Book Description
Here is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit and belligerent fierceness of opinion: Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation–having first achieved prominence with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954 and as one of the Angry Young Men–but also a dominant figure in post—World War II British writing as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist.
In
The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader, acclaimed editor of
The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on unpublished works and correspondence but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken out before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis’s childhood, school days and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. Even as he makes the case for Amis’s cultural
centrality–at his death Time magazine claimed that “the British decades between 1955 and 1995 should in fairness be called ‘the Amis era’”–Leader explores the writer’s phobias, self-doubts and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence and personal disaster.
Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity and elegant style,
The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.
Customer Reviews:
Big But Good.......2007-07-14
This a hefty read -- there are relatively few biographies of literary figures that are as long. But, the length is worth it. Leader writes gracefully and interestingly about a man who often is hard to like but difficult not to admire. Most of us know Amis either as the author of "Lucky Jim" (book and movie) or as the father of the Booker Prize winner Martin Amis. Kingsley's career, however, is more important than those two claims to fame. He was one of the initiators of the Angry Young Men who had a major impact on English writing from the 1950s on. And, he brought back to English, and American poetry, an emphasis on accessibility to the average reader, although his effort is not always visible today. Further, he was the model of the hard-drinking, womanizing author that populates so much of popular fiction and film. In that story, we find a lot of what makes his life so sad as well as so interesting. And, this is an interesting book that takes you inside the creative process of writing and the destructive process of hard living.
Exhaustive/exhausting biography of a great writer.......2007-05-31
I love Amis' work and expect that he'll be read as long as literature has legs, but this bio requires a lot of stamina. It's all there: drinking, carousing, family life, contrarian politics, the wicked sense of humor. Leader did an enormous amount of research and doesn't pull punches about some serious character flaws. One thing that bugged me throughout was the implicit assumption that the books and poetry were autobiographical - besides being factually wrong, this drags things out unnecessarily.
If I was going to pick out a novel of Amis for the uninitiated, I'd have to make it 3 of them to show his versatility: "Lucky Jim", "The Alteration", and "Ending Up". But you wouldn't go wrong with "Take A Girl Like You", "Girl, 20", "The Anti-Death League", his collected short stories or any of his criticism.
Book Description
In 1954, Kingsley Amis grabbed the attention of the literary world as one of the Angry Young Men with his first novel Lucky Jim. He maintained a public image of blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion until his death in 1995. In his letters, he confirms the legendary aspects of his reputation, and much more. This collection contains more than eight hundred letters that divulge the secrets of the artist and the man, with an honesty and immediacy rare in any biography or memoir.
Amis, so assured in his pronouncements on fellow writers, grapples privately with fears, self-doubts, ambitions, and personal disasters. He is wildly funny, indulging in mordant gossip and astonishing frankness with his intimate friends and lovers. Some letters are dashed off with signature frustration; others are written with painstaking and painful circumspection. They make vivid the triumphs and tumult of his life and his times, from post-war Britain through the Thatcher era, as well as his attractions to women, jazz, drink, and the comic possibilities of the English language.
As an intellectual pugilist who took no prisoners, Kingsley Amis had few peers. These letters, at times scandalous, at times tragic, reinforce his historical relevance and literary stature.
Customer Reviews:
Amusing, interesting, often catty, revealing.......2004-02-01
Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite post-war novelists. I had not before read a collection of letters, and I confess there was a time when I would have thought the idea of actually reading through someone's lifetime of letters just plain idiotic. But in fact I found these fascinating -- interesting to read for the biographical details, hints of the creative process, discussion of his works and Philip Larkin's works in progress -- as well as often very very funny and sometimes eyebrow-raisingly nasty.
