Kingsley Amis (21 in 1943)

Abstract

Kingsley Amis is a fascinating man, because in front of his normally vulnerable and perhaps more than normally compassionate humanity he has composed for himself such a queer and complex, such a contradictory and in the end such a formidable and unbreathable façade. That is a biographer’s problem; it would be impertinence in a critic to touch it, but I am bound to notice its existence, because I have always set down understanding this admirable and most interesting artist as unfinished business. He unnervingly resembles a great man. His façade is something like Evelyn Waugh’s, but the anxieties and secrets that Waugh had to hide were different. Kingsley Amis has always seemed to be a poet who happened to write excellent novels. The novels have not always been to my taste, probably because I am not much of a novel-reader, but the poems are very much what I like: the liveliest and most cheerful edge of The Movement, as it was called. People were surprised when Philip Larkin revealed a Kingsley Amis side, rather late in life. It is curious also that Philip Larkin’s novels illuminate the attitudes of his own poetry more interestingly and less obviously than those of Kingsley Amis do his. In fact the only difficulty of Amis poems is tone, and the degree to which a joke is to be taken seriously.