Kingsley Amis

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Sir Kingsley William Amis (actually Kingley Amis ; born April 16, 1922 in London ; † October 22, 1995 ibid) was an English writer and poet. Lucky for Jim , his Somerset Maugham Award- winning debut novel , made him well known in both North America and Europe. The US American magazine Time selected the novel as one of the best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005 . In 1986 Kingsley Amis was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils .

Life

Kingsley Amis was the son of an employee and thus, according to British understanding, belonged to the lower middle class. After attending the City of London School, Amis studied English at Oxford and, after serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals (Telecommunications Corps ), was an English lecturer at the University of Swansea from 1948 to 1961 and at the University of Cambridge from 1961 to 1963 . In 1963 he gave up his academic activity and was thereafter, apart from a short time at Vanderbilt University in 1967 and 1968, only active as a writer.

Kingsley Amis was married to the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard from 1965 to 1983 in second marriage . Amis, who had previously had numerous extramarital relationships, had left his first wife, Hillary Bardwell, and children in 1962. He is the father of the also very successful writer Martin Amis .

During another scholarship after his military service at the Oxford College of St. John's, Kingsley Amis met Philip Larkin and John Wain , with whom he remained on friendly terms. This friendship left its mark on the work of all three authors, who had a comparable social background, who had taken part in the war and shared similar problems: the bewilderment about the academic idleness, the lack of commitment and self-reflection in university operations, the aversion to the presumption of authority there as well as belief in tradition and cultural narrow-mindedness.

Amis died in 1995 of a spinal injury that he sustained in a fall a month earlier. He was in the Golders Green Crematorium cremated , where his ashes is located.

politics

Amis was a member of the Communist Party in his youth , wrote leaflets for the Fabian Society during this time and, after the publication of Glück für Jim, was counted by some literary critics - albeit not without contradiction - among the socially critical angry young men .

As with many other left-wing intellectuals of his generation, disillusionment came after 1956 with the departure from Stalinism and the Hungarian uprising . In the years that followed, Amis tended to take anti-communist positions. His increasingly conservative stance was particularly evident in his publications on life in Great Britain. He repeatedly commented on the training policy of the British government, arguing against the "democratization of higher education". He took the view that increasing access would lead to a deterioration in the level of education ( more will mean worse ). This attitude is already expressed in his first work, Lucky Jim , which earned him the public reputation of a left-wing and socially critical author. As a conservative Tory , Amis was ultimately in opposition to the intellectual left . Malcolm Bradbury commented on Amis' political developments in the late 1980s by saying:

"Amis' political stance has shifted to the right, and today he sees himself as an unyielding and presumably Thatcher- influenced Tory with a few" liberal sprinkles "such as the death penalty, homosexuality and abortion. But these "liberal sprinkles" are only occasionally visible ... "

- Malcolm Bradbury, 1988

Classification of the complete work

Overview

Kingsley Amis was a versatile writer who wrote in and about different genres, including science fiction and fantasy . He has written hundreds of book reviews, edited over a dozen books, and wrote introductions to numerous others. He also wrote short stories and poetry throughout his literary life. Amis was very critical of experimental prose throughout his life and commented on it as follows:

“I can't stand it [experimental prose]. I don't like it - and I think most readers do - when I have the slightest doubt what is happening or what it is supposed to mean. I do not want a full literary description of everything and I am willing to take every hint of the author, but I refuse to be misled. "

Although Amis thought little of works that were difficult to understand or misunderstood, Merrit Moseley points out that luck , in particular, was often misunderstood for Jim . On the face of it, Glück für Jim and Amis' novels that followed immediately afterwards can be understood as studies of members of the lower classes of Britain, which in part meant that later works were seen as betrayal of his early work.

The quality of the entire work is considered high, but not consistently high. Merrit Moseley attributes this to, among other things, the different living conditions of American and British writers. American writers often make a living as university lecturers in creative writing or are even writers in residence , an even less strenuous way of earning a salary. British authors, to whom this option is usually not or was not open, are forced, on the other hand, to publish significantly more, to switch to marginal activities or to bring a narrative work to market more quickly. Amis has written over thirty books and has edited or co- authored numerous others.

Individual works

Amis published some poems for the first time in 1947 without attracting particular attention. This was followed in 1954 by his great success with luck for Jim , which also made him known internationally. Glück für Jim (Lucky Jim), which he dedicated to his fellow student Philip Larkin , was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award . The satirical novel is now regarded as one of the key works of the 1950s in Great Britain, which changed narrative English literature as permanently as John Osborne's simultaneous play Blick zurück im Zorn changed British theater literature . Malcolm Bradbury grants the young Yanks a similar influence on British literature as Evelyn Waugh had on British literature of the 1920s. Not only the way the novel was written was influential, but also the subject and type of hero. David Lodge wrote about the novel:

“ Glück für Jim is a book of great eloquence that hides behind an apparent clumsiness, but at the same time is rooted in the English tradition of situation comedy, which has always remained alien to Joyce . Happiness for Jim is a magical book to me - as it is to so many of my English contemporaries who come from backgrounds similar to me: aspiring, scholarship winners, and first generation of college graduates. It gave us exactly the linguistic means of expression that we needed to express our sense of social identity, that difficult thing between independence and self-doubt, irony and hope. "

- David Lodge

Other literary critics have emphasized that the Americans have created an archetypal figure in Jim Dixon with whom an entire generation could identify: disrespectful, powerless and rebelling against the forces of the "establishment" he is not an anti-hero, but a non-hero. Dixon is an ordinary man with ordinary desires and an everyday reaction to his experiences. Despite his work at the university, he is not an intellectual, his work bores him and his relationship with his manager is that of an everyday job holder.

Glück für Jim was followed by three more novels by 1960, which also have humorous traits. The novels published in the 1960s were more serious, increasingly dealing with marriage, sex and the relationship between men and women. The novels of the 1970s are also characterized by an examination of aging.

In 1959 Amis held a series of lectures on SF at Princeton University , which he published in a revised form as a book. This long essay on contemporary SF literature from 1960, New Maps of Hell , demonstrated his years of interest in the genre and was one of the first books in the world to take a serious academic look at SF (the book later borrowed its title for a Rock album ). Amis also published anthologies with SF stories, such as the Spectrum series from 1960 to 1965. His focus was on literary dystopias , and he and his friend Robert Conquest also wrote one, the novel The Egyptologists 1965. It becomes an authoritarian society described, with rampant security authorities and strong regulation. The plot of the novella came from Conquest and Amis decorated the story with sexually explicit descriptions.

Amis had a particular fondness for the spy novels by Ian Fleming , with whom he was also personally friends. In Secret File 007 he wrote an extensive analysis of the world's most famous secret agent, James Bond , and after Fleming's death he was the first to be given the honor of continuing the series ( James Bond on the Greek trail , 1968).

The alternative world novel The Alteration (1976) describes a world in which there was neither Reformation nor church division, and the story of a boy who, in good Catholic tradition, is to be castrated in order to keep his beautiful voice. The book won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award . Russian Hide and Seek (1980) plays with realities in a similar way and depicts Amis' ironic reckoning with socialism: Here, Great Britain has been occupied by the Soviet Union and its development has been set back by centuries. For another, socially critical novel The Old Devils , Kingsley Amis received the Booker Prize in 1986 . In 1990 he received the knighthood ( KBE ) from the British Queen .