Zachary Leader has chosen about 800 of several thousand surviving letters. The great bulk are to the poet Philip Larkin, his closest friend. Another huge chunk are to another very close friend, the writer and Sovietologist Robert Conquest. He also corresponded a good deal with my favorite novelist, Anthony Powell, another good friend of his (though Amis betrays a certain lack of confidence in his friendship with AP -- I sense that he was intimidated by Powell's upper class background and lifestyle, by his rather mandarin literary taste, and by his age). There are many letters to his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, as well as a rather unfortunate set of nasty comments about her in other letters after their rather ugly divorce. Lots of letters to agents and publishers -- these rather interesting from the writing business point of view. Quite a few responses to fan letters -- these generally quite gracious and often offering interesting answers to questions about Amis' books. Unfortunately no letters to Bruce Montgomery ("Edmund Crispin"), another of Amis' special friends: they cannot be inspected until 2035! Hilly Bardwell Amis Boyd, Lady Kilmarnock, his first wife, burned all his letters, perhaps understandably, after he left her (or she left him but because of his affair with Howard) in 1963. Amis in his life was reluctant have any of his other letters to women lovers printed, and Leader either didn't track down any such, or chose not to print them. As for his children, Philip did not keep his letters, Sally did not want them published, and Martin could find only a postcard or two (though apparently there were many more).
Highlights? His early letters to Larkin, with their complex
abbreviations and injokes, and the talk about poetry. The cattiness he displays towards writers whose work he disliked, such as most obviously John Wain, his fellow "Angry Young Man". Amis on "Old English Literature": "The prose is admitted even by initiates to be stumbling and graceless; the verse is shackled by continual repetitions of idea ... This is the echo of an Age stated but not shown to be Heroic whose literature carries neither primitive insight nor civilized assurance." (and more) The general funniness of things, even though occasionally mean.
Certainly an amusing and interesting angle from which to consider a great writer.
Always Diverting.......2001-12-25
Amis's letters are a lot of fun, as you might expect. Amis is often as outraged and funny as in his best fiction (especially in the letters to Larkin). Often in literary appraisals he is acute, and he always seems true to something in himself, so that even when one disagrees--i. e., T. S. Eliot is not simply a pretentious bore--one goes along.
Good as this correspondence is, it isn't up to Larkin's letters because Amis doesn't believe or feel as deeply as Larkin does, nor does he have as focussed a perspective as Larkin, so the humor isn't set set off in such sharp contradistinction to a fundamental seriousness. Yet you keep reading because the book clears away cant and intellectual fustian so vigorously. Moreover, it gives just enough glimpse of Amis's biography: a sad, messy counterpoint spreads out in the background: the meanderings of a brilliant man with a zillion reactions and nothing firm to attach them to.
Larkin's parody of his own poem "Days" on page 1040 is not to be missed; it's in one of Leader's helpful footnotes.
This book weighs a couple of pounds, so is hard to hold--to be read at table rather than in bed. Couldn't the publisher have used lighter weight paper and given us smaller type and less margin?
Rage & Glee.......2001-11-21
Volumes of letters should be judged by their editing as much as their content, hence the five stars. Z. Leader is thorough, intelligent, impartial, and exact. There is sufficient scholarly apparatus to guide the working academic and the demanding lay reader. As for the letters, well, there are a lot of them. Despite his professed laziness, Amis cranked off an immense amount of smart, thoughtful, scurrilous, and funny correspondence in the 50+ years recorded here. Exemplary funny bits are on pages 276-277 in a 1952 letter to Philip Larkin. If you laugh, buy the book. If you don't, don't. If you're shocked by cruel, rude jokes between close friends, don't. Amis demanded, and often provided, hard thinking, precise expression, and blunt honesty. His staunchly conservative, sometimes reactionary, views contrast interestingly with his drunken philandering, which should provoke thought among those readers who enjoy thinking at all.
Amazon.com
"We live in the age of mass loquacity," Martin Amis writes by way of introduction to Experience, thereby placing the reader in a curious bind. How to feel about a memoir by a writer who deplores our current enthusiasm for memoirs? Can such a public appeal for private life be convincing? The son of misanthropic comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Amis the Younger's life story is "a literary curiosity," he tells us, "which is also just another instance of a father and a son." He's spent his whole life bathed in the dubious yellow glow of celebrity, from the cries of nepotism surrounding his first novel's publication to the bizarre tempest in a teapot involving the size of the advance for The Information, his choice of literary agent, and of course that famously expensive set of new teeth.
