THE IRRITABLE YOUNG MAN: KINGSLEY AMIS (1922-1995)

AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF HIS first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), Kingsley Amis found himself pigeonholed as one of the Angry Young Men, postwar British writers from the lower classes who seemed bent on toppling the shaky but still oppressive Establishment culture. The label never fit Amis comfortably; he was, at most, an Irritable Young Man, more likely to hoot than to rant. His use of humor as a means of subversion proved remarkably effective and durable. Works during the 1950s by other so-called Angries–novels by John Wain (Hurry on Down) and John Braine (Room at the Top), the plays of John Osborne (Look Back in Anger)–no longer excite much passion or even interest. Lucky Jim is still as fresh, and as capable of reducing a reader to helpless laughter, as it was 41 years ago.

Amis’ death last week at 73 ended a remarkably prolific career. After his successful debut, he produced more than 20 additional novels and a comparable number of books of nonfiction, criticism and poetry and anthologies. But he had been so prominent, funny and nettlesome for so long–nearly a half-century–that his passing inspires valedictory thoughts that go beyond the stilling of a single voice. If literary histories continue to be written–a point by no means certain–and written with a focus on aesthetics rather than politics–ditto–the British decades between 1955 and 1995 should in fairness be called the Amis Era.

That is because he began and remained throughout his writing life a brilliant practitioner of English prose and a hilarious debunker of received opinions. He influenced several generations of younger writers, among them some who abhorred his increasingly conservative views. England, to paraphrase Wordsworth, had need of him.

From his drab suburban birthplace in South London, Amis did well enough at his schooling to win a place at Oxford in 1941. From that point on, the old story should have followed without a hitch: lower-middle-class lad knuckles his forehead in gratitude and takes on the accent, manners and tastes of his social betters. Amis, however, whose education was interrupted by four years of service in the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, returned to Oxford with no intention of kowtowing to the prevailing dogmas. He and his friend Philip Larkin, another scholarship boy who went on to literary renown, hung out in pubs, listened to American jazz and privately mocked the arty, Bloomsbury pretensions of their dons. Amis’ skill at mimicry flowered in Larkin’s appreciative presence: “Kingsley’s masterpiece, which was so demanding I heard him do it only twice, involved three subalterns, a Glaswegian driver and a jeep breaking down and refusing to restart somewhere in Germany. Both times I became incapable with laughter.”

Lucky Jim confirmed Amis’ ability to evoke such reactions in print. It also established the author’s basic comic strategy: a beleaguered hero tries to behave inoffensively among people whose self-centered behavior drives him privately mad. This formula still sparkled in The Russian Girl (1994), in which a husband meditates on his wife’s odd and affected accent: “After a time he had stopped noticing it at all more than a couple of times a day, and for years had given up speculating what speech-sounds she might make if, for example, he were to creep up behind her and fire a loaded revolver past her ear.”

Amis invented this type of sentence, an interior monologue in which wicked and decorous thoughts alternately keep bubbling up, striving for the mastery of an uneasy conscience. The object of this attention, of course, is a wife, a woman, and such moments of imaginary violence drew severe feminist criticism, particularly as they resonated throughout Amis’ novels Jake’s Thing (1978) and Stanley and the Women (1985).

Such complaints about Amis’ sexism were not entirely misplaced. The men in his books are not always nice to or about women, and vice versa. Given a choice between what ought to be true and what actually goes on, Amis invariably chose to write about the latter.

When he was young, he sensed a false view of life being preached by British conservatism, and he turned his considerable wit against it; as he grew older, he sniffed out totalitarian impulses emanating from the left and opposed them too. Spoon-fed the doctrines of literary Modernism–to be profound is to be obscure, the highest art is only to be understood by a cadre of initiates–Amis made rude noises. Coming across the claim that T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is “the century’s most influential poem” and “a supremely important poem,” he snapped, “Importance isn’t important. Only good writing is.” Many of his pronouncements are debatable. But Amis produced reams of good writing, and he was and is important.