While Amis was writing That Uncertain Feeling, the article by J.D. Scott in the Spectator proclaiming the birth of The Movement appeared. Movement writers were broadly seen as reacting against Dylan Thomas’s “rich (and not infrequently inflated) volubility” and Eliot’s Europeanism (Poburko 1999, 147). Scott referred to the stance of eight writers, including Amis, as “bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility about ‘the writer and society’” (1954, 399). After reading the article, Amis wrote to Larkin to call it “a load of bullshit,” though “Useful to a point” (Amis 2001, 405). Although British writer Andrew Sinclair has said of post-Second World War Britain that “There was a failure of morals and of caring, but not of dreaming” (1994, 21), in Amis’s poetic world, as in that of other Movement writers, the dream is denied. Refusing either to look forward at a fanciful dream or glorify the literary and cultural past, Amis’s poetic stance is firmly rooted in the present.
When Amis’s A Look Round the Estate: Poems 1957–1967 appeared, it showcased his talents as a poet while pointing to two problematic tendencies in his writing. First, in the eleven poem sequence known as The Evans Country he gleefully disturbs the reader through the central character’s amorality. Amis had played the part of moral provocateur before in Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman, but Dai Evans, the sexual predator of unknown occupation who inhabits The Evans Country, is quite different from Patrick Standish and Roger Micheldene. He lacks charm, wit, and any suggestion of a more serious social agenda to elevate him above the level of sordid philanderer. Although Amis offers an artistic commentary of sorts in the depiction of Swansea’s architecture and critique of romanticism, the poems are bleak. Amis tells us that the natural and manmade worlds are ugly, Evans’s activities are correspondingly dirty, and nothing can be done about either situation. The second problem relates to Amis’s tendency to place his narrators outside the work as witnesses, rather than participants, who find fault without providing any concrete solutions for improvement. At least eight of the other poems in A Look Round the Estate use painting, music, and literature (or literary creation) as the lens for viewing the world, and in these artistic poems the reader becomes aware of the poet watching but not participating, as he identifies ironies, contradictions, and areas of concern.
While Amis would hesitate to pass moral judgment on social – and especially sexual – relations in any of the novels written in the forty years that passed between the publication of Lucky Jim and The Biographer’s Moustache, he was always dogmatic about art, as the discussions of both painting and poetry in his first two novels clearly show. In the 1970s this dogmatism would lead him to bring his first-person narrators into the action, and force them to do more than simply criticize. After all, if art can only be good or bad, when one recognizes the bad then something ought to be done about it. Christopher Hitchens explains Amis’s artistic intransigence in the following terms:
The word “good,” in all its variations ... was almost all that this man of immense vocabulary required as a shorthand critical tool. I don’t know whether the concept hailed from the “Newspeak” dictionary in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the choices range from “plusgood” to “doubleplusungood,” but “bloody good” from Kingsley was authoritatively affirmative, “good” was really pretty good, “some good” wasn’t at all bad, “no good” was applied very scathingly indeed and a three-sentence six-word pronouncement which I heard him render upon Graham Greene’s then-latest novel The Human Factor (“Absolutely no. Bloody good. AT ALL!”) was conclusive. (2010, 163)
In Amis’s poetry, ethical judgments are generally withheld but he always maintained that art, like experience, can only ever be good or bad. Thus, a recurring theme is the pursuit of pleasure. He expressed this rather crudely in an unpublished poem written in 1950, which is prefaced by the sentence, “Here is a list of the things I have understood”:
Dai Evans is clearly a believer in the Amisian mantra that good things make a man glad, but the effectiveness of the poetry is diminished by the lack of accountability of protagonist and narrator. Artistic balance, which would become of key importance in Amis’s fiction in the 1970s, is conspicuously absent. Amis’s provincial poetics were leading him into an artistic corner from which he could only escape by humanizing the artistic antimodels, implicating his narrators in events, and giving serious consideration to the audience’s role in the creative process.
