Experience by Martin Amis, Cape, 401pp, £18 in UK
The Letters of Kingsley Amis edited by Zachary Leader, HarperCollins, 1,208pp, £24.99 in UK
Some wise thinker has observed that the greatest favour a father can do his son is to die young. Kingsley Amis, after Evelyn Waugh the finest comic novelist of the 20th century, and a not inconsiderable poet, was not noted for such acts of selfless generosity. He died in 1995, at the age of 73; at that time his second son, Martin, was 46 - not old, in this era of increasing longevity, but old enough to feel his father's death not as any kind of release but as the loss of an essential support. Although the old devil was a longish time dying - in August he had suffered a fall, and probably a stroke, but lived on in increasing misery until late October - his family of two sons and a daughter, and a divorced but dearly loved wife, were, in Martin's account, devastated. Kingsley's biographer, the hapless Eric Jacobs, reported in the Sunday Times that at the funeral only the daughter, Sally, cried. Not so, the son insists: "Everybody cried."
It is possible to divide all writers, of either gender, into fathers and sons. Think about it. Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, George Eliot are fathers; Marlowe, Kleist, Dostoyesvky, Virginia Woolf are sons. Martin Amis is now 51, but as a writer he still has not lost that youthful ferocity which made his early novels, such as The Rachel Papers and Other People, so vividly, so appallingly, successful. In Experience, a volume of memoirs, his past is summoned up pristine and gleaming, as if it had all happened yesterday. For most men of fifty-plus the years of youth will have become a kind of immediate antiquity, a lost land to be looked back on in dazed amazement - where did all that time go? - but for Amis the age of flowered shirts and crushed velvet flares exists in a timeframe wholly conterminous with his present-day status as a famously, one might almost say notoriously, successful novelist. Towards the end of Experience he locates himself with wry accuracy: "the parents are going, the children are staying, and I am somewhere in between".
As everyone who even glances at the newspapers must know by now, Martin Amis was spurred to write Experience partly by what he sees as a betrayal of his father and his father's family by the biographer - or, The Biographer - Eric Jacobs, who kept a record of his subject's dying months and printed it as a series in the Sunday Times not long after Kingsley had died. In an appendix, "The Biographer and the Fourth Estate", the younger Amis gives a sound kicking not only to Jacobs's shins, but to the broad backside of the English press as well. The Biographer he likens to Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, "A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint", the " `deformed and scurrilous Greek', compelled by his own baseness to see deformity everywhere". As for the "toiling smallholders of the Fourth Estate: to their world-famous attributes of intrusiveness, negligence, vulgarity, and dipsomania we may add what Kingsley called their `non-committal superiority of manner', their habit of `pervasive unspecific irony', and their `cruising hostility' ". Whew.
Martin Amis has good reason to be hostile to the English press. There was the "scandal" of his seeking a half-million advance for his novel The Information - he got it, sort of, in the end - the sagas of his dental problems, of the falling out with his long-time friend, the novelist Julian Barnes, and of his divorce and rapid re-marriage. Bruising stuff. He wonders at the fascination with which broadsheet journalists regard him, but surely he is being disingenuous. After all, he was born with a silver pen in his hand, had a gilded if rackety childhood, and achieved literary success at a depressingly early age (Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, May 10th, 1979: "Last year Martin earned £38,000. Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit"), married a woman who was not only beautiful but also a philosopher, for God's sake, then left her and married another beauty, this one a highly talented writer. How can he expect the hacks not to hate him? In the 1970s, a New Statesman competition for unlikeliest book title was won by the entry "Martin Amis: My Struggle". Funny, but unfair. Martin Amis's talent is entirely his own, and his success has had little to do with his father's eminence.
A lesser artist might even have indulged in a whinge or two about the difficulty of being the writer son of a successful novelist, but not Amis: early reviewers of his work, he says, "seemed to think that it must have been extra difficult for me, coming out from behind my father, but it wasn't; his shadow served as a kind of protection". This is admirably candid, and generous, too. Experience is no record of father-son tensions and tantrums; Martin Amis loved, and loves, his father, and does him honour in these pages, an honour that Kingsley would surely have appreciated. The portrait of the older man that emerges has its patches of darkness. Kingsley Amis when young was a man of the left, but moved steadily and relentlessly rightward as he aged, and ended up as a jingoist little-Englander spouting preposterous views on everything from nuclear weapons to Michael Heseltine's mother. He was also, on the evidence of his letters, one of the funniest, warmest and most endearing human beings a son could hope to have for a father - funniest, especially. Here he is in 1952 writing to Philip Larkin - to whom he "can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, brutal, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful feelings that I don't want anyone else to know about" - after taking his children to a circus, and finding the clowns entirely unfunny:
Why are some of them dwarfs? Why? Are they supposed to appeal to adults? Or to children? Or both? How could anybody ever have begun to imagine at any time that one of them might possibly some day ever get anywhere near being the slightest bit funny? I mean, that's just not one of the ways of being funny, is it? Even if you were very good at it, I mean. I mean, if you tried to be funny by putting a births, marriages and deaths column into medium-grade cipher and writing the result up on a blackboard in front of an audience of Leghorn roosters and cashiered army officers, that couldn't be funny, however good you were at it, could it? Well then.
And since we are on the subject, we may as well have an example of how much of that humour his son has inherited. This is Martin Amis writing of his dental travails, which included at one point having all his upper teeth removed, leaving him ashamed to show his face in public:
As for the transitional period, the week of oral nudity . . . : it seemed to defy contemplation. But I reckoned I would be comfortable enough in my coalhole or in the cupboard beneath the stairs among the fuseboxes and the geranium bulbs, with somebody rolling the odd thermos of soup under the door. When the day came I would unfurl myself from the foetal position and emerge, as pale as a Sex Pistol, for the first fitting.
"As pale as a Sex Pistol": that is the mark of genius.
The publication of these two books has caused a kind of feeding frenzy in the broadsheet press in Britain, which is ironic, given Martin's opinion of those same broadsheets. Seeing his and his father's words and photographs plastered on the front of every cultural section of the papers over the past two or three weeks, one might have been forgiven for wondering if Amis fils is being what the Irish call a little Irish in his quickness to bite the microphone that interviews him; next thing we shall hear him on Desert Island Discs or the Late, Late Show assuring us in the breathy way of guests on these occasions that he is really a "very private person". However, Experience forgives all; it is supremely better than the hype would have given us any reason to expect or to hope for. Page for page, it is probably the best piece of prose you are likely to read this year. It is moving, angry, honest, and above all wonderfully stylish; it is packed with incident and anecdote, and very, very funny. Parts of it do not quite succeed, particularly the sections dealing with the author's first cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared in 1973, and was later discovered to have been one of Frederick Wests victim's - but then, how could such horror be written about successfully? Amis is to be admired for taking the risk of trying.
The volume of Kingsley Amis's letters is a mighty undertaking. Poor Jacobs, The Biographer, was supposed to have been the editor, but his Sunday Times indiscretion got him sacked by the family. Zachary Leader has done an exhaustive, and surely exhausting, job, erecting around the text a vast scholarly apparatus that is almost comic in its inappropriateness to the content of the letters, which are full of jokes, squibs, curses and indefensibly outrageous opinions. Amis re's pere's epistolary style is much more unbuttoned and raffish than that of his books, where even at his funniest he writes with such hallucinatory formal rectitude that he sounds like a grammarian - "I feel it's so important to be correct in diction and sentiment that I don't mind being a bit flat" - and there are at least three laughs per page, and at more than a thousand pages of text, that's a lot of laughter.
The picture of their author that these letters paint is by turns savage and compassionate, brave and shrinking, loving and unforgiving, especially toward his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard. The politics are unremittingly extreme, the world-view misanthropic, the humour irresistible, even when the opinions are appalling. He was a strange and in many ways wonderful man, and he should have the last word. In his fine eulogy for his lifelong friend Philip Larkin, there is a description which might well apply to Amis himself:
If he regarded the world severely or astringently, it was a jovial astringency. He could be at his funniest when uttering those same painful truths about life as those he made so devastating in his poetry. And it was all from the heart.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times