Here, finally, is Amis's chance to set matters straight--and if you're looking for his take on these controversies, you won't be disappointed. In fact, you should turn right away to the end of the book. After all, how many memoirs have indices--and how many indices are this entertaining? In addition to movers and shakers like "Travolta, John," "Brown, Tina," and "Bellow, Saul," one finds an extended entry for "dental problems," which includes "of animals," "sexual potency and," "Bellow on," and--more ominously--"tumour."
Yet it's as "a clear view of the geography of a writer's mind," not as a celebrity tell-all, that Experience succeeds. Organized not by chronology but by a strange thematic schema all Amis's own, this messy, tangential book moves backward and forward in time and comes studded with footnotes and interspersed with schoolboy epistles. As a result, it's much truer to the actual texture of experience than anything more "novelistic" could possibly be. Amis's charming, quarrelsome, almost entirely helpless father; the tragic disappearance of his cousin, Lucy Partington; the daughter discovered only as an adult; those teeth--the narrative circles around these events and personages in prose as virtuoso but often less chilly than that found in his novels. This is memoir as anatomy of obsessions, and in the most profound way, it illuminates the source and power of Amis's remarkable work. --Mary Park
Book Description
Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With
Experience, he discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.
Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov's
Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest,
Experience is a literary event.
Customer Reviews:
Incredible.......2007-10-01
One of the best, funniest, smartest, most interesting books I've ever read. I want to send this to everyone I know, I'd pay.
and the implied loss of innocence.......2007-05-19
How many opportunities is one likely to have to read a well-regarded literary author's memoirs about (among other things) his relationship with his well-regarded author father? (Has either Susan or Benjamin Cheever even come close to matching their father's achievemtents?) It was fascinating to read about this father-son relationship from the son's point of view. While Martin clearly admired Kingsley, he was not blind to his father's weaknesses (both as a writer and as a husband); and he was fully aware of their differences on political and gender issues.
But these memoirs cover Martin Amis's life up to the present, the present being several years after his father's death. While Kingsley is a key figure, he is not the only relationship that gets examined. (His portraits of his mother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow are especially vivid.) And although this is not a grim book, much of what Amis recounts is about profound losses--his own loss of innocence due to childhood sexual abuse, the loss incurred when his parents divorced, the death of a cousin at the hands of a serial killer, and the loss of friendships (especially Julian Barnes's) from the furor surrounding the publication of Amis's book, THE INFORMATION. Implied losses, delicately mentioned but never examined, are those of his relationships with the women in his life.
Toward the end of the book, Amis writes, "My life, it seems to me is ridiculously shapeless. I know what makes a good narrative, and lives don't have much of that--pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness...but the only shape that life dependably exhibits is that of tragedy." (p. 361) It is tragedy that Amis can accept but courageously, if futilely, seems to want to protect his own children from.
The fascinating Messrs Amis.......2007-03-30
"Experience" is the finest memoir I've read in a dozen years. It has a post-modern format with a variety of voice tones that range from witty to profound and poetic. Amis's narrative jumps back and forth in time and deals with his extended family and distinguished friends, among whom are: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom and Robert Graves. The portrait of his father, Kingsley Amis, a hard-drinking, woman lover, dominates the book. The memoir, written by a man of great charm, held me absorbed from first page to last.
90 Percent Proof.......2007-02-24
I gave Amis's memoir 5 stars because I have to---it is that good. ("Pale as a Sex Pistol," is not nearly his best, and it's very, very good.) And, admittedly, I was nearly finished with the book before it hit me that Amis almost had me convinced that chronic alcoholism can actually put a spring in one's step if you only had a sense of humor!
The deepest impulse behind this memoir is to protect his father's image and reputation. It was a preemptive strike against future excavations by lesser sorts who write biographies, are too pc, etc., into Kingsley Amis's life.
Martin Amis is very clear that he was concerned about his father's reputation vis-a-vis posthumous publication of his father's letters. He didn't want his father to suffer the fate of Philip Larkin.
