SOURCE: “Changing Social and Moral Attitudes,” in Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters, edited by Dale Salwak, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 130-48.

[In the following essay, Gindin, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, considers the nature of comedy as well as the political and moral tone of Amis's work.]

The changes and inconsistencies in the social attitudes visible in Kingsley Amis's fiction over the past thirty-five years are not any better explained by his change from voting Labour to voting Tory than they initially were by the simplistic designation of ‘Angry Young Man’. Loyalty to one party or another masks the consistency within the changes in Amis's fiction, for his comedy has never promulgated an interpretation of experience that could follow a party doctrine or programme, never depended on a vision of what social experience should or might be. Rather, the sharp comic texture of Amis's prose and the operation of his satire depend on a clash, implicit or explicit, between a conventional illusion about what experience might be and the immediate sense of what it is. In his emphasis on what is, Amis writes a comedy of social accommodation. As, through his mimicry of varying voices and social details, his early protagonists learn or fail to learn to drive cars, lose virginity or order meals in restaurants in a world of rapidly expanding social possibility, the emphasis seems to fall on an opportunistic adjustment to experience. In the more recent fiction, in a world of physical decay and diminishing possibilities for most of his characters, Amis emphasises a necessary acceptance of things. In either case, however, the superficial focus is on accommodation to what the outer social world is rather than on any judgement about that world that can be translated or reduced to partisan political statement.

Much of Amis's early comedy depends on metaphors of a direct physical response to experience. Conflict is frequently dramatised as farce; iconoclasm is often a form of assault. Images of physical discomfort plague all Amis's characters. In I Like It Here (1958), a presumably elegant seaside resort in Portugal that could lay a very fair claim to being dubbed the Blackpool of the South but for its smallness and lack of amenities’ is distinguished only in the availability of cheap drink and constant infestations of insects. Amis then spends three very funny mock-heroic pages reporting the protagonist's futile struggles against fleas. Sexual communication is interrupted by wasp stings, mosquitos or the intrusions of undisciplined children. The foul tastes of food crowd all the early novels, as in the boarding house in Take a Girl Like You (1960), in which the haddock is reminiscent of the ‘lionhouse at the zoo’ and the beef tastes of ‘damp tea-towel’. Lest this be taken solely as a response to British food after nearly two decades of austerity, the messes of ‘foreign sauce and muck’ are even worse. Posed against the actual tastes and smells is the characters' hope that eating might provide sensuous pleasure as well as necessary sustenance, and the comedy is in sharply rendered images of the differences.

Mental experience is parodied in Amis's frequently elaborate structures of inappropriate logical analysis or classification. Love-making is also interrupted or prevented by pseudo-logical analyses of how to defend different parts of the anatomy or a manual of technique to demonstrate the protagonist's skills as seducer. In Take a Girl Like You, all forms of behaviour and relationship are codified into impossible axioms or classified by types of men (the valuable ones dead), or ways of smoking a cigarette: ‘not the almost-unbearable-enjoyment one nor the old-smoking-campaigner one, but the wise, thoughtful one, as if he was the only person in the whole world who understood exactly about cigarettes’. Even the varieties of pretentious nonsense he meets in America have to be classified by another of Amis's protagonists, Roger Micheldene in One Fat Englishman (1963), in order ‘to be sure about nonsense’. The human mental or rational activity, the elaborate classificatory chain, is funny because inappropriate and unconnected, a diversion from the experience itself. Like his physical comedy, Amis's comedy of logical analysis underlines the difficulty in his protagonists' accommodation to the worlds they want to impress.

Another form of comedy depends on the juxtaposition of references to social class, a metaphor from one widely different form of social organisation planked against another. Estoril is always reminiscent of Blackpool, and Amis widens this theme into a cogent account of the different—and, for the protagonist, frightening—uses of money in the different social and national worlds. Class divisions inhibit accommodation, not by virtue or necessity, but by the difficulties involved in foregoing the security of origins and immersing oneself in the newer world of increased possibility. The English writer in Portugal

fancied that he had a long history of lower-middle-class envy directed against the upper-middle-class traveller who handled foreign railway-officials with insolent ease, discussed the political situation with the taxi-driver in fluent argot, and landed up first go at exactly the right hotel, if indeed he wasn't staying with the contessa, all cigarette-holder and chaise-longue, who called him by a foreign version of his christian name.

