On all sorts of egomaniacs - Zachary Leader in TLS:

'“We shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in the end.” So boasted Philip Larkin in 1974, of his and Kingsley Amis’s influence on English literary culture. The occasion of the boast was Amis’s invitation to edit The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), the successor to W. H. Auden’s edition of 1938. Larkin had previously edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), the successor to W. B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Poetry (1936). That Larkin’s boast was well founded was admitted even by those who deplored his and Amis’s taste, labelling it retrogressive, a lament for “England gone”.

It is hard to see Amis (1922–95) lamenting “England gone”. The novel with which he made his name, Lucky Jim (1954), was as hostile to ersatz English or folk purity (madrigals, recorders, organic husbandry, homemade pottery) as to Frenchified notions of ennui and alienation. Both foreign and domestic strands of cultural pretension, as Jim Dixon sees it, evade reality, the French because it thinks reality an illusion, the English because it thinks illusion is reality. Jim’s big thing, like Amis’s, like Larkin’s, is being undeceived, as clear-sighted about his own hypocrisy as about that of the hypocrites and egomaniacs who surround him, principally his ridiculous boss, Professor Welch, and Welch’s odious son Bertrand.'

(...)

'Being undeceived, or less deceived, can itself be seen in Amisian terms as “English”, in contradistinction to “British,” a term once used to designate a nation thought of by its inhabitants as not just stronger but rightly stronger than other nations. Before he allowed himself to become a Blimpish caricature, Amis was conservative in a Burkean or Orwellian sense, an “English” sense. In a famous passage from “England Your England” (1940), Orwell compares his country to a stuffy Victorian family in which “most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts”. There is also “a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income”. Orwell concludes: “A family with the wrong members in control, that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase”.

One can deplore or despair of one’s family, or make fun of it, as Orwell does, or leave it, but it is still one’s family. At Oxford Amis was a communist, but his experience of the war, especially of the officer class, helped him to arrive at Orwell’s position, to see his enemies as “irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts” rather than greedy, gouging capitalists. In the decade after the war, as the extent of Soviet and Nazi atrocities became known, the dangers of totalizing ideologies, whether of the left or right, contributed to a determination not to be taken in by programmes or extremes, including literary ones, modernism in particular. In this sense, Amis’s anti-modernism was also “English”.

“We shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in the end.” So boasted Philip Larkin in 1974, of his and Kingsley Amis’s influence on English literary culture. The occasion of the boast was Amis’s invitation to edit The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), the successor to W. H. Auden’s edition of 1938. Larkin had previously edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), the successor to W. B. Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Poetry (1936). That Larkin’s boast was well founded was admitted even by those who deplored his and Amis’s taste, labelling it retrogressive, a lament for “England gone”.

It is hard to see Amis (1922–95) lamenting “England gone”. The novel with which he made his name, Lucky Jim (1954), was as hostile to ersatz English or folk purity (madrigals, recorders, organic husbandry, homemade pottery) as to Frenchified notions of ennui and alienation. Both foreign and domestic strands of cultural pretension, as Jim Dixon sees it, evade reality, the French because it thinks reality an illusion, the English because it thinks illusion is reality. Jim’s big thing, like Amis’s, like Larkin’s, is being undeceived, as clear-sighted about his own hypocrisy as about that of the hypocrites and egomaniacs who surround him, principally his ridiculous boss, Professor Welch, and Welch’s odious son Bertrand. In his most famous comic set piece, Dixon tears to bits fantasies of Merrie England in a drunken speech delivered to the entire university, first in imitation of Professor Welch, who has chosen the topic, then in imitation of the university principal.

Being undeceived, or less deceived, can itself be seen in Amisian terms as “English”, in contradistinction to “British,” a term once used to designate a nation thought of by its inhabitants as not just stronger but rightly stronger than other nations. Before he allowed himself to become a Blimpish caricature, Amis was conservative in a Burkean or Orwellian sense, an “English” sense. In a famous passage from “England Your England” (1940), Orwell compares his country to a stuffy Victorian family in which “most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts”. There is also “a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income”. Orwell concludes: “A family with the wrong members in control, that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase”.

One can deplore or despair of one’s family, or make fun of it, as Orwell does, or leave it, but it is still one’s family. At Oxford Amis was a communist, but his experience of the war, especially of the officer class, helped him to arrive at Orwell’s position, to see his enemies as “irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts” rather than greedy, gouging capitalists. In the decade after the war, as the extent of Soviet and Nazi atrocities became known, the dangers of totalizing ideologies, whether of the left or right, contributed to a determination not to be taken in by programmes or extremes, including literary ones, modernism in particular. In this sense, Amis’s anti-modernism was also “English”.

The style of Lucky Jim is clear and straightforward, in the tradition of Henry Fielding, for whom the only source of comedy is “affectation, which has two aspects: vanity and hypocrisy”. These aspects remained the chief target of Amis’s comedy throughout his life. A great engine of comic aggression, he attacked vanity in all its forms, as egotism, selfishness, narcissism.'

(...)

'When, in 1980, his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, left him, for reasons obvious to everyone but himself, Amis set to work on Stanley and the Women (1984), a novel so hostile towards women, the Women’s Movement and therapy (to which he thought Howard in thrall) that his American publishers turned it down. Amis had long been suspicious of therapeutic “openness”, which he thought of as “American”. “How close we seem to be tonight, James”, says Margaret in Lucky Jim, “all the barriers are down at last, aren’t they” – a remark that makes Jim want to “give an inarticulate shout and run out of the bar”. Were Amis’s feelings about women – and, more casually, Jews – those of Stanley and his friend Cliff? “I wouldn’t like it to be thought that Stanley’s thoughts are the author’s last word on the subject, but they’re certainly my thoughts up to a point, enough for me to be able to present a man thinking them.”

Twenty years earlier, newly in love with Howard, Amis’s advice to young men was that it was important to like women, by which he meant

really like them, not just pursuing them or being constantly in their company or talking about them all the time… For all sorts of reasons (economic, social, biological, psychological) men have it in their power to damage women far more than women can damage men. A man who realizes he has this power and never uses it is a man who likes women.'

Read the article here.

I have never read Kingsley Amis, and apart from the misogyny and antisemitism - we should probably not make too much about it - I tend to believe that vanity and hypocrisy are the pillars of comedy, and naiveté of course, a bit of greed.

It's time for Kingsley Amis.