From: Celestina Groeberhorst
Category: Amis
Date: 8/26/99
Time: 10:31:56 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
UNTITLED / BY IAN BELL / [FROM *THE HERALD* OF GLASGOW. OCTOBER 25, 1995.]
None of the obituaries got around to mentioning it---euphemisms are low-rent piety---but Sir Kingsley Amis was a creep. In his public persona at least, this sketch of a suburban snob, with his Garrick Club tie and his *Daily Mail* mind, his moral cowardice and his maiming cruelty, was effortlessly odious.
Does it matter? Wasn't Amis a "comic genius", a "master prose stylist", the plain-speaking voice of Middle England? If he was, it does.
It's an odd fact, but none of suburbia's favourite literary sons have had much to recommend them as people. Waugh, Wodehouse, Betjeman, Larkin, Amis: the chaps who wrote proper English books and real English verses, with a decent laugh, a good story, and rhymes reliable as the sonorous beat of old lawnmowers on dull Sunday afternoons. These were not an appetising bunch.
None much cared for the living world, whatever it happened to be on any given day. Betjeman's puerile nostalgia for Edwardian England was the mirror of his addiction to limp Edwardian prosody. Waugh, curator of Catholic reaction, at least did the human race the courtesy of loathing himself as much as he loathed anyone else who lacked a title.
Furtive Larkin, with his dirty mags and his dirty mac, his hatred of "abroad" and his provincial racism, kept English verse in the closet for decades. Wodehouse was his own fiction, meanwhile, calculating and emetically cute, no proper traitor but the sort who could persuade himself the Second World War was some other bod's affair.
Yet each of these, now joined by Amis, is celebrated as an embodiment of English values. This would be depressing, save that few among their multitude of admirers seem to notice, far less to mind. In this, England is at ease with itself.
Granted, even his admirers admit that Sir Kingsley was heartless, in life and in fiction, that he despised anything modern just because it was new, that his drunken political enthusiasms would have bored an empty saloon bar, that he was invincibly parochial (try asking an American or a European about his standing as a writer), that he grew to hate and fear women. But these aspects of his mind and art are thought not to matter.
No one requires artists to be admirable, of course. Nevertheless, it is striking that the writers who have appealed most directly to England's sense of itself since the Great War have seemed to symbolise England's decline---reactionary, nostalgic, class-ridden, seedy, and dull.
Amis the writer? After the one about the bloke (the Bloke of Blokes) at the provincial university, Sir Kingsley wrote the same three books several times over and fleshed out his contracts with bank jobs passed off as genre fiction. If the halitosis of his memoirs---the whiff of something gamey, the vigour of the maggot---is something that makes you laugh, you probably don't believe Larkin meant all that stuff about "niggers".
Amis never hit a difficult target in his life, but with the silent majority of the middlebrow as his jury he was always given the benefit of the doubt. His prose reeks of linguistic squalor, of lazy constructions, 50s slang, caricature got up as characterisation, moralising passed off as moral judgement, of low, vindictive farce retailed as corruscating wit. The language was the man, or so even he affected to believe.
But if art is any sort of mirror we can learn something from the old buffer, bluffer and serial self-plugger. It's not his Anglo-Saxon attitudes that matter so much, nor even those of his literary kin, but the fact that their wit and wisdom are admired, praised, even loved. These men had the common touch, the authentic voice. Each rose from what the taxonomists of social distinction would call the lower middle class---and invariably each despised (hence the satire) the sort of lower middle class people who read their books.
What did Sir Kingsley tell himself? Speak for England? Despise the foreign, rubbish the experts, damn love and liberals, and lefties, and girlies, and proles? Speak for an England that never was, revel in your performance, and still have time for a snort or two at the club.
They'll be there now, the chaps. Betjeman in his boater and Larkin in his library; the knighted yeoman novelist with his paragraphs of oak; Wodehouse with his secret terrors and Waugh blubbing over a rent-boy infatuation with languorous aristocracy.
Icons of English letters at the 20th century's end. All that remains, in fact. It's what they call a heritage.