But all memorable styles tend to become parodies of themselves in the end. And Amis’s style is certainly memorable. To me it is one of the most original and infectious styles in 20th-century English writing, comparable in its impact to that of Joyce or Hemingway, though not recognised as such, or not by academics, because of Amis’s dislike of their carry-on. The way he writes arises out of what Stephen Potter would call his Ordinarychapmanship, but it is only the starting point to declare, as Amis does in what is taken to be the Manifesto of the Movement poets, ‘Nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities.’ What Amis does is not only to represent ordinary blokes and (less successfully) blokesses but to catch the way their minds run on, correcting their first thoughts, doubling back, trying to render what exactly it is that they are thinking. More complicating still is that Amis is at the same time setting down how the author is trying to describe and then describe better, more exactly, more vividly what the characters are doing or saying or looking like. So that at its best you feel a thrilling sense of actually being there as the text is being created. Amis was famous for liking unshowy immediacy in books. All his life he preferred the sort of book which began ‘a shot rang out’. He hated writers like Bellow and Nabokov for their distinguished style which ‘usually turns out in practice to mean a high idiosyncratic noise level in the writing, with plenty of rumble and wow from imagery, syntax and diction’. Yet he was at pains to point out that immediate didn’t mean simple. Paradise Lost was the greatest poem in our language, but it was difficult as well as being immediate. Amis was himself engaged in something which was much more difficult than it looked. When it works, a comic joy spreads over every page, even when he is writing about death and decay as he is in Ending Up or The Old Devils.
To the end Kingsley remained the spoilt only child who believes that the universe ought to be organised for his benefit and is furious whenever he discovers it isn’t. ‘You atheist?’ the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked him. ‘Well, yes,’ Amis replied, ‘but it’s more that I hate Him’ — resented the competition, I suppose. And it is this combination of indignation and eloquence that puts him up there with Swift and all those other monsters we hate to love.
I ought to say that this book is 200 pages too long, but as I enjoyed almost every word of it, I can’t.
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