Amis, Kingsley (Robert Markham) (1922-1995) novelist, poet, nonfiction writer

Kingsley Amis was born in London to William Amis, a clerk for Colman’s Mustard, and Rosa Lucas Amis. He was educated at the City of London School and Oxford, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet Philip Larkin. From Oxford he went on to lecture in English Literature at the University College at Swansea.

While at Oxford and during his early years at Swansea, Amis wrote some well-received poetry, but it was with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), that he came to public attention. Drawing on his own experiences, Amis wrote of Jim Dixon, an English lecturer at a provincial university who is surrounded by pretentious snobs and wealthy hangers-on of the arts. Jim, who it seems can do nothing right, has a series of comic misadventures and loses his academic job. His fortunes turn for the better when he begins to vocalize his hilariously nasty thoughts: “The bloody old towser- faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. ‘You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation,’ he said.” Jim is representative of a new class of person in postwar England, a member of the hitherto less-privileged classes who by talent and study are beginning to make inroads into the bastions of the traditionally privileged. Novelist David Lodge commented on the novel’s significance for him: “Lucky Jim was another magic book for me—and for most English readers of my age and background, upwardly mobile, scholarship-winning, first-generation university graduates—for it established precisely the linguistic register we needed to articulate our sense of social identity, a precarious balance of independence and selfdoubt, irony and hope.” The novel placed Amis in the company of other contemporary writers whom critics labeled Angry Young Men.

Critics are divided about Take a Girl Like You (1960). Many believe it is Amis’s best work, while just as many feel it is marred by a misogynistic plot. In this book Patrick Standish attempts to seduce virginal Jenny Bunn. He gives her an ultimatum: “I can’t carry on any longer as we are. I’ve tried but it’s too much of a strain. I love you and want to sleep with you. I can’t go on seeing you and not.” He ultimately succeeds only when she is drunk. The work is fraught with a sort of moral ambivalence and marks a turn in Amis’s “comic” fiction toward darker themes. Malcolm Bradbury praised the work: “It opened the way for Amis to take on a new kind of writing, in which the 1960s mood of sexual liberation and then of growing male-female conflict were to be dominant themes.” Around this time, Amis became a public figure, and many critics feel that his time and energies became dissipated in television appearances, literary squabbles with other authors, and side projects such as his “Amis on Drink” column for Penthouse.

In the 1960s Amis published many novels, including One Fat Englishman (1963), whose titular hero is the obese and disagreeable publisher Roger H. St. John W. Micheldene. Under the pseudonym Robert Markham, he published The James Bond Dossier (1964), a mock-scholarly study of the Bond novels, followed under his own name by a spy novel, The Anti-Death League (1966), in which he expresses an essentially atheistic worldview. The Green Man (1969) is a supernatural story set in a country hotel. In 1973 he published a detective story, The Riverside Villa Murder, and to end that decade he published Collected Poems 1944-1979 (1979).

Amis’s best novel from the 1980s, The Old Devils (1986), takes place among a group of aging drinkers in Wales. Critic James Wolcott describes it as “so dense with booze that the book seems sunken, subaquatic, its retired Welsh sots trying to remain standing in an aquarium stocked with gin and drifting hunks of scenery.” It won the Booker Prize.

Amis was knighted in 1990 and the following year published his Memoirs, wherein he settles old scores with his many literary and personal enemies. Amis’s son Martin Amis has been publishing novels since the 1970s and has become nearly as popular and respected as his father. Kingsley Amis will be remembered for his wildly funny comedies and his experiments with genre fiction. As scholar Robert Bell put it, “The funniest writer of our time is also one of the most troubling.”

Other Works by Kingsley Amis:
- Girl, 20. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972.
- That Uncertain Feeling. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.

Works about Kingsley Amis:
- Amis, Martin. Experience: A Memoir. New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2000.
- Bradford, Richard. Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owen, 2001.
- Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
- Leader, Zachary. The Life of Kingsley Amis. New York: Vintage, 2007.