When another traveller finds a taxi more efficiently than he does, the protagonist snarls, ‘Class traitor. … Imperialist lackey. Social chauvinist.’ Class assault can escalate to ethnic or racial insult in the comedy of one of Amis's most outrageous anti-heroes, Roger in One Fat Englishman, as his way of sorting out his new world. More tamely, even the superficially confident protagonists in Amis's later fiction (the bumbling incompetents of the early fiction gradually disappear, although the issues of competence and accommodation remain) sort others out by class, sometimes by religion or race, often by occupation or trade that carries a consistent social meaning, as Amis's protagonists are consistently lethal in referring to the impercipient anxieties of dentists and dentists' mistresses. Jake Richardson, in Jake's Thing (1978), in a new world that acknowledges, discusses and tries, often foolishly, to change sexual behaviour, recognises that, in terms of both class and sex, he confronts ‘Just another example of thinking that if you've named something you've explained it. Like … like permissive society.’

To some extent, over the decades of his fiction, Amis's protagonists acquire a mastery through their occupations and histories of accommodation that enables them to survive the more obvious and superficial pitfalls of the modern world. They can drive cars, order meals and generally get women into bed, tokens of manhood rather like shooting bears in other social worlds. Yet the texture of a comic vocabulary that centres on physicality, disembodied mind or pseudo-logical analysis, and a social organisation based on classifiable divisions, remains central to Amis's prose. The comedy, outrageous or not, varying considerably in tone and in specific social reference, protects the persona from the uncertainty or inadequacy he feels. Amis's comic vocabulary and metaphors do not propound concealed ideologies or truths that might suggest salvation or redemption. Rather, in his world of change or accident, Amis's comedy becomes a vehicle for demonstrating both the kinds of control his protagonists have or have not over their chaotic and inexplicable worlds and the author's own linguistic control, his versions of the widely juxtaposed differences between human illusion and human experience. At various levels, Amis's comedy underlines the capacities, dilemmas and ambiguities of attempts at control of the self in accommodation to changing social experience.

The chaotic parties and farcical scenes in Amis's early novels are supposed communal gatherings lurching wildly out of control, like the iconoclastic medieval lecture in Lucky Jim (1954) or the international variety show that begins as a religious celebration in I Like It Here. In both these instances, fear generates the protagonist's participation, in the latter novel the combination of ‘fear’ and ‘abroad … was what took him to perihelion’. In other early novels, the protagonist is more consistently aggressive and outrageous in assaulting others. The principal male in Take a Girl Like You, Patrick, for example, is a conscienceless womaniser who can operate well among the teachers and would-be artists of the small provincial city, but is ludicrously out of his depth in London or with the socially sophisticated. Aware of his different worlds, he often tries to summon ‘full control’. Yet his control can be brutal or deceptive, as when he finally seduces Jenny Bunn in his ambiguous triumph over her outmoded ‘Bible Class ideas’. Patrick expresses his need for control in the ridiculous cricket-elevens-of-enemies he draws up (combining names both within and outside the fiction), his manuals for seduction, his ludicrous plots to move others (like the one in which he sends his flatmate to watch a rained-out cricket match in London) and his shabby skill in turning logical argument to his own design. In a private moment, however, he recognises the fear on which all his language rests, as, apparently defeated, he ‘tried to control his breathing’ while imagining himself in ‘thick mud, just mud and the struggle to breathe, a gradual loss of consciousness followed by dreams of water and mud and the struggle to breathe, dreams superseded by identical dreams, a death prolonged for ever’. One need not be as immorally duplicitous as Patrick to manufacture socially ludicrous forms of control. In the same novel, the Guernsey tomato farmer's daughter who masquerades as a passionate and sexually liberated Parisian in the provincial city is finally exposed. She responds: ‘Playing a part's the only thing left these days, it shows you won't deal with society in the way it wants you to’.

The masks continue for Amis's protagonists. Roger Micheldene, in America, combines his language, his falsely reverential high culture, his deliberate aggression, and his lies, in an attempt to win the Danish/American symbol of beauty, Helene. He assumes his capacity to control others: ‘A man's sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal that is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.’ Helene is an animal, although not at Roger's prompting, and her own self-control is firmly established with her husband, an apparently dull and pedantic Danish/American linguist named Bang. Roger's language is persiflage. As his manipulations become more and more ludicrous, he becomes paranoid, assuming irrationally that others are plotting against him the more his own plots misfire. Similarly, in the later fiction, like Jake's Thing, the protagonist's elaborate schemes to control others are linked to his even more improbable convictions that others are deliberately and maliciously controlling him. Control, seen both positively and negatively, is a comic survival kit in an uncertain world.

In a number of the novels, the attitude toward experience as a series of comic survival kits perched uncertainly on the top of an abyss of nothingness or death is derived from reference to the Second World War. The war is seen implicitly as the war the English might well have lost, did not expect to win, had no ultimate reason or metaphysical justification for winning, but accidentally and fortunately won nevertheless. Amis's protagonists, like Amis himself, despite a generally concealed sensitivity to the pain and loss of others, managed, with nothing of the heroic proclamation or gesture, to survive. At several points in I Like It Here, Garnet Bowen, the protagonist, recalls the war: once to contrast the self-deluding tourists who romanticise the atmosphere of precipitous little streets in Italian towns with those, a decade earlier, who suffered there; once to connect the fear beneath his derision of Portugal to the one episode during the war in which he momentarily and physically feared darkness and death.

