Kingsley Amis (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Although written with Kingsley Amis’s full cooperation and published in Great Britain shortly before the novelist’s death in 1995, Eric Jacobs’s biography pulls no punches. His introduction portrays Amis in old age, vulnerable, heavyset and increasingly unsteady on his feet. Amis was beset by anxieties yet determined to continue the activities that kept his anxieties at bay: writing, meeting with friends, and drinking.

Jacobs traces Amis’s life in leisurely fashion from his lower middle class youth to his final years. Thanks to his writing he became famous and wealthy, and oddly enough shared a household with his first wife Hilary and her current husband for the last decade and a half of his life. He had grown increasingly outspoken on social and literary matters, and enjoyed his reputation as a curmudgeon.

It was Amis’s first novel, LUCKY JIM (1954), that catapulted him to fame. Although subsequent novels would not match LUCKY JIM in comic invention, Amis’s vision broadened and deepened as he matured as a writer. According to Jacobs, Amis’s fine supernatural novel THE GREEN MAN (1969) contains a self-portrait of Amis as an alcoholic, lecherous innkeeper whose selfishness destroys his marriage.

Amis’s own first marriage had ended because of his involvement with fellow novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis and Howard were married in 1965, but eventually grew apart. Jacobs sees the novel STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984), which was widely attacked for its apparent misogyny, as mirroring Amis’s disenchantment with his second wife. He goes on to interpret the mellow tone of THE OLD DEVILS (1986) as an outgrowth of his renewed friendship with Hilary. The novel went on to win Britain’s highest literary award, the Booker Prize.

Admirers of Amis’s many books may regret that Jacobs has avoided writing a literary biography, but they are likely to appreciate his evenhanded treatment of their author.

Sources for Further Study

American Scholar. LXV, Autumn, 1996, p. 624.

Booklist. XCIV, May 15, 1998, p. 1588.

Boston Globe. June 21, 1998, p. C3.

Library Journal. CXXIII, May 15, 1998, p. 84.

National Review. L, September 14, 1998, p. 66.

New Statesman & Society. VIII, June 30, 1995, p. 37.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. July 19- 25, 1998, p. 3.

Sewanee Review. CIV, Summer, 1996, p. 452.

Spectator. CCLIV, June 10, 1995, p. 36.

TLS: Times Literary Supplement. June 16, 1995, p. 26.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, August 23, 1998, p. 5.

World Literature Today. LXX, Spring, 1996, p. 413.