What is brilliant about this memoir is how Martin uses language that consistently plays down his father's behavior and incites (thereby diminishing) the behavior of others. Nothing is Kingsley's fault. Nothing. There is a near-Christ like depth of understanding and forgiveness that permeates his take on his father.
I am just doing this from memory but here are some examples. During a bad time in the marriage between Kingsley and his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Martin Amis witnesses Jane doing all the work, including a lot physical work, in order to move house. While Kingsley sits around doing nothing but drinking, Jane's moving furniture is "maschochistic." Kingsley is "gently incapaciated." It's striking how Martin uses a perjorative term for Jane and obliquely soft language for his father. In this case, why wouldn't Kingsley be passive aggressive, or destructive?? Why is Kingsley's behavior described with utter homeliness and Jane's sent to the hells of pyschology?
The breakup of the first marriage ("remember," his father intoned to Martin and his brother, "I will always love your mother")... Well, I grew up with an aloholic, too -- and not a literary one-- and by God if that's not the exact same words my father said to my siblings and me -- and you could be sure Kingsley was drunk. Yet, this statement is treated as if it comes from some fathomless well of love. All evidence suggests that Kingsley's behavior towards his first wife was serially cruel.
I defy anyone to find a passage where Kingsley is not held up in a better light than anyone else who walks through the memoir.
Martin Amis has been called the Mick Jagger of literature but he has more in common with the fictional/cinematic Michael Corleone. Amis is a genius and his talent is beyond dispute but he was gifted with something else -- he manages to stay stable under the most strange, difficult circumstances. His mother noticed this -- she said he was born under a lucky star; his father stated, "...he is sane."
As Experience draws to its close, Amis is sitting at his father's bedside in the hospice. He is working on a review of Gore Vidal's first memoir and he is able to write it, while is emotions are "woefully disordered."
Experience -- you can say that again!.......2006-11-28
If you are a reader with a capital "R", this book is a must read. Martin Amis' gift with language, his sense of humor, and the rich material of his family life come together to make the reading of the book an experience in itself.
I've literally read and re-read this book so many times the cover has fallen off. I like Mr. Amis' fiction writing but this book is, in my opinion, his best, and easily one of my alltime favorites.
Average customer rating:
- Remarkable book
- Essential for Amis fans
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The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters
Paul Fussell
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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
ASIN: 0195087364 |
Book Description
"Fussell is a wonderful writer," according to The Washington Post Book World, "at once elegant and earthy." With such books as Wartime and The Great War and Modern Memory, he established a reputation as an incisive critic with a razor-tipped pen. Now Paul Fussell turns his attention to one of his own literary heroes, a man of similar acidic wit, Kingsley Amis. In The Anti-Egotist, Fussell captures the essence of Amis as a man of letters--"a serious critic," as John Gross writes, "operating outside the academic fold." Part biography, part critical appraisal, The Anti-Egotist traces the influences that have shaped Amis's writing, ranging from his schooldays through military service to university teaching, as he emerged as a novelist, poet, and essayist. By drawing our attention to the details first of Amis's life, then of his writing, Fussell reveals the profound moral sense that expresses itself so wonderfully in Amis's fiction and criticism. He mixes affection with insight as he paints a highly personal portrait of Amis as writer who despises self-promotion in all its forms, savaging the world's show-offs and blowhards with a particularly sharp-toothed bite. Amis's criticism, too, shook the British literary world with his "no-nonsense, can-the-bullshit tone," restoring skepticism and honesty to postwar English writing. Fussell guides us through Amis's immense output--portraying him as a book reviewer, custodian of language, gastronomic critic, anthologist, and poet--showing how his overriding concern is always for the public, deriding pretensions that come at a cost to the audience. And the power of Amis's writing, from his humor to his deft characterization, rings through in page after page of Fussell's accurate and evocative assessments. In recent years, Kingsley Amis has drawn considerable fire, thanks to his outspoken conservative opinions; many critics see him as little more than a crusty old curmudgeon. In The Anti-Egotist, Paul Fussell does the reading public a double favor in restoring the reputation of this important writer: he effortlessly captures the literary virtuosity that lifted Amis to fame, and he reveals the moral convictions that make this seeming curmudgeon more relevant than ever.
