Everything you wanted to know about Kingsley Amis, and more.

Everything you wanted to know about Kingsley Amis, and more.

THE LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS

By Zachary Leader

Pantheon. 996 pp. $39.95

Modesty scarcely was Kingsley Amis's long suit, so perhaps it is appropriate that neither is modesty the long suit of Zachary Leader, a British academic who has written, in his gargantuan Life of Kingsley Amis, what amounts to the official biography of the late novelist, humorist, journalist and television talking head. According to Leader, this biography "shows what it was like to meet Amis and to be him" and "makes a case for the breadth and depth of his writing and . . . tells the story of how and why he did what he did, both as a writer and as a man." One might consider these judgments to be reached by reviewers and readers rather than by the author himself, but Leader is his own reviewer:

"Six themes shape this biography: the formative influence of Amis's early upbringing, which he himself identified as a key to his personality and to many of the most pressing concerns of his fiction and poetry; the aggression which is so marked a feature of his character and writings; his astonishing energy (to his son Martin he was 'a great engine of comedy'); his sense of writing as craft or profession; his hostility to distinctions between high culture and low and concomitant attraction to popular forms; and his lifelong obsession with egotism, selfishness, inconsiderateness, qualities he acutely anatomises and censures in his writing even as they threaten to overwhelm him in life."

Well, thank you, sir. All that occurs on page 6. Doesn't seem much point in reading (or writing) the rest of this review, does there, not to mention reading (or writing) the rest of The Life of Kingsley Amis? But write Leader most certainly did, to the exhausting (for the reader, though apparently not for him) length of 822 pages of text, plus all the usual scholarly apparatus. Since Amis's own books were models of concision, clarity and wit, it is both bizarre and wildly inappropriate that he is now subjected to an elephantine biography such as one might expect to emerge from the literature department of an American university, but there is an explanation: Though Leader has taught in England for fully three decades, he is an American by birth who retains his American citizenship and, it certainly seems, the American academic infatuation with bloated literary biography.

Somewhat surprisingly, Leader's life of Amis was received enthusiastically in England. Having previously read, and generally admired, Eric Jacobs's Kingsley Amis: A Biography (1995), I saw no special need for yet another (there are three or four others of lesser note) but was curious about the wealth of detail this new one was said to provide. What the book itself demonstrates, though, is that the line between wealth and poverty is thinner than is usually believed. If there is anything Leader knows about Amis that he doesn't tell here, there is no evidence of it, but all these recitals of Amis's two marriages and compulsive womanizing, his astonishing drinking, his gregariousness and selfishness, his successes and occasional failures, his incredible productivity -- all this stuff doesn't give us nearly as much of Amis as Leader obviously imagines. The inner man is as much a mystery at the end of this slog as he was at the beginning; the accumulation of meaningless detail (on page 615, by way of one especially numbing example, Leader manages to drop no fewer than 29 names, various Amises not included) is a poor substitute for deeply informed, genuinely sympathetic speculation.

It can be argued, and perhaps was argued by Leader's British reviewers, that such a mountain of detail manages to convey a sense of the subject's quotidian life: what he (or she) ate and drank and with whom, where he shopped, how he got around town, whom he liked and whom he didn't, et cetera, et cetera. There's some truth to this. A sense of the subject's ordinary day is something the reader justifiably hopes to be given. But discrimination -- deciding what matters in the subject's life and what doesn't -- is far more important, and there is none of it here.

In brief: Amis was born in South London in 1922 into a family that was "lower middle class and suburban." His father was a socially and intellectually insecure white-collar worker, and his mother was beset by various anxieties. He got to Oxford just before the war and made important friendships there, most notably with the future novelist and poet Philip Larkin. He served without incident in World War II, wrapped up his studies at Oxford at its end, met and married Hilary (Hilly) Bardwell, and in 1949 found a teaching job at the University College of Swansea. He was happy there and ever after remembered it with fondness, but the exposure it gave him to academic life led to his first (and best) novel, Lucky Jim, the classic satire of academia.

Published in 1954, the novel was a great success and immediately established Amis for good. He had arrived. Soon he was widely assumed to be one of England's leading literary Angry Young Men, but the label didn't really fit, and he usually expressed discomfort with it. Though he was terrible with money, he usually had enough, and most of the time he was happy. As he wrote to Larkin toward the end of 1953, tongue firmly in cheek: "What I want . . . is a chance to decide, from personal experience, that a life of cocktail parties, cars, week-ending at rich houses, wine, night-clubs and jazz won't bring happiness. I want to prove that money isn't everything, to learn that pleasure cloys."

Thereafter his life had three central themes: work, women and booze, though one would be hard-pressed to say in what order they should be ranked. The reader is likely to be amazed -- I certainly was -- that he managed to get so much work done, not to mention done so well, amid all those liaisons and hangovers, but he published more than 40 books and innumerable reviews, articles and other fugitive pieces. Most of his books are out of print in this country (Leader says at the end of the biography that Penguin plans a general reissue), and it's unclear how many have staying power: Lucky Jim and The Old Devils, most certainly, and perhaps One Fat Englishman, Take a Girl Like You and Girl, 20, but many of the others now seem dated, and one can't help noting that at the center of most of them is a character suspiciously like Kingsley Amis.

On this, if not on much else, Leader is good. Amis disliked being called an autobiographical writer (though he readily acknowledged that parts of him were in all his books), but Leader shows how closely his books were connected to his life and how one can learn much about him simply by reading them. This raises, again, the previous question -- why bother to read this biography? -- but it does underscore the intimate connections between life and work. Leader is also good at demonstrating Amis's eagerness to try new forms and his deep sympathy for the best of popular culture, from jazz to Ian Fleming to, as Amis himself put it, "the action novel, the thriller, the ghost story, science fiction, the western, the stories of espionage and private eyes and all that kind of thing: all separate little streams."

Amis generally is counted one of the best British comic writers of the 20th century. This is a fair judgment, though against the principal competition, Evelyn Waugh, Amis comes up short. He is notable as well for his influence on other, younger British satirists, especially of academic life, among them David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. He was "the most clubbable of men" and was loved by many friends, but he had many insecurities (he didn't drive or fly, "suffered from night terrors and screaming fits"), and he was capable of childish selfishness and willfulness. If he was in the mood to be good company, that's just what he was, but if he wasn't, watch out. As is often the case with biographies of writers, one comes to the end of this one convinced that it is better to be in the company of Amis's books than of the man himself. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.