Amis and the 'Great' miss

A couple of weeks ago, while doing the annual pre-Diwali cleaning — me, the books; wife, everything else— I came across an old paperback by Kingsley Amis. I remembered having bought it from the pavement bookseller outside the old Coffee House in Connaught Place in the early 1970s, for Rs 2.

It was called Ending Up and was about a lot of old English people who, to cut costs, live together in a large cottage. The only reason I bought it even though I was in my early 20s was that it was by Amis. Of course, I enjoyed the idiosyncratic characters thoroughly, especially the old Brigadier who, wrote Amis, “farted in a military manner”. I have wondered ever since what that manner might be.

The paperback was crumbling. So I threw it into the carton meant for the kabadiwala. But that book did set me thinking: Was Amis the only writer who wrote books for and about old people? I can be corrected, I suppose, but I rather suspect he was.

In fact, he wrote as many as six, starting with Jake’s Thing in 1978 to The Folks that Live on the Hill in 1990. In between, there were The Old Devils, Stanley and the Women, and Difficulties with Girls. He died in 1995 when he was only 73. 

The sixth — written as early as 1963 — was, in fact, the first. It is, in my opinion, his best. It is called One Fat Englishman. Its hero, if he can be called that, represents everything that political correctness has abolished now: Racist, misogynist, misanthrope, choleric, entitled and perpetually horny.

Missing Amis

India missed Amis. Even in my generation, there were barely a dozen people who admired his writing. 

And we came across him not in the regular bookshops but on the pavements where importers imported remaindered paperbacks by weight rather than the title. As impecunious students, we bought him only because fresh imports being sporadic, there was nothing else left to buy. 

The other such writer, about whom I will write next time, was Anthony Burgess. Unlike Amis, who the newly politically correct England hated, Burgess remained the writer’s writer and, therefore, not very well known in the mass market.

But coming back to Amis and books about old people — how they grow old, how they manage without food and sex but hanker equally after both, how they despise the young and so on — it is puzzling as to why more fiction has not been written for them. 

After all, there are lots of people still around who grew up when reading was not confined to Facebook, Twitter and suchlike. There is a huge market waiting to be served and it is being ignored by publishers, who have decided that the only way to go is the J K Rowling way.

But the two markets are not mutually exclusive. It is, if you ask me, commercially stupid to ignore the market for books about the old. I sincerely hope some Indian publisher will commission such books. There is no shortage in India of retired people who can also write.

Unlucky Jim

Amis was, as an Irish friend of mine put it, a writer of “men’s books”. What she meant, I suppose, was that he wrote about women in a genuinely puzzled way, about wine and whiskey in a genuinely fond way and about everything else in a genuinely contemptuous tone that put women off.  “Like you,” she said.

Having read almost all of his 25 novels, it seems to me that one reason Amis will not be one of the “Greats” is that people mistook his characters’ attitudes to be his own and assumed that the story in each book was about himself. In fact, he used to moan a lot about this. 

One reason Amis never made it big beyond the literary cocktail circuit was that America rejected him. His portrayal of them — in One Fat Englishman — as being crass in scores of ways put off the reviewers and after that, he never had much of a chance there. 

This came on top of half of the UK — the women — rejecting him. That would still have been fine had not the British been growing steadily androgynous in their attitudes. But this change locked Amis out of the mainstream male market too.

Today barely anyone remembers him and even I, a huge fan, was reminded of him only because I had been asked (tasked?) to discard some books. In the end, the ladies won.