The Columbia History of the British Novel

Jim.

Amis's subsequent writing seldom lived up to the promise of Lucky Jim. There, readers share in the author's delight as Jim Dixon hurls the proper measure of vitriol toward a deserving target. In Amis's later works the vitriol is at times poured by the barrelful, and the target seems to be anything that comes into range. Often, Amis's moral viewpoint becomes indistinct when he ridicules characters who represent antithetical sides of an issue. For example, in Take a Girl Like You, Amis derides the heroine for trying to preserve her virginity, as well as her antagonist for trying to rid her of it. Similarly, in One Fat Englishman (1963), Amis mocks the shortcomings of American culture as well as those of his hero, a snob who mocks the shortcomings of American culture.

There is a similar problem in Jake's Thing (1978), the story of an Oxford don whose declining sexual drive leads him to seek help from a number of inept-even goofy-mental health specialists. Amis's animosity is directed not only against incompetent therapists or even therapists in general, but also toward his own protagonist and assorted other characters. In Stanley and the Women (1984), Amis tells about the mental breakdown of the protagonist's son and in the process introduces still another deranged psychiatrist. But the dotty therapist is by - 900- now a stereotyped figure, and the satire again begins to turn sour. Too often, Amis's splenetic curmudgeons emerge as little more than mouthpieces for their author's irascible complaints.

Even so, after a shift of gears, Amis can surprise readers with a deft observation. In most of his novels he is at least in places shrewd and witty, a trait that can go far toward rehabilitating an otherwise dull chapter. (An example is the following description of a restaurant in Jake's Thing: 'The food wasn't much good and they were rather nasty to you, but then it cost quite a lot.') Like the satirists he admires, Amis is in his best form with an appropriate target, exposing the rot as he shears away layers of encrusted hypocrisy.

Similar strengths and weaknesses can be found in many of Amis's novels. In some-particularly his earliest-he presents a satiric view of contemporary sexual issues and explores moral questions that are related to them; examples include I Want It Now (1968); Girl, 20 (1971); and Difficulties with Girls (1988), where he returns to some of the characters he introduced in Take a Girl Like You. Some of Amis's other novels such as Ending Up (1973) and The Old Devils (1981) deal with more somber questions: problems of aging, alcoholism, illness, and impending death.

In other books Amis moves away from social issues to make use of popular genres. Colonel Sun (written under a pen name in 1968) is a respectful imitation of a James Bond thriller; The Anti-Death League (1966) is a spy novel; The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) and The Crime of the Century (1989) are mysteries; The Alteration (1976) and Russian Hide and Seek (1980) are science-fiction novels; and The Green Man (1970) is a ghost story. A similar interest in popular forms can be found in Amis's criticism. He published a study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960), and in collaboration with Robert Conquest, edited Spectrum: A Science Fiction, Anthology (1961). Amis also completed a book on Ian Fleming's novels, The James Bond Dossier (1965).

This interest in popular forms is a central element in Amis's writing; he wants even his serious novels to retain a broad appeal. In I Like It Here (1958), when Amis's hero visits the grave of Henry Fielding, he muses on Fielding's undiminished popularity: 'Perhaps it was worth dying in your forties if two hundred years later you were the only noncontemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and wholehearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologized for or excused on the grounds of changing taste.' That Fielding is 'the only -901- non-contemporary novelist' who can still be read with interest is disputable; but the comment reveals the populist sentiments that figure in Amis's view of modernism, in particular his feeling that it carries an air of snobbish exclusiveness. Thus he once complained that British culture seemed to him as if it were 'the property of some exclusive club.'