Amis’s poetry mirrors his prose in the absence of formal experimentation and the use of provocative content to advance controversial views. That he intended the poems to be more than mere entertainments is apparent in a 21 May 1967 letter to Larkin in which he says he is “in fine fettle,” having “just put together a book of beautiful poetry (A Look round the Estate) to show that I am full of integrity after all” (Amis 2001, 680).1 The majority of the poems are formally traditional, often written in quatrains, and follow strict rhyming and metrical schemes. And yet, to use John Press’s terminology, they are perhaps best defined as provincial, rather than traditional. While the key concepts in provincialism are also found in definitions of the Movement, Amis’s attraction to the provincial aesthetic is doubtless connected to his desire for fame. As we saw previously in the discussion of “horse-pissing,” implicit in his attacks on the literature and literary ideas of the past is an argument for the superiority of Amis’s own writing. In the early poem “Beowulf” he recalled his lack of interest in medieval literature by satirizing the academic study of literature with so little impact for people of his generation. “Someone has told us this man was a hero. / Must we then reproduce his paradigms, / Trace out his rambling regress to his forbears,” he demands (1979, Collected Poems, ll. 13–15).
Just as the artistic subtext of That Uncertain Feeling contains an attack on modernism and, specifically, Dylan Thomas, many of the poems in A Look Round the Estate target Keatsian romanticism, which was so effectively satirized through Patrick Standish’s wooing of Jenny Bunn in Take a Girl Like You. The attack is launched in the first poem, “An Ever-Fixed Mark,” which recalls two varieties of homosexual love at a private boys’ school. Sex, or the idea of “using somebody for pleasure” (1967, l. 11), is favoured by the sportsman Buck, while Ralph the romantic prefers “Letters three times a week, / Sonnet-sequences, Sunday walks” (ll. 20–1). Once they reach adulthood, the equation becomes more complicated:
These days, for a quid pro quo,
Ralph’s chum is all for romance;
Buck’s playmates, family men,
Eye a Boy Scout now and then.
Sex stops when you pull up your pants,
Love never lets you go. (ll. 25–30)
Perhaps disappointment in love has forced Ralph to enter into commercial exchanges with partners willing to simulate romance, but his situation seems far more sordid than that of Buck, who is now content to look without touching. The poem leads to a depressing contemplation of the interplay between love, sex, and romance. Most of the subsequent poems also point to the hollowness of ideals and, though they are complex and intelligent, they are rarely hopeful.
Shrugging off the influences of Thomas, Empson, and Auden, in the 1950s, Amis began to write a very different kind of poetry in which he incorporated the sardonic voice cultivated with Larkin and used in Lucky Jim. In the 1957 essay “The Poet and the Dreamer,” previously discussed in relation to Take a Girl Like You, Amis insisted that poetry must be personal and must comment on life as one finds it, not as one wishes it to be. Clive James astutely calls the essay “a fine example of the critical attack that brings out every virtue” (2007, Cultural Amnesia, 348) for it tells us more about Amis’s literary ideals than it does about Keats’ poetic flaws. James insists that Keats must have possessed “a solid inner artistic confidence” to write the Odes and, in spite of Amis’s contrary assessment, “There is no good reason to believe that he would not have gone on developing” (350). Amis declared that Keats would not have because their poetic voices and messages differed markedly, and in the 1960s he was incapable of accepting artistic difference.2