In 1962, Amis published a volume of short stories, My Enemy's Enemy, in which a number deal with the military at the end of the Second World War, although none is set in combat. The title story begins with a conventional contrast within the military between those who seem to care only for order and discipline (sometimes linked by others to Nazis), awarding prizes ‘for the smartest vehicle to the driver of an obsolete wireless truck immobilised for lack of spare parts’, and those who know and do their jobs well, who without show or inspections maintain their trucks and their communicating signals. Instead of relying on an easily simplified contrast, however, Amis deepens both sides, uses both metaphor and the plot to show that not all spit-and-polish officers are incipient Fascists, not all agile and sensible mechanics are as honest and straightforward as they seem.

Another long story called ‘I Spy Strangers’ deals directly with the politics of the 1945 election within the Army. The story begins with a mock Parliamentary debate between the military Labourites who might allow the victorious Russians to do whatever they want and the military Tories who would just as soon find an excuse, while still mobilised, to bomb Russia. The debate is never resolved. Rather, it is diffused into the more knowable and therefore, perhaps, socially controllable divisions of class between the Tory officer who fears a force ‘hostile to his accent and taste in clothes and modest directorship and ambitions for his sons and redbrick house at Purley with its back-garden tennis court’ and the Labour officer who would build a ‘decent’ Britain, abolish public schools, the House of Lords and perhaps the Royal Family. But, despite a point of view that recognises political equity and change in the majority of the Labour party (still, at the time in which the novel is set, doubtful that it represented a majority of the whole nation), Amis does not simply dismiss or render irrelevant institutional Toryism. He respects the institution complex and capacious enough to function unevenly within the modern world in spite of the folly of its superficial posture and the spurious pretence of its ideological moorings.

Amis's institutional military at the end of the Second World War is like the aristocratic fairy godfather who for all the negative reasons saves the anti-hero and awards the prize in Lucky Jim. The godfather explains, or, rather, doesn't: ‘It's not that you've got the qualifications. … You haven't got the disqualifications, though, and that's much rarer.’ Amis's characters in the early fiction act as if they experienced an unexpected and undeserved reprieve from pain and death by 1945, and they aren't at all sure what to do with it. They don't express gratitude, which would be false, but they don't express ideological certainty or pompous assurance of immutable virtue (the disqualifications) either. They haven't the language for the qualifications, and their words, their forms of control, fend off or assault the disqualifications.

The early Amis's deepest engagement with the themes of control and survival is visible in his 1966 novel set within the military, The Anti-Death League. The plot and characters involved in a staged military manoeuver at a peacetime Army base are framed, beginning and end, by traffic accidents that simply happen—a motorcycle courier delivering a secret message killed at the beginning, the parson's dog, unable to stand the music that is the object of the parson's principal devotion, slipping his collar to run into his death on the highway at the end. In both instances, the ministrations of parson, doctor and security man are irrelevant, establishing a world always conscious of the accidental finality of death. Within the novel, the only person killed (again by random accident) in the abortive military manoeuver is L. S. Caton, the rather slimy author and editor who writes in green ink and offers lectures in each of Amis's early novels, a gesture that seems appropriately to expunge from the fiction a worn comic device. Death also intrudes into the fiction centrally in the preparations for the dangerous manoeuver finally aborted and into the single love affair (as distinguished from the frequent and uninvolving sex), that between one officer, James, and Catherine.

A comic and literal anti-death league, which sends out missives suspected of undermining security, is only the ludicrous surface of the military, that institution presumably best equipped to deal with death. The various institutional voices provide a cacophony of irrelevance: the security officer who tries to follow his manual and apply reasonable thought, but usually ends in contradiction or paranoia; the doctor (a psychiatrist here, and the most immoral of Amis's characters) who meddles outrageously in what no one understands; the intelligence officer who can confront death and his own homosexuality only through drink; the parson who makes music as an alternative to attempting to assuage death through his religion in a world where ‘to believe at all deeply in the Christian God, in any sort of benevolent deity, is a disgrace to human decency and intelligence’.

In contrast to these voluble characters, James and Catherine express their lives simply, directly and repetitiously (leading to the possible conclusion that the novel is sentimental or that Amis has lost some of his linguistic energy and skill) until, when threatened with the possibility of Catherine's cancer, they just silently hold each other on their bed. The silent, the unknowability, is political and institutional as well as personal. James and Catherine's silence is less Amis's ineptitude than his deliberate and effective statement about inadequate, intractable human language. Death cannot be mediated, assuaged or explained in human terms, and no benevolent God exists in Amis's world.¹ The human efforts become varying forms of persiflage, comic because they are outrageously impotent and irrelevant in confronting death. ‘Human decency and intelligence’, as well as human love, the transitory alternative to death, are in Amis's terms, best conveyed in a language approaching silence.

