What is it about fruit? There is no more searing passage in the memoirs of Auberon Waugh than the bit when three bananas reach the Waugh household in the worst days of postwar austerity and Evelyn Waugh places all three on his own plate, then before the anguished eyes of his three children ladles on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and scoffs the lot. So in all the 900-odd pages of this marvellous Life of Kingsley Amis there is nothing that chills the blood more than the moment when Hilly Amis’s eight-year-old son Jaime reaches for the one peach in a fruit bowl otherwise containing only oranges, apples and grapes and Kingsley shouts, in a voice described by his son Martin as ‘like a man hailing a cab across the length of Oxford Circus during a downpour on Christmas Eve’, ‘HEY! That’s my peach.’
Behind the sacred monster’s mask lurks a monstrous baby, an insatiable craving machine. There is a line that appears in Take a Girl Like You, but also uttered by Kingsley himself as he and some friends pulled up at a fried-clam joint on the way to the Newport Jazz Festival: ‘Oh good, I want more than my share before anyone else has had any.’ Just as Kingsley would later tell the ‘That’s my peach!’ story against himself, so he was constantly working his own episodes of unbridled selfishness into his fiction. In his last book, The Biographer’s Moustache, the novelist tells his biographer, ‘These days the public like to think of an artist as a, as a shit known to behave in ways they would shrink from.’ To which the biographer, maddened by his subject, retorts at the end of the book, ‘You’re not a reluctant shit and certainly not an unconscious shit, you’re a self-congratulatory shit.
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