The 1956 poem “Against Romanticism” aptly summarizes Amis’s objections to romantic idealizations of life. He argues, via a traveller in comfortable surroundings with “an ingrown taste for anarchy” (1979, Collected Poems, l. 20), that complications in life are largely of our own making. The traveller’s urge to make “grand meaning” leads to the desire “to build a better time and place” (l. 23). It would be preferable, though, “if images were plain, / Warnings clearly said” (ll. 27–28) and in the third and final stanza Amis outlines his poetic platform. “Let us at least make visions that we need” (l. 32), he begins, and “Let mine be pallid” (l. 33). In the remaining fourteen lines, he elaborates on this decidedly negative vision. He sees “Buildings free from all grime of history / The people total strangers, the grass cut, / Not long” (ll. 36–38) and a “voluble swooning wilderness,” in which the “green” is “not parched or soured by frantic suns” (ll. 38–39). The grass is not “trampled by the drivelling unicorn” (l. 41), and the sky is “clean of officious birds” (l. 42). He concludes:
Let there be a path leading out of sight,
And its other end a temperate zone:
Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the
foot. (ll. 44–47)
Zachary Leader has called Amis’s attack on romanticism a “corrective, an attempt to restore balance,” and “a counterweight to, not a negation of, the tendencies against which it kicks” (2006, The Life, 409). However, the bleakness of the world is notable, as it is in The Evans Country, set in a “thinly disguised Swansea” called Aberdarcy (Leader 2006, The Life, 242). The Evans Country first appeared in 1962 as a six poem sequence and was expanded to eleven poems in 1967. Eric Jacobs notes the unattractiveness of Swansea when Amis moved there in 1949: “Swansea itself was drab, like most of the rest of the country at the time, not yet able to put behind it the depredations of the war. Its main square was crossed by a Bailey bridge above a bomb crater. Rebuilding was not complete until the 1950s” (1995, 133–4). The eleven poems highlight the activities of Dai Evans; throughout the natural landscape and buildings are pallid, though the poems’ contents are not. Evans has liaisons with five women in the sequence, returning home to his wife in the final poem after “A fearsome thrash with Mrs No-Holds-barred / (Whose husband’s in his surgery till 7)” (ll. 22–3). To those readers with Empsonian tendencies who might censure Evans, Amis issues the same challenge – “What about you?” – in the first (l. 20) and last poems (l. 32). He played a similar game in That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You by garnering the reader’s sympathies for John Lewis and Patrick Standish through their wit and good humour before having them misbehave, and make the reader feel tricked, if not betrayed. The difference in The Evans Country is that the protagonist, like the surrounding landscape, is neither attractive nor charming. Amis revels in the architectural ugliness of Swansea, as Evans does in smut. In the opening poem, “Aberdarcy: the Main Square,” the poet declares: “The journal of some bunch of architects / Named this the worst town centre they could find” (ll. 13–14); and this is the site of Evans’s first rendezvous:
By the new Boots, a tool-chest with flagpoles
Glued on, and flanges, and a dirty great
Baronial doorway, and things like port-holes,
Evans met Mrs Rhys on their first date. (ll. 1–4)
In the third stanza, the poet recalls Evans and Mrs Rhys returning from “that lousy weekend in Porthcawl” (l. 12) when “he dropped her beside the grimy hunk / Of castle” (ll. 9–10). To readers tempted to sneer at Swansea and Evans, Amis asks in the fourth stanza: “But how disparage what so well reflects / Permanent tendencies of heart and mind?” (ll. 15–16). The use of the word “permanent” reflects, as did the essay on Keats, that while Amis’s world is not necessarily static, he does not anticipate change for the better. Once again, the use of the bleak urban landscape to comment on Evans’s situation reveals the poet’s provincialism. All traces of the past – cultural or otherwise – are effaced throughout The Evans Country. References to the Parthenon in “Aldport (Mystery Tour)” and D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in “Aberdarcy: the Chaucer Road” are immediately undercut by hurried sexual encounters. The only thing of consequence to Evans and, perhaps by extension, Amis as poet, is the here and now.