Moral choice in Amis's fiction is not inhibited by the fact that he finds no metaphysical or ideological warrant or derivation for it, nor does his Godless universe prevent Amis from offering moral contrasts between characters who are equivalently limited and unknowing as human beings. Rather, in the fiction, Amis uses the language of moral behaviour, calls some characters ‘humane’ or ‘decent’, and shows others as concerned only with self or the achievement of their own ends. The moral framework is social as well as individual, contingent on the recognition that the world contains many others besides the self. Accommodation to society is not in itself good or evil, and a virtue that involves the recognition of others is difficult to maintain in isolation. Amis's modern world is crowded, and his characters must learn to deal with traffic, voyages outside protective class or country, and changing codes of sexual behaviour. But the forms of dealing show a moral contrast between using change simply to feed or aggrandise the postures of self and understanding change in an active recognition of otherness.

Some of Amis's early heroes, those whose speech is likely to convey the most wildly outrageous social mimicry, like Patrick in Take a Girl Like You, Roger in One Fat Englishman or Dr Best, the psychiatrist in The Anti-Death League, are made morally inferior to the ‘decent’, to those who can love, or to those, like the parson or the homosexual in The Anti-Death League, whose language can scuttle their own positions. Still others, like Lucky Jim or Garnet Bowen in I Like It Here, are treated with more moral ambivalence. The elaborate persiflage of their language is the comic texture of self-protection, but Jim can appreciate other, simple, prizes in his growing sense of accommodation and Bowen can understand and value his wife as the woman who, unlike others who attract him, is incapable of blackmail, of using the secrets of others to advance the self. The language of Amis's positive morality, like that of James and Catherine in The Anti-Death League, is understated, deliberately simplified. The positive morality most often emerges through the mimicry and the elaboration of all the negative persiflage and self-justification. To develop a positive social language more extensively would, in terms of Amis's fiction, risk sounding pretentious, the inevitable sound of the glorification of self. In the absence of ideology or a language of truth, Amis expresses his morality largely through a comic language that exaggerates and explodes the pretentious into its reverse.

In regarding pretence as the sign of human and literary debility, and social accommodation as an axiom in human experience, Amis often consciously echoes values associated with eighteenth-century literary culture. He uses these values less in the context of neoclassicism or the ideas and assumptions of social order so important for some of the early twentieth-century modernists than in the assumptions and implications of the mock-heroic. In I Like It Here, Garnet Bowen visits Fielding's tomb in Lisbon and muses:

Perhaps it was worth dying in your forties if two hundred years later you were the only non-contemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and whole-hearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologised for or excused on the grounds of changing taste. And how enviable to live in the world of his novels, where duty was plain, evil arose out of malevolence and a starving wayfarer could be invited indoors without hesitation and without fear. Did that make it a simplified world? Perhaps, but that hardly mattered beside the existence of a moral seriousness that could be made apparent without the aid of evangelical puffing and blowing.

Although conscious of the pose in sounding like the ‘English Men of Letters Series’ and being barely able to read the Latin on the tomb, Bowen recognises both the honest virtue of Fielding's mock heroic stance and the fear of the more complex and ideological world from which it emerges and against which it tries to establish human control. Amis's perspective throughout his early fiction echoes something of Fielding's man of commonsense and simple virtue, as well as of the rationalism of Pope's deliberate reduction of man to the simply human scale or of the legend of Dr Johnson's sticking to the rules and lighting matches under his fingernails so as not to go mad.

Amis's literary adversary is the posture of any emotional, ideological, sociological or provincial anti-rationalism, the assumption that eternal truth is achieved by projecting the social and emotional extensions of self. I Like It Here and the other early novels mock the social statements that deliberately castigate the rational and glorify the idiosyncratic or the self. Dylan Thomas's poetry, for example, in its provincial emotionalism, is a frequent target, never more so than in its posthumous transmutation into legend and excuse that becomes a metaphor for human folly and falseness in Amis's recent novel, The Old Devils (1987). At the same time that Amis is too knowledgeable and intelligent to transform a general and complex historical movement like Romanticism into his enemy, his perspective insists on an allegiance to the knowable and locatable, a frequent dismissal of some of the thematic corollaries or excesses of nineteenth-century Romanticism in fiction. He is likely not to credit the deeper significances of self-doubt, emotional and psychic turbulence, and either the perils or the triumphs of solitary introspection. He has little patience with human anguish, rebellion or self-pity. His early plots, too, follow his perspective; they are rational constructions that lampoon deviation, excessive complexity or eccentricity. They tend to reinforce the signals issued by his language. Take a Girl Like You, as plot, is centrally an ironically reversed version of Richardson's Pamela. Amis's rational plots frequently, in the early fiction, resolve mystery, either directly, as in The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), or metaphorically, in social and psychological terms in That Uncertain Feeling (1955). His rational structures are seldom open-ended, seldom vulnerable to the deeper doubts, perplexities and human anguish of the open-ended or unresolved.

