Biography:The writer Kingsley Amis was much loved but also much hated. This, his official biography, stresses his virtues as well as his vices. The result is a portrait of great complexity that is both an exhilarating and a melancholy read.
Amis's father worked for Colman's mustard while his mother kept the home in the London suburb of Norbury. He was an only child. His parents, though they excused him religion, were extremely controlling: to prevent him masturbating, for instance, there was no lock on the bathroom door.
After a classical education at the City of London school, Oxford (where he made friends with Philip Larkin, the poet), wartime service in the Royal Signals, marriage to Hilly, by whom he had three children, Philip, Martin (the novelist) and Sally, Amis went to Swansea University to teach, and there, helped by Larkin, he wrote his first masterpiece, Lucky Jim.
The book, published in 1954, changed everything. He became a celebrity, gave riotous parties, and enjoyed numerous amorous entanglements, which Hilly tolerated, as she had entanglements of her own. Later, he taught in America, and then moved to Cambridge University where his life took - as many would later say, including himself - a disastrous turn when he attended the Cheltenham Literary Festival, at the organiser, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard's invitation. They fell in love and Hilly fled with the children to Majorca. Amis might have followed but that would have involved him making his own travel arrangements, which he'd never done; Hilly had always looked after those things; plus, he'd have to travel alone, which he'd never done either. So, he moved in with his mistress instead and later they married.
For a while, Amis and Howard were a golden couple. He produced a huge volume of work. Then the relationship started to deteriorate; his alcohol consumption rocketed; sexual relations withered. In 1980, Elizabeth left the matrimonial home. This presented Philip and Martin, now adults (but not Sally, who, though an adult was not a coping one; like her father, she drank) with a problem.
With Amis beset by terrors and unable to care for himself, who would do the dadsitting? Philip, though Martin approved, had a brilliant inspiration. How about Hilly, now Lady Kilmarnock, as housekeeper? At least she would know what to expect. She agreed. Hilly plus husband and son moved in and the arrangement lasted until Amis's death in 1995.
Amis came out of nowhere, established his literary pre-eminence early and remained at the top until the end of his life. From the beginning he rejected modernism, pretension and writing that was obscure, unclear or too noisy. What he favoured above all, and it showed in everything he did - the novels, the poems, the reviews and the popular journalism (of which he produced an immense quantity; he was an incredibly hard worker, the equal of Anthony Burgess) - was clarity. He was also hilarious, in private as well as in public, and several hundred pages of this biography had me roaring with laughter. He was, finally, (which is forgotten now) a great teacher, remembered by students as intelligent, judicious and benign.
SADLY, HE DID not apply his intelligence to his private life (though that's hardly a crime). In the private domain his fidelity to fun at any cost led, during his first marriage, to affairs (which rarely left either him, Hilly or the third party happy) plus heavy drinking. The relationship with Elizabeth Jane Howard put a stop to the infidelities (mostly) and a brake on the drinking: the early years of the second marriage saw a rejuvenation of Amis's creative powers. But when the marriage went sour and the drinking accelerated, Kingsley's response was to turn himself into a caricature of his father, a failure in the mould of Mr Pooter, who hadn't liked black people, the lower orders or reds.
At first the pose was a joke, a way to stick it to the left, which also allowed him to avoid feeling the pain he felt on account of his marital calamities and the dreadful certainty that dogged him in old age that he should never have left Hilly. But then the mask stopped being something put on and taken off at ease, and instead, as he said in his poem Coming of Age from A Look Round the Estate, he "played his part so well,/ He started living it . . . His trick of camouflage no longer a trick". He became Kingers, he of the "Fascist lunches" at Bertorelli's, the great hater, the baiter of women, which is pretty much his posthumous reputation.
He was, of course, more than that; to the end of his life he could be kind, his gift for friendship remained (though always on his terms) and his intelligence, at least when it came to literature and the English language, was undimmed, all of which qualities Leader demonstrates whilst also acknowledging and detailing his faults. This, therefore, is a book that pulls off the remarkable feat of simultaneously confirming and demolishing the received idea we have of its subject. And we must thank Leader for doing this for us, for it is only once the gossip and innuendo have been swept away that we can see the work clearly, for what it is.
Some was second rate, yes, but much was brilliant and there are at least four or five novels which, without doubt, deserve to enter the canon.
Carlo Gébler is a writer and broadcaster
The Life of Kingsley Amis By Zachary Leader Jonathan Cape, 996pp. £25