Amis at his Regent’s Park Road home in 1990

Kingsley’s hell of a life left us laughing

Kingsley Amis lived at full throttle amid fears and contradictions, but he is well remembered for it, writes Gerald Isaaman

The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachery Leader, Jonathan Cape, £25. order this book

I USED to be important,” he said in his dying days in hospital. Kingsley Amis, superb author of those supremely comic novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils, was the man who came from nowhere, the man who wanted fame and status.
And in a tumbledown life full of fears and contradictions, hypocrisy and hope, adulation and hate, he achieved it, and he will be remembered for it. But the price was awesome.
With it came his own self-destruction through booze, to the extent that while it may have removed his fears of even travelling on a Tube train, his hungry totally lecherous desire for fun and frolic with women left him with no libido.
One of the most frightening chapters in his brilliantly sympathetic and soul-searching authorised biography of a disastrously embittered talent, undoubtedly worthy of a major prize, is Kingsley’s arrival in Gardnor House, Flask Walk, Hampstead, in July, 1976, with his haunted second wife, the beautiful novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard.
While she wrote encouraging articles of domesticity for glossy magazines like Bride, they had grown to hate each other as, nightly, Amis crawled up the stairs to bed in a state of torpor, howling with grief like a lost dog on the nearby Heath.
The string of sex therapists he consulted with customary hurtful honesty – and performed for with “pictorial pornographic materials”– provided no solace, except to provide him with new material.
His novel, Jake’s Thing (1978), is highly autobiographical, the fiction the actual hellish facts of his own awful fate, reduced to using a “nocturnal mensurator” device for measuring “penile tumescence”.
Such was the artifice of Amis that he and Jane were deliberately photographed walking arm in arm in the garden to defy any critics.
The book, in which she can be identified as the “cake-eating Brenda” and which abused her friends too, was another upset in a life that ended most nights with drunk Kingsley forever quarrelsome, and without them sharing the same bed.
She deserted the “romantically mortified” Kingsley in 1980, poignantly writing: “You know that I have been – we’ve both been – unhappy for years… I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t the slightest hope of things getting any better… This has been the most agonising decision and I’ve taken all the trouble I know to be sure it is the right one, but I have made it, and it is final.”
Yet it wasn’t his first look at life in Hampstead. In 1964 he lived in a four-room flat at 4C Keats Grove, as near to any mighty muse any lover of poetry as Kingsley might get. It was a happy experience.
He describes the flat as “very small and most of the time about a millimetre thick in coal dust. To keep it warm I have to go down and up five flights of stairs bearing first an empty, then a full, coal bucket.” The place was plagued too with squirrels.
Kingsley found solutions the second time round, moving in with his first wife and her husband, living together in Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill, where he held court at the Queen’s pub across the road, as well as the Garrick and its faithful members.
There, whisky in hand, he sat always in the same chair in the bar, the club curmudgeon amid his disciples, bottles of Macallan, his favourite spirit, inevitably providing a death mask for his once handsome, debonair features.
Yet he maintained his discipline of writing every morning, fiction, poetry, letters to intimate friends such as Philip Larkin, one of his abiding inspirations, listening to jazz, writing for he media, praising Margaret Thatcher, scorning extended university education, not bad going for a once-committed left-winger who shared socialist aspirations with polemicist admirers.
Yet amid his dysfunctional life he could be kind and generous, as revealed in his friendship with Rosie Boycott, who accompanied him so often on his forays into smart restaurants, to write magazine columns about them. And his attitude to me as a local reporter on the edge of the literary world.
I was there at his side when he won the Booker Prize with what was probably his second best book after Lucky Jim, disbelieving his own good luck after the judges, all women save one, split, giving up their desire to hand the prize to the Canadian author Robertson Davies.
He wandered in a daze round the giant Guildhall, as perhaps he did much of his life, whether elated, drunk or in desperate despair and fearful of failure.
It was hell of a life. And this is hell of a good biography of a broken spirit that nevertheless gave us something truly worthwhile – laughter.