Amis père and Amis fils

In the second of two articles Andrew Varley looks at issues raised by Kingsley Amis' letters and by his son, Martin's, autobiography.

Kingsley Amis' playing the part of old buffer in his club, damning the eyes of lefties, may have been less wholehearted and sustained than Evelyn Waugh's furious squire, but it raises the question as to why people play rôles. It is reasonable to assume that they are looking for protection, possibly from the dangers of intimacy or emotional hurt. Waugh had been badly affected by the collapse of his first marriage after his wife ran off with another man. Although Amis' part as boozy curmudgeon was already well-rehearsed by the time that Elizabeth Jane Howard left him, the experience was more painful than he had anticipated and led to new excesses of misogyny as in Stanley and the Women and Jake's Thing. "Work's the thing, of course. Yes, but that's just what I can't settle to," he wrote. "Now whisky" Her first condition for returning to him was that he give up drink. It was unimaginable, as was the thought of any of his friends' climbing on the wagon. Behind the chaff, his concern that Philip Larkin might not drink alcohol again is plain: "Are you still not drinking? What's the matter with you?Why did you give it up? Come on, you can tell me. Come on." Again and again, the alcoholic mocks anyone who gives up or moderates his drinking. This is, after all, a reproach. Just, as schoolchildren, we found it much more of an ordeal to stand in front of the Headmaster's desk alone, so the drunk finds the downward slide eased by the knowledge that he is in similarly afflicted company. The fact that Larkin was a more moderate drinker than him1 was neither here nor there. The alcoholic believes what he wants to and quite often this includes delusions that those around him are putting away the stuff as quickly as he is.

Writers have their own theories about how fiction is, or should be, created. If they are any good, these are practical ideas arising from experience of what works and what does not. Despite the fact that he taught literature at a university, it is to Kingsley Amis' credit that he did not believe in innovation for innovation's sake. New ways of doing things are best developed to solve particular problems - and, after so long, the scope for effective, lucid innovation is strictly limited. Just as many architects, especially those we hear most about, have abandoned this sane approach to the development of their art, so novelists no longer believe that they are functioning properly if they are not inventing new ways of telling a story. The result is usually obscurity and pretentiousness.

Which brings us to Martin Amis. He approaches the subject of his father's drinking entirely from the angle of its effect on Kingsley not on himself. The account is disjointed because that is the way Martin Amis has chosen to write this book, under the impression that memory is more honestly served by presenting it in imitation of the fragmented way it comes to mind. This is clearly nonsense. Each fragment of memory has undergone the literary process of transformation from its form when it first popped up in his consciousness into what eventually appeared on the page. And is memory so fragmented? If something comes to mind unbidden, it is not unusual to pursue it, rerun the events from the storeroom of unconscious and in the process create in the mind a coherent narrative, accurate or not as the case may be. With Martin Amis the result is that the style he has chosen is mannered and intensely irritating. He is interesting on the subject of Kingsley, however.

"Getting drunk: there was no doubt that that was always the quest. Being drunk had its points, but getting drunk was the good bit," he writes about his father in Experience. "Kingsley has written often and poignantly about the moment when getting drunk suddenly turns into being drunk." Again the anticipation and, of course, the ritual. Martin Amis, recalling his father's elaborate cocktail making, describes his attitude to alcohol as "hobbyistic". Many drunks like to surround what they do with a kind of religious mystery. With them it is in some ways like a dionysic rite, as though the process of getting drunk leads to enlightenment. Martin connives at this deception when he quotes the perceptive words of Anthony Powell2, who befriended Kingsley at the beginning of his career. "In vino veritas - I don't know," says Powell, "but in scribendo veritas - a certainty."3 Martin Amis adds, "In vino and in scribendo alike, the conscious mind steps back and the unconscious mind steps forward." Now this is to misunderstand what getting drunk is about, at least for the addict. It is not a liberation of the unconscious but an imprisonment of the conscious. Putting it another way, it is the conscious robbed of its context, a hopeless situation for a creative artist. It is a common piece of self-deception that intoxication in some ways aids the artistic process and it is understandable that Amis fils, a keen smoker of dope as a youth, goes along with it.

This kind of drunk - the mytholgiser, the ritualist, or whatever you choose to call him - seeks to elevate drinking to an art form. However hopeless his case may be, however obvious that the whole point is to get drunk, he will discuss vineyards and chateaux in mindnumbing (if inaccurate) detail or compare one single malt to another, Islay versus Speyside4. Kingsley Amis was not above honouring his favourite tipple by using it as an image to illumine a critical point. For example, in reviewing Larkin's last book, High Windows, he says, "When everyone else has gone to bed, how many poets compete successfully with a new recording of the Tchaikovsky B flat minor5 as accompaniment to the final Scotch?" Naming a number of the poets he most admired, he continues, "The quality they share is immediacy, density, strength in a sense analogous to that in which the Scotch is strong." Martin felt this comparison to be indecorous when it was written but later, he says, he came to accept it. He does not say why this was. Whatever his reason, the image comparing the strength of poetry to the strength of Scotch is telling but false. More than that, in using it Kingsley Amis inadvertently - or sub-consciously, if you prefer - draws attention to the tragedy of his own situation. He sees and recognises the strength of poetry which enriches and empowers but he chooses another sort of strength which diminishes and imprisons. It is the difference between the strength of a friend and the strength of any enemy.

At the end of the section he devotes to his father's drinking, Martin Amis tells a sad story of accompanying him home after dinner. At the beginning of the meal he noticed the look on his father's face which told him that he was about to pass on to the state of complete intoxication. Many of those who live with a drunk know the moment and the feeling of hopelessness which accompanies it. Martin sees that he must escort Kingsley home. On their way, they stand on a traffic island in the middle of the Edgware Road and Kingsley falls over. Not a trip, not a sudden tumble, but a comprehensive collapse which Martin Amis experiences as though it were happening in slow motion. It is an image of the total disintegration of an individual as much as a particular incident.

Alcoholics in treatment are often shown a film on the Alcoholic Family. This is one of those rough and ready concepts with which the recovery industry abounds. They may not mean much scientifically but they accord with many people's experience. The star of the film - an American Catholic priest famous for the treatment centre he ran - suggests that the most common behaviour of the eldest son of an alcoholic is to strive to please his father or to outstrip him. He will be looking over his shoulder for approval and confirmation of his status. Martin Amis, in the days of his first success, appeared on some television book programme. One of the works under discussion was the actor David Niven's memoirs, The Moon's a Balloon. The author was present and, in his amiable and self-deprecating way, talked about the book. Amis said that he thought it was not a bad effort for someone who was not a professional author. At the time, the absurd condescension of the remark grated; now, it seems more like an attempt to establish his own position on the literary ladder.

Martin Amis suggests that Kingsley never gave him any encouragement to be a novelist - and quite right too, you might think - but that is not to say that he did not pick up the message during his childhood that professional writing was an admirable intellectual and artistic exercise. There is evident hurt when he records that his father rarely showed appreciation of his work and, from Kingsley's comments, it is apparent that he had ambivalent feelings about it. In his turn Martin is clearly in two minds about his father's drinking. It appears to the son to be such a part of the father than any separation seems impossible. This is to make the sub-conscious acceptance that alcohol made Kingsley Amis what he was. Perhaps that is going too far. It may be better to say that, by the time Martin came to perceive his father as an individual, something which all sons must eventually do, drink had so far exerted its power over Kingsley that it was difficult to know when he was talking and when it was. Literature might have been richer if he had done more and it less.