Lives in Writing Read Online Free PDF Page A

the same style:
     
Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap, I got indoors, vigorously rubbing lipstick off my mouth with my handkerchief.
     
    Essentially this is prose that puts truthfulness before elegance, especially ‘elegant variation’, but manages to achieve a kind of eloquence as well as humour with lexical and syntactical repetition that seems superficially clumsy. The aim is always to be honest, exact, and undeceived. It was a style that Amis had cultivated and honed in correspondence with Larkin long before either of them was published, and it helped a lot of other young British writers to find their own voices.
    Amis’s place as leader and trend-setter did not last for much more than a decade. Society changed, literary fashion changed, and he changed. But he remained a significant figure in English letters, maintaining throughout his life a prolific output, not only of novels (twenty-five in all) but also numerous non-fiction books of various kinds, television screenplays, a vast amount of journalism, and a significant number of poems that have stood the test of time. He enjoyed his celebrity, and used his access to the media to comment on social and political issues of the day, as his views swung from left to right in the course of his life. That his son Martin achieved comparable fame and influence among his generation caused Amis
père
some irritation as well as pride, but helped to maintain his own prominent position in English cultural life. His personal life was also full of interest, with fascinating links to his work, and is well documented. In short, he fully deserved a major biography.
    Amis’s own
Memoirs
, published in 1991, though entertaining and occasionally revealing, was not an autobiography but a collection of discontinuous reminiscences, character-sketches and reflections that gave away little about the writer’s private and emotional life. It was also, according to several disgruntled people described in its pages, factually unreliable. Not long afterwards Amis approved and to some extent assisted a biography of himself written by Eric Jacobs, a journalist and fellow habitué of the Garrick Club. Published in the spring of 1995, it revealed a very different person behind Amis’s bluff, blimpish and entertaining public mask: someone who for most of his life had been subject to anxiety, panic attacks, and various phobias, who would not fly, drive, or travel on the Underground, and was dependent on other people to manage the simplest tasks of life. It was an eye-opening book for those interested in the subject’s personal history, but under-researched and inadequate in its treatment of Amis the writer. When it was finished Jacobs obtained Kingsley’s agreement to record their conversations in the manner of a latter-day Boswell, with a view to eventual publication. There was also an informal understanding that Jacobs would in due course edit Amis’s letters.
    By this time Amis was in poor health, and drinking heavily, as he had been for years. In the autumn of 1995 he had a serious fall and after a few weeks of illness and dementia, very distressing to his family, he died peacefully in his sleep on 22 October. With extraordinary tactlessness, Jacobs attempted to rush into print with his observations of Amis’s last weeks of life, and approached some newspapers with the material. When Martin Amis protested, Jacobs immediately backed down, but he was not invited to the funeral, and the editorship of the letters was given to Zachary Leader, a friend of Martin’s. This was perhaps hard luck for Jacobs (who died in 2003), but fortunate for readers of Kingsley Amis. Leader is an academic critic with a special interest in modern British writing. American by birth, he has lived the larger part of his adult life in England, long enough to respond