Amis's literary perspective is not, however, limited to an endorsement of rational and protective eighteenth-century values, or to the consequent clarity and focus visible in his critical work like What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions. Nor are his post-eighteenth-century literary references limited to parody that mocks his characters, although the novels contain a great deal of that, as in One Fat Englishman's misappropriations of literary tradition from Chaucer through to Evelyn Waugh's book on Rossetti, or the description of an elegant whore as looking ‘like a brilliantly catty novelist and reviewer with a Ph.D. on Wittgenstein’ in Take a Girl Like You. The latter novel also uses T. S. Eliot, ‘And every attempt is a wholly new start … and a different kind of failure. … A raid on the inarticulate … with shabby equipment always deteriorating’, both to mock Patrick's opportunism and to introduce a complicated theme concerning the use of language in the modern world that takes its Eliot quite seriously. Amis's protagonists are invariably compendiously literary, even those in the war-based stories in My Enemy's Enemy whose citations, either as parody or serious theme, range from Chaucer to D. H. Lawrence.

The early novel most explicitly concerned with literature and literary criticism, I Like It Here (which includes, as a set piece, an ancillary parody of a late 1950s literary critical syllabus), does not repose in its veneration of Fielding's sensible accommodation and protection. Garnet Bowen is also in Portugal to discover whether an ageing novelist who has not published in years, and whose work may convey moral and psychological depths beyond those visible to Fielding, is or is not genuine. The difficult old novelist is named Stretcher, and Bowen finally decides that both he and his claim that he's ‘better than Fielding’ are genuine. The links to Henry James are more than just the suggestions of nomenclature, for Bowen, at the end, begins to modify his expectation that ‘great writers’ are ‘prancing phoneys’ in ‘the great-writer period … roughly between Roderick Hudson and about 1930, death of Lawrence and the next bunch just starting off—Greene, Waugh, Isherwood, Powell. Or perhaps 1939.’ Amis is not switching his historical terms or endorsing cosmic or aesthetic anguish; rather, in using the early, firmly moralistic Roderick Hudson and in connecting his Jamesian speculations to the morally inquisitive and protective voice of Strether, Amis is accepting and questioning a literary moral framework that might extend Fielding and develop forms of moral rationalism more appropriate to the confusing and chaotic modern world. Bowen cannot really assimilate or fully understand Stretcher, and he retreats to the limited England he came from, but he does at least realise that the later Jamesian voice, however muted, is not mysterious, and has the authentic sound of genuine achievement.

A version of the Jamesian extension of moral issues from those of Fielding, the growing realisation that moral judgement becomes more difficult as a developing sensibility continues to confront cultural change, echoes through Amis's fiction over the last decade. The outrageously selfish protagonists of Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman often modify into less completely selfish successful men who illustrate the complacency of achieved social accommodation. The protagonists, for example, of both Jake's Thing and Stanley and the Women (1984) had adjusted themselves satisfactorily to their version of a changing world only to find that the world had changed again, leaving what they had thought of as their adjustments and moralities in doubt. An Oxford don approaching sixty who lives most of the week in London, Jake has carefully restricted himself to his work, his exact knowledge of bus routes and topography, and his sexual triumphs since the end of the Second World War. He has not bothered to vote since 1945, and he has never believed in causes or God. But he faces the loss of all sexual desire—either for his sympathetic second wife or for any of his other encounters, old or new. Told that his problem is not physical, he enters the new world of sexual and psychological therapy.

