KINGSLEY AMIS

The Folks That Live on the Hill

1990

TAKING A LEAD from pundits and polls, the public pretty much expected Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath in the general election of 1970. I had a contract to write for the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine, and so I was invited to the party that Michael Berry, then the owner of the Telegraph, made a point of hosting after every election, from the moment the voting closed until the last constituencies declared. The party was in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel. At the far end of the room, various larger-than-life Snows and Dimblebys dominated a giant television screen. Among those at the table with me was Ken Tynan, elegant in a white tuxedo with a bright red tie and in his buttonhole a matching red carnation. There could be no mistaking his allegiance or his expectation. I had imagined that Ken had to be clever but not very nice, only to discover that he was not at all clever but quite nice, if mostly to those celebrating the political orthodoxies of the hour. Borrowing from Rossini, I took to thinking of him as un barbier’ di qualità.

Also at that table was Kingsley Amis. The novelist David Lodge had given me (and signed too) a reprint of an essay he had published in the Critical Quarterly arguing that Amis might go in for comedy but nonetheless had a “sardonic sense of literary tradition,” and therefore was in the company of Henry James and James Joyce, no less. At the same time, he could make a crack like “Change means worse.” The results of the voting began to trickle in and suddenly it became apparent that the Conservatives were making gains and might well win. Tynan looked very stony and Kingsley stood up on his chair and then on the table, whereupon he danced a sort of fandango and shouted, “Show the shaggers!” and “Five more years outside barbed wire!”

The opening lines of a poem written to mark a milestone birthday seem true to Kingsley’s perception of himself: “Fifty today, old lad? / Well, that’s not doing so bad:/ All those years without / Being really buggered about.” A private dinner party at which we were guests, and so were Kingsley and his then wife Elizabeth Jane Howard, yielded a similar outburst of his core personality. The lady on his right said that she had just finished reading his new novel and didn’t think it was as good as his previous novels. Sitting at a round table with a glass top, we all could see Kingsley’s knuckles whitening as he clenched his fists, and then he barked at the top of his voice, “Fuck you!”

On another occasion, at dinner in our house, Kingsley lectured on the importance of not joining the Common Market. My diary notes him saying: “We don’t want anything to do with those people. The French are bastards, the Germans are bastards, most of the Italians are too. Two and a half bastards want to get hold of us. As for the little countries, Belgium ‘is just a little sod.’ He’s in thrall to the monosyllables, yet I caught him on the BBC saying what a pleasure it had been to discover the music of Albinoni.”

Another diary entry, dated February 1964, describes Kingsley coming to the office of the Spectator to organize a letter of protest to the Times. (I was then the literary editor, David Watt the foreign affairs correspondent and Joan the telephone operator.) “Flitting from room to room, he borrows a pound off David Watt, off Joan, off the managing director, the fatuous Mr Elliott. ‘I’ve got a girl downstairs, a bit tight, who I’m screwing. … At about two thirty he wants to take the boys out to lunch. He is wearing a green fake-Austrian leather jacket with silver buttons and a red leather tie. ‘Rather natty.’ The boys are David Watt and myself. The girl downstairs is Elizabeth Jane Howard. We go to the Greek restaurant on Whitfield Street. Amis drinks most of a bottle of retsina and then another of Greek brandy. We leave, pulling him out, at four. ‘What’s the hurry?’ he blurts. He insists on paying from a roll of fivers. In the street he asks us if we know how arctic explorers shit. ‘It’s been bothering me for a long time.’ He explains how they have reversible trousers, take them on and off in layers. Incoherent and laughing at himself: ‘The turd is frozen hard, you see.’”

My diary continues, “Amis ringing me about the Aldous Huxley book on Science and Literature. ‘I had a glance through it this morning on the john, it’s no bloody good at all.’”