The drab urban landscape of Swansea is invoked in a curious way in the opening poem: “All love demands a witness: something ‘there’ / Which it yet makes part of itself” (ll. 17–18). The reader too is placed in the role of witness, given access to Evans’s thoughts and actions but prohibited from passing judgment. In “Welch Ferry, West Side,” Evans’s alienation from nature mirrors Amis’s from the romantics. The description of the industrial landscape in the first five lines is as unflattering as that of Aberdarcy Main Square:
The narrow channel where the tankers crawl
And void their cargo into the pipelines,
Encloses, with the railway track that runs
Down to the tinplate works, a chunk of hill,
And here sometimes a pony browses. (ll. 1–5)
This is the backdrop for Evans’ rendezvous with Miss Jones. After it has ended, “all the smog had lifted, and more stars / Than he knew what to do with filled the sky” (ll. 16–17). Though the view prompts him to “mutter,” “Looks beautiful tonight” (l. 20), he then raised his voice:
Eurwen, get moving, do.
You think I want to hang round here all night?
Free over the week-end, are you? I’m not;
I’m boozing with the boys on Saturday,
Sunday’s the club ... All right, then – never. (ll. 21–5)
In essence, each poem inverts the principles of romantic love poetry. Evans does not work in concert with nature and the seasons but, as in the four-line poem “Aldport (Mystery Tour),” struggles against it:
Hearing how tourists, dazed with reverence,
Look through sunglasses at the Parthenon,
Dai thought of that cold night outside the Gents
When he touched Dilys up with his gloves on.
While the winter cold in this poem prevents Evans from freely indulging his sexual urges, nature has “got all the cards” (l. 13) in “St. Asaph’s.” In summer, the leaves of a chestnut tree impede Evans’ view of schoolgirls, while the girls’ thick coats render the barren branches meaningless in winter. In the final quatrain, the narrator offers encouragement to Evans: “you still know the bloody leaf / From bole or blossom, dancer from the dance,” so there is “Hope for you yet, then” (ll. 15–16). By advising him to use his cunning to work around nature, the narrative voice proves to be in collusion with Evans, just as it often is with the protagonists in Amis’s early novels.
When nature is not an impediment to sexual pleasure, it is a non-factor. “Llansili Beach” opens with Evans relaxing on the sand. “Inside a minute / A two-piece with a fair lot in it / Rolls up between him and the sea” (ll. 5–7). Predictably, Evans turns his attention from the ocean to the woman. He proceeds to offer her a cigarette because “No heartfelt gaze’ll satisfy / A real romantic like our Dai; / Wouldn’t be natural for a bloke” (ll. 17–19). Amis’s satirical use of “romantic” suggests that poets like Keats were no different from Evans in their sexual appetites, though their ability to imaginatively depict love disguises animal desire. Evans behaves naturally, meaning that he is true to his nature and wholly uninhibited, when he ogles women through his glasses “four-eyed and unashamed” (l. 15), and propositions women with increasing frequency to compensate for his diminishing “visual range” (l. 22).
The title of the poem sequence offers further evidence of Amis’s anti-romantic agenda. The Evans country refers to the establishments and locales that he frequents to indulge his pleasures – his sexual hunting grounds – and subsequent word choice reinforces the idea of hero as predator, while reminding us that his behaviour is instinctive and therefore natural. In the sequence’s opening poem, the narrator recalls the time Evans “slunk” back from a weekend away (l. 11); in “Langwell,” he retreats to his “den” (l. 21); he pushes his glasses onto his “snout” (l. 10) in “Llansili Beach”; and in the final poem, he is “In like a whippet” (l. 21) for his “fearsome [adulterous] thrash” (l. 22). At other times, instead of accentuating Evans’ wolfish behaviour, Amis depicts him as a human hunter. In “St. Asaph’s” Evans looks out the window at schoolgirls but “A chestnut tree stands in [his] line of sight” (l. 1). He then “squints” (l. 4) and “spot[s] / Bunches of overcoats quite clear” (ll. 9–10).
Critics have viewed Amis’s poetic achievement in The Evans Country from various perspectives. William Pritchard thinks that Amis moves beyond satire and “acts instead as a true witness to love, even Evans’s love, by measuring, thus celebrating it in verse” (1994, 79). Jacobs considered the poems a record, if not a celebration, of the drabness of post-war Swansea (1995, 133), while Ian Hamilton calls the poems “a group of bawdy cameos set in a philistine, lower-middle class South Wales” (12). Zachary Leader places the achievement on a more personal level, as the reader is enticed to enter the world of Dai Evans, and “lower[ed] by the experience” (2006, The Life, 243). Amis apologist John McDermott defended him against Donald Davie,3 who criticized Amis for “refus[ing] to answer questions that need answering” and for the “wretchedly badly written” poems in The Evans Country (1973, 70). Davie, thought McDermott, “misses the expressive intention of what is contrived to appear clumsy in the sequence” (1989, 264). Davie did acknowledge the value of Amis’s other poetry, particularly in its political exploration of the nature of authority (1973, 84).4 But it is not surprising that he should view The Evans Country unfavourably. Both his poetry and criticism are imbued with a strong moral sense and he frequently “invoke[s] the civilising power of urbanity,” as John Lucas notes (2006, 7). Other critics, such as Nicholas Poburko, have been troubled by the thematic focus on rejection in The Evans Country. Evans has little time for social conventions, treating both accepted beauty and romantic love with irony. Thus, his favourite buxom candidate for Miss Glamorgan finishes last, love letters are burned, and each tryst seems to obliterate the one that came before. In discussing “Against Romanticism,” Poburko labels Amis’s poetic stance immature: “There is something adolescent, maybe perverse, in his desire to be strangers with everyone, to walk off, isolated,” noting the “fundamental hopelessness” of the situation (2).
The suspicions of Press, Poburko, and Davie that Amis was being disingenuous in celebrating low culture are perhaps well-founded. Press felt equally uneasy about an earlier poem “A Song of Experience,” featuring another version of Dai Evans. The critic disliked the proposition that this poem’s commercial traveller,
with his rat-like sexuality, is a surer guide to sexual relationships and to the nature of women than Blake, Lawrence, and Yeats; and that life, as represented by the traveller, is somehow more real than the fantasies of art or the romantic day-dreams of Juliet. Amis’s pose as a bluff, straightforward chap who has cleared his mind of cant is revealed here as a shoddy masquerade unworthy of his intelligence and of his sensibility. (95)
The above deserves more serious consideration than the moral objections voiced by Empson and Holbrook cited earlier though, in Amis’s defence, he, like Evans, does not pretend to have answers to teleological questions. What may be seen as moral ambivalence can also be interpreted as maintaining curiosity about all manifestations of human nature. In the final poem in The Evans Country, the protagonist leaves the Bay View, a bar, and “starts reflecting / How much in life he’s never going to know: / All it must mean to really love a woman” (17–19). This reflection leads to the thrash twenty minutes later with the dentist’s wife before he returns to greet his own spouse. Evans has no answers to questions about the nature of love. His lifestyle is his response. And while Amis is suspicious of those, like Keats, who appear to offer answers, he does not necessarily glorify the sexual conquests of his protagonists. Dai Evans’s success with women is continually undercut by the fact that he never appears either happy or content. Similarly, the narrator has no need to criticize the lifestyle of the “dark-eyed traveller” (Amis 1979, Collected Poems, l. 2) in “A Song of Experience,” for the truth of what he has accomplished through all of his sexual experience is emphasized by the poem’s final line, in which he “stow[s] his case of samples in the boot” (l. 33). He has sampled widely, but that is all. When comparing the traveller’s amorous experiences with those of Blake, Lawrence, and Yeats in literature, Amis’s wording reminds us he has not experienced love but something so ephemeral as to be almost meaningless: “The inaccessible he laid a hand on, / The heated he refreshed, the cold he warmed” (ll. 13–14). Through these lines, the reader understands that his effect on his lovers is more physical than emotional, and he fades from each woman’s memory with the speed and permanence of the impression of his hands on their skin.
One must understand that Amis’s views of life and love had not fundamentally changed in the twenty years that preceded the publication of A Look Round the Estate, but his method of presenting them had. There are great similarities between The Evans Country and a libretto Amis wrote for a Bruce Montgomery opera, Amberley Hall, in 1950, which explores the tripartite relationship between “a lady, her husband and her aspiring lover” (Amis 1991, Memoirs, 74). In the opening stanza, the lover Frederick announces: “Love, said the poets, gives the answer / To all the questions of the dreamer.” He goes on to speak of the emptiness of physical love in a way that encapsulates the spirit of Amis’s Swansea poetry of the 1950s and 1960s:
A hunter now of love, rough-riding
Full tilt across a neighbour’s holding,
Like any hunter, checked by nothing
Until the prey is caught,
I rode love down, and, the chase ended,
Dry-mouthed with hunger, lay and feasted;
Then, surfeited, sat up and wondered
Where was the truth I sought. (1950, Bodleian, 22)
Dai Evans too waxes philosophical after his “thrash” at the end of The Evans Country. Amberley Hall’s second stanza reveals another way of looking at the relationship between love and the physical world. Phyllis asks if love will be able to find her in such a mundane place as “these muffled rooms, above / Terraces thick with weeds,” and answers: “Yes, for Love makes a palace rise / Out of chill poverty, / And in it brings to lovers’ eyes / The form they long to see” (21).
Passion is not squelched by poor town planning, and tawdry buildings do not have a reductive effect on love. Surely one of the central points in The Evans Country is that lovers see what they wish to see, in both their partners and their surroundings, and Dai Evans would behave the same way even if the setting changed from Swansea to London.
However it is difficult to reconcile “the cool, sardonic mocker of academic stuffiness” in Amis’s fiction and poetry “with the serious teacher of literature struggling against all that debases learning and flatters ignorance” in his pamphleteering (Press 1963, 96). William Pritchard noted another contradiction in Amis’s “chaste and impersonal” delivery (1994, 77) when he read provocative, confrontational poetry. In the eight overtly artistic poems in A Look Round the Estate, Amis’s preference for standing outside the work and observing the world is often apparent. In “The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment,” human existence is evaluated as if it were a “great work” appearing in serial form (l. 1), authored by the Christian God. The narrator, or “this reviewer” (l. 46), passes the following judgment: “the work’s ‘greatness’ is no more than size, / While the shaping mind, and all that that implies, / Is on a trivial scale” (ll. 19–21). Two poems consider the attraction of science fiction. The first, called simply “Science Fiction,” wonders whether people do not, perhaps, read the genre because of “the impulse to meet face to face / Our vice and folly shaped into a thing” (ll. 2–3). Things are always changing in science fiction, as in life, though not for the better. The poem concludes:
But climates and geographies soon change,
Spawning mutations none can quell
With Silver sword or necromancer’s ring,
Worse than their sires, of wider range,
And much more durable. (ll. 14–18)
The conclusion drawn by “L’Invitation au Voyage” is that while the wonders of the deep sea may seem appealing, they become tiresome after a while, and cannot compete with the wonder of sex. After detailing all of the intellectual attractions of the ocean research voyage, the narrator says, “Thanks, Captain Nemo, this is always what / I think I want” (ll. 19–20), and confesses that should a single mermaid pass his window he would call for the long-boat and abandon the expedition. The poem is somewhat disingenuous because it presents a false dilemma. Amis himself never had to make a choice between writing and women; he was always able to enjoy both. But its hedonistic tone matches that of The Evans Country.
“On a Portrait of Mme Rimsky-Korsakov” is also problematic, though for a different reason. As the poet looks at a portrait of the great composer’s wife he imagines her
Serene, not as a prize for conflict won.
But mark of never having had to fight.
Needing no mind, because too beautiful,
She sat embodying her unconcern
For all charades of love or symbolism. (ll. 1–5)
While the beautiful wife is having her portrait painted, her husband is busy working and, after comparing her beauty favourably with that of the famed Oxford model Jane Morris, Amis concludes: “The Snow Maiden and the rest of the stuff / Attain the permanence of print, wax, and / Footnotes in treatises on orchestration” (ll. 14–16). Perhaps the message is that without doing anything but sitting still, Nadezhda Purgold, the wife of Rimsky-Korsakov, attained artistic immortality. This conclusion can only be reached by ignoring the fact that she was an accomplished musician in her own right, first learning piano from Mussorgsky’s teacher, then studying composition at the St Petersburg Conservatory (Mussorgsky 1947, 106). One can appreciate Amis’s point – that the power exerted by great physical beauty can make art seem insignificant – but in order to make the situation fit the argument Nadezhda Purgold is metamorphosed into a mindless woman with no concern for art.
“A Chromatic Passing-Note” offers another jaded commentary on romanticism, as the narrator recalls sneering at the clarinet part in Franck’s Symphony in D Minor in his youth, then realizing some time later that the motif “went to show that real love was found / At the far end of the right country lane” (ll. 5–6). Amis’s objections to Franck’s music resemble those made to Keats’ poetry, for he thinks that the composer offered “buffer only, syrup, crutch” (l. 11), instead of “a preview of / The world, action in art, a paradigm” (ll. 8–9). While he “got a laugh” at age fifteen for his musical appraisal of “That slimy tune” (l. 1), the poet now realizes: “‘Slimy’ was a snarl of disappointment” (l. 12). The poem is highly effective in showing how one’s reaction to a piece of music can change over time. It also shows Amis, or the narrative voice, rejecting another artist – like Dylan Thomas and William Empson – for leading him astray in his youth. Though this type of unilateral attack on artistic predecessors clarifies Amis’s own literary goals, it was becoming repetitious by the end of the 1960s, and this in part explains why he would write some novels that do not deal directly with art while others become radically different genre experiments. Not long after the publication of A Look Round the Estate Amis would create his first positive artistic model in the collaborative novel The Egyptologists, as shall be examined, and this signals a rethinking of the role of art and artists in society.
Another problematic aspect in several poems is the passivity with which poet and narrator view the world. “New Approach Needed” criticizes Jesus Christ for not staying around long enough to experience love, marriage, and fatherhood. He was therefore nothing more than a “royal tourist” (l. 20), and not a “resident witness” (l. 19). Amis’s use of the term “witness” is revealing, for the contrast underscores the importance of having direct knowledge; and yet a witness differs from a participant in the level of his or her engagement. In other poems in the collection, such as “Coming of Age,” the narrator never seems fully engaged with his fellows, with his efforts to appear at ease socially making him a “spiritual secret agent” (l. 2) or a “spy.” A.E. Housman, a poet Amis revered,5 is invoked in “A.E.H.” to convey the image of the poet as recorder of death and heroism, “who, unbloodied, / Weeps with fury, not from pain” (ll. 7–8). One cannot help but be struck by the incongruity of Amis criticizing Christ for his second-hand knowledge of the world while in so many of his poems the narrator places a deliberate distance between himself and the world.
While problems in Amis’s artistic vision become evident in his poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, one ought not to overlook his literary achievements. In The Evans Country he used the provincial aesthetic to anticipate something like what would become known as postmodernism. When the poet observes the ugliness of his flawed world he generally withholds moral comment. In fact, he often delights in ugliness, as the depictions of the natural world and architecture clearly indicate.6 Although the significance of architecture for Amis has received scant critical attention, his writing career began and ended with commentaries on ugly buildings. His collaborative novel fragment, “Who Else Is Rank,” begins thus: “The house was large with sharp corners like a box of child’s bricks. There was a one-sided portico with glass to which no architect had ever given his consent” (HEHL). In 1995, the last year of his life, Amis wrote an essay/letter to the president of The Royal Institute of British Architects in which he recalled a conversation with an institute member. Amis launches his letter with surprising bluntness:
I would blow up this building as thoroughly and noisily as possible, in protest not at its design but at its occupants, whom I would allow a bare minimum of warning before the detonation. During an irritatingly lavish and convivial dinner there some time ago, one of them countered my attack on his profession by first eliciting my hearty agreement that at most only one new novel in a hundred was worth reading, and then asking rhetorically why I should expect new buildings to be any different. (HEHL)
Amis replied that architects do not possess “the artist’s blessed ability to destroy his mistakes utterly and forthwith” (HEHL). Architectural mistakes, unfortunately, remain in our lives much longer than literary ones.
