Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis - Hardcover

Bradford, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0720611172 ISBN 13: 9780720611175

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

Kingsley Amis always claimed that his fiction was not based on his life, and he worked hard and quite successfully at obscuring the autobiographical threads that run through his novels. But they exist, and Richard Bradford traces the channels between Amis's experiences, his states of mind, and his fictionalized versions of both. Bradford's biography shows that it is impossible to offer a comprehensive picture of Amis the man as husband, philanderer, friend, father, jester, son, boozer, agnostic, pseudo-socialist, and club-land Tory without also considering how each dimension of his life tested and extended his literary skills. Sometimes he remodeled the present, particularly during the 1950s when his books reflected his double life as family man and prolific libertine. He revisited the past in novels such as The Riverside Villas Murder, a detective story that tells us much about his early relationship with his father. Less frequently he took revenge, notably with his cruel parody of his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in Stanley and the Women. Readers of Amis's books often feel as if they have had a personal encounter with a shadowy presence behind the words, and Bradford's biography embodies this shadow.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Bradford is professor of English at the University of Ulster. He previously has taught in the universities of Oxford, Wales and in Trinity College, Dublin. He has written 12 books on a variety of subjects, including two critical monographs of Kingsley Amis.

From Publishers Weekly:

This illuminating biography by a professor of English at the University of Ulster plumbs the interrelationship of life and art an idea Bradford's subject, the late Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), would never have approved of. Amis once declared his novels (beginning with his most celebrated work, Lucky Jim, in 1954) "firmly unautobiographical," but Bradford demonstrates quite the opposite and does so in a way that gives the reader substantially deeper views of both the prolific author's work and the man himself. Combining close reading of the texts fiction, poetry and his substantial body of nonfiction with the already well-documented facts of Amis's life, the book reveals Amis's motivations. In particular, Bