King, Spleen, Knave

About a decade ago there was a row over the legacy of Philip Larkin. Was he a scabrous old reactionary whose artistic merit had, like Ezra Pound's, been vastly overrated, or was he the real deal? The elided headline during this locust moment in book culture was, I thought, "Major Poet, Minor Prick." Hard as it may be for the tidy-minded to accept, one can hold untenable opinions and still manage to make great art.

Auden, whose own opinions on everything from religion to politics ranged from the ridiculous to the profound, understood this perfectly when he wrote, eulogizing Yeats and invoking Kipling, that time "[w]orships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives; / Pardons cowardice, conceit, / Lays its honours at their feet." And Yeats and Kipling were, I'd wager, far nastier customers than even the owlish recluse of Hull.

We seem to have wandered into another mangy flea market of Dead Author bloviation. There was some hope that the life of Kingsley Amis, belonging as it did to a man whose quarry was the farce of human existence and who could therefore be excused exhibiting farcical tendencies himself, would pass re-examined without a replaying of the Larkin brouhaha. True, the reviews of Zachary Leader's new biography have been somewhat less sanguinary about the later John Bullshit/Little Englander shtick, the casual racism and anti-Semitism and misogyny. But we still find it necessary to enlist Clive James to set the Work categorically apart from the Man, no matter how the flaws and triumphs of the one became the flaws and triumphs of the other.

A deeper indication of Amis’s capacity for self-analysis on the matter of sexual attractiveness is that he was capable of making a subject out of what it might be like not to be attractive. In Take a Girl Like You, Jenny Bunn is the fully articulated version of Christine in Lucky Jim. Those who thought Christine unreal would have twice the reason to think that of Jenny, but in both cases, the combination of beauty and goodness is surely not impossible. You might even say that the beautiful find it easier to be good. It is certainly true to life that Jenny, with her looks, her practicality and her sense of fun, would touch the heart of any man, and especially a man like Patrick, who is heartless and knows it. But in the figure of Graham, the decent type who yearns for her hopelessly, Amis pushed analysis into a new area. There had been radiant young lovers in English novels before, from Tom Jones and Sophie Western onwards. And there had been stumbling, hopelessly yearning dim bulbs before: Dickens is full of them. Graham is not even the first of these to bare his soul: Leonard Bast in Howards End shows us what it might be like to be a loser. But Graham is the first to bare his soul with eloquence. The scene in which he tells Jenny what it is like to be a man who has no chance with a girl like her is like nothing else in literature before it, and would alone be enough to establish Amis as the moral writer that F. R. Leavis said he wasn’t. (I was at the lecture – on Dickens – when Dr Leavis, asserting that Amis had no interest in describing the behaviour of a gentleman, inadvertently defined Amis’s central literary interest as exactly that.)

In point of fact, Amis' women were often a lot stronger, smarter and, well, luckier than his men. Jake's Thing may have been about a spent middle-aged libido, unameliorated by its daily subjection to a fat and homely wife. But it was wifey who takes off with the nextdoor neighbor at novel's end, leaving Jake and his flaccid cock unmolested but alone on the sofa, absorbing mindless telly and idling away an eminently undistinguished academic career. This was Jim Dixon's worst nightmare come true.

The girls could be manic (all women run around all the time like they're drunk, says Alun Weaver in The Old Devils, a condition shared only by children and queers), but the old boys were unfailingly depressive. To read anything of Kingsley's middle-of-the-journey period, of his failed marriages and chronic fears (the dark especially) is to see that he was never more mordantly self-critical than he was in his fiction.

Feminists object to seeing ungentlemanly or laddish conduct depicted at all, but then they act as we live in something called the "patriarchy," in which such conduct is presumably the norm. What they could, if they let the blood pressure drop a bit, get out of Kingsley would be tantamount to what a Marxist gets out Wealth of Nations. Amis understood the slow-mounting disappointments of masculine sexual identity better than any writer before or since. And he was hilarious in his understanding. Anyone who tells you different is a staggering bore.