'The Concept of Finding the Right Word'

Reading Kingsley Amis in any of the forms at which he excelled – novels, poems, the sheerest pen-for-hire journalism, you name it – is always bracing, a reminder that a good writer can try his hand at anything and often do it well. Versatility is an undervalued virtue. As Amis once boasted: “Any proper writer ought to be able to write anything, from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.” Another lesson from Amis père: If you’re temperamentally a provocation-minded crank, keep it funny. No one will forgive an earnest crank. Amis turned himself into a moral satirist. His targets were egotism and fraud, human qualities never in short supply. 

In Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (2008), a gathering of three earlier books devoted to Amis’ avocation, he offers advice on how to treat the “Metaphysical Hangover,” including what to read:

 

“I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is not gloomy exactly, but its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate of no mood of self-pity.”

 

Amis fancied himself a language cop who happily dispensed with Miranda warnings. In “Getting It Wrong” (The State of the Language, eds. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, 1980), Amis assembles an anthology of malapropisms (he would have loved Twitter) and diagnoses their popularity:

 

“Various changes, not all of them educational, have seen to it that most of the men and women who use words in public don’t care any more which words they are, apart from a feeble hankering after the seemingly stylish. The concept of finding the right word, which used to be a strong influence on that of finding a good word, is being lost. How such people keep awake while they write is beyond me.”

 

As a poet, Amis has been rightly overshadowed by his friend Philip Larkin, one of the masters. Amis’ body of poems is small. Each is public-minded, never hermetic, often satirical and character-based. In his introduction to the anthology he edited in 1978, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, Amis describes vers de société as “. . . a kind of realistic verse that is close to some of the interests of the novel: men and women among their fellows, seen as members of a group or a class in a way that emphasizes manners, social forms, amusements, fashion (from millinery to philosophy), topicality, even gossip, all these treated in a bright, perspicuous style.” Here is Amis’ “Waking Beauty” (1963) with muted echoes of Keats:

 

“Finding you was easy.

At each machete-stroke

The briers-- neatly tagged

By Freud the gardener--

Fell apart like cut yarn.

Your door was unfastened.

 You awoke instantly,

 Returning that first kiss

 

“But how should I return

 As in no mere fable.

 Through far thornier tracts

 Of the wild rose-jungle,

 Dry, aching, encumbered

 By a still-drowsy girl?

 

“Your eyes cleared and steadied.

Side by side we advanced

On those glossy giants

And their lattice of barbs:

But they had all withered.”

 

I haven’t even mentioned Amis’ best novels – Lucky Jim, Ending Up and Girl, 20 -- though it’s his verse I most admire and most often reread. Today we observe Amis’ centenary. He was born on April 16, 1922 – the annus mirabilis of literary modernism, most of which he disparaged, and the same year as his some-time literary comrade, Philip Larkin –and died on October 22, 1995.