Customer Reviews:
Remarkable book.......2002-08-24
"For all the sometimes rowdy comedy attending Amis's depictions of meanness, his understanding of its psychology is complicated and serious. It is, if funny, also immoral, so little and minimal, practiced by wee men only. And it betrays neurosis, implying constant "paranoid" watchfulness lest one be had. It keeps one on a constant stretch of attentive calculation, and this finally becomes a substitute for thought, as well as replacing an objective interest in things outside oneself."
"I feel STRETCHED", Bilbo Baggins after having the One Ring for a while.
Essential for Amis fans.......1999-06-26
I had to have this one - an intersection of two writers I've admired for some time. Fussel is probably the ideal person to write such an appraisal. As mentioned above, the lack of critical theoryspeak is most welcome. The interpretation of Amis as a moral satirist (which isn't a category that you see very much) provides a useful key to most of his work (fiction, poetry, and prose alike.) If you're a fan of the work, you'll enjoy this - it's like having a chance to sit down across from an intelligent, perceptive reader who likes the same things you do.
Customer Reviews:
A last round for (or on) his friends.......2002-10-08
The famous founder of the original Angry Young Men offers up these mis-named memoirs. It is not an autobiography but more a collection of pub performances in written form. Which is no handicap to enjoying the collection: conversation remained an art in England long after it became extinct in America.
Some of the people profiled are not friends or enemies, but neglected writers whose stars Amis hoped to revive. The writer Elizabeth Taylor is one of these. Others, like Anthony Burgess and Enoch Powell, are simply famous people who were barely acquaintances, but with whom Amis had notable run-ins.
The profiles of his literary friends are mostly strings of amusing faux pas or escapades, usually drunken. He sportingly lingers over his own social pratfalls as much as over others'. Or maybe fair play has nothing to do with it; he just recognizes good material no matter who the subject is. In his own telling, he spends much of these events half in the bag, to the point of being unable to reconstruct them from memory later. Except for a passing opinion or two, he stays away from politics and literary theories, even giving Robert Conquest's limericks more ink than his Sovietology. He sticks to the same approach even with his nearest and dearest: his wives and novelist son only appear as part of some anecdote or other.
His view of America is like Frances Trollope's. Gleeful japes at the Ugly American abound, each more devastating than the last. Well, H. L. Mencken did it earlier and better. And no charge for saving England's bacon so many times, old top.
Here and there genuine affection for his closest friends bubbles to the surface. Philip Larkin appears throughout the collection, in addition to his own chapter, and Amis frequently quotes from Larkin's uncollected poetry. Under Amis' treatment, the mopey old onanist almost becomes a tragic figure. Other people like post-conversion Malcolm Muggeridge make no sense to him, as Amis does not have or at least does not display any spiritual side.
Taken altogether, this is a very English, sometimes acidly English, survey of one writer's circle of acquaintances, but not much of their era.
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- Decent Biography But Arrogant Amateur Psychoanalysis
- Fascinating book, unconvincing thesis
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Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis
Richard Bradford
Manufacturer: Peter Owen Publishers
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Customer Reviews:
Decent Biography But Arrogant Amateur Psychoanalysis.......2003-11-09
There were already at least two biographies of Kingsley Amis in print when Professor Bradford wrote this one. Professor Bradford's biography is both complete and well-written.
It is marred, however, by Professor Bradford's insistence that "Amis's fiction (is) one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking autobiographies ever produced." His point is not simply that Amis has modeled some characters on people he has known, nor that some events are paralleled in Amis's life. Virtually every writer of fiction draws from his life. He goes much further than that, claiming that nearly every character in Amis's novels and stories is intended to be Amis himself or somebody that Amis knew.
