Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis

Richard Bradford

Kingsley Amis always claimed that his fiction was not based on his life, and he worked hard and quite successfully at obscuring the autobiographical threads that run through his novels. But they exist, and Richard Bradford traces the channels between Amis's experiences, his states of mind and his fictionalized versions of both. Bradford's biography shows that it is impossible to offer a comprehensive picture of Amis the man – as husband, philanderer, friend, father, jester, son, boozer, agnostic, pseudo-socialist and club-land Tory – without also considering how each dimension of his life tested and extended his literary skills.

Sometimes he remodelled the present, particularly during the 1950s when his books reflected his double life as family man and prolific libertine. He revistited the past in novels such as The Riverside Villas Murder, a detective story that tells us much about his early relationship with his father. Less frequently he took revenge, notably with his cruel parody of his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in Stanley and the Women.

Readers of Amis's books often feel as if they have had a personal encounter with a shadowy presence behind the words. Bradford's biography embodies this shadow.

'I found Bradford's approach refreshing. Rare among literary critics he writes clearly, doesn't show off and knows a lot about his subject. He presents a fascinating chronicle of Amis's brilliant ear for speech . . . He also brings out the full extent of the symbiosis between Amis and his best friend Philip Larkin: in a way, Larkin invented Amis' – Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

'What Bradford contributes to the picture is a persuasive analysis of the autobiographical sub–text running through the fiction . . . as a result of his painstaking and well–written study, the reader is brought closer to the man and his work' – Simon Rae, Times Literary Supplement

'Recommended . . . Bradford gives an intelligent and interesting account of Amis's life and work, written with an unstrident ease, lucidity and sympathy that would surely have pleased its subject. Bradford is particularly perceptive on the relationship with Philip Larkin, whose superior genius awed and inspired Amis.' – Rupert Christiansen, Spectator

 

RICHARD BRADFORD is Professor of English at the University of Ulster. He previously has taught in the universities of Oxford, Wales and in Trinity College, Dublin. He has written twelve books on a variety of subjects, including two critical monographs of Kingsley Amis.