Encyclopedia, Difference between revisions of "Kingsley Amis" - New World

Revision as of 16:18, 10 January 2007

The cover of Kingsley Amis' Collected Letters, published in 2000

Sir Kingsley William Amis (April 16, 1922 – October 22, 1995) was an English poet, academic, novelist, and teacher. Amis was considered a refractory and revolutionary, as well as one of the "angry young men" of the 1950s (though he denied his participation). However, with age he became a reactionary, and was known to all as a "supreme clubman, boozer and blimp." His early struggle with money and education, instilled in Amis the desire to create his destiny and make his life more than what others thought it could be. The result was a deeply intelligent and witty man, whose stories and poetry reflect his awareness of the world. In all, Amis penned over twenty novels, published three collections of poetry, as well as short stories, and scripts for radio and television. His later writings consisted of books concerned with purely social and literary criticism. Amis is also known for the work of his son, Martin Amis, a famous British writer.

Biography

Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, South London, as the only son of a buisness man. Amis pursued higher education at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford. It was while where he met Philip Larkin, with whom Amis formed the most important friendship of his life. During this time spent at Oxford, Amis was made aware of his lower-middle-class origins and he sought to better his education and made goals for improving his life. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis completed university in 1947, and was a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea (1948–61), and at Cambridge (1961–63), where he was a fellow of Peterhouse.

In 1948, Kingsley Amis fell in love with a bright and sunny seventeen year old Hilary Bardwell. He lovingly called her Hills and the couple began their marriage with the birth of their son Martin in 1949. Martin, a famous writer in his own rite, wrote an autobiographical account of his life as Amis son. He called it Experience, it was a very straightforward novel, yet it reflected a good humor and many compared the quality of his descriptions to Dickens.

I slept in a drawer and had my baths in an outdoor sink. My nappies bore triangular singe marks where they had been dried on the fireguard. It was tough. My father's dinner would often consist of the contents of the doggybag that my mother brought back from the cinema café (the Tivoli) where she worked.
Martin Amis, Experience

This depiction of Amis early married life soon changed with the publication of his first novel, Lucky Jim. The novel was published in 1954 and became an immediate success in the literary world.

Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of 1950s Britain. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim is a seminal work, the first English novel featuring an ordinary man as anti-hero. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.

Like Philip Larkin, Amis was a keen jazz fan, with a particular enthusiasm for the American musicians Sidney Bechet, Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell [about whom Amis and Larkin corresponded extensively — see 'The Letters of Kingsley Amis', edited by Zachary Leader, HarperCollins, 2000].

As a young man, Kingsley Amis was a vocal member of the Communist Party. He became disillusioned with Communism, breaking with it when the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Thereafter, Amis became anti-communist, and conservative. He discusses his political change of heart in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967), and it percolates into later works such as his dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).

Amis was an atheist and novels such as The Green Man and The Anti-Death League were in part speculations about the personality of a divine being and its relation to death and dying.

Amis's novel about a group of retired friends, The Old Devils, won the Booker Prize in 1986. Like many of his novels it is a social comedy, embodying the author's pessimistic view of human relations and conduct, and his hostility to the false or pretentious. He received a knighthood in 1990.

Amis was twice married, first in 1948 to Hilary Bardwell, then to novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1965 (they divorced in 1983). Amis spent his last years sharing the house of his first wife and her third husband. He had three children, including the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote of his father's life and decline in his memoir Experience.

Writing Career

You'll find that marriage is a good short cut to the truth. No, not quite that. A way of doubling back to the truth. Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion aren't those of adolescense, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. Your age, by the way, Jim. That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery like that can't help knocking you off balance for a time.
Kinglsey Amis, from Lucky Jim, 1954

Science Fiction

Amis's critical interest in science fiction led to New Maps of Hell (1960), his interpretation of the genre's literary qualities. He was particularly enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell he coined the term "comic inferno", describing a type of humorous dystopia, particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. With the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, Amis produced the science fiction anthology series Spectrum I–IV, which drew heavily upon the 1950s magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He wrote three science fiction novels, The Alteration, an alternate history novel set in a twentieth-century Britain where the Reformation never occurred; Russian Hide-and-Seek, an alternate history where Russia had conquered Britain after the Second World War; and the supernatural-horror novel The Green Man, which the BBC adapted for television.

A tape-recorded conversation on science fiction took place between Amis, C. S. Lewis and Brian Aldiss in Lewis's rooms at Cambridge in December 1962, shortly before Lewis's death. A transcript appears under the title 'Unreal Estates' in the collection On Stories by C. S. Lewis.