For Amis, the works of the modernists foster cultural posturing: the doyens of culture promote them until paying homage to the enshrined modernist aesthetic becomes the price of admission into a cultural elite. The cycle is accelerated by literary scholars who, responding more to one another's pronouncements than to their own artistic sensibilities, force sanctioned works onto the impressionable young. 'Most scholars,' Amis assures us, 'are men of foggy aesthetic sense, the ideal audience for their own propaganda.' Surveying this slough of intellectual self- deception, Amis takes it on himself to champion the ordinary reader, the main victim of the poseurs. Under this populist banner Amis has attacked, along with the modernists, such canonical icons as Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost.

Like many of the 1950s novelists, Amis praises those writers who maintain rapport with ordinary readers- those who, if they consider themselves serious writers, are also entertaining. In this context Amis speaks approvingly of such twentieth-century novelists as H. G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Anthony Powell. Among American writers Amis praises Louis Auchincloss, Jerome Weidmann, John Cheever, P eter DeVries, and Mary McCarthy. On the other hand, Amis dismisses Hemingway and Faulkner; English readers, he feels, tend to find them 'alien, strongly and essentially non- European.'

Amis is surely justified in arguing that for art, affectation precludes the development of affection. And he may also be right that some members of an elite-critics, academics, upholders of a Bloomsbury establishment-did in fact try to turn the works of the modernists into shrine objects. But lost in his attacks is a judicious examination of the intrinsic worth of modernist writing. Amis invokes the names of Woolf and Joyce in jeremiads on their detrimental effects on culture, but he avoids discussing their works. He seems unaware that Joyce himself was a critic of social intolerance and cultural posturing. Nor does Amis ever consider whether Woolf's feminism might be as legitimate an expression of democratic principles as his own antielitist satires. -902-

Even worse, Amis at times reveals something less than a wholehearted allegiance to the same democratic principles. His characters continually vent their biases, often sounding very elitist indeed when they sound off against Americans, West Indians, Jews, foreigners, blind people, and women-particularly, and persistently, women. In Jake's Thing, a novel that gained notoriety for its expressions of misogyny, Amis tries to restore balance by ridiculing his hero, who accommodatingly labels himself a male chauvinist pig. But this attempt to have it both ways-to fire away at women while taking the occasional potshot at a woman-hater-only muddies the waters. As in some of his other novels, Amis's irresolute moral point of view transforms directed satire into pointless invective. Readers lose sympathy for Amis's characters, and even for Amis himself, when he seems to relish nothing so much as a testy crudeness in flaunting his characters' bigotry.

A similar characteristic undermines Amis's attacks on modernism: a sense that prejudice has too easily overcome objectivity, that long-held opinions blind him to the value-to the greatness-of the best modernist writers. Amis lacks nothing in intelligence, but his criticism is undermined by a streak of inflexibility. Having once expressed a view-no matter how outrageous-Amis finds it hard to backpedal: my biases, right or wrong. Having years ago decided to jettison the modernists, Amis gives little sign of considering whether his dismissals were hasty. It also seems imprudent for Amis to lavish praise on writers of modest accomplishments when Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, and Nabokov are dismissed.

Amis urges his contemporaries to dispense with style in their writing, but blithely ignores significant aesthetic questions such as whether it is indeed possible to write without style. It might seem that Amis is being hyperbolic, that in attacking modernist extravagance he is only advocating a plain style. But plain can lead to drab, and drabness takes its toll on Amis's novels as well as on those of his contemporaries. In his broad condemnation of modernism Amis precludes the use of innovative methods for himself as well as for any novelists who take his message seriously.

Amis's aesthetic led him to repudiate untried, venturesome, and innovative elements, to define anything arcane or unfamiliar as extravagant. Rejecting the modernists, Amis adopted an aesthetic xenophobia that restricted him to sedate, conventional practices; as a result his novels are often limited. It is in his satiric attacks that one finds a real -903- sense of freedom, adventure, and playfulness; this, perhaps, is why Amis has sometimes been tempted to carry them too far.

C. P. Snow

As a reviewer, C. P. Snow often praised the younger writers of his generation for rejecting experimental writing. In a piece for the New York Times Book Review published in 1955, he included Kingsley Amis in this