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Dyfrig Jones searches in vain for a Welsh angle on Kingsley Amis in a new biography.

The Life of Kingsley Amis
Zachary Leader



Cape
£25.00 Hardback
ISBN 9780224062275

Biography has played a prominent role in both the life and work of
Kingsley Amis. His early works were presumed to be based on his own life, and as his career progressed, ‘Spotting the Amis’ – guessing which character represented the author himself – became the standard critical response to each new novel. And since 1992, when his own Memoirs were published, there has been a renewed interest in the life behind the work. Following his autobiography came an official biography, by Eric Jacobs; a biography of sorts by his son Martin Amis; a 1000-page collection of his letters; and a memoir written by his second wife, Elisabeth Jane Howard. His death, in 1995, led to an acrimonious dispute between Amis's family and Eric Jacobs, which has now led to yet another official biography (relegating Jacobs' book to ‘unofficial’ status, presumably).

   The author appointed to write this latest account of Amis's life is the editor of the Collected Letters, Zachary Leader. A professor of English Literature at Roehampton University, his academic background – the ‘scholarly’ study of literature that Amis shunned, even as a lecturer – permeates the entire book. Rather than attempting a simple anecdotal biography, as Eric Jacobs did, Leader aims to bridge Amis's work and life. As an academic, he is more than aware of the dangers of assuming that biographical events have exact fictional parallels. Rather than attempt to draw firm conclusions about the connection between the work and the life, he sets a broad analysis of the novels alongside a detailed and thorough account of their writing. His whole approach is informed by Amis's own viewpoint, that ‘what you put into fiction isn't the things that happen to you, it's what the things that happen to you make you think up’.

   The only section where this approach fails is in the early parts of the book, which focus on Amis’s childhood and adolescence. Leader has to rely on Amis's own account of his childhood, and has little in the way of corroborative evidence. In the absence of real biographical detail, he leans heavily on the Amis novels that have children as protagonists – The Riverside Villas Murder and You Can't Do Both – and does so to his detriment.

   What distinguishes Leader from the other biographers is that he seriously attempts to find an objective viewpoint. The previous accounts are all quoted extensively, but none of them are taken at face value. Despite being an official biography, Leader freely questions the motives of each member of the family when relaying their accounts, and different versions of the same story are always compared.

   In addition, Leader manages to give greater prominence to some of the characters in Amis's life who may not have been given their due in the past. Amis's chaste romance with Philip Larkin is well known, but Leader makes it clear that the relationship between them was often strained, and places as great an emphasis upon Amis's friendship with the historian Robert Conquest. Similarly, the novelist Elisabeth Jane Howard – Amis's second wife – has always been more prominent in the accounts of Amis's life, partly due to the fact that she recently published her own autobiography. This new biography, by contrast, gives Hilly Bardwell – Amis's long-suffering first wife, and the mother of his children – the voice she deserves.

   Despite the meticulous detail of this biography, Amis's relationship with Wales is curiously neglected. The years he spent at Swansea are chronicled, but Leader tends to treat Swansea as any other provincial British city. Some may assume that this merely reflects Amis's – the royalist Tory’s – own prejudice. But, as Peter Stead has demonstrated, Amis had an understanding of, and affection for, Welsh culture. His attitude towards Welsh nationalism and the Welsh language were, admittedly, hostile. His antipathy towards the Welsh language was largely coloured by his loathing of 'Daddy B' – Leonard Bardwell, his father-in-law – a Welsh-speaking Englishman who had an affection for ‘languages of limited utility’ (Martin Amis's phrase), and folk cultures in general.

   The absence of discussion of Wales – especially in the chapter on The Old Devils – is striking. In a shorter, less detailed book, the slip could be excused. But in as comprehensive and detailed a study as this, it is a glaring omission. The same can be said of the book's analysis of Amis's relationship with Dylan Thomas. Thomas was a major hate figure for Amis, who saw his poetry as self-aggrandising. Yet as a Swansea-based writer, Amis was perpetually aware of Thomas’s influence on the city. Surprisingly, Amis was appointed executor of Thomas's estate after his death. Leader, however, barely mentions Amis's opinions on Thomas, and does not even record their only meeting, in 1957. Nor does he examine the way in which Amis lampoons the Dylan Thomas industry in The Old Devils.

   Whilst, however, these omissions may disappoint, they do not undermine the book as a whole. Despite being a detailed and scholarly volume, Leader’s Life is entertaining enough to draw in the general reader. Considering that Kingsley Amis has fallen slightly out of fashion in academic circles, this may be an important consideration. Appealing to a broad audience is important from a
commercial point of view. It remains to be seen whether Leader's well balanced book will revive a serious interest in Amis's work, as well as in his life.