James Bond

Kingsley Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond in the 1960s, writing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular The James Bond Dossier under his own name. That same year, he wrote, The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's Chief of Staff in many of Fleming's Bond novels.

It is widely claimed that after Fleming died in 1964 following completion of an early draft of The Man with the Golden Gun, the publisher commissioned Amis and possibly other writers to finish the manuscript. Bond historians and Fleming biographers have in recent years debunked this theory, indicating that no such ghostwriter was ever employed, though Amis did provide suggestions on how to improve the manuscript, later rejected. [See here for more on the controversy]

The empty room gazed bleakly at Bond. As always, everything was meticulously in its place, the lines of naval prints exactly horizontal on the walls, water-colour materials laid out as if for inspection on the painting-table up against the window. It all had a weirdly artificial, detached air, like part of a museum where the furniture and effects of some historical figure are preserved just as they were in his lifetime.
Kinglsey Amis, Colonel Sun

In 1968 the owners of the James Bond property, Glidrose Publications, attempted to continue the series by hiring different novelists, all writing under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Kingsley Amis was the first to write a Robert Markham novel, Colonel Sun, but no further books were published under that name. It is widely believed that Amis had planned to write a second Bond novel but was talked out of it. Colonel Sun was adapted as a comic strip in the Daily Express in 1969. In a 2005 Titan Books reprint volume of the comic strip, an introductory chapter indicated that Amis planned to write a short story featuring an elderly Bond coming out of retirement for one last mission, but Glidrose refused him permission to write it. Amis was unsuccessful at persuading EON Productions to adapt his novel as a film. According to the Titan Books introductory chapter, Amis was told that Harry Saltzman (co-producer of the Bond series up until 1974) had "blackballed" any use of Colonel Sun as a Bond film, apparently in response to Glidrose having rejected the publication of the post-Fleming Bond novel, Per Fine Ounce by Geoffrey Jenkins, which Saltzman had championed. In 2002, however, Colonel Sun was clearly referenced in the James Bond film Die Another Day in which the villain was named Colonel Tan-Sun Moon.

Bibliography

1947 Amis's first collection of poems, Bright November

1953 A Frame of Mind

1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits.

1954 Lucky Jim, Amis' first novel ISBN 10-0142180149

1955 That Uncertain Feeling

1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956.

1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals. A Fabian Society pamphlet

1958 I Like it Here

1960 Take A Girl Like You ISBN 10-0140018484

1960 New Maps of Hell

1960 Hemingway in Space (short story), Punch Dec 1960

1962 My Enemy's Enemy

1962 The Evans County

1963 One Fat Englishman

1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest).

1965 The James Bond Dossier

1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007, under the pseudonym "Bill Tanner|Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner"

1966 The Anti-Death League

1968 Colonel Sun, a James Bond novel, under the pseudonym "Robert Markham."

1968 I Want It Now

1969 The Green Man ISBN 10-0897332202

1970 What Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions

1971 Girl, 20

1972 On Drink ISBN 10-0224007971

1973 The Riverside Villas Murders

1974 Ending Up

1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World

1976 The Alteration ISBN 10-0881844322

1978 Jake's Thing

1979 Collected Poems 1944-78

1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek

1980 Collected Short Stories

1983 Every Day Drinking

1984 How's Your Glass?

1984 Stanley and the Women

1986 The Old Devils

1988 Difficulties With Girls

1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill

1990 The Amis Collection

1991 Memoirs ISBN 10-0671749099

1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories

1992 The Russian Girl ISBN 10-0670853291

1994 The semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both ISBN 10-0091803195

1995 The Biographer's Moustache ISBN 10-0002253305

1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage ISBN 10-0312186010

2001 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Edited by Zachary Leader ISBN 10-0786867574

Amis Favorite Poets

Kingsley Amis wrote The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988) in which he listed....

Richard Aldington - Kenneth Allott - Matthew Arnold - Kenneth Ashley - W. H. Auden - William Barnes - Oliver Bayley - Hilaire Belloc - John Betjeman - Laurence Binyon - William Blake - Edmund Blunden - Rupert Brooke - Robert Browning - Robert Burns - Thomas Campbell - Thomas Campion - G. K. Chesterton - Hartley Coleridge - Robert Conquest - W. J. Cory - John Davidson - Donald Davie - C. Day Lewis - Walter De la Mare - Ernest Dowson - Michael Drayton - Lawrence Durrell - Jean Elliot - George Farewell - James Elroy Flecker - Thomas Ford - Roy Fuller - Robert Graves - Thomas Gray - Fulke Greville - Heath - Reginald Heber - Felicia Dorothea Hemans - W. E. Henley - George Herbert - Ralph Hodgson - Thomas Hood - Teresa Hooley - Gerard Manley Hopkins - A. E. Housman - Henry Howard - T. E. Hulme - Leigh Hunt - Elizabeth Jennings - Samuel Johnson - John Keats - Henry King - Charles Kingsley - Rudyard Kipling - Philip Larkin - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - John Lydgate - H. F. Lyte - Louis MacNeice - Andrew Marvell - John Masefield - Alice Meynell - Harold Monro - William Morris - Edwin Muir - Henry Newbolt - Alfred Noyes - Wilfred Owen - Thomas Love Peacock - George Peele - Alexander Pope - Frederic Prokosch - Walter Ralegh - John Crowe Ransom - Christina Rossetti - Siegfried Sassoon - John Skelton - Robert Southey - Edmund Spenser - Sir John Squire - Robert Louis Stevenson - Sir John Suckling - Algernon Charles Swinburne - George Szirtes - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Dylan Thomas - Edward Thomas - R. S. Thomas - Francis Thompson - Anthony Thwaite - Chidiock Tichborne - Aurelian Townsend - W. J. Turner - Oscar Wilde - John Wilmot, Lord Rochester - Roger Woddis - Charles Wolfe - William Wordsworth - W. B. Yeats - Andrew Young

External links

"Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998.
Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
The Paris Review interview, with downloadable PDF

Preceded by: Ian Fleming 1953-1964	James Bond writer 1968	Succeeded by: John Pearson 1973

[[Category:]]

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

Kingsley Amis ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

History of "Kingsley Amis"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 == Biography ==
-Kingsley Amis was born in [[Clapham]], [[South London]], educated at the [[City of London School]] and [[St. John's College, Oxford]], where he met [[Philip Larkin]], with whom Amis formed the most important friendship of his life. After serving in the [[Royal Corps of Signals]] in the Second World War, Amis completed university in 1947, and was a lecturer in English at the [[University of Wales Swansea]] (1948–61), and at [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]] (1961–63), where he was a fellow of [[Peterhouse]].
+Kingsley Amis was born in [[Clapham]], [[South London]], as the only son of a buisness man. Amis pursued higher education at the [[City of London School]] and [[St. John's College, Oxford]]. It was while  where he met [[Philip Larkin]], with whom Amis formed the most important friendship of his life. During this time spent at Oxford, Amis was made aware of his lower-middle-class origins and he sought to better his education and made goals for improving his life.  After serving in the [[Royal Corps of Signals]] in the Second World War, Amis completed university in 1947, and was a lecturer in English at the [[University of Wales Swansea]] (1948–61), and at [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]] (1961–63), where he was a fellow of [[Peterhouse]].
-The only son of a business clerk, Amis was born in 1922 in London. He was educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford University, where he became acutely aware of his lower-middle-class origins.
+In 1948, Kingsley Amis fell in love with a bright and sunny seventeen year old Hilary Bardwell. He lovingly called her Hills and the couple began their marriage with the birth of their son Martin in 1949. Martin, a famous writer in his own rite, wrote an autobiographical account of his life as Amis son. He called it ''Experience'', it was a very straightforward novel, yet it reflected a good humor and many compared the quality of his descriptions to Dickens.
-In 1949, Amis and ...welcomed a son Martin.
+{{Quotation| I slept in a drawer and had my baths in an outdoor sink. My nappies bore triangular singe marks where they had been dried on the fireguard. It was tough. My father's dinner would often consist of the contents of the doggybag that my mother brought back from the cinema café (the Tivoli) where she worked.| Martin Amis| Experience|}}
-{{Quotation| I slept in a drawer and had my baths in an outdoor sink. My nappies bore triangular singe marks where they had been dried on the fireguard. It was tough. My father's dinner would often consist of the contents of the doggybag that my mother brought back from the cinema café (the Tivoli) where she worked.| Martin Amis| Experience|}}
+This depiction of Amis early married life soon changed with the publication of his first novel, ''Lucky Jim''. The novel was published in 1954 and became an immediate success in the literary world.
 Amis achieved popular success with his first novel ''[[Lucky Jim]]'', which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of 1950s Britain. The novel won the [[Somerset Maugham Award]] for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled the [[Angry Young Men]]. ''Lucky Jim'' is a [[seminal work]], the first English novel featuring an ordinary man as [[anti-hero]]. As a poet, Amis was associated with [[Movement (literature)|The Movement]].