TheNightmareinKingsleyAmissNovels

TheNightmareinKingsleyAmissNovels

byOdetaManuelaBelei

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JournalofHumanisticandSocialStudies(JournalofHumanisticandSocialStudies),issue:1/2013,
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The Nightmare in Kingsley Amiss Novels

Odeta Manuela Belei
Abstract:
Amis is chiefly known as a comedic novelist of mid-to late-20th century
British life, but his literary work extended into many genres poetry, essays
and criticism, short stories,, anthologies, and a number of novels in genres such
as science fiction and mystery. Amis, originally wished to be a poet, and turned
to writing novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued
throughout his career to write poetry which is known for its typically
straightforward and accessible style, yet which often masks a nuance of
thought, just as it does in his novels.
Keywords: Angry Young Man, Lucky Jim, biography, fiction, nightmare

The conservative trend also began to be perceptible in Amiss novels

of the 1960s, in which he turned his attention from the unsatisfied
outsider figure to insiders who were often portrayed as obnoxious
representatives of this decade. In 1965, he divorced his first wife and
married the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. His novels of the 1960s,
the mainstream books of any rate feature a closer, more cynical look
at the morals and follies of marriage, and the relationship between men
and women. The turn toward deeper seriousness that first appeared in
Take a Girl Like You is echoed in the frequent sadness and the wasted
emotion and wasted lives of books such as One Fat Englishman (1963),
The Anti Death League (1966) and The Green Man (1969). This period
also evinces a greater interest in experimenting with genre fiction,
mysteries, ghost, stories, science fiction, and James Bond.
The next four novels, The Green Man, Girl 20, The Riverside Villas
Murder and Ending Up, are proofs of Amiss increasing concern with
the question of human depravity, the ambiguity of perfidy, and the
existence of evil forces in a world that we like to conceive of as being
driven by good. In Take a Girl Like You and The Anti Death-League,

Paper presented at the International Symposium RESEARCH AND EDUCATION IN

INNOVATION ERA, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, 8-9th of November 2012.

Assistant Lecturer PhD, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, [email protected]

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evil is felt as a dark power loose in the world, as a vague, indefinite

force that pervades modern life and takes shape in society and its
institutions. In the novels of the late sixties and early seventies,
however, the outside evil not only threatens and pursues; but now calls
out to an evil within, and sometimes finds a ready answer. In these
novels Amiss characters live on a darkling plain in a nightmare world
in which both young and old are victims of a predominant malevolent
presence. The potency of evil, the destructiveness of guilt, the often
uncertain quest for identity and peace of mind, these are some of Amiss
central philosophical concerns during this dark period.
The Green Man is beyond the shadow of a doubt his most peculiar,
unsettling work of fiction. The novel offers a preoccupation with God,
death and evil reminiscent of The Anti Death-League, but it is different
from its predecessors in both sentiment and technique. It begins with a
mixture of social satire, fable, comic tale and ghost story. Interested in
fantasy from his childhood, Amis had always wanted to write a ghost
story but had been waiting for the right idea to strike him. One day it
presented itself to him: What happens when the man who sees ghosts is
an alcoholic? (Salwak, 1992: 165). Finding the answer was compelling
enough to start his new novel.
In The Anti Death-League, God has left His heaven, all is wrong
with the world. Nevertheless in The Green Man the struggle is not
similar to the one in the previous novel. The battle here is not against the
sensations of emptiness created when morality disappeared; it is a fight
against a manifest agent of evil: Dr Thomas Underhill. The seventeenth-century
wizard has raped young girls, created obscene visions, murdered his
wife as well as his enemies, and now invades the twentieth century in
pursuit of the narrators thirteen year old daughter.
Like That Uncertain Feeling, this novel is narrated retrospectively
from the first person viewpoint of its protagonist, Maurice Allington.
The story begins on a hot summer day in August 1968. The Green Man
is a medieval coaching inn at Fareham Hertfordshire, and fifty-three-year
old Maurice Allington is its landlord. Maurice is a man who spends
most of the time thinking about death-or at least the total extinction.
Unlike Jim Dixon, John Lewis, Garnet Bowen, Patrick Standish and
others, Maurice Allington is given the unique opportunity to make sense
of the world through supernatural intervention. His transformation is
from an alienated man to an unwitting hero who chooses to take on the
responsibilities of an absentee God.
There are several parallels between Maurice and his creator. By the
end of the 1960s Amiss drinking habits were beginning to endanger his