He starts with the contention that Jim Dixon, the protagonist of Lucky Jim, Amis's first and perhaps best-known novel, is Amis himself. Dixon, fresh out of college, is teaching in an obscure English college. Amis began teaching at University College of Swansea in Wales while completing his graduate thesis at Oxford. The parallels break down there, however. The plot of Lucky Jim involves Dixon's jettisoning his unattractive, somewhat mentally ill girlfriend and acquiring an attractive, nice blonde one. Amis married an attractive blonde woman while still at Oxford, more than a year before he began teaching at Swansea. Central to the plot of Lucky Jim is Dixon's status as an outsider, never explicitly stated but implied by many things, including the fact that he is from the north of England with an accent that immediately identifies him as such and the fact that he attended a university of no particular prestige (a passage in the third chapter hints that it may be the University of Leicester). Amis, by contrast, was born and raised in London, and, by Bradford's own account had a BBC accent. As already noted, he was an Oxford graduate. Whatever else Amis was, he was not an outsider, at least not by virtue of his birthplace, accent, or university education.
On and on it goes, with Bradford claiming that Simona Quick, the waif-like nineteen-year-old in I Want It Now, is really Jane Howard, Amis's second wife, who was in her mid-forties at the period in which the book was written and takes place, that Amis has split himself between two characters in Girl, 20, that the ten-year-old boy who is to be castrated to preserve his pure, youthful voice in The Alteration is in fact Amis in his mid-fifties, worried about declining .... prowess, and that Amis has split himself into four different characters in The Old Devils, attributing to them such unusual characteristics as the fact that they all drink too much.
Bradford and his editor also get some facts wrong, either by design or by laziness. On page 206, he claims that, in One Fat Englishman, "Micheldene is obliged to take part in a game of charades and is asked to become the embodiment of 'Englishness'". In fact, the other characters try to act "Britishly", and it is Micheldene who is to guess what the word is. This is not a very important point, but consulting the novel itself is all that is necessary to get it right.
Similarly, Bradford, in claiming that Jake Richardson, the title character of Jake's Thing, is actually an older Jim Dixon (who, by Bradford's thesis, is Amis under a different name), asserts on page 305 that "Jake's given name is James", while, in the novel itself, Jake's given name is, in fact, Jaques, pronounced "Jakes". One might argue that the French "Jacques" (Richardson's ancestors came from France) is the equivalent of the English "James", but the chain of reasoning is now one link longer, and, once again, consulting the novel would have been sufficient to provide correct information.
Fascinating book, unconvincing thesis.......2001-12-29
Since Kingsley Amis was one of the most interesting and amusing 20th century English novelists, any book that closely examines his complete work is bound to be welcome. As well as the sheer gut-busting humour and insight of his first and best known novel, Lucky Jim, Amis was an excellent story-teller capable of serious reflection about the human condition. He just didn't believe in being pompous and self-important about it. Some of his books - The Anti-Death League, for instance, or The Green Man - serve up a fascinating blend of dry humour, drama, characterisation, philosophy and even suspense.
Obviously the man who wrote these books - not forgetting poetry, critical essays and biographies - was himself quite complex. The life and soul of any party, though many were hurt by his scathing wit, Amis was scared of the dark and even being alone, and was apparently prone to sudden attacks of pure existential fear. The tendency to identify him with Lucky Jim, his first and most famous anti-hero, was strengthened by the gradually spreading awareness of the chronic womanising which broke up both his marriages. Yet it seems that Amis much regretted these domestic disasters, conceivably having failed to understand that marriage offers real, though easily overlooked, benefits to husbands as well as wives.
Bradford's thesis is simply that, denials to the contrary notwithstanding, all of Amis' fiction is drawn directly from his own life experience. All he manages to demonstrate, however, is the meaninglessness of this position. Of course every author draws on experience for material - otherwise all fiction would be fantasy. When Bradford is reduced to arguing that "Simona... has characteristics so completely different from Jane's as to virtually announce themselves as covering devices", the poverty of his basic idea is clearly revealed. If a character resembles anyone Amis ever met, he must have copied that character from real life. But if the character is completely different, the same inference is drawn.
Otherwise, the book is well written and evidently based on research as thorough as Amis' own (for a surprising rigour was one of his best qualities). This impression is hardly spoiled by occasional infelicities and repetitions - and at least when Bradford revisits the same text twice, he tells the same story each time. Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it will surely encourage any reader to get hold of Amis' novels and read them (or re-read them, as the case may be).
Is it evil to smile at the thought of how Amis would have fumed if he could have read the manuscript himself? Not really - it is the sort of joke he would have appreciated, and perhaps accompanied by his famous "crazy peasant" face.
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Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis
Bell
Manufacturer: Twayne Publishers
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ASIN: 0783800398 |
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Series Editors: James Nagel, University of Georgia; Zack Bowen, University of Miami and Robert Lecker, McGill University
The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day. Each volume includes:
- An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings-illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches, and sorting out the schools of thought
- The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays
- A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries
- Original essays, new translations, and revisions commissioned especially for the series
- Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters and manuscript fragments
- A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews
- A name and subject index
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Kingsley Amis
Eric Jacobs
Manufacturer: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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The Life of Kingsley Amis
ASIN: 0340590726 |
Amazon.com
A man who considered boredom the worst offense in fiction and nearly the worst offense in life, British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is wrought larger than life in Eric Jacobs's engaging biography. Through his student years at Oxford (where "drinking, smoking, and behaving badly" formed the basis for many a friendship), his marriages and simultaneous affairs, his less-than- stellar teaching career, and his highly routinized years as writer and pub dweller, Amis was a merciless raconteur both in print and in person. He shunned all manner of things phony, fashionable, and, of course, boring, and honed his intellect into the acerbic observations that run through all his novels, from Lucky Jim to You Can't Do Both.
Jacobs plays to the Amis anti-academic mentality. The biography contains no scholarly apparatus and is happily footnote-free. The many colorful anecdotes are drawn from scotch-laced afternoon conversations with Amis in his later years and from peppery correspondence between Amis and such lifelong friends as poet Philip Larkin (whom Amis befriended because they were "savagely uninterested in the same things"). Jacobs is diligent about forming connections between the characters in Amis's fiction and the real-life sorrows and anxieties of their author: losing his virginity when an Oxford undergraduate to a girl who primed him with a sex manual is closely replayed in the novel You Can't Do Both. The overall effect is a clear view into a man of outrageous wit and genius and into the large legacy of novels, poetry, and essays he bequeathed. --Joan Urban
Book Description
Kingsley Amis arrived on the English literary scene with the publication of his classic novel Lucky Jim in 1954, and few writers since have provoked such wildly disparate degrees of laughter, admiration, and dismay in the reading public. For better or worse, Amis was known almost as much for his personality as for his work as a novelist. His outspoken nature (one columnist called him a literary rottweiler), his unfashionable praise for Thatcherism, and his devotion to whiskey kept him in the public eye. But in this, the only authorized biography of Amis, Eric Jacobs skillfully captures that personality with sympathetic detail and healthy doses of Amisian wit, spinning a narrative that mirrors the sprightliness and originality of his subject's work.
"Fond and very readable." (The Observer)
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Kingsley Amis
Dale Salwak
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0389209929 |
Book Description
This is a fascinating critical study of the life, work and milieu of one of Britain's best known and most popular novelists. Starting with a biographical overview of the influences on the developing writer while at home, at school, at Oxford, and at war, Dale Salwak goes on to offer the general reader a lively interpretation of all of Amis's novels, from "Lucky Jim" (1954) through to "The Folks That Live on the Hill" (1990), set against the ever-changing backdrop of the twentieth century. Dale Salwak makes extensive use of the major Amis archives, and draws on material from Amis's notebooks, letters, juvenilia and manuscripts, as well as upon his own discussions with Amis and many of his friends. Waving these sources with his own critical appraisal, Salwak plots each step in the development of Amis's imaginative vision throughout his writing career. This illustrated study, which includes a selective chronology and a complete primary bibliography, will be read with pleasure by those who are interested in learning more about Kingsley Amis, modern novelist.
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Kingsley Amis (Writers & Their Work Literary Conversations Series)
Richard Bradford
Manufacturer: University Press of Mississippi
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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20th Century
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| World Literature
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Semiotics
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ASIN: 0746308582 |
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