Amis advocates an ironic celebration of architectural ugliness for the same reasons that the postmodern text Learning from Las Vegas argues against the modern architectural preference for “revolutionary, utopian, and puristic” principles: because one must accept “existing conditions,” even if they are aesthetically distasteful (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1972, 1). Dai Evans not only accepts his environment, but makes it his accomplice. At the beginning of Learning from Las Vegas, the authors announce: “Just as an analysis of the structure of a Gothic cathedral need not include a debate on the morality of medieval religion, so Las Vegas’s values are not questioned here” (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour 1). Connections can be made without drawing moral conclusions. Thus, where the hero awaits his lover, the buildings are “dirty” and “grimy” in The Evans Country’s opening poem; “Tall hotels ablaze with neon” in “Brynbwrla” (l. 15) hold more interest for Evans than the chapel; and a beauty contest, in which Evans’s view of female beauty is revealed as the minority one, is held in the Casino Ballroom in “Maunders.” Even if the content of this poetry sequence is sordid, and the disappointingly unambitious architecture in post-war Swansea matches Evans’s lack of romantic idealism, the poems are never slackly or carelessly written. Brian Shaffer has noted the “solid architecture” of Lucky Jim’s plot in the analogy made between Dixon’s relationship with Margaret and his connection to the university (2006, 44), and similar thematic parallels and careful, suggestive word choice exist in the best of Amis’s poetry.
While his concern for artful creation is evident in The Evans Country, a strong interest in the social role of the artist and the connections between writers, artists, musicians, and the general public does not emerge until the novel Girl, 20 (1971). This interest is absent from most of his early poetry, as he criticizes the surrounding world but never conceives of himself as a participant capable of instigating change. When W.S. Merwin reviewed Amis’s A Case of Samples he admitted to finding something off-putting in both the serious and the comic pieces. The poems of “generalized intellectual statement,” writes Merwin, “sometimes sound to me like a reedy clergyman expounding calculus; they attempt Empson’s intellectual weight and complexity without displaying his power of mind and his ability to haunt one with experience.” He identifies “a tendency to be tricksy” in the comic poems, though “for the most part they are enviable: hard, delightful and as funny on the third reading as on the first” (Merwin 1957, 33). This assessment is fair, and it can also be applied to novels such as One Fat Englishman and Take a Girl Like You. For critics and readers sympathetic to Amis’s type of writing, this “tricksy” tendency may be a positive attribute; indeed, Paul Fussell claims that Amis’s early poetry is inferior to his later work because it lacks the “mocking, self-critical sardonic ‘What About You?’ vein” (170).
In sum, Amis’s best poetry, marked by several of the poems in A Look Round the Estate, resembles his early fiction in its provincialism, sardonic tone, and tendency to non-constructively criticize. This is not surprising, since Philip Larkin’s influence had led Amis to develop this narrative voice. As a poet, Larkin too was primarily provincial in outlook and, as Amis’s ideal reader, he had encouraged his friend to use the bantering, humorous tone of his letters as a narrative device. He also told Amis to “sod up the romantic business actively,” which Zachary Leader interpreted to mean that he should make Lucky Jim “more like a romance, with proper dragons and witches” (Leader 2006, “I Want More Than My Share,” 13). This Amis did, and he followed the formula with great success in his first five novels, but to widen his artistic vision he needed change. In the next three novels, beginning with The Egyptologists, he would write for two new ideal readers, Robert Conquest and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and the influence exerted by both is revealed in the artistic subtexts.