My discovery of Kingsley Amis began in 1967, when as an undergraduate I read and reported on his first published novel, Lucky Jim, in the context of the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ movement of the 1950s. Some of the points I made then became part of my 1974 doctoral dissertation, ‘Kingsley Amis: Writer as Moralist.’ In 1975, Contemporary Literature published my first interview with Amis, and three years later G. K. Hall released my annotated bibliography of secondary writings on him. That book, I thought at the time, closed my work on the man. I would move on to other projects.

I did move on to other projects, but the subject wouldn't let me rest. A recurring edginess and anxiety visited me whenever I glanced at my Amis collection or read a new novel of his, not to mention the familiar ‘tapping on the shoulder’ that biographers often experience. In 1980, I re-visited Amis and his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, at their Hampstead home for a follow-up interview on the occasion of the publication of his fifteenth novel, Russian Hide-and-Seek. Its subject—a futuristic dream world turned nightmare—seemed at the time a far cry from the apparently contented domestic life that the Amises enjoyed. But in 1982 during another visit I was surprised to learn that after seventeen years of an often stormy marriage he and Jane had painfully separated, that Amis was now living with his first wife and her third husband in Kentish Town, and that for the first time in his professional career, he had abandoned a novel in progress. Listening to him talk, I found myself wondering whether Amis would ever write a good novel again, a question that he may well have been asking himself. His confidence was understandably at a low ebb.

Every novel Amis has written reflects in some way the particular life he was leading at the time. Usually, the book can be traced back to some key idea, to some intense emotional need, to what Leon Edel calls some ‘state of disequilibrium’ in his being, to what Catherine Bowen terms ‘some ghost within that struggles for release.’ It is not surprising, then, that two years after Jane had left, the idea for Stanley and the Women drifted into Amis's head. ‘One moment I knew nothing,’ he said; ‘the next I knew it would be about a man with a mad son who breaks up his marriage.’ On the subjects of madness and the battle between the sexes, Amis has had much to say in earlier novels, but never so provocatively as in this dark comedy. With the exception of Lucky Jim (and 27 years later, his Memoirs), nothing in Amis's career would provide such an unprecedented outpouring of intense reaction among readers as that novel. As one reviewer accurately predicted, Stanley and the Women would be ‘greatly relished and deeply resented.’ It took a full year of rejections before an American publisher would accept it. When Amis told me in 1985 that an English writer had approached him about writing a book on his life and work, I said with interest and alarm, ‘Well, there'll be two then—one by an American.’ I was committed.

Operating on the principle that if we dig far enough into a writer's fiction, we can find the real person behind the authorial voice, I spent the next three years on nothing but published sources: Amis's novels, poetry, essays, and interviews. Every word of an author's work inevitably says something about the kind of person he is. At the same time, it would be naive to assume a one-for-one likeness between himself and his characters, or between incidents and certain events in his life. I worked hard to avoid falling into that trap, and tried to allow for the author's imagination and invention and creation at every turn. As I closely read, re-read, and evaluated everything in as broad and open-minded a way as possible, Amis's work seemed to guide me, chronologically, through his life in letters. Slowly there emerged from my study recurring attitudes toward family, friends, work, marriage, society, and his role as a writer upon which I could structure my book.

But published sources are only a start. I had to learn a great deal more. I wanted to know the personal and intellectual contexts from which the novels grew; the process by which Amis arrived at major decisions about structure, about the invention and ordering of plot, about the creation of characters. And I wanted to say more about Amis's breadth and consummate artistry in any genre that he chose to use. It was time to turn to the archives. ‘If the biographer reads a writer's work carefully,’ confirms Leon Edel, ‘he is already in possession of a significant compass to that writer's archives, because he is made aware of the singular personality who is his subject.’

While writing my book on Kingsley Amis, I was fortunate to have (with the exception of the Bodleian Library's collection of letters to Philip Larkin) unrestricted access to his archival material. Jack Gohn's 1976 bibliography alerted me to the Humanities Research Center's collection of Amis's juvenilia, his rejected Oxford thesis, and the notebooks and typescripts covering his first five published novels. Queries in PMLA, The New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement helped me to locate letters held at Pennsylvania State, Syracuse, Princeton, and the University of Victoria. And two colleagues led me to the Huntington Library's acquisition which includes almost one hundred drafts of Amis's novels, as well as various stories, unpublished plays, essays, notebooks, radio and television scripts along with 250 letters. Together, these materials span the entire course of Amis's career from 1934, when he was twelve years old, to 1990, and tell us much about his education, his evolution as a writer, his methods of composition, his friendships and acquaintances, and his respective tenures at Swansea, Princeton, Cambridge and Vanderbilt.

I was also fortunate to gain the early confidence of my subject as well as many of his friends and acquaintances. Between 1973 and 1990 Amis and I met in London six times for interviews, each lasting up to four hours. To insure absolute accuracy, I taped our conversations, and on two occasions sent him a transcript for correction. I handled interviews of Amis's friends and acquaintances similarly, and if I could not see an individual in person, I interviewed him or her by telephone. Beyond that, they left me completely on my own.

There are great advantages when the subject is alive, and also a great disadvantage, which is the biographer's lack of complete freedom to say what he wants about the subject. Amis's viewpoint in the preface to his Memoirs is of special relevance here. ‘To publish an account of my own intimate, domestic, sexual experiences,’ he writes, ‘would hurt a number of people who have emotional claims on me, probably as much by my writing of good times as bad, and I have no desire to cause pain, or further pain, to them or myself.’ On very sensitive issues—his marriages, for example, or his three children—I therefore limited my material to what he or family members had said in print, or what Amis himself had told me on the record.

It has been said that the notebooks of an accomplished novelist offer ‘a peculiar kind of biographical fact.’ A rebellious adolescence, a controlling father, a disappointing love, two divorces, recurring melancholy, fears of the dark, of loneliness, of possible madness, of death, and numberless other facts of personal biography may be windows on the work of an author, but notebooks can stand closer to the work than does any event. ‘In the final version we have one book;’ Edward Wasiolek goes on, ‘in the notebooks we have the shadows of other books—his intentions, his trials, his mistakes, his uncertainties. The novel offers what he finally chose to say, but the notebooks offer us what he considered, and what he discarded.’

This process is clear in Amis's notebooks for his second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, which avoided the ‘second novel’ syndrome many writers experience. Here Amis tells the story of John Lewis, age 26, who works in the library of a small southern Welsh town, making barely enough to support his wife, Jean, and their two young children in a depressingly low-rent second-floor apartment. The sub-librarianship—a fairly well-paying job—is open, and he applies for the position. His chances are improved when he meets Elizabeth, whose husband, Vernon, is very rich, very influential, and, very fortunately for John, a member of the Town Council and the Libraries Committee.

Most of the novel concerns John's entry, with Elizabeth's help, into her quasi-aristocratic world, and the degrading effect this experience has on his character. Although Elizabeth tempts him away from the sanctity of his home, a combination of moral scruples and a fear of deeper involvement compels him to repent, to renounce the position, and to move with his family to the smaller colliery town of his childhood, away from the wicked, sophisticated set of Aberdarcy. Detachment is in the long run the best escape, and John resolves ‘to keep trying not to be immoral, and then to keep trying might turn into a habit.’

In Amis's notebook, dated September 1952 and June 1953, we find a virtual dialogue between the author and his novel: schematic plans of major portions of the book; ruminations about technical problems; queries, judgments, opinions; and especially, reflections on his responsibilities to the reader. The latter remains a constant preoccupation throughout Amis's canon, and then as now his awareness of his reader remains paramount. In this regard Amis quotes Rossetti:

Above all ideal personalities with which the poet must learn to identify himself, there is one supremely real which is the most imperative of all; namely, that of his reader. And the practical watchfulness needed for such assimilation is as much a gift and an instinct as is the creative grasp of alien character. It is a spiritual contact hardly conscious yet ever renewed, and which must be a part of the very act of production.

To this end Amis, in planning his novel, attends to the smallest details. His notes tell us that the opening scene must occur in a library ‘to avoid the cliché of starting the day with a man in bed.’ Jean Lewis must not come across as ‘too hopeless,’ for that would ‘degrade the book and alienate all sympathy’ for her husband. Elizabeth will be introduced immediately ‘to get the thread started, though [there is] no reason why the reader shouldn't be allowed to think at this stage that an illustration of [the hero's] propensities is all that is meant.’ Humor must be ‘kept at a minimum’ and employed in chapters fifteen and sixteen only if it will ‘increase the horror.’ The author must everywhere eschew malice toward his characters. ‘All the behaviour [will] be viewed as natural as possible.’ will be a moral line to the story (hence its working title, The Moral Man). Even in this early stage, the basic conflict of a man testing his moral fiber against temptations of the flesh is clearly evident and coherently summarized. It is a pattern that will be repeated in ensuing work: the core or center of the conflict sketched in freehand in the notebooks.

After I completed the majority of work with the primary sources, it was time to move out from the immediate, personal story to the periphery. Reviews and essays from both my collection and Amis's publishers' files helped me to draw on other possible readings and to look in detail at the way that the work, once it had left Amis's hands, had been received and interpreted. And consideration of the ever-changing sociocultural backdrop of the twentieth century helped me to understand better why Amis has become increasingly preoccupied with the darker side of life. But there comes a time when a biography has to be finished, even if its subject works on. I selected 1990 as my cut-off date—a pivotal year, to be sure, with Amis's ascension to knighthood in June, the publication of his twenty-second novel, The Folks That Live on the Hill, and the completion of his Memoirs—and in 1992 Harvester-Wheatsheaf published my study, Kingsley Amis, Modern Novelist. Then, I believe, I could say that this book closed my work on the man. It was time to move on to other projects.

The experience of writing this book has reminded me over and over again of the importance of patience. As James Phelan writes in Beyond the Tenure Track, ‘More important than how soon is how well.’ Seventeen years is a long time to wait. In my case, it was to my advantage to wait as long as possible. I never knew ahead what a new work by Amis would be like—that is one of the joys of living contemporaneously with an accomplished writer. Perhaps, too, with the passing years I myself became better equipped to undertake this study. During some of that time I was busy with other work, and that allowed a great deal of irrelevance in my material to fall away. I threw out more than I used. From published sources to the archives to secondary materials—that progression worked well for me, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone else.

Finally, it will not come as a surprise when I say that the researching and writing of this book was not at all as organized, as straightforward, or as well-planned as my remarks suggest. In 1972 Amis wrote in a letter that in general, critics ‘tend to overestimate the part played in a novelist's career by planning, forethought, purpose … while underestimating the role of chance, whim, laziness, excess of energy, boredom, desire to entertain oneself, wanting a change for change's sake.’ My experience has been that some of these words apply to the literary critic and biographer as well.