The second half of this work will show that Amis’s explicitly artistic novels written after The Green Man examine the reciprocal relationship between flawed artists and their peers. Martin Green prematurely and mistakenly suggested that “After The Anti-Death League, Amis seemed to have made up his mind that he could not write novels, and must devote himself to the minor forms of fiction” (1984, 155). His novels are never minor, though experiments in genre, narrative voice, and content have baffled critics who stubbornly measure later works against Lucky Jim. In the novels written after 1970, Amis does not always employ artistic antimodels, but when they do appear they tend to be central, rather than peripheral, characters. This change is due to Amis’s maturity as a writer, which allows him to view artistic creation from multiple perspectives, not just from the point of view of a bored or irritated audience member who feels entitled to ridicule the artist who has unjustly wasted his time. Amis would begin to argue that both the outer audience and inner circle of friends must be held accountable for the production of bad art. He continues to introduce shamming descendants of Bertrand Welch, Gareth Probert, and L.S. Caton in the novels written between 1971 and 1995, but no longer as foils or comic caricatures. Perhaps the most striking change in Amis’s artistic vision is embodied in the implication of the passive observers and recorders who had previously sneered at shamming artists. In Amis’s post-1970 novels, it is neither acceptable nor, strictly speaking, possible to laugh at bad artists, and he suggests that it is our social duty to discourage them from creation if they cannot be improved or at least be made to see the errors of their ways. The figure of Kingsley Amis, writer, also makes its way into the subtext of some of these works, inviting the reader to compare him with the antimodels. Consequently, several novels read like manifestos in which the author justifies artistic decisions and makes claims for the superiority of his own craftsmanship.
In the novels that do not feature antimodels as central characters, Amis still addresses artistic issues that have received little or no critical recognition. He examines publishers, the artist’s inner circle of friends, and the outer audience. These issues combine to reflect an obsessive interest in the artist’s role in society and the attainment of fame. One sees that his position on art substantially changed during the period between the writing of his BLitt thesis and I Want It Now because he had achieved his primary goal of becoming a celebrated writer. The object of his thesis had been to determine how one went about acquiring a readership and reputation, and it was written from the perspective of an unsuccessful fiction writer who was turning into a reluctant academic. Perhaps the failure of the thesis led him to explore its central ideas in his early fiction to see if he had, after all, been right. He secured an ideal reader in Philip Larkin then distanced himself from Larkin while trying to prove his own artistic legitimacy. After acquiring a large band of followers, or readers, he began to challenge them in novels such as Take a Girl Like You and One Fat Englishman by denying them the traditional pleasures of the romantic comedy genre to which they expected him to adhere after Lucky Jim. Since his books continued to sell these experiments were, to an extent, validated, though the increasingly negative reaction of some critics and readers would lead Amis to ponder the role of the audience and its obligations to artists.
Another pattern in Amis’s post-1970 novels is the use of doubles. Though he maintained that, with the exception of L.S. Caton, he never recycled characters and always strove to tell different stories, creative doubling is apparent as he dealt with the same issue or persona twice from diametrically opposed sides. Examples include: two novels about professional musicians (The Alteration and Girl, 20); one novel, The Anti-Death League, that questions the very existence of God and another, The Green Man, in which the divine becomes a character; two novels featuring librarians (That Uncertain Feeling and The Folks that Live on the Hill); a pair of books about Russians (Russian Hide-and-Seek and The Russian Girl); a sequel to Take a Girl Like You (Difficulties with Girls); two analyses of modern psychiatry (Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women); two novels with characters modelled on Peter and Marilyn Quennell (The Folks that Live on the Hill and The Biographer’s Moustache); a second novel set in America, I Want It Now, to go with One Fat Englishman; and two novels about television personalities with large egos (I Want It Now and The Old Devils). The important point in relation to these doubles is that they show Amis’s concern for artistic balance, and his ability to examine any given issue from different sides. Some of the doubles might be more accurately characterized as inversions. For example, two musicians could not have less in common than Hubert Anvil, the pre-pubescent soon-to-be eunuch who sings for the glory of the Roman Catholic Church, and the aging, oversexed avant-garde composer Roy Vandervane. And yet The Alteration and Girl, 20 ask the same fundamental question: should an artist follow the safe, creatively stifling path to fame or risk losing his reputation for the sake of experimentation? Young Hubert chooses the former path and Vandervane the latter. In regard to these doubles, Amis did not simply change certain variables to avoid the charge of creative recycling, but made concerted efforts to consider competing perspectives.
Amis’s interest in, and awareness of, the inner audience emerges in the novels that are often labelled misogynist. Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women follow the Amisian trend of writing against a member of the inner audience. We have seen how Amis minimized the influence of Larkin through the writing of That Uncertain Feeling and The Egyptologists. He attacked Larkin’s profession, then collaborated with Robert Conquest to write about a particularly masculine world – an adulterer’s club – to which Larkin as a bachelor (though not a faithful one) was not privy. Even before the writing of The Egyptologists, Amis had moved on and begun to write with Elizabeth Jane Howard as his inner audience. He not only wrote for her, by detailing the perfection of their love in an imperfect world in The Anti-Death League and I Want It Now, but got her to write for him in One Fat Englishman. To complete the cycle, he then wrote against her in Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women in trying to prove that men do not need women and are better off without them. The pattern was initiated once again with the Sovietologist Conquest through the composition of Russian Hide-and-Seek and The Russian Girl. The latter work includes a poem written by Conquest and it joins Lucky Jim and One Fat Englishman as the third non-collaborative novel with material directly borrowed from the inner audience.
Perhaps the most artistically enlightening aspect of Amis’s novels written after 1970 is their introspective, self-exploratory side. In The Alteration, Ending Up and The Biographer’s Moustache one sees Amis scrutinizing his own aims and achievements. If one of the primary points in his BLitt thesis was to determine which nineteenth-century British writers had aged well, in many late novels he begins to wonder how Kingsley Amis was aging. It will be argued that he understood the necessary components in a successful novel and envisioned the loss of his literary powers in Ending Up, a novel about five septuagenarians who become worse as they get older. The components in Ending Up will be applied to his subsequent works to see how well Amis measured up to his own criteria.