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health and, his sanity. Jane testifies to the fact that he would often match
the bottle-a-day intake of Maurice. The bouts of anxiety attacks that he
had feared in the late 1940s were symptoms of mental disorder. Maurice
suffers from jactitations, an uncontrollable twitching of limbs
frequently accompanied by hypnogogic hallucinations, and so did
Amis. Jane remembers that Amis would sometimes hallucinate. On
several occasions he became incapable to distinguish between actual and
imagined events; once he spent a day arguing with her and forgot who
exactly had said what the previous evening.
Maurice slept with Diana on the day after his fathers death. It is
surely not a coincidence that when Amis, after his fathers death, was
living with Hilly, he was also having an affair with Jane. While William
Amis was living with his sons family the situation was endurable, yet
for father and son uneasy. Maurice, like his creator, is decent and
tolerant towards his father, but his description of him is that he cannot
understand his life; this can be a description of Amis father too.
Martin, like Maurices son, did not like his father, and he was
frequently angered by the way in which he regarded his own world as
more important then the one he was supposed to share with his family.
Three years after the publication of The Green Man, Amis gave a
broadcast on BBC radio called Kingsley Sees a Ghost. In it he
describes how he had supposedly wandered into near-duplicate events of
The Green Man, himself playing Maurices part. The broadcast was a
hoax, but Amis had no interest in taking his audience in, he later
exclaimed:
I had done some work on making it sound credible, calling self and wife by our
names, of course, mentioning friends by name, and using a conversation style, with
plenty of sort of and I mean. All Id hoped to do was carry about three
quarters of the listener with me until about three-quarters of the way through when
theyd say, Oh, come off it, that is absolutely impossible, and would listen to the
rest of the story as sort of thriller. (Salwak, 1992: 173)

On the subjects of ghosts he told one interviewer:

Its difficult to say whether or not I believe in them. My feelings changed in the
course of writing the book. You point a camera at a ghost, and theres nothing on the
film: but this is not to say you didnt see something. I find it remarkable that
different people seem to use the same thing, years and years apart. So: do I believe
in ghosts? No. but Im afraid of them. (Salwak, 1992: 174)

The next novel, Girl 20 involves two male protagonists, both of

whom reflect features of Amis. Sir Roy Vandervane is a 53-year old

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composer and conductor, and his friend and confidant Douglas Yandell,
who tells the story, is a music critic and twenty years younger. Their age
difference functions as an autobiographical trick, because Amis passes
on to Vandervane many of his own temperamental and behavioural
features from his early thirties; he is irresponsible and egotistical. As
narrator, Yandell serves as Sir Roys conscience, criticising his
behaviour, trying to correct his mistakes, and attempting to rekindle in
him a sense of obligation to himself, his family, and his music. The Girl
20 of the title is actually seventeen, and Sylvia Meers is an awful
combination of the anarchy, narcissism and hostile indulgence that, in
Amis view, were the predominant features of contemporary youth
culture. She is also Vandervanes mistress; in 1971 Amis was not having
an affair with a seventeen year old girl, but his creation of Sylvia was
one element of the novels private investigation of a state of mind.
Most reviewers of the novel saw it as not only as a satire on youth
orientated culture but also a statement of lasting truth about the human
situation. The Times Literary Supplement noted Amiss serious concern
with sex and aging (Salwak, 1992: 175), While John Higgins in the
London Times cited the novel as a book of the year and proclaimed it an
entertaining and accurate observation of popular manners (Salwak,
1992: 175). Bernard Levin said that it is more searching in its
revelation of human truth than almost anything he has written. In a
letter to Amis, Levin expanded on his views, claiming the novel to be
magnificent, one of the best things Amis had ever written:
That is was going to be funny I knew in advance, but even I who an no
lukewarm admirer of yours was hardly prepared for the superb pace (dare I say
Mozartzian ?), the iron control of the shape, and the inexorable progress towards
an ending which, though one of the most appalling and moving things I have ever
read (I literally couldnt sleep at all that night as it went round and round in my
head), was seen, as soon as it arrived, to be contained in what had gone before and
the fixed point towards which everything else had been moving. My dear friend is
an honour to be living in the same world as a man who can write like that.
(Salwak, 1992: 175)

