Lives in Writing Read Online Free PDF Page B

came to experience the kind of educational ambience that he had previously known only vicariously from juvenile reading.
    It was virtually an all-male environment, as were St John’s College, Oxford, where he went in 1941 to begin reading English, and the army into which he was called up in 1942, interrupting his studies for the duration of the war. So from his late adolescence into early adulthood girls were scarce and seldom sexually available, and his closest personal relationships were with other young men, notably with Philip Larkin, who was already at St John’s, and also reading English, when Amis went up to Oxford. Larkin had a similar social background to Amis’s, and they had the same tastes in literature, jazz, and humour. They immediately became fast friends. ‘It was love, unquestionably love on my father’s part,’ Martin commented in
Experience
, after reading Amis’s early letters to Larkin, an intense feeling of affinity which the former both acknowledged and defused by referring to the latter occasionally as ‘dalling’. From an unpublished and uncompleted novel called ‘Who Else Is Rank?’ which Amis wrote in collaboration with a fellow officer during his military service, and a short story by Philip Larkin called ‘Seven’, it is clear that there was a homosexual element in the group to which they belonged at Oxford, and a camp style was adopted by some of its heterosexual members. This may partly explain Amis’s determination later to seize every possible opportunity for fornication, as if he needed to reassure himself about his own sexual identity. (In one of his letters to Elizabeth Jane Howard, with whom he fell in love in 1962, he says: ‘thanks to you I have dismissed for ever any lingering doubts about my masculinity and all that.’)
    Amis joined the Royal Signals in 1942, correctly calculating that this would be one of the safest branches of the military in a war because its activities are usually well to the rear of any fighting. Nevertheless his unit was posted to France only three weeks after D-Day, and followed the British forces across Europe until the end of the war, so he cannot have been entirely out of danger. When I reviewed the
Letters
in the
Times Literary Supplement
I speculated that perhaps Amis’s chronic anxiety and panic attacks had their origin in some concealed wartime trauma, but there is no evidence for this in Leader’s detailed account of his military service. Nor, either in his letters or published comments, does Amis seem to have had any sense of taking part in the climactic chapter of an historical epic. The short stories he wrote about the army and the relevant chapters of ‘Who Else Is Rank’ focus on regimental life as a microcosm of British civil society, and the prospects of change in this realm in the future. In his first years as an undergraduate at Oxford Amis, like many of his contemporaries, including Iris Murdoch, joined the communist-dominated Labour Club and later the Communist Party itself. He described this later in life as a form of rebellion against his father, though it was also a way of meeting liberated girls, one of whom relieved him of his virginity. He certainly soon tired of earnest discussions of dialectical materialism, and the effect of his military experience was to turn him away from dogmatic Marxism to a democratic socialism which would allow plenty of individual freedom. The young soldier corresponding to Amis in ‘Who Else Is Rank?’ dreams of a post-war England ‘full of girls and drink and jazz and books and decent houses and decent jobs and being your own boss’.
    Amis enjoyed at least the first four items on this list when he returned to Oxford to complete his degree course. Larkin, who was medically exempted from military service, had left and become an academic librarian, first in Belfast and then in Leicester. The two men would never again live in the same place, but this had the effect of provoking a rich