Kingsley, As I Know Him

Abstract

I first met Kingsley in the mid-1950s, in Princeton, where he was the object of intense social admiration as a result of Lucky Jim, which appeared in 1954. Everyone wanted to meet Kingsley, to hear him talk, to smile at him, to be near enough to be warmed by his success. I remember going on the train to Newark, invited by R. W. B. Lewis, then teaching at the Newark branch of Rutgers, to hear Kingsley lecture on comedy. One sentence from his talk that night has stuck with me for life. ‘The funniest thing in the world,’ he declared solemnly, ‘is solemnity’. That insight I have recalled on numerous academic, political and ecclesiastical occa-sions, and it is seldom far from my mind when I revisit Samuel Johnson’s observation to Boswell, ‘Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man.’ I’m not trying to suggest that Kingsley is in any way a latter-day Johnson, only that the implications of his remark are moral and sceptical and thus in the line of a distinctly British empirical tradition. Like many notable current novelists, Kingsley is a moralist left, by the whirligigs of popular taste, without any more plausible form for moral imagining than the novel. Two hundred years ago he might have written sermons, one hundred years ago ‘Culture and Anarchy’ or ‘The Idea of a University’. Today, he writes Girl, 20, I Want It Now and Ending Up.