Living British novelists are well treated. Publishers pay them more than they are likely to recoup; hedge funds, coffee shops and mobile phone companies give them prizes; newspapers carry long articles about their work. But all that ends rather suddenly. The speed with which dead writers can vanish is quite shocking.
Sir Kingsley Amis died in 1995, having been for three or four decades one of this country’s pre-eminent novelists. The shape of his career was a happy one: Lucky Jim in 1954 was the locomotive that pulled the carriages (more than 20 other novels); the Booker prize for The Old Devils in 1986 gave a late boost; the hostility of feminist critics provided good publicity; and the decline of the late books came too late to matter much.
His post-mortem publisher Penguin (he was a Gollancz, Cape and Hutchinson man in life) have set about re-presenting him to a new generation. The Complete Stories comes in a wonderful jacket based on a painting of Amis by Jonathan Burton — an image so good that one can overlook the typographical mess on the back. To bring out the stories first is a bold move because Amis is not principally known as a short-story writer, famously referring to such work as “chips from the novelist’s work bench”. He also disparaged the form on the grounds that it was likely to attract funds from the Arts Council.
Yet it was quite a work bench in its way, and these stories are wide-ranging in style and sympathy. There are excursions into science fiction, a genre that once interested Amis enough for him to write a book about it (New Maps of Hell, 1960), though these don’t go far beyond playful time travel. There are some early army stories that show the characteristic resentment of the young soldier towards the officer class that shaped a good deal of 1950s British humour, notably The Goon Show. These stories also show Amis getting to grips with the business of detail: mess and barracks are precisely and simply described, though he has not yet mastered the killing single detail.
It is interesting, also, to see Amis’s sympathy for the underdog here, which was seen at the time as “left-wing”. Like most people who go from left to right, Amis did not traverse the terrain in stages from Fabian Society to Monday Club; he went round the back, across a political Bering Strait, maintaining in his own mind a consistency of outlook. He was always for the modest, clear-sighted man; it was simply that he changed his view of who was oppressing this admirable figure. Up to a certain date he thought it was the officer class, after which he believed it was the state: same monolithic weight of ignorant received ideas entrenched by privilege and statute; different left/right label. An early story, Moral Fibre, about a bossy female social worker, shows the right-wing attitude in larval stage, in still plausibly leftish garb.
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Dear Illusion is about a poet who tries modestly to prove that his poems are no good, by publishing a deliberately rotten volume that is well received by the usual suspects. This story provokes some (perhaps illegitimate, but anyway irresistible) thoughts about Amis’s own view of writing fame. In her introduction to this volume, Rachel Cusk writes well of how blokeish Kingsley sometimes worried about being thought “lazy” or not doing a “proper” job, and how this anxiety lay behind a number of work-bench metaphors.
A passionate, sensitive and well-read man with inconsistent sympathies (he loved Auden, was firmly liberal on sexual matters and so on), Amis seldom ventured into deeply emotional territory. When he did so, as in the triumphant death scene of The Old Devils, it was in a muted, technically tricky way. Here we have the wonderful story All the Blood Within Me, about a man who attends the funeral of his long-time lover, in the company of her complaisant husband. It was a pity that such emotional areas seem to have scared Amis because his prose can always rise to the occasion.
As well as Cusk, Penguin has commissioned Helen Dunmore to write an introduction (to Ending Up); and what better way to win back women readers? One can forgive David Lodge and Howard Jacobson for being men since their claim to introduce One Fat Englishman and Girl, 20 is beyond dispute. The best of Amis’s late books, in my view — the only one to catch him at his best — was his brilliantly witty The King’s English, and this is now introduced by Martin Amis.
But amid this happiness, a word of caution. Let’s look at what happened to Amis’s peers: John Fowles, Iris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess, the stars of that novelistic generation. Fowles’s The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman now sell about 4,000 copies each a year. Murdoch’s best book, The Black Prince, sells about 1,500. Burgess’s much-trumpeted Earthly Powers sells fewer than 1,000 a year. Amis’s Lucky Jim comes in at a little under 5,000 a year; The Old Devils fewer than 2,000; One Fat Englishman, 37 copies and Girl, 20 only 43… For Murdoch and Burgess it is almost as though they had never been; and it is in this landscape of indifference and amnesia that one can only wish the Amis relaunch the very best of luck.