Its settings and locations are its most explicit autobiographical

component. It begins with Yandell receiving a phone message asking
him to visit his old friend, Vandervane, with who he has been out of
touch for several years, at his residence on the outskirts of London.
Yandell has not been there before, and his account of the place is an
almost exact representation of the house in which Jane and Amis lived
from 1967 to 1975. When Amis and Jane returned from the United
States in 1968 they began looking for a larger house. The one in Maida

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Vale was not big enough to accommodate its expanding number of

permanent and occasional residents. Gladsmuir in Barnet was a
detached, Georgian country house. The eight years in Barnet were
pivotal in several ways. When they arrived, the fun and optimism of
Amiss first three years with Jane were still the predominant features of
their relationship, but by the time they moved to Hampstead in 1975,
they were both trying to preserve something that had disappeared. The
Green Man was written in the early years when the sign of the
disintegration appeared and Girl 20 casts even more pessimistic shadows
which would continue to fall across his fiction until the mid-1980s.
The previous four novels had described the progress of his
relationship with Jane, but after Girl 20 there seemed little more to be
said. For the first time, Amis chose to set a novel in the past, his own.
The Riverside Villas supplements regret and belated affection with
reinvention. Like most writers, Amis wanted to return to his childhood.
After publishing nine novels from a darkening adult perspective,
perhaps his contemplation of some of his own adolescent interests
offered an escape into simpler and more innocent emotions.
The setting is autobiographical. The central character, Peter
Furneaux, is fourteen, and 1936 is the year of the story. The family in
Riverside Villas is an exact reproduction of the post-First World War
semi detached way in which Amiss family lived in Norbury, and
Peters school, Blackfriars Grammar, is a version of Amiss City of
London. His father always referred to William Amis as Captain
Furneaux. Peter disagrees with him on everything from cricket to correct
English, in much the same way that Kingsley and his father had engaged
in bouts of verbal warfare.
Amis had first written to Sir John Betjeman after the latters
enthusiastic view of Lucky Jim. They became friends and communicated
regularly by means of letters. Amis had sent him an early review copy of
The Riverside Villas Murder and asked for his impressions. He wrote: I
am savouring it slowly. It is full of the poetry of your acute observation
and delightful juxtaposition of words. A couple of weeks later,
Betjeman wrote again:
I enjoyed every word of the book, including the extremely complicated end, but
top for me is the chapter called Moments of Delight. I think it would be very
nice if you were to write a school story. No one has done it properly for years.
What is so wonderful about your writing about Peter Furneaux, old boy, is that
youve entered completely into the unshockable practical mind of Peter and his
friend, Reg. thats the way to do it Its a wonderful book and your style is so
vigorous; your observation is so sharp, and our narrative power so strong and
economical. It is an honour to know you, old top. (Salawak, 1992: 181182)

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In an interview conducted soon after publication, Amis held that the

