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Amis Speaks -- By: NRO Staff

Kingsley Amis didn?t stick to friendly territory. The English novelist, poet, and essayist lampooned university elites but taught at Swansea, Cambridge, and Princeton. He criticized Dylan Thomas?s poetry but served as trustee of Thomas?s estate. He blasted conservatism in his youth, leftism afterward. The man truly knew his targets.

It shows to great effect not only in his writings but also in his chats with the press, many of which critic Thomas DePietro has assembled in Conversations with Kingsley Amis. Amis?s appeal reaches far, though conservatives in particular will find the new collection a fine tribute to one of their leading men of letters

A lower-middle-class native of Southwest London, Amis became a Communist as a teenager. He began losing fondness for the party while serving in the army in World War II, but he remained left of center for another two decades. He was sometimes explicit about this in his fiction: Jim Dixon, of Amis?s comical 1954 debut Lucky Jim, defends the Labor government?s ?soak the rich? tax policy while the unlikeable Bertrand denounces it.

But Amis hinted at a rightward shift long before he first voted Tory in 1970. He treated suburban America sympathetically -- though not uncritically -- in One Fat Englishman (1963), he deplored government-run higher education, and he admired traditionalist writers like G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh.

Indeed, Amis?s best conservative insight in this collection predates his Toryism by almost a decade. He reflected that many Americans enjoyed Lucky Jim more than many Englishmen did. Americans, far removed from the English university world, didn?t read it as a commentary on a passing social scene. ?I?m saying something about modern society, yes, but only in the details,? Amis told the Sunday Telegraph. ?What I?m really interested in is human nature as it?s always been.? This is why his early novels like Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You haven?t lost their biting hilarity.

In his last three decades, he had changed in politics, but stayed the same in many respects: irreverent and incisive, but self-effacing. In a Conversations interview, he bristled when others called his house in Hertfordshire ?grand,? though by all accounts it was just that. ?People get the wrong idea,? he says, ?thinking we might be, you know, glamorous or brilliant or something.?

He also enjoyed pastimes that some of his stature would consider guilty pleasures: science fiction, jazz, and TV westerns. He loved high art, but loathed ?artiness.? Some careless folks missed that distinction -- they pointed out, for instance, that Amis wrote about Jim Dixon hearing ?filthy Mozart.? Amis often had to explain that neither he nor his young protagonist meant any offense against the composer, just against the novel?s insufferable crowd of music buffs.

Amis grew less populist and more severe as he grew older. In one interview, he voiced distress about the flood of people entering universities to study the humanities. ?I think that you can?t share real culture equally and deeply over a whole society,? he told literary critic Michael Billington in 1979. ?There aren?t enough brains to go around, really, and when 100,000 people, instead of, say, 10,000 people, study the Victorian novel, what those 100,000 are getting is a kind of shadow, a simulacrum, of what the 10,000 lucky ones, the ones fit for it, used to get.?

Conversations contains lots of pith on other subjects including, of course, politics. He takes hard and amusing pokes at student protesters of the Vietnam War. The real thrill of protest, he explains, amounts to this: ?You?re embattled, surrounded by people who feel as you do, and surrounded by girls, and it?s a way of being brave without any real fear of the consequences.?

Amis wasn?t merely good on politics. He sometimes voiced (but rarely practiced) a conservative moral sense. Asked in one of the discussions if he is a Christian, he responded, ?No. I wish I were. That would be fine. But I?ve never had any faith. I can?t remember such a thing. It?s a weakness, a limitation. Which doesn?t mean to say that all people with faith are better off than all people without it, more worthy somehow. But still, it?s a grave thing to be deprived of.? He had a similar disagreement with himself over chastity. He personally had no use for it, but loved Jenny Bunn in Take a Girl Like You for cherishing it.

Like his opinions, his mannerisms get detailed attention in these interviews. Readers will wish they could see them firsthand, for Amis is described as a deft comedian, quick to crack jokes, make faces, and impersonate. Most of his profilers appreciate their subject and write about him gracefully.

All this praise for the collection needs a caveat: It is mostly Amis at his best. At his worst, he divorced twice, drank heavily, and mistreated those close to him. The last few interviews contain some foul remarks about women, and his hostility toward them shaped some of his later novels (Jake?s Thing, Stanley and the Women). His faults got him plenty of stern press attention even after his death in 1995, but those faults don?t lessen his work?s greatness. Amis was no moral paragon, but that is not what he claimed to be.

Asked if he saw himself mainly as an entertainer, Amis replied, ?I think that every novelist ought to entertain before he does anything else. And that?s very difficult. It?s much easier to be serious and to seem important, or to seem serious rather than to entertain.?

He did entertain before he did anything else, serious and important though he was.

-- Bradley Vasoli is an associate at a communications firm near Philadelphia.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).