In some ways, he reacts like the earlier outrageous heroes, and Amis's capacity for assaultive social rhetoric is as sharp as ever. Knowing good food, Jake is lethal about the tasteless sludge served in Oxford colleges and Oxford restaurants with spurious foreign credentials. He blasts the language that refers to the group sexual session as a ‘workshop’, and excoriates new forms of scholarship that include the theory that Hamlet was really a woman in disguise. He becomes acutely uncomfortable in a world where, as he complains, the man in charge of his treatment ‘didn't know where Freud functioned, what had happened in 1848 or who James Bond was’. Jake expands, thinking the therapist had probably never heard of ‘the Titanic, haggis, T. S. Eliot, plutonium, Lent, Vancouver (city let alone island or chap), Herodotus, Sauternes, the Trooping of the Colour, the Times Literary Supplement, the battle of Gettysburg, Van Gogh, Sibelius, Ulysses’. Jake eventually learns that his loss of sex drive has a physical origin. But, in the process of discovery, he also violates his own standards in going to bed with an old flame, now married, to prove himself, in his handling of newer attractions, and in his spontaneous sexist outburst at a college meeting. Emotional explosions from within destroy the forms of self-control he thought he had attained. In addition, his second wife, who realises that he had only manipulated rather than shared what she had thought of as a relationship, leaves him for a feckless, formless, absorptive man for whom Jake has only contempt. Amis establishes a point of view that sees Jake as unable to maintain control because his moral recognition of others was insufficient. He had only a superficial moral language vulnerable to the next switch in preposterous fashion. Yet Jake himself is not entirely the outrageous pretender as he comes to question what he had thought were his own forms of accommodating morality.

Stanley and the Women erodes further and more deeply the confidence and complacency of the potentially outrageous accommodator who had thought himself in control of his world. In some ways, Stanley, a successful trade journalist specialising in motor cars, is the familiar iconoclastic anti-hero, although he, like Jake, is a vastly expanded and matured version of the early Amis anti-hero who could not accommodate and saved himself by retreat in That Uncertain Feeling. Stanley is given a rhetoric that, in the complex London world of 1982 which illustrates a resurgence of class feeling, subtly derogates Jews, parcels women into appropriate roles that acknowledge their professional skill and independence, and skillfully merges metaphors for food and clothing into an assault on conventional taste, like the dress his first wife wears ‘which looked to me as though it was made out of a well-known brand of dietary biscuit’. Stanley thinks his relationship with his second wife, a beautiful and successful editor, is arranged with sensible control, including the decision not to have children, and she is initially warm and supportive when his son from his first marriage suffers a nervous breakdown. But his control vanishes in a psychiatric world full of contradictory advice and the complexities of family treatments, where the boundaries of madness and sanity are questioned and Hamlet is read through the perspective of R. D. Laing.

In his pain, Stanley retreats to the lower-middle-class, South London world he came from: he relies for advice on doctors who share his origins. His second wife, Susan, in leaving him, mimics his mimicry, screaming in her ‘very poor imitation of perhaps a Hackney or Bow accent’ that he's a ‘lower-class turd’: ‘I don’t know how I've put up with you for so long, with your gross table-manners and your boozing and your bloody little car and your frightful mates and your whole ghastly south-of-the-river man's world.’ But the strains of experience that erode control bite much more deeply in the action of the novel. Apparently recovering, Stanley's son returns to live with him and breaks again, apparently lunging toward Susan with a knife when Stanley is away. Stanley cannot tell whether the attack was intended and Susan's superficial wound the fortunate issue of self-defence, or whether the attack was only a gesture and Susan's wound self-inflicted. Stanley, who thought he could be both a good father and an appropriate husband to a second wife, cannot manage the contradictions in loyalty and belief that the extreme situation demands. Older forms of comic control are irrelevant, for Stanley cannot know enough about the motives and inner imperatives of others, no matter how close to him, to sustain the rational control he thought he had mastered. The cacophony of contemporary voices about psychiatry, women, families, has no more certain knowledge. Some voices, like that of a calm Sister in a hospital are just kinder and more humane than others; Stanley comments ‘good and bad in every crowd … like Germans’. A sub-text in the novel suggests recall of the Second World War, the luck of survival in a frightening world of competing and antagonistic forms of intense pain. Stanley's second wife returns in a quickly staged gesture at the end of the novel, although the inner truth of the situation is still unknowable. Stanley accepts the patched-up conclusion, for, as one of the doctors has said, ‘after all one has to be married’, and his son is likely to recover. But his sense of pain and guilt, as well as his recognition of the limits of knowledge and rationality, are unassuaged in a world he had once thought he could deal with responsibly.

In a recent essay entitled ‘No, not Bloomsbury’ (the title comes from Lucky Jim), Malcolm Bradbury has developed an extensive parallel between the comic personae of Amis and Evelyn Waugh.² The similarities include both authors' sharp, astringent language, their assaults on the pious and self-pitying, and their dyspeptic personae's comic iconoclasm about the contemporary world. Bradbury rightly sees that both are moralists whose comedy mocks human pretence, and that Amis, increasingly, like Waugh, writes about human loss and pain. But, despite the parallels in their language and rhetorical stances, the social and metaphysical implications of the two writers' fictions are more significantly different than Bradbury's parallel acknowledges. On the level of political dialogue, Bradbury sees them both as cantankerous, moralistic Tories, but he also quotes Amis's recent statement that he supports the Tories except on the issues of hanging, homosexuality and abortion. Although Waugh can no longer comment on current policies, it is doubtful that he would ever sanction such significant deviation from Tory policy, especially on the last issue. Differences between the two are visible in different moral positions on sexual fidelity, where Amis is often unmoved by the pain of betrayal that generates Waugh's anger and bitterness.

Even wider differences attach to Tory institutions, the Army and the Church. In Waugh's trilogy of the Second World War, Sword of Honour, the persona begins with confidence in the institution of the military in 1939 as the safeguard of national value and tradition. Through the first years of the war, he is bitterly disillusioned by the military's incompetence, violations of its own standards, and incorporation of the socially and selfishly opportunistic. He depicts an institution that betrays tradition and Toryism by compromise with the modern world. Amis, writing only after he had emerged from a military from which he had never expected any value, develops a perspective almost surprised to sanction an institution that, despite its inevitable strains and contradictions, functions in the contemporary world. The Toryism of the military's beliefs or values is, for Amis, less the point than its capacity for accommodation. The ostensible principles are contradictory anyhow, and Amis's military is valuable only in its opposition to other principles or ideologies that would scrap it in the name of a higher truth. Waugh's Church, although of course not part of British Toryism, itself enshrines ultimate value. In both his fiction and other comments, Waugh defined that moral value as a conscious refusal to accommodate to a changing social world (and, in fact, was deeply disappointed when the Vatican Council established accommodations he could not sanction). For Amis, Church as institution is irrelevant, not representing anything at all in the fiction, although individual members may or may not derive morality from their own contradictions and responses. Not only are Waugh and Amis sharply different in their attitudes toward institutions that presumably represent the Conservative, but they differ deeply on the comic extravagances of social accommodation itself. Tony Last reading Dickens to the natives in Brazil might be equally outrageous for both authors, but Waugh grants him a measure of the martyr's sympathy whereas Amis would scorn the tacit assumption of the martyr's complacency and virtue.

A further measure of the differences between the perspectives of Waugh and Amis is visible through a novel like Ending Up (1974), an Amis version of ultimate questions more skeletal than most of his novels. The society of the novel is five old people, dependent on each other, who live in an isolated country cottage. Their survival requires both accommodation to each other and a severe restriction of their own former interests because of the increasing debilities of age. The most articulate and active (also the nastiest and most selfish) is a former Army officer who no longer can sustain earlier interests in athletics, military tactics and strategy, history, India, ‘pioneers in aviation, chess, the life of the Duke of Wellington, the works of George Meredith’. He is confined to the necessity of long sessions in the lavatory, careful cleaning of himself and another resident who has had a stroke, routine reading of the newspaper, rationed smokes and drinks, and games like patience. All the others, too, carefully order life within the limits of unchangeable loss and physical decay, bad hearts, alcoholism and fading memory. The forms of control, the survival kits, invert in time: recognising others and trying to establish social connection turns to playing tricks on others, preying on their weaknesses; intelligence and scholarship become a series of long lists and names, the sign of trivial pedantry; attempts to maintain contact with outsiders result in repeated letters forgotten or the abyss of miscommunication when younger relatives of some of the characters come to visit; sustaining others leads to self-ingestion, to girth or drunkenness. Moral differences between the five characters exist, but they are trivial, nearly irrelevant, in the declining control, fiercely protected, over the death they all inevitably share.

The plot is carefully worked to the climax in which the former Army officer (whose doctors have given him a more immediate sentence of death he does not divulge), playing a trick on another character, stumbles to his accidental death. This, by a series of connections, relying on the interdependent restrictions and debilities of each, within hours leads to the death of all five. The novel is painful farce; the comically restricted controls that would forestall death turn into its accidental agents. There is no appeal, rescue, transcendence or consolation in fiction that is entirely closed, both literally and metaphorically. Although a few of the voices share the comic malice, pain and dyspepsia of those of Evelyn Waugh, Amis's perspective provides nothing outside, no eternal fall, no cultural meaning, no martyrdom, no transmission of anything to the next generation, and no echo of eternal doom. Ending Up is closer to the fictional perspective of Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale than to that of any of Waugh's novels.

The basic conditions of human experience in Ending Up, the finality of death and the inversions of human control designed to forestall it, are repeated in The Old Devils. The later novel, however, also contains a much richer social texture as well as a cogently and comically articulated moral stance. It is, perhaps, Amis's fullest and deepest achievement thus far, and his most complicated use of the varieties of human character. In a novel set in a Welsh town about ageing couples, all of whom have known each other for forty years, each of the males is introduced with an elaborate comic treatment of the physical debilities he faces as he starts the day. The characters are typed by psychic connections to their fears and forms of ageing: the anality of the introverted scholar/pedant/poet; the carefully nurtured emergence from coma for the once brilliant alcoholic to enable him to drink again; the struggle with corpulence and the pain of incipient heart attack for the former teacher who has achieved commercial success. All share the simpler comedy and slighter pain of tooth decay, although these inconveniences are not revealing—more a general statement of the condition of British teeth and Amis's lingering conventional animosity toward dentists. Each of the characters is also, in one way or another, dependent on his wife, who confronts her own forms of control in the world of endemic decay. The emphasis on wives, their hang-ups, soporifics, pains and accommodations, also brings the whole dimension of relationships into the novel. Although superficial forms of past control are still recalled in Amis's comic lists and manuals of anatomy for permissible seduction, the years have added all the complex assumptions and suspensions of control, the combinations of independence and dependence, that comprise relationship. The texture of detail is social as well as personal and psychological, for connection to and characterisation in terms of the changing society is part of what keeps the human being from the vacuity and isolation of death.

The plot of the novel follows the return to the community of Alun and Rhiannon after a forty-year absence. Alun, the most energetic and aggressive of the men, is the outrageous voice who, as writer and performer, has fashioned a career by representing the charming and dissident Welsh on the BBC; Rhiannon, the prize, is still the most attractive and sensitive of the women, although their marriage has been difficult. Amis is predictably lethal about the phoney re-creation of a distinctive Welsh past: all those ancient customs for which ‘research had failed to come up with a date earlier than 1920’ and those signs that ‘used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before’. Alun and Rhiannon have aged less than the others, seem to have been able to use their grander life as a substitute for the grimmer, more narrow forms of control life has demanded of the others. But Alun's youth is finally as spurious as his paraded Welsh identity. He claims he is determined to break away from the Dylan Thomas syndrome and write of Welsh experiences authentically. But he can't, his language is still the elaborate and empty panoply of the BBC. His literary failure becomes his moral failure as well when he casually abandons the alcoholic (who is dependent on others to get home in the dark), the one character both sensitive and brave enough to tell, however reluctantly, Alun the truth about his work. Knowing he's failed artistically and morally, that his life is basically false, Alun loses control entirely. His casual nastiness gets them all kicked out of their habitual pub just before a sudden heart attack makes him the only one to die.

Amis's moral perspective is, however, not only stated negatively, not only apparent through the false, outrageous accommodation that has no concern for others. Through all the various sexual encounters, past and present (and, in Amis, morality is never contingent on life-long sexual fidelity), the relationship between Peter, the corpulent former teacher who has become a commercial success, and Rhiannon is given a status and an unfeigned sense of mutual concern beyond accommodation not granted to any of the others. They had loved each other when Peter was a teacher, Rhiannon a student. When she became pregnant, Peter, frightened of losing his job, had insisted she have an abortion and go off to London with Alun. In the years since, as he accommodated to changing society, left teaching, and married a woman who demanded penance and no longer wants him, Peter carried the responsibilities and guilts of his whole world. His ingestion of guilt swelled to corpulence; he became dependent on pills of nitroglycerin to control the strains on an overloaded heart. He learned to understand others without judging them. The marriage of Peter's son and Rhiannon's daughter (and Peter and Rhiannon are depicted as the only adequate parents in the novel, concerned and close without being demanding or intrusive) in some way compensates for their own aborted child. They conclude the novel living together in something beyond the requirements of controlled and sensible accommodation. Peter is a superficially ludicrous version of James's Strether, learning late the possibilities of a finer, deeper morality, one that does not judge and takes the guilts and responsibilities into the self, in a world of more crowded social complexity than he had ever imagined. What he learns may not do him any good, at least not for long, and there is no consolation for death.

Abstracted, the morality almost sounds too simple, rather like Jamesian uses of ‘wonderful’. The language of morality can easily sound banal. James achieves his language by shrouding the difficult extensions of sensitivity and morality in ambivalence. Amis relies on an unpretentious vocabulary close to silence or banality, on what is most visible in its contrast to the language of persiflage. Positive language is close to intractable, the most difficult and vulnerable survival kit. Yet the force and social concern of a finer, understated morality emerges from The Old Devils shrouded in an anti-heroic corpulence and decay that control any implicitly pretentious statement. In his own terms, Amis has moved some of the distance from Fielding to the later James.

Notes

1. Amis himself has connected his depiction of God in The Anti-Death League with William Empson's characterisation of God as malignant in Milton's God. See Dale Salwak's interview with Amis in ‘An Interview with Kingsley Amis’, Contemporary Literature XVI (Spring 1975) pp. 15-16.

2. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘“No, Not Bloomsbury”, the Comic Fiction of Kingsley Amis’, in his No, Not Bloomsbury (London: André Deutsch, 1987) pp. 201-18.