novel was a new departure, a murder mystery whose plotlines would be
far more significant then those of mainstream fiction. The specifics of
who committed the crime, how and what clues were left, would
effectively determine the behaviour, the future and the emotional
condition of the characters involved. He also spoke of how the nature of
the project had involved him in more research than ever before. He had
chosen a date of The Time, Punch, and Radio Times. He wanted his
invention of the narrative of the crime to be accompanied with the
actualities of its setting, other crimes reported in the papers, sport, and
weather, what people would be listening to on the radio (Bradford, 1989: 273).
The murder of the title is committed by the Furneauxs neighbour,
Mrs Trevelyan, who kills herself before she is charged. The victim is her
lover, Inman, and a few days before the crime she introduces Peter to
sex. She is presented as a married woman whose intelligence along with
her emotional and sexual unorthodoxy is at odds with the world in
which she lives. Amis was doing two things. He is projecting his late
adolescence into his early adulthood, and he is recalling an event that
reinforced the irreconcilable differences between him and his father
(Bradford, 1989: 274). In the summer of 1947 Amis was at home when
his father, searching for cigarettes in his coat, found a pocket of
condoms. William Amis informed him that not only was sleeping with a
woman a vile matter, but that the issue becomes even more immoral if
the woman is married, like Elizabeth Simpson was. In 1943 Amis was
21 year old, soon to confront the distinct possibility of violent death, and
his father treated him as though he were still fourteen. Elizabeth
Simpson had not killed anyone, but for William she was guilty of an
equally appalling crime in which his son had connived. William Amis
died on 18 April 1963, when the Amises (Kingsley and Hilly) were in
Spain. And in In Memoriam W.R.A. written afterwards, Amiss tone
is apologetic, regretful, and slightly guilty. In The Green Man Maurices
father, too, has seen the ghost, but Maurice is always too busy to listen
to him and he dies, desperately trying and failing to speak to his son
about an experience he knows they have shared. And in Amiss novel
You Cant Do Both, Robin is outside his ill fathers hospital room,
knowing that it is too late to talk to him about their previous arguments,
their mutually felt but avoided feelings of affection. The years in
Swansea with his father could have been different if Amis had been
more tolerant.

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The Riverside Villas is an intriguing piece of work because it

reinforces the truth according to which Amis fiction was his
autobiography. The only major figure in the novel that seems not to be
based upon Amis recollections is Colonel Manton, the detective in
charge of the case, but he is in fact a version of Amis himself.
Any writer who is interested in the full range of human activity will
not omit old age as a topic of thought and exploration. In 1973, Amis,
aged fifty-one, wrote in a letter:
I enclose the opening of my still-untitled current work of fiction. That sounds
like jargon, but in fact I dont know whether its going to be a novel or a short
novel or a novella of greater or lesser length or what. 120150 pages are my
guess. Ive done 70 One thing the book isnt going to be is a serious study of
old age... At least, thats what I say now. (Amis, 1973: 186)

Intimations of morality occur to his characters in all his early novels

from John Lewis and Patrick Standish to James Churchill and Maurice
Allington. In Ending Up, death is more than a suggestive presence, for
old age enters in the form of five characters, all miserable, lonely
septuagenarians. There is real sadness and compassion in this book, and
outrage, too. Betjeman wrote to Amis that it is a book to make one
want to cut ones throat before getting old. It is your best (Betjeman,
1978: 187). One day Amis asked himself, What would this sort of
arrangement be like if one had a pack of characters who were all about
twenty years older? He tried to imagine a situation where everybody
had been there for a good long time, so each other was most
vulnerable.
Malcom Bradbury said about the novel that it brought to the centre
of his writing a theme that had long belonged to it, that of the pains of
aging and morality (Salwak, 1992: 188). The origins of that theme can
be traced to Amiss first published novel, The Legacy, completed when
he was twenty one. In the early work, the protagonist meets Mr Masters
and wonders what life would be like at the age of sixty, without money
or family or friends; tawdry, ridiculous and terrifying, it advertised the
supremacy of loneliness among all known evils. The protagonist
decides that he must devote all his waking hours to the systematic
avoidance of such a horror (Salwak, 1992: 188).
In Take a Girl Like You, Patricks muted awareness of his own
mortality, flares up on occasional painful realisations, while in The Anti
Death-League and The Green Man, death is an omnipresent threat. This
theme is extending from the Green Man to this novel, as Martin Green
points out when he observes that while the expectation and the wish for

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death is only incidental there, it is central to Ending Up (Salwak,

