Zachary Leader’s 1,000-page biography of Kingsley Amis is paradoxical: an exemplary summation of an increasingly marginal-seeming figure whose life, while eventful, hardly merits this degree of analysis. Amis, who died in 1995, was a sporadically amusing comic novelist with a finely tuned ear for speech patterns and, especially, bogus or pretentious formulations. Despite his notorious impatience with ‘difficult’ writing, his own could be far from easy. His ‘classic’ ‘Lucky Jim’, co-authored with best mate Philip Larkin, is a toxic sludge of smug in-jokes and casual misogyny, its status within the canon incomprehensible to the modern reader. His breezy, largely fabricated ‘Memoirs’ (1991), however, hits the spot every time, suggesting that his real gift, refined over countless drunken Garrick lunches, was for self-serving anecdotalism where the confusion of wit with cruelty is part of the point.
Leader’s take on Amis is that he was a literary giant. It’s a necessary deception. If you believe this then it’s easier, fractionally, to tolerate the damage Amis did with his philandering; his rages; his drinking; his imbecilic politics; his child-like helplessness; his contempt for women, homosexuals and of course ‘bores’, defined by his previous biographer Eric Jacobs as people with ‘nothing interesting, intelligent or amusing to say’. (Not Kingers, then!)
Leader’s prose is supremely readable, though his obsessive pursuit of Amis leads him down some drab alleys. Do we really need to know about the family holiday to the Algarve which the Amises took in 1955? Not as far as I’m concerned, but Leader would say yes, it helps us understand the dislike of Abroad which fed into novels such as ‘I Like It Here’, and anyway, look at all the funny letters he wrote to Larkin about it. (These letters, by the way, which are indeed funny in isolation, take on a much more sinister quality in the context of the life.)
Again and again, you find yourself wondering: Why did people tolerate Amis, humour him, admire him? And then: Why are so many novelists needy, egocentric monsters? And then: Who really benefits from this kind of warts-and-all exposure? For all his faults, Amis was loved by his family, and presumably loved them back, though God knows his treatment of his wives makes you wonder.
