Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He was the father of British novelist Martin Amis.
Background
Kingsley William Amis was born on April 16, 1922, as the only child of William Amis, who worked in the London offices of Colman's, the mustard maker, and Rosa (Lucas) Amis. While growing up in the southwest London area of Norbury, the young Amis also apparently inherited some nervous tendencies from his mother, who worried about his health, diet, and safety.
Education
Amis entered the City of London School at the age of 12, a boys' school that provided a university track education. He was educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford. Returning to civilian life and Oxford, he pursued an undergraduate degree in English, which he earned with first class honors in 1947, a year later receiving his master's degree.
Career
Amis spent the 12 years teaching at Swansea, and in the early 1956 began to work on his first novel, after working out some of Lucky Jim's structure with Larkin.
The novel was accepted for publication by the London publisher Gollancz in May of 1953, a prestigious house with whom he would remain for the first decade of his career.
Lucky Jim recounts a few weeks in the life of Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer in history at a lesser university in northern England.
He dislikes the job, finds his colleagues pretentious, and fears that he will be released from his contract at the end of the term when his probationary period ends.
Dixon also finds himself romantically involved with two women, one pretty, the other plain, and is halfheartedly attempting to write his first serious treatise, an examination of medieval shipbuilding.
Amis's debut novel was a tremendous success in Britain, and he was hailed as his generation's newest literary star.
Lucky Jim seemed to touch a nerve in postwar Britain, with many of the once-mighty imperial nation's longcherished notions giving way to a new, suddenly more mobile middle class.
They included Larkin as well as playwrights Harold Pinter (born 1930) and John Osborne (1929 - 1994).
Not surprisingly, Amis's novel and the whole movement also prompted some pointed backlash, including an essay by W. Somerset Maugham in December of 1955 in a yearly roundup of notable books in the Sunday Times, as quoted in The Life of Kingsley Amis.
Maugham praised Amis and Lucky Jim but went on to discuss the larger issue of a new postwar Britain and its disappearing class boundaries.
Charity, kindness, generosity, are qualities which they hold in contempt.
Lucky Jim was made into a film in 1957, as was Amis's second novel, That Uncertain Feeling.
Published to great fanfare in 1955, the story centers on John Lewis, an adulterous librarian in a small town in Wales.
It was made into a 1962 Peter Sellers film titled Only Two Can Play.
During this reckless American period, Hilly reportedly conducted her own affairs as well. Echoes of his affairs often found their way into Amis's fiction, such as descriptions of the vicious sexual games played by the male villain in his fourth novel, 1960's Take a Girl Like You.
His first title for them was written under the pseudonym Robert Markham, and was one of the James Bond adventure tales that continued on after the death of the original author, Ian Fleming (1908 - 1964).
Subsequent titles published during the 19706 include Girl, 20, Ending Up, The Alteration, and Jake's Thing.
These are the works “that most deeply divide Amis's admirers and his detractors, ” according to Gopnik.
Amis's 1986 novel The Old Devils, about a novelist who returns to his Welsh hometown after many years and then dies in the middle of an evening of drinking with his longtime pals, won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction.
Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, suffering a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened, was re-admitted to hospital, and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London. He was cremated; his ashes are at Golders Green Crematorium.
In 1991 Amis's autobiography, Memoirs, was published, followed by the novel The Russian Girl in 1994.
His twenty-third and final novel, The Biographer's Moustache, was published that year.
Amis had been a member of the Communist Party during his Oxford days, but his political ideals had traversed the full range from left to right by the 1986, as he went from being a supporter of the Labour Party to admitting to a minor crush on prime minister Margaret Thatcher (born 1925), leader of Britain's Conservative (Tory) Party.
Views
Quotations:
"I used to tell myself stories all the time, ” he said in a 1988 London Sunday Times interview with John Mortimer, adding that he concocted the stories in part to quell his anxieties. I was always nervous. Full of fear."
Connections
In 1946 Sir Kingsley William Amis met Hilary Bardwell, they married in 1948. Near the end of 1947 Hilly became pregnant, and the two wed in January of 1948. In August of 1949, a second son, Martin, was born. Their first child, whom they named Philip in honor of their friend Larkin, was born that August.
Affairs decimated Amis's marriage, which began a precipitous decline in early 1963 during his affair with novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard (born 1923), a former actress and model whose first marriage had been to the son of the noted Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott (1868 - 1912).
The divorce from Hilly became final in June of 1965, and he wed Howard in London at the end of the month. The union with Howard also served as a catalyst for severing ties with Gollancz, and he signed with his new wife's publisher, Jonathan Cape.