1992: 189). As a result, Amis creates the illusion of seeing a great deal
happen in a short temporal space. To put it bluntly, Philip Toynbee
writes for the Observer. Mr Amis has never done better. Everything in
Ending Up is beautifully spare and accurate (Salwak, 1992: 189) and
Bernard Levin called it as good and as powerful and as haunting as
anything he has ever written (Salwak, 1992: 189). In 1976 it was
named Book of the Year in the Yorkshire Post and was nominated as a
finalist for Englands most prestigious literary award, the Booker
McConnell Fiction Prize.
Part of what is remarkable about Ending Up is that in such a short
novel Amis is able to reveal so much about his five central characters:
Adela Bastable and her brother, Bernard, Derrick Shortell, Marigold
Pyke and George Zeyer. The creation of the inhabitants of TuppeneyHappeny Cottage, in a state of obliged togetherness was a projection of
Amiss feelings about Lemons. The permanent residents were himself,
Jane, Monkey and Sargy. For three years, until 1971 when she died,
Katherine Howard, Janes mother had lived with them. Soon after that
her room was reoccupied by the poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis, an old
friend of Jane, who died there in 1972.
Bertrand is seventy-five, dying of cancer; Amis calls him the most
unpleasant of my characters. He is an ex-army officer. Homosexuality
in the novel is a device employed by Amis to divide features of him
between two separate male characters. The characters army background
was taken from Amiss. During the army he had frequently ridiculed and
attempted to break down the class-based division between officers and
squaddies.
Amis told his biographer, Eric Jacobs, of how Jane had complained
that Victor Gollancz, whom she had met, could never remember who
she was and kept mistaking her for an actress. From here, Amis created
a female character, Marigold, who is selfish, vain and an ex-actress. The
fifth member of the household is George Zeyer, an ex-academic. He had
a stroke, has to spend much of his time in bed and suffers from aphasia.
Again, there are echoes of Lemmons. George is a refuge from
Czechoslovakia who acquires the title of Emeritus Professor of Central
European History from Northampton University. When Amis began
planning the novel one of his closest friends, Tibor Szamuely, had
recently died of cancer. Szamuely is from Hungary not Czechoslovakia,
but was also a historian whose most respected work, The Russian
Tradition was published posthumously in the same year as Ending Up.

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Amis created George Zeyer as a tribute to his last friend. He became the
least pretentious, perhaps the most endearing resident of the cottage.
In Ending Up, death has taken over the role which love traditionally
plays in fiction as the most central and significant experience of life,
which must illuminate and confer meaning to everything. Martin Green
argues:
Indeed, there is something more impressive than compensation in the novel:
there is already recognition of the virtues of these humiliated and self
humiliating people Ending Up successfully controls and indeed turns to profit
the sense of misery, both individual and general, out of which it arises. It is as
successful on its own terms as The Green Man. But those terms are harrowing
ones. As a document, both personal and cultural, it is very painful. (Green, 1984: 162)

REFERENCES:
Novels:
Amis, K., Take a Girl Like You, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1961.
Amis, K., The Green Man, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1970.
Amis, K., Girl 20, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1972.
Amis, K., The Riverside Vilas Murder, London, Penguin Books, 1984.
Amis, K., The Anti-Death League, London, Penguin Books, 1987.
Critics:
Amis, K., The Legacy, in his Collection, Amis Collection, Henry E.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Bejeman, J., Collection, University of Victoria, British Columbia.
Bernard Levin letter, 2 November 1971, Rpt in Amis Kingsley Collection.
Bradbury, M., No, Not Bloomsbury, New York, Columbia University Press,
1988.
Bradford, R., Lucky Him, London, Peter Owen, 2001.
Clive, J., Profile 4: Kingsley Amis, in The New Review, 1 July 1974.
Dale, S., Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1992.
Green, M., The English Novel in the Twentieth Century, London and Boston,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Gross, D., Having it Both Ways, in Literary Supplement, 24 November,
1993.
Higgins, J., Books of the Year: Times Critics and Reviewers Make a Choice for
1971, in Times, 9 December 1971.
Levin, B., Books of the Year, in Observer, 15 December 1974.
Oakes, P., Recent Fiction, in Truth, 26 August 1955.
Toynbee, P., Kicking the Bucket, in Observer, 2 June 1974.

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Interviews:
Kingsley Sees a Ghost: Broadcast on BBC Radio, published in 1972; Rep. in his
Collected Short Stories 1980.
Amis, K., to Dale Salwak, 13 April 1973.

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