Kingsley Amis always claimed that his fiction was not based on his life, and he worked hard and quite successfully at obscuring the autobiographical threads that run through his novels. But they exist, and Richard Bradford traces the channels between Amis's experiences, his states of mind, and his fictionalized versions of both. Bradford's biography shows that it is impossible to offer a comprehensive picture of Amis the man as husband, philanderer, friend, father, jester, son, boozer, agnostic, pseudo-socialist, and club-land Tory without also considering how each dimension of his life tested and extended his literary skills. Sometimes he remodeled the present, particularly during the 1950s when his books reflected his double life as family man and prolific libertine. He revisited the past in novels such as The Riverside Villas Murder, a detective story that tells us much about his early relationship with his father. Less frequently he took revenge, notably with his cruel parody of his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in Stanley and the Women. Readers of Amis's books often feel as if they have had a personal encounter with a shadowy presence behind the words, and Bradford's biography embodies this shadow.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This illuminating biography by a professor of English at the University of Ulster plumbs the interrelationship of life and art an idea Bradford's subject, the late Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), would never have approved of. Amis once declared his novels (beginning with his most celebrated work, Lucky Jim, in 1954) "firmly unautobiographical," but Bradford demonstrates quite the opposite and does so in a way that gives the reader substantially deeper views of both the prolific author's work and the man himself. Combining close reading of the texts fiction, poetry and his substantial body of nonfiction with the already well-documented facts of Amis's life, the book reveals Amis's motivations. In particular, Bradford dissects the overarching theme in Amis's novels: the tension or conflict between what one wants to do and what one ought to do, and how that tension "energizes [one's] style." He takes pains to point out that Amis's literary value is not dependent on his works' autobiographical underpinnings; he reveals the skill and power of Amis the writer at transmuting life into art. But he also crafts an appropriately multifaceted portrait of Amis the man: a serious writer of comic fiction, an intellectual with an appetite for low culture and, of course, a prodigious womanizer ("Amis went to bed with practically anyone he found attractive and willing"). This bio is not perfect. Transitions within chapters are sometimes abrupt (or nonexistent); details get recycled in a few places; he doesn't really undertake the challenge of analyzing Amis's psychology. But the writing is consistently clear and the insights literary and biographical are formidable. It's the art that makes Amis worth reading, but Bradford's book illustrates that Amis's novels are "the most entertaining and thought-provoking autobiographies ever produced." 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Kingsley Amis (1922-95) is best known in America for his comic novel Lucky Jim, written in 1954, which satirized British academic life and defined the Angry Young Men school of British postwar novelists. Although Amis vehemently denied any connection between his life and his fiction, Bradford (A Linguistic History of English Poetry) has discovered a number of parallels too obvious to be coincidental. In this unauthorized biography, he painstakingly explores the relationship between Amis's life experiences and his writing, showing that his fiction can be seen as disguised autobiography. For instance, he points out that, beginning with Lucky Jim, Amis's first piece of published fiction, Amis taught in a small rural college in England (as did Jim) and that Jim's inner and outer worlds parallel those of Amis the family man and Amis the philanderer. Bradford views Amis's denial of this autobiographical content in his writing as an attempt to keep private the how and why of his work. Bradford brings his considerable critical talents to this biography; through his in-depth analysis, Amis the man emerges with new clarity. Recommended for academic libraries. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent Biography But Arrogant Amateur Psychoanalysis,
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This review is from: Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis (Hardcover)
There were already at least two biographies of Kingsley Amis in print when Professor Bradford wrote this one. Professor Bradford's biography is both complete and well-written.It is marred, however, by Professor Bradford's insistence that "Amis's fiction (is) one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking autobiographies ever produced." His point is not simply that Amis has modeled some characters on people he has known, nor that some events are paralleled in Amis's life. Virtually every writer of fiction draws from his life. He goes much further than that, claiming that nearly every character in Amis's novels and stories is intended to be Amis himself or somebody that Amis knew. He starts with the contention that Jim Dixon, the protagonist of Lucky Jim, Amis's first and perhaps best-known novel, is Amis himself. Dixon, fresh out of college, is teaching in an obscure English college. Amis began teaching at University College of Swansea in Wales while completing his graduate thesis at Oxford. The parallels break down there, however. The plot of Lucky Jim involves Dixon's jettisoning his unattractive, somewhat mentally ill girlfriend and acquiring an attractive, nice blonde one. Amis married an attractive blonde woman while still at Oxford, more than a year before he began teaching at Swansea. Central to the plot of Lucky Jim is Dixon's status as an outsider, never explicitly stated but implied by many things, including the fact that he is from the north of England with an accent that immediately identifies him as such and the fact that he attended a university of no particular prestige (a passage in the third chapter hints that it may be the University of Leicester). Amis, by contrast, was born and raised in London, and, by Bradford's own account had a BBC accent. As already noted, he was an Oxford graduate. Whatever else Amis was, he was not an outsider, at least not by virtue of his birthplace, accent, or university education. On and on it goes, with Bradford claiming that Simona Quick, the waif-like nineteen-year-old in I Want It Now, is really Jane Howard, Amis's second wife, who was in her mid-forties at the period in which the book was written and takes place, that Amis has split himself between two characters in Girl, 20, that the ten-year-old boy who is to be castrated to preserve his pure, youthful voice in The Alteration is in fact Amis in his mid-fifties, worried about declining .... prowess, and that Amis has split himself into four different characters in The Old Devils, attributing to them such unusual characteristics as the fact that they all drink too much. Bradford and his editor also get some facts wrong, either by design or by laziness. On page 206, he claims that, in One Fat Englishman, "Micheldene is obliged to take part in a game of charades and is asked to become the embodiment of 'Englishness'". In fact, the other characters try to act "Britishly", and it is Micheldene who is to guess what the word is. This is not a very important point, but consulting the novel itself is all that is necessary to get it right. Similarly, Bradford, in claiming that Jake Richardson, the title character of Jake's Thing, is actually an older Jim Dixon (who, by Bradford's thesis, is Amis under a different name), asserts on page 305 that "Jake's given name is James", while, in the novel itself, Jake's given name is, in fact, Jaques, pronounced "Jakes". One might argue that the French "Jacques" (Richardson's ancestors came from France) is the equivalent of the English "James", but the chain of reasoning is now one link longer, and, once again, consulting the novel would have been sufficient to provide correct information.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating book, unconvincing thesis,
By
This review is from: Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis (Hardcover)
Since Kingsley Amis was one of the most interesting and amusing 20th century English novelists, any book that closely examines his complete work is bound to be welcome. As well as the sheer gut-busting humour and insight of his first and best known novel, Lucky Jim, Amis was an excellent story-teller capable of serious reflection about the human condition. He just didn't believe in being pompous and self-important about it. Some of his books - The Anti-Death League, for instance, or The Green Man - serve up a fascinating blend of dry humour, drama, characterisation, philosophy and even suspense.
Obviously the man who wrote these books - not forgetting poetry, critical essays and biographies - was himself quite complex. The life and soul of any party, though many were hurt by his scathing wit, Amis was scared of the dark and even being alone, and was apparently prone to sudden attacks of pure existential fear. The tendency to identify him with Lucky Jim, his first and most famous anti-hero, was strengthened by the gradually spreading awareness of the chronic womanising which broke up both his marriages. Yet it seems that Amis much regretted these domestic disasters, conceivably having failed to understand that marriage offers real, though easily overlooked, benefits to husbands as well as wives. Bradford's thesis is simply that, denials to the contrary notwithstanding, all of Amis' fiction is drawn directly from his own life experience. All he manages to demonstrate, however, is the meaninglessness of this position. Of course every author draws on experience for material - otherwise all fiction would be fantasy. When Bradford is reduced to arguing that "Simona... has characteristics so completely different from Jane's as to virtually announce themselves as covering devices", the poverty of his basic idea is clearly revealed. If a character resembles anyone Amis ever met, he must have copied that character from real life. But if the character is completely different, the same inference is drawn. Otherwise, the book is well written and evidently based on research as thorough as Amis' own (for a surprising rigour was one of his best qualities). This impression is hardly spoiled by occasional infelicities and repetitions - and at least when Bradford revisits the same text twice, he tells the same story each time. Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it will surely encourage any reader to get hold of Amis' novels and read them (or re-read them, as the case may be). Is it evil to smile at the thought of how Amis would have fumed if he could have read the manuscript himself? Not really - it is the sort of joke he would have appreciated, and perhaps accompanied by his famous "crazy peasant" face.
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