Kingsley Amis

File:Kingsleyamis.jpg

The cover of Kingsley Amis' Collected Letters, published in 2000

Sir Kingsley William Amis (April 16, 1922 – October 22, 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He was the father of the British novelist Martin Amis.

Biography

Kingsley Amis was born in London, educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford, where he met Philip Larkin, with whom Amis formed the most important friendship of his life. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis completed university in 1947, and was a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea (1948–61), and at Cambridge (1961–63), where he was a fellow of Peterhouse.

Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of Fifties Britain. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim is a seminal work, the first English novel featuring an ordinary man as anti-hero. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.

Like Philip Larkin, Amis was a keen jazz fan, with a particular enthusiasm for the American musicians Sidney Bechet, Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell (about whom Amis and Larkin corresponded extensively -see 'The Letters of Kingsley Amis', edited by Zachery Leader, HarperCollins, 2000).

As a young man, Kingsley Amis was a vocal member of the Communist Party. He became disillusioned with Communism, breaking with it when the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Thereafter, Amis became stridently anti-communist, and conservative. He discusses his political change of heart in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967), and it percolates into later works such as his dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).

Amis was an atheist and novels such as The Green Man and The Anti-Death League were in part wary speculations about the personality of a divine being and its relation to death and dying.

Amis's novel about a group of retired friends, The Old Devils, won the Booker Prize in 1986. He received a knighthood in 1990.

Amis was twice married, first in 1948 to Hilary Bardwell, then to novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, in 1965; they divorced in 1983. Amis spent his last years sharing the house of his first wife and her third husband. He had three children, including the novelist Martin Amis, who movingly wrote of his father's life and decline in his memoir Experience.

Science fiction

Amis's critical interest in science fiction led to New Maps of Hell (1960), his interpretation of the genre's literary qualities. He was particularly enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell he coined the term "comic inferno", describing a type of humorous dystopia particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. With the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, Amis produced the science fiction anthology series Spectrum I–IV, which drew heavily upon the 1950s magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He wrote three science fiction novels, The Alteration, an alternate history novel set in a twentieth-century Britain where the Reformation never occurred; Russian Hide-and-Seek, an alternate history set in near-future Britain where Russia had conquered Britain after the Second World War, and the supernatural-horror novel, The Green Man, which the BBC adapted for television.

A tape-recorded conversation on science fiction took place between Amis, C.S.Lewis and Brian Aldiss in Lewis's rooms at Cambridge in December 1962. A transcript appears under the title 'Unreal Estates' in the collection "On Stories" by C.S.Lewis.

James Bond

Kingsley Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's creation, James Bond, in the 1960s, writing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. He wrote the popular The James Bond Dossier under his own name. Later, he wrote, The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William 'Bill' Tanner", Tanner being M's Chief of Staff in many of Fleming's Bond novels.

It is widely claimed that, after Fleming died in 1964 following completion of an early draft of The Man with the Golden Gun, the publisher commissioned Amis and possibly other writers to finish the manuscript. Bond historians and Fleming biographers have, in recent years, debunked this theory, indicating that no such ghostwriter was ever employed, although Amis is known to have provided suggestions on how to improve the manuscript which were rejected. (See here for more on the controversy and speculation.)

In 1968 the owners of the James Bond property, Glidrose Publications, attempted to continue the series by hiring different novelists, all writing under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Kingsley Amis was the first to write a Robert Markham novel, Colonel Sun, but no further books were published under that name. It is widely believed that Amis had planned to write a second Bond novel but was talked out of it. Colonel Sun was adapted as a comic strip in the Daily Express in 1969. In a Titan Books reprint volume of the comic strip published in 2005, an introductory chapter indicated that Amis planned to write a short story featuring an elderly Bond coming out of retirement for one last mission, but Glidrose refused him permission to write it.

Partial bibliography

1947 Amis's first collection of poems, Bright November

1953 A Frame of Mind

1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits.

1954 Lucky Jim, Amis' first novel

1955 That Uncertain Feeling

1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956.

1958 I Like it Here

1960 Take a Girl Like You

1960 New Maps of Hell

1960 Hemingway in Space (short story), Punch Dec 1960

1962 My Enemy's Enemy

1962 The Evans County

1963 One Fat Englishman

1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest).

1965 The James Bond Dossier

1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007, under the pseudonym "Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner"

1966 The Anti-Death League

1968 Colonel Sun, a James Bond novel, under the pseudonym "Robert Markham."

1968 I Want It Now

1969 The Green Man

1970 What Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions

1971 Girl, 20

1972 On Drink

1973 The Riverside Villas Murders

1974 Ending Up

1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World

1976 The Alteration

1978 Jake's Thing

1979 Collected Poems 1944-78

1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek

1980 Collected Short Stories

1983 Every Day Drinking

1984 How's Your Glass?

1984 Stanley and the Women

1986 The Old Devils

1988 Difficulties With Girls

1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill

1990 The Amis Collection

1991 Memoirs

1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories

1992 The Russian Girl

1994 The semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both

1995 The Biographer's Moustache

1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

Poets in The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988)

Richard Aldington - Kenneth Allott - Matthew Arnold - Kenneth Ashley - W. H. Auden - William Barnes - Oliver Bayley - Hilaire Belloc - John Betjeman - Laurence Binyon - William Blake - Edmund Blunden - Rupert Brooke - Robert Browning - Robert Burns - Thomas Campbell - Thomas Campion - G. K. Chesterton - Hartley Coleridge - Robert Conquest - W. J. Cory - John Davidson - Donald Davie - C. Day Lewis - Walter De la Mare - Ernest Dowson - Michael Drayton - Lawrence Durrell - Jean Elliot - George Farewell - James Elroy Flecker - Thomas Ford - Roy Fuller - Robert Graves - Thomas Gray - Fulke Greville - Heath - Reginald Heber - Felicia Dorothea Hemans - W. E. Henley - George Herbert - Ralph Hodgson - Thomas Hood - Teresa Hooley - Gerard Manley Hopkins - A. E. Housman - Henry Howard - T. E. Hulme - Leigh Hunt - Elizabeth Jennings - Samuel Johnson - John Keats - Henry King - Charles Kingsley - Rudyard Kipling - Philip Larkin - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - John Lydgate - H. F. Lyte - Louis MacNeice - Andrew Marvell - John Masefield - Alice Meynell - Harold Monro - William Morris - Edwin Muir - Henry Newbolt - Alfred Noyes - Wilfred Owen - Thomas Love Peacock - George Peele - Alexander Pope - Frederic Prokosch - Walter Ralegh - John Crowe Ransom - Christina Rossetti - Siegfried Sassoon - John Skelton - Robert Southey - Edmund Spenser - Sir John Squire - Robert Louis Stevenson - Sir John Suckling - Algernon Charles Swinburne - George Szirtes - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Dylan Thomas - Edward Thomas - R. S. Thomas - Francis Thompson - Anthony Thwaite - Chidiock Tichborne - Aurelian Townsend - W. J. Turner - Oscar Wilde - John Wilmot, Lord Rochester - Roger Woddis - Charles Wolfe - William Wordsworth - W. B. Yeats - Andrew Young

External links

• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• The Paris Review interview, with downloadable PDF

Preceded by Ian Fleming 1953-1964

James Bond writer 1968

Succeeded by John Pearson 1973