Kingsley Amis was an awful chauvinist – and the funniest writer in history. Roger Lewis salutes him on his centenary
All hail the King
Hilly and Kingsley Amis with Sally, Philip and Martin Amis, Swansea, 1956
DANIEL FARSON/GETTY
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t’s a good job that, a century after he was born, the works of Sir Kingsley Amis CBE aren’t generally in print, as they’d be hastily cancelled, with students and lecturers running a mile. The attitudes on parade in his novels are very much, shall we say, of their time – the fifties through to the seventies – and harden in the end into a sort of caricatured Garrick Club gruffness, or a Colonel Blimpishness. Those attitudes are nevertheless startling, even to his admirers, and were always misogynistic, chauvinistic. Take a Girl Like You, for example, published in 1960, is basically about rape, and how an arrogant male (Patrick Standish) is ‘justified’ in behaving as he behaves if 20 The Oldie February 2022
the female in question, Jenny Bunn, is beautiful and provocative – as if, underneath, despite protests, she’s asking for it. In Amis’s world, sex, pretty much a chap’s full-time occupation, alleviates the tension caused by women – who are (according to Stanley and the Women [1984] and Difficulties with Girls [1998]) an alien band going in for superstition, religious mania, folklore, horoscopy and witchcraft, and who are generally less rational than your chaps. Amis is also dated in that the London (or Swansea) he describes is already historical. People drink and drive with impunity and park easily. The middle classes and ordinary people such as
journalists live in big houses in nice districts. Pub landlords are disagreeable ‘characters’. Cabbies are opinionated Cockneys. Asians running corner shops are a novelty. And everyone sneers at the ‘queers’: ‘Right, on your way, brother. Out. I’m not having you in my house. Go on, hop it… There’s nothing says I got to have one of you in here, OK? Not yet, there isn’t. Any moment now but not yet. So out.’ The point of Amis, archaic sexual opinions aside, is that all the incidental business, the notes on human behaviour, is the funniest in the English language – not excluding Evelyn Waugh. If my copies of Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard
