisive intervention, on the son’s part, in
the father’s legend: and was no doubt meant to be. The stakes were high. Without that moment, a saving grace might have been lost to history. The anecdote gives some much-needed evidence for
what must surely have been the truth: that Amis had turned against himself deliberately. A drunken man may speak with a brutality towards nuance that the same man sober wouldn’t put up with.
Amis’s plain aim was to attain that condition even between drinks. Since a civilised mentality consists entirely of nuance, for its possessor to attack his own subtlety is the sign of a war
within. What was the war within Kingsley Amis all about?

With due allowance for the requirement that we should be fair to Jane – she never stole him, he made a free choice – it seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to
disapprove of his own conduct. The artist who invented Sir Roy Vandervane well understood how a figure of achievement could be propelled into stupidity by the anguish of passing time. But Amis, in
his second marriage, was no philanderer. There could have been several reasons for that. As any man can note by keeping an eye on the divorces in his generation, the second marriage has to work.
But Amis’s anxieties with Jane weren’t centred on the strain of being faithful. They were centred on the loss of desire. The fiction told the truth, and nowhere more conspicuously than
in
Jake’s Thing
, where the erstwhile cavalier ends up wearing a dinky little rubber ring to measure the flaccidity of the lance he had once followed into action.