Book of the Month: King's English (Kingsley Amis)

Kingsley Amis is one of my most favourite writers. One Fat Englishman was the first Kingsley Amis novel I read. I still remember the hearty chuckles I was unable to keep under control as I savoured the novel. I enjoyed the novel tremendously (unlike David Lodge). 

That was more than twenty years ago. Over the years I have read a lot of Sir Kingsley’s novels and, with few exceptions (such as The Alteration, one of the few instances when the great man strayed away from comedy), have enjoyed them all.

Kingsley Amis is quite simply the funniest writer in English (beating Tom Sharpe, another favourite comic writer I like, to the second position) I have read. In my list of all-time favourite writers Kingsley Amis is second only to V.S. Naipaul.

One of the—indeed the only—non-fiction book of Kingsley Amis I read years ago was The King’s English: A Guide to Modern English Usage. It was published in 1997, two years after he died.

A great pleasure for me of reading Kingsley Amis novels is the language. Amis had a way with words like no one else; his way of using phrases was unique; the style was droll and, even as I laughed my head out at the biting observations of Amis’s protagonists, I found myself marvelling at the consummate skill with which the author used language. It is a gift only a few are blessed with.

I was therefore keen to know the great man’s views about the language that was obviously so dear to him and over which he had such complete mastery.

I read The Kings English and enjoyed reading it thoroughly. I put it on my shelf, promising myself I would return to it again one day; but I never did. Till last Saturday. (As will be clear later, I have deliberately used the word ‘till’ instead of ‘until’.)

In last Saturday’s Guardian was published an article by Martin Amis, Kingsley’s son and a formidable writer of great repute himself, on King’s English, celebrating, in the process, his father’s lifelong interest in English language.

That made me, over the weekend, go back to my own paperback edition (incidentally the same one—1998—that Martin Amis reveals he has in his collection, adorned with encomium from several reviewers including David Lodge, Sebastian Faulks, and Joseph Connolly.) (I initially wrote ‘fulsome praise’ but hastily changed it to ‘encomium’ when, on page 82 of The King’s English, I came across the following comment on ‘fulsome’: This once useful word meant ‘disgustingly excessive, cloying’ as applied to compliments, apologies etc. . . . Undereducated persons, perhaps foggily supposing fulsome to be a posh form of full (from which it does partly descend) have in recent years taken to using it to mean ‘ample’ or possibly ‘cordial’. Not to be used henceforth by careful writers.)

In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua Academia Amis clarifies his position with characteristic candour:

‘My interest in words as parts of language preceded their appeal to me as units of literature of any sorts, and I was learning how to spell some individual words before I knew what they meant. Ever since, I have retained what I like to think of as a special feeling for language in spoken as well as written form. This has gone hand in hand with one of the less immediately appealing sides of my character, the didactic or put-‘em-right side. I would guess that for every acquaintance of mine who looks on me as some sort of authority on correct usage or pronunciation there is at least one who sees me as an officious neurotic who sets right venial blunders uninvited. Any vocal stickler for accuracy perpetually runs that sort of risk.’

The splendid raconteur then goes on to regale us, over the next 250 odd pages, on subjects as varied as Americanisms, hyper-urbanism, political words, disappearance of Latin, and difference between a delusion and an illusion.

The book is liberally strewn with delicious linguistic nuggets, frequently clothed in Amis’s combative humour. 

Here is what Amis has to say about the word ‘dilemma’:

This is a very precise word and was once a very useful word meaning ‘a position that leaves only a choice between two equally unwelcome possibilities’. , . the word was narrow and clear. Unfortunately it has ceased to be either and for many years has been resorted to by journalists and others on the look-out for for a posh-appearing synonym for ‘difficulty, quandary’. This perversion has made dilemma unsuitable for careful writers.

The book is replete with Sir Kingsley’s dictates to ‘careful writers’. Helpfully, he provides a definition of a ‘careful writer’.

This expression [careful writers], Amis writes, grew current in the permissive years when nobody dared say in so many words that such-and-such expression was illiterate or wrong, but at the same time people went on feeling that some usages were better than others. Rank barbarism could not, while the fashion lasted, be denounced as such, only mildly tut-tutted over as ‘avoided by careful writers’.

Lest you rush to the conclusion that Sir Kingsley was prissy, fussy, and priggish—in other words, a ‘wanker’ (as opposed to a ‘berk’—he provides the a page long elucidation on the difference between the berks and the wankers), let me assure you that he was anything but, as demonstrated in the following comment he makes on the word ‘fortuitous’:

Although Fowler was denouncing it in 1926. The misuse of fortuitous has only become noticeable in the last decade or so. The word originally meant nothing more than ‘owing to [pure] chance’, as in, say, ‘their meetingin the fish-shop was altogether fortuitous.’ Recently the word has come to mean something more like ‘fortunate, by a lucky chance’ . . . In fact fortuitous now supplies the evident need for a single word with that meeting. Such a need may not be very compelling, but the more recent usage is serviceable and needful enough to suggest that such newcomers should not be shot out of hands. For after all, there are plenty of near-enough synonyms for fortuitous in the old sense . . .

Here is another entry, this time about the word ‘till’:

. .  . The only point of this entry is to reassure anyone who needs it that till is a genuine English preposition and conjunction with its roots in Old English and Old Norse and is not a daringly informal shortening of stuffy old upper-class until and spelled ‘til.

In his Guardian article, Martin Amis writes:

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on defamatory.

In the last twenty years of my love-affair with Kingsley Amis’s novels, I, too, have been searching for an adjective to describe Kingsley Amis’s style of humour. I had arrived at the adjective ‘curmudgeonly’. Martin Amis’s article informs that that was how his father had come to be ‘monotonously’ described towards the end of his life. I, of course, did not have any pejorative connotation when I thought of Kingsley Amis’s humour as ‘curmudgeonly’. However, after reading Amis Junior’s article, I looked up the meaning of the word curmudgeon, and this is what I discovered: an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notion. Then I looked up ‘grumpy’, and learned that it means surly or cranky. Next, I thought of looking up ‘grouchy’, but gave up, having realised that this would be unending. While I have no doubt that many of the protagonists of Kingsley Amis’s novels are curmudgeons and perennial grumps, his humour is more than just curmudgeonly ranting (as in many of the books of Jeremy Clarkson). I don’t however feel comfortable with Martin Amis’s choice either (defamatory). It is almost impossible to describe Kingsley Amis’s humour in one word.

The King’s English is a delight to read, from the beginning to end. It is self-assured, succinct, acerbic, belligerent, contentious and always thought-provoking. As Joseph Connolly wrote: ‘it is  . . . selective and representative and witty and (given the author how else could it be otherwise?) as witty and entertaining as hell . . . It is rather wonderful to be guided through real modern usage by its foremost practitioner.’

If you care for English language, read this book; it’s a treat.

Book of the Month: House of Meetings (Martin Amis)

In recent years Martin Amis has been preoccupied with many a weighty matter on which he has written at length, attracting approbation and hostility in equal measures. It feels as though Amis has decided that the rich subject matters of his earlier, incisive, satires—the world of upwardly mobile, Baby Boomer generation—are not weighty enough. He is a writer in search of gravitas.

House of Meetings is Martin Amis’s 11th novel, and it is about, in keeping with Amis’s recent preoccupations (or fascination)—he published a work of non-fiction on Stalin (Koba the Dread) a few years ago—, Russia during the Soviet epoch. More precisely it is about, a large part of it anyway, Russian Gulags, or the slave-camps, in which millions, all Soviet citizens, were incarcerated. It seems that the fierce condemnation of Stalin that was Koba the dread was not quite enough to exorcise the demons—what demons, some might inquire, can someone of Amis’s privileged English background have in connection with a system, of which neither he nor anyone in his family had any experience—and after five years, he has disgorged House of Meetings, the fictional companion to Koba the Dread. It is either that or Amis, going through a creative hiatus after his entertaining (and unfairly panned) Yellow Dog, has hacked out a novel from the material he gathered while researching for Koba the Dread.

The novel is a letter written by an unnamed ‘foul-tempered and vile-mouthed’ octogenarian—he prefers to say, tongue firmly lodged in cheek, that he is in his high eighties, and not in late eighties because of the unfortunate connotations of the word ‘late’—as a long communiqué to his step-daughter. The narrator, who has made a fortune in America, is visiting his mother country. He is travelling on a cruise-ship, up the Yenisei River from Krasnoyarsk and across the Arctic Circle, to Predposylov (a fictional city based on Norilsk), on the outskirts of which, on the slopes of Mount Schweinsteiger, was situated one of the gulags, Norlog, where he was incarcerated for years with his half-brother, Lev. This, as the narrator informs his step-daughter in the first few pages, is a love-story; it involves the two brothers and a Jewess whom both of them love. The narrator is no hero. As a young man, he informs without any trace of remorse, he raped his way, as a member of the rapacious Red army, through East Germany, and received decoration for his bravery. At the end of the war, during one of Stalin’s last waves of terror, he is declared, on the flimsiest of evidence, an enemy of the state and is transported to the gulags in Siberia. Just before his incarceration he falls in love, contrary to what even he admits as his base nature, with a young vivacious Jewess, Zoya, though his passion remains unrequited. Within two years he is joined in the gulags by his half-brother, who, the narrator is inwardly mortified to learn, has married Zoya. The two brothers are released from the gulags in the mid-fifties during the (relatively) liberal Khrushchev era as non-entities. For three years before their release, Zoya has been visiting Lev, travelling all the way from Moscow to the slave-camp, along with other wives of men incarcerated in the gulags, to the eponymous ‘House of Meetings’. Lev and Zoya get back together, but things don’t work out and they separate within a few years. They both get remarried; she to a man considerably older than her—the narrator suspects for his money—who has been in his youth a literary apologist for the Stalinistic regime and has been suitably rewarded; he to a shy young woman the narrator suspects to be a virgin. He has a son, who, predictably, gets killed in the Afghan war in the eighties. Soon after, Lev dies. The narrator, who has amassed considerable wealth in the preceding years, has decided to immigrate to America. Before his departure he meets Zoya who is still married to the old man and is spending more and more time of the day under the influence of alcohol. Zoya rejects the narrator’s proposal to accompany him to America, but comes to his hotel room, later, where, when she is practically comatose with alcohol he rapes her. The book ends with the old narrator dying in a hospice of an immune deficiency syndrome.

Martin Amis, like his father, started of as a comic novelist and writer of social satires. Both of them made their names and reputations with novels that were quintessentially English, Kingsley Amis perhaps more so than Martin, although both, from time to time, have moved into what a critic once described as other countries. For Sir Kingsley, the ‘other country’ was mostly metaphorical—in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Amis pere tried other genres such as horror and science fiction, the latter being a long-standing interest, with mixed success, before returning to, with Jake’s Thing, the terra firma of social comedy, from which he saw no reason to veer till the end—whereas for the son, the ‘other country’ has been metaphorical as well as literal. In his 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow, Amis took on the subject of Holocaust, a daring act for an English novelist, who was born four years after the Second World War, and had no personal connection to the genocide. There are those who believe that it is impossible to capture the full horror of the Holocaust, which was beyond imagination, in a novel, certainly not when the novelist has no personal experience of the horror. But Amis pulled it off, not least by the cunning device of having his protagonist live his life backward, from an all-American citizen in the present day to a newborn German baby in the young century, with visits in between to the death camps, where he had played a not insignificant role. Time’s Arrow remains, together with Schindler’s List (Arc), one of the very few novels written in original English on the subject of Holocaust. In some ways its achievement is greater than that of ‘Schindler’s Arc’ for which Thomas Kenneally won the Booker award—Time’s Arrow, too was short-listed for the Booker, only to be pipped at the post by ‘The English Patient’ and ‘Sacred Hunger’—in that it was a total fiction—the protagonist was a creation of Amis—unlike Schindler’s List, which was a fictionalised account of the heroics of Oscar Schindler. Time’s Arrow was a departure from the novels Amis had published till then, not only in respect of its subject matter but also its prose-style.

In the interviews he gave at the time of the publication of Time’s Arrow, Amis insisted that the novel was one of a kind, that he was essentially a comic novelist and not a political one. The subtext was: Amis had no intention of jettisoning the genre and style that had made his reputation as one of the outstanding comic novelists writing in English. His two subsequent full-fledged novels, ‘Information’ and the vastly underrated Yellow Dog saw him returning to his old style with his trademark fizzy language, which, as one critic (aptly) described, had a domino effect—‘one word or phrase nudging the next into motion and prose zooming along.’ During this period he also published his highly acclaimed memoirs, Experience which examined his relationship with Kinglsey Amis, and the cruelly and harshly reviled Koba the Dread. And now, with House of Meetings, he has decided to dip his toes in the waters of one of the dark chapters of twentieth century history: Stalin’s gulags.

House of Meeting, at one level, boasts of some of the distinctive features—peculiarities for some—that one associates with a Martin Amis novel, particularly intellectual violence. The protagonist is not a character most readers would warm up to: a multiple rapist, who lusts after his brother’s wife (and rapes her, too, when she is vulnerable after his brother’s death), makes his wealth using dishonest means, and legs it to America in the 1980s. The harshness and the daily barbarities of the Gulags are described starkly with no punches pulled. While there are occasional surges of linguistic vibrancy—Amis’s coruscating and sardonic wit shines brilliantly, for example, when he describes the wars between ‘the brutes and the bitches’ in the gulags; it also leaves the readers awestruck, and not only at the excellence of writing— that has won Amis many admirers, the tone, overall, in keeping with the sombre subject-matter, is more measured and subdued. The language, for most part, is sparse, almost minimalist, and, accustomed as one has become to Amis’s customary explosive literary flourishes, it takes some time to get used to the pared-to-the bone style of House of Meetings. It also has a curious effect of disconnecting the readers from the pathos of the story. It is not easy to convey poignancy using this style, which, one suspects, does not come naturally to Amis, unlike, say, Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark. Was Amis responding to the unnecessarily harsh criticism his last novel, Yellow Dog, with its ‘gratuitous word-play’, was subjected to from some quarters?

At less than 200 pages (paperback edition) this is a slender novel, and there are times when the readers may be left with a feeling that Amis is shoehorning too many themes. Therein lies, I think, its drawback: unlike the audacious ‘Time’s Arrow’, it tends to lose its focus at times. Although the narrator declares at the beginning that it is a love-story, it is not just that: it is also a commentary on Russia, and what the narrator describes as its slow decay, firstly under the stifling Communism, and later, under the post-Soviet corruption and chaos. From time to time, true historical events and their descriptions are thrown in for good measure. The diverse, albeit related, elements that form this conglomerate do not always gel effectively; they add very little to the narrative flow, indeed, at times, prove to be annoying distractions.. The narrator’s animadversion of the successive Soviet regimes—Stalin, Khrushchev, and Breznev—is too American in its intellectual posture. It is Amis, the Westerner with his comfortable, upper-middle-class heritage, who is criticising, and not the survivor of the gulags. You are hard pressed to believe that the narrator is a Russian (albeit a one who has lived for more than a decade in the West) and that Russian is his first language. He does not strike as a real character. It is almost as though Amis, preoccupied with moralistic fastidiousness, has little interest in verisimilitude.

In one of Kingsley Amis’s early novels, That Uncertain Feeling, is a passage where the hero classifies the books on his bookshelves into four categories: books which would tell him what he knew already; books which he couldn’t understand; books which wrote things he knew to be untrue; and books which told what he did not want to be told about—“especially that”. It might be argued that ‘House of Meetings’, which, as Amis has openly acknowledged, derives its inspiration from several recent works of non-fiction on this grim subject—the title itself seems to have been inspired by descriptions in Ann Applebaum’s excellent ‘Gulag’ of the designated place of assignation for the men in slave camps and the few wives who made the journey, having been unofficially allowed visits in Khrushchev’s regime to spend a night with them, and some of the experiences of Lev seem to have taken from, with insignificant alterations, from Janusz Bardach’s memoirs Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag—the fictional narrator even recommends this book to his fictional niece—, tells what those interested in the subject already know (barbarities in the gulags), and many others may not want to know (barbarities in the gulags).

House of Meetings is Amis’s bleakest book. It has its moments, but leaves the reader untouched and unsatisfied. It is not quite the epic it aspires to be. In a recent interview Amis announced that his next novel will be autobiographical and ‘everyone will hate me again.’ I certainly hope so. I should rather be hated than pitied as a writer past his sell-by-date. We await the return of Amis of the old.