Why Lucky Jim Turned Roght-Obituary of Kingsley Amis

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nsibility, still sustaining what was now the long dark comedy of life into later years, in which the once angry young man had turned into a yet more angry and mortal old one.2 So, a justification for Amis's novels can be to detach them from the ideology of their author and to read them against the grain - in much the same way as the novels of (say) Evelyn Waugh can serve as critical commentary on what they describe, despite their author's intentions. Where Waugh can expose the limitations of upper class society (particularly, for example, the behaviour of top army brass in his war trilogy), Amis can expose sexist limitations in the drunken self indulgent middle class section of society he chooses to focus on as it advances into middle age.

Can this justification be sustained? Clearly it is possible to benefit from reactionary novelists and there is a long Marxist tradition which refuses to see good literature as simply the expression of a 'correct' political viewpoint. But in Kingsley Amis's case the justification cannot be sustained. The case against Amis rests less on his manifestly reactionary views than on the limitations of the fiction itself.

Kingsley Amis was born in 1922 in south London, the only son of lower middle class parents. The Memoirs give some sense of his family and background - ordinary, suburban, with all the minor class and political prejudices one would expect. Though Amis recalls conflict over taste in music, there is little sense that this conflict challenged the acceptance of a mild, pervasive philistinism in respect of culture. The only other tension reported in the Memoirs is over sex, with young Amis being warned that masturbation would 'thin the blood' and cause insanity. Later, when he had left home and was in the army, his father tried to tell him off for having an affair with a married woman.3 After a period of school in London and Wiltshire (where he had been evacuated to on the outbreak of war i...