Contemporary Literary Criticism | Amis, Kingsley (Vol. 129) - George Watson (essay date Winter 1997)

George Watson (essay date Winter 1997)

SOURCE: “I Was Kingsley Amis,” in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 610-18.

[In the following essay, Watson, a longtime friend and colleague of Amis's, discusses their friendship, praising Amis as a novelist who expressed their generation's experiences.]

Or so I used to remind him, since I stood in for him in Swansea in 1958-9, taking his classes while he taught in Princeton for a year, on his first visit to the United States.

But that hardly matters. We were all Kingsley Amis, more or less, if born between two world wars, and there was a sense in which, as a great mimic, he was all of us. His novels spoke in our voice, and they looked like the first fiction that ever did. Now that he is dead, there is no pride in admitting that so consciously unflattering an author was our voice. In fact one often wished he was not. But there he was, from Lucky Jim (1954)...

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