“The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: 11; Kingsley Amis Versus Vladimir Nabokov,” in Contemporary Review, Vol. 269, November, 1996, pp. 254-56.

‘Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story,’ E. M. Forster describes himself in Aspects of the Novel as saying in ‘a drooping regretful voice’. He wishes that it could be something different from ‘this low atavistic form’. Kingsley Amis had in his critical writings no such misgivings. He regarded expression and style as qualities which merely forward the action. He deplores what he calls the ‘verbal shock tactics, dislocated syntax, unnatural epithets and other affectations of singularity’ which he deems to have originated in James Joyce's Ulysses. Amis, the erstwhile member of the Classical Sixth Form of the City of London School, watched over other writers' syntax attentively, and once reproached Anthony Powell for flouting Fowler's Modern English Usage in the last volume of The Music of Time.

He praises Muriel Spark's Territorial Rights, a characteristically grisly tale unalleviated by her usual humor, because ‘although set in Venice, it doesn't go on about Venice. … Going on about places is nearly always a self-indulgence’. So much for Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig and Anthony Powell's Temporary Kings, which pre-eminently ‘go on’ about Venice! Kingsley Amis comes more and more to resemble E. M. Forster's golf-playing interlocutor, surely one of the appalling Wilcoxes of Howard's End, who answers the question, ‘What does a novel do?’ with the words, ‘Why, tell a story of course, and I've no use for it if it doesn't. … You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story.’ E. M. Forster remarks that he ‘detests and fears’ this man. Amis adds to his praise of Territorial Rights, that ‘there is no uplift or edification here.’

Now let us allow the texts to speak for themselves. Here is Vladimir Nabokov's description, tinctured with the predilections of his narrator Humbert, of Lolita at the swimming pool, to be followed by the comments of Kingsley Amis:

She adored brilliant water and was a remarkably smart diver. Comfortably robed, I would settle down in the rich post-meridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling gland, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra. Pubescent sweetheart! How smugly would I marvel that she was mine, mine, mine, and revise the recent matitudinal swoon to the moan of the mourning doves, and devise the late afternoon one, and slitting my sun-speared eyes, compare Lolita to whatever other nymphets parsimonious chance collected around her for my anthological delectation and judgment; and today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think that any of them ever surpassed her in desirability.

Amis does not like foreigners, amongst whom he includes Welshmen, notably Dylan Thomas: ‘ranting, canting Thomas’, whose poetry is ‘all surface’ (an extraordinary taunt, in view of its multilayered and at times cryptic depths, difficult but always rewarding to penetrate), whose prose is ‘tainted with fancifulness’. In Amis's The Old Devils Dylan Thomas, under the pseudonym of Brydan, is the depraved model whom other writers must shun. Whilst commenting on the passage from Lolita, Amis in his What Became of Jane Austen? calls Nabokov ‘an émigré’ who writes (like Joseph Conrad, possibly the most vivid of the Edwardian novelists) in an ‘adoptive language’ alien to the ‘native speaker’:

No extract, however, could do justice to the sustained din of pun, allusion, neologism, alliteration, cynghanedd, apostrophe, parenthesis, rhetorical question, French, Latin, ‘anent’, ‘perchance’, ‘would fain’, ‘for the nonce,’—here is style and no mistake. One will be told, of course, that this is the ‘whole point’, that this is the hero, Humbert Humbert, talking in his own person, not the author, and that what we are getting is ‘characterization’. All right; but it seems ill-advised to characterize logomania by making it talk 120,000 words at us, and a glance at Nabokov's last novel, Pnin, which is not written in the first person, establishes that this is Nabokov talking. … The development of this émigré's euphemism is a likely consequence of Nabokov's having had to abandon his natural idiom, as he puts it, his ‘untrammelled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue’. This, which enacts the problem with characteristic tricksy indirection, also implies its solution as the laborious confection of equivalent apparatuses in the adoptive language: the whole farrago of imagery, archaism, etc, which cannot strike even the most finely tuned foreign ear as it strikes that of the native English-speaker. The end product sadly invokes a Charles Atlas muscle-man of language as opposed to the healthy and useful adult.

What Amis objects to is that Nabokov writes ingenious and inventive prose not in the schoolboy sequence of subject, verb and predicate; an order for the most part ignored, as he could see for himself, by the Latin writers he studied in his Classical Sixth form. Biliously Amis scorned Dylan Thomas's enterprise as defined by Thomas himself: ‘I use everything and anything to make my poems work … old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paromasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device in language is there to be used if you will.’ A close and careful reading of the passage cited by Amis will reveal that almost every phrase used by Nabokov is imaginatively loaded.

It is time to set up a competition between the two writers' prowess in the use of English. The subject, which is the remembrance of the past, is a favourite with both authors.

In Nabokov's Ada, Ada and her mother Marina Durmanov are dining at a table by an open window with Demently (‘Demon’) Veen, Marina's former lover, and his son Van, Ada's present lover. The ‘ghost’ is Ada's childhood as a butterfly collector:

The tablecloth and the candle blaze attracted timorous or impetuous moths among which Ada, with a ghost pointing them out to her, could not help recognizing many old ‘flutterfriends’. Pale intruders, anxious only to spread out their delicate wings on some lustrous surface; ceiling- bumpers in guildman furs: thick-set rake-hells with bushy antennae; and party-crashing hawk-moths with red black-belted bellies, sailed or shot, silent or humming, into the dining room out of the black hot humid night.

It was a black hot humid night in mid-July, 1888, at Ardis in Ladore county, let us not forget, let us never forget, with a family of four seated around an oval dinner table, bright with flowers and crystal—not a scene in a play, as might have seemed—nay, must have seemed—to a spectator (with a camera or a program) placed in the velvet pit of the garden. Sixteen years had elapsed from the end of Marina's three-year affair with Demon. Intermission of various length had at the time only increased the tenderness and the torture. Her singularly coarsened features, her attire, that sequin-spangled dress, the glittering net over her strawberry-blond dyed hair, her red sunburnt chest and melodramatic make-up, with too much ochre and maroon in it, did not even vaguely remind the man, who had loved her more keenly than any other woman in his philanderings, of the dash, the glamour, the lyricism of Marina Durmanov's beauty. It aggrieved him—that complete collapse of the past, the dispersal of its itinerant court and music-makers, the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance.

The opulence of Nabokov's recollection is hardly matched by the meagre statement Amis makes of the unremarkable pleasures of Patrick Standish's youth in Take a Girl Like You. So far as one can discern from the passage, Patrick, befuddled by drink, is trying to walk a straight line between his earlier carefree life and his adult responsibilities, particularly to Jenny Bunn, whom he has not precisely raped but at least taken by surprise:

They came out into brilliant early-evening sunlight that made Patrick groan inwardly. It set his memory spinning with model railways in the garden, sandcastles on the beach, rabbits on the common, lemonade at the corner shop, the band in the park, the cricket, the river. Sunday walks, picnics, blackberrying, mushrooming, Delius, Debussy, always with a girl there or in his mind, it seemed now to have made no difference which. And of course it would not have in those days, before he looked like getting started. What a girl made him think then had as little to do with her as what blackberrying and Delius made him think had to do with them. But that had changed as he grew up as he began to see living as the art of the possible, began to push the blackberrying- Delius background into the background and treat the mind and body of a girl as the destined, reasonable fore-ground. No more insolent, incapacitating bewilderment.

Well done. Then why was it that he had to go back to black-berrying-Delius before he could find a time when he had felt all right?—not happy or fulfilled or in tune with things or any of that junk, but simply all right able to sit down to work without yelling with hatred, able to enjoy the sun without worrying about making the emotional and reminiscential and cross-referential most of it, able to talk to a girl without being afraid of missing a chance. … And a good thing too, eh? Hell, who said he had to feel all right, anyway?

This is tortuous, periphrastic, laboured: verbosely inarticulate. An author describing drunkenness should at least be clear-headed himself. Amis wrote his prolonged gibe about Nabokov whilst completing Take a Girl Like You. He should have remembered his own words about the confusion of characterisation with the authorial identity. The incidents recalled are oversimple and tinged with Amis's personal taste for the mild and formless music of Debussy and Delius. Although the words used, apart from the preposterous ‘reminiscential’ and ‘cross-referential’, contain few syllables and certainly nothing figurative, and although Amis is liberal in clichés (‘groan inwardly’, ‘the art of the possible’, ‘adult situation’) the passage is, even in its context, almost incomprehensible. Nabokov's reminiscence, on the contrary, is utterly clear if read attentively. The émigré has easily outdone the self-appointed old English bulldog. I am a little sorry to write so adversely about Kingsley Amis, whose novels from Lucky Jim in 1954 to One Fat Englishman provided many good laughs, but from I Want it Now (1968) onwards, what a dismal incoherent, befuddled decline! He did revive with Trouble with Girls, a sequel to Take a Girl Like You, which was a kind of rejuvenation. It is hard to pass by his jeers at far better writers than himself.