Kingsley and Martin Amis

Both Kingsley and Martin Amis are major British writers. Both were awarded the Somerset Maugham Award for their respective first work ( Glück für Jim , 1954 and The Rachel Diary , 1973) . Martin Amis also became one of Britain's most influential writers because of his work as a literary critic for The Times and New Statesman . He was also of great public interest because of his way of life in Great Britain and outshone his father in fame and fame when he was awarded the prestigious British Booker Prize for The Old Devils . Letters from Kingsley Amis from the 1980s already show that he saw the success of his son increasingly distant, but also envious. To Philip Larkin Kingsley example, wrote in 1984, when Greedy appeared that his son now probably be famous than him. Kingsley Amis publicly criticized the works of his son until the end of his life; he accused him that his style was characterized by "terrible compulsive vividness" (in the original terrible compulsive vividness in his style ), made Vladimir Nabokov responsible for the fact that his son had to prove his stylistic abilities with every sentence and claimed that he found himself unable to finish reading his son's novels. Julian Barnes , a long-time friend of Martin Amis, called Kingsley Amis' public attacks on his son's work scandalous, while Christopher Hitchens , who was also friends with Martin Amis, called the tips circulated in the press only theatrical thunder. Martin Amis refrained from responding publicly to his father's attacks, but also noted that his father had actually only read three of his novels and fired the others across the room after twenty or thirty pages. But he added philosophically:

“... older writers should be hostile to younger writers because the younger writers are sending them an unwelcome message [with their works]. They say: It is no longer like that. It's like that now. "

It is assumed that Martin Amis' edgy personality, his stylistic virtuosity, his patriarchal views and his regularly emphasized admiration for the work of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow have their origin in the unusually difficult relationship with his father. Kingsley Amis himself reported that his son tried to hide any literary attempt from him while he was still living at home. Conversely, Martin Amis accused his father:

"My father, not least - I think - also because of a certain indolence, took no notice of my early attempts at writing until I finally threw the proof of my first novel on his desk."

After his father's death in October 1995, Martin Amis described the relationship as increasingly positive. In the afterword to his non-fiction book Koba the Terrible - The Twenty Millions and Laughter , entitled Letter to the Spirit of My Father , Amis even pointed out that - if their year of birth had been reversed - each of them would have written in the style of the other. In 1997, Amis admitted that he was offended that his father was so unwilling to read his novels:

"How could he be so little curious about me?"

bibliography

Novels
  • Lucky Jim (1954)
  • That Uncertain Feeling (1955)
  • I Like It Here (1958)
  • Take A Girl Like You (1960)
  • One Fat Englishman (1963)
  • The Egyptologists (1965) (with Robert Conquest ).
  • The Anti-Death League (1966) - Science Fiction
  • Colonel Sun (1968, under the pen name Robert Markham) - spy thriller
    • English: 007 James Bond on the Greek trail. Scherz-Action-Krimi Vol. 53, 1969. Ian Fleming is incorrectly named as the author on some German editions .
  • I Want It Now (1968)
  • The Green Man (1969) - Horror
    • German: To the green man. Translated by Herbert Schlueter. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1972, ISBN 978-3-455-00120-4 . Also as: The green man. Reprint. Translated by Herbert Schlueter. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag (Fischer Phantast. Bibliothek # 2717), Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 978-3-596-22717-4 .
  • Girl, 20 (1971)
  • The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) - detective novel
  • Ending Up (1974)
  • The Crime Of The Century (1975)
  • The Alteration (1976) - Science Fiction
    • German: The Metamorphosis. Heyne Science Fiction & Fantasy # 4314, 1986, ISBN 978-3-453-31310-1 . Also as: The transformation. With an afterword by Franz Rottensteiner. Translated by Walter Brumm. Heyne SF&F # 4314, Munich 1986, ISBN 978-3-453-31310-1 .
  • Jake's Thing (1978)
  • Russian Hide and Seek (1980) - Science Fiction
    • English: The Eye of the Basilisk. Translated by Walter Brumm. Heyne SF & F # 4042, 1984, ISBN 978-3-453-30984-5 . Also as: The Basilisk's Eye: E. Melodrama; Science fiction novel. German translation by Walter Brumm. Heyne SF&F # 4042, Munich 1984, ISBN 978-3-453-30984-5 .
  • Stanley and the Women (1984)
  • The Old Devils (1986)
  • Difficulties With Girls (1988)
  • The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990)
  • We Are All Guilty (1991)
  • The Russian Girl (1992)
  • You Can't Do Both (1994)
  • The Biographer's Mustache (1995)
Volumes of short stories and collections
  • My Enemy's Enemy (1962)
  • Collected Short Stories (1980)
  • The Amis Collection: His Best Journalism, Pieces and Reviews (1980)
  • The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990 (1990)
  • Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories (1991)
  • Dear Illusion: Collected Stories (2015)
Poetry
  • Bright November (1947)
  • A Frame of Mind (1953)
  • Poems: Fantasy Portraits (1954)
  • A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956 (1956)
  • The Evans County (1962)
  • A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957-1967 (1968)
  • Wasted, Kipling at Bateman's (1973)
  • Collected Poems 1944-78 (1979)
Essay and non-fiction
  • Socialism and the Intellectuals. A Fabian Society Pamphlet (1957)
  • New Maps of Hell. A Survey of Science Fiction (1960)
  • The James Bond Dossier (1965) - non-fiction book
  • The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965; as Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner)
  • Lucky Jim's Politics (1968)
  • What Became of Jane Austen ?, and Other Questions (1970)
  • On Drink (1972)
    • German: Drink decently. Illuminated / ruined by Eugen Egner. Translated by Joachim Blessing. Rogner & Bernhard, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-8077-1044-0 .
  • Rudyard Kipling and his World (1974)
  • An arts polity? (1979)
  • Every Day Drinking (1983)
  • How's Your Glass? (1984)
  • Memoirs (1991)
  • The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997)
  • Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (2008, collective edition of On Drink , Everyday Drinking and How's Your Glass? )
as editor

Spectrum (anthologies of classic science fiction, with Robert Conquest)

  • Spectrum (1962)
  • Spectrum 2 (1962)
  • Spectrum 3 (1963)
  • Spectrum 4 (1965)
  • Spectrum 5 (1966)
  • Oxford Poetry 1949 (1949; with James Michie)
  • Selected Short Stories of GK Chesterton (1972)
  • The Times Anthology Of Ghost Stories (1976) (with Patricia Highsmith and Christopher Lee )
    • English: Thirteen Pinches Midnight: The Times Anthology of Modern Ghost Stories. Translated by Irene Paetzold. Bastei Lübbe Horror Library # 70008, 1979, ISBN 3-404-01121-X .
  • Tennyson (1973)
  • Harold's Years: Impressions from the New Statesman and The Spectator (1977)
  • The Faber Popular Reciter (1978)
  • The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse (1978)
  • The Golden Age of Science Fiction (1981)
  • The Great British Songbook (1986; with James Cochrane)
  • The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988)
  • The Pleasure of Poetry: From His Daily Mirror Column (1990)
  • The Amis Story Anthology (1992)

Film adaptations

  • 1957: Lucky Jim , directed by John Boulting
  • 1961: You can only love as a couple ( Only two can play )
  • 1970: Take a Girl Like You , directed by Jonathan Miller
  • 1990: The Green Man - A Ghost Story ( The green man , three-part TV series)
  • 1992: The Old Devils (TV-movie), directed by Andrew Davies
  • 2000: Take a Girl Like You , (three-part series) directed by Andrew Davies
  • 2003: Lucky Jim (TV adaptation), directed by Robin Shepperd

literature

  • Hans Joachim Alpers , Werner Fuchs , Ronald M. Hahn : Reclam's science fiction guide. Reclam, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-010312-6 , p. 14.
  • Richard Bradford: Kingsley Amis. Arnold, London 1989.
  • Gerd Dose: Alternate Worlds: Kingsley Amis '“The Alteration” and Keith Roberts ' “Pavane”. In: Rüdiger Ahrens, Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann (Hrsg.): Fiction and History in Anglo-American Literature: Festschrift for Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock for his 60th birthday . Winter, Heidelberg 1998 (English Research, 256), ISBN 3-8253-0725-5 .
  • Philip Gardner: Kingsley Amis. Twayne, 1981
  • Jack Benoit Gohn: Kingsley Amis: A Checklist. Kent State University Press, 1976.
  • Edward James: Yanks, Kingsley . In: James Gunn : The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Viking, New York et al. a. 1988, ISBN 0-670-81041-X , p. 16 f.
  • Zachary Leader (Ed.): The Letters of Kingsley Amis. HarperCollins, London 2000, ISBN 0-00-257095-5 .
  • Gina Macdonald: Americans, Kingsley . In: Noelle Watson, Paul E. Schellinger: Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. St. James Press, Chicago 1991, ISBN 1-55862-111-3 , pp. 6-9.
  • Matthias Mader: The Alteration (The Metamorphosis) by Kingsley Amis - an attempt to classify the genre. In: Quarber Merkur No. 71, Bremerhaven 1989, pp. 21-32.
  • John McDermott: Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. Macmillan, London 1989.
  • Merrit Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis. University of South Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0872498617 (Eng.)
  • Peter Nicholls , David Langford : Amis, Kingsley. In: John Clute , Peter Nicholls: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . 3rd edition (online edition).
  • Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172.
  • Franz Rottensteiner : Afterword. In: Kingsley Amis: The Metamorphosis. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag Munich, 1986, pp. 249-254.
  • Dale Salwak: Kingsley Amis: A Reference Guide. Prior, 1978.
  • Dale Salwak (Ed.): Kingsley Amis in Life and Letters. Macmillan, London 1990.
  • Donald H. Tuck : The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968. Advent, Chicago 1974, ISBN 0-911682-20-1 , pp. 7 f.

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 1
  2. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 6.
  3. ↑ See Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172, here p. 151.
  4. ↑ a b Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 3.
  5. ^ Wolfgang P. Rothermel: Kingsley Amis . In: Horst W. Drescher (Hrsg.): English literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 399). Kröner, Stuttgart 1970, DNB 456542965 , pp. 150-172, here p. 152 f.
  6. ↑ quoted from Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 3. In the original the quote is: Amis's politics moved toward the Right, and today he defines himself as a non-wet and presumably Thatcherite Tory "with a few liberal bits", on hanging, homosexuality, abortion. But the "liberal bits" are only occasionally noticeable.
  7. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 4 and p. 5.
  8. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 6. The original quote is: I can't bear it. I dislike, as I think most readers dislike, being in the slightest doubt about what is taking place, what is meant. I don't want full and literal descriptions of everything, and I'm prepared to take a hint from the author as well as the next man, but I dislike mystification.
  9. ↑ a b Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 4 and p. 6.
  10. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 8 and p. 9.
  11. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 19
  12. ↑ quoted from Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 20. The original quote is: Lucky Jim (1954), a book of great verbal dexterity disguising itself as clumsiness, but rooted in an English tradition of comedy of manners quite foreign to Joyce. Lucky Jim was another magic book for me - and for most English readers of my age and background, upwardly mobile, scholarship-winning, first-generation university graduates - for it established precisely the linguistic register we needed to articulate our sense of social identity, a precarious balance of independence and self-doubt, irony and hope.
  13. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 20 and p. 21
  14. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 10.
  15. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 13.
  16. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 13. In the original, Martin Amis speaks of [sent the others] windmilling through the air after twenty or thirty pages.
  17. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 13. In the original, Martin Amis speaks of ... older writers should find young writers inimical, because younger writers are sending them an unwelcome message. They are saying, It's not like that anymore. It's like this.
  18. ↑ James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 11.
  19. ↑ quoted from James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 12. The original quote is: My father, I think, aided by a natural indolence, didn't really take much notice of my early efforts to write until I plonked the proof of my first novel on his desk.
  20. ↑ quoted from James Diedrick: Understanding Martin Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2004, ISBN 1-57003-516-4 , p. 12. The original quote is: How could he be so incurious about me?
personal data
SURNAME Yanks, Kingsley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Markham, Robert (pen name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 1995
Place of death London