Lives in Writing Read Online Free PDF

to the nuances of Amis’s prose. His monumental, meticulously annotated edition of Amis’s
Letters
, published in 2000, did full justice to the richness of the material, for Amis was one of the great letter-writers of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the funniest. His early correspondence with Philip Larkin, whose
Selected Letters
edited by Anthony Thwaite (1992) displayed an equally expressive epistolary style, is a fascinating record of the formation of the literary ideas and practices that eventually flowered in the Movement. Simultaneously with the Amis
Letters
, Martin Amis published
Experience
, a complex memoir of an extraordinary concatenation of events in his life in 1995, including his father’s last illness and death, and containing many vivid anecdotes of their relationship from childhood onwards. Leader draws on these sources, but also provides a great deal of information that is new, recovered from unpublished manuscript material and from wide-ranging interviews with people who knew Amis. Many of the latter were hurt by him, in print or in life. There was an aggressive streak in his character, and he derived a devilish glee from flaunting rudeness and prejudice which tested his friends’ and family’s tolerance to the limit. ‘Few writers have written as perceptively about bad behaviour as Amis or been as consistently accused of it,’ Leader observes. He achieves the feat – especially difficult for any ‘authorised’ biographer – of being both empathetic with and critical of his subject. Reading this book one is at various points surprised, amused, fascinated and shocked, but one closes it at the end impressed by the ruthless honesty with which Kingsley Amis explored and confronted the less amiable aspects of his own character in his imaginative writing.
     
    As a narrative, it has a wave-like structure, and might have been called
The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis
, the two crests of his literary career being the successes of
Lucky Jim
and
The Old Devils
(with which he won the Booker Prize in 1986). In the trough between these two books there was much personal unhappiness, angst, accidie, and ill-health, from which he seemed to recover for a period before a final descent into dissolution and death, the fear of which had always haunted him, as it did Philip Larkin.
    ‘Kingsley Amis’ is a good name for a writer – both parts of it being unusual and instantly memorable. His given name probably derives from the popular Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley, but it is not likely that Amis’s parents had such a vocation in mind for their son when they named him after a cousin of his mother’s. Born in 1922, he was their only child – according to family rumour the birth was so traumatic that conjugal relations subsequently ceased. Mrs Amis was certainly panicked by any allusion to sex in the home – Amis recalled a ‘fierce (and absurdly visible) shake of the head’ at the mention in his presence when he was about fourteen of ‘somebody’s honeymoon or some such depravity’. The family was lower-middle-class, its ethos a genteel secularised Protestantism. Mr Amis was employed as a clerk with a firm in the City of London, and Mrs Amis was a housewife. They occupied a series of modest houses in a nondescript suburb called Norbury on the southern rim of Greater London. What saved Amis from a childhood of crippling dullness was the City of London School where his father enrolled him at the age of twelve and where he was supported after one year by a scholarship. This was by all accounts, including Amis’s, an admirable institution which modelled itself on public schools but took its pupils from a wider social range and, being a day school, did not cut them off from normal life during term. In 1939, however, when the outbreak of war seemed inevitable, the school was evacuated to share the teaching facilities of Marlborough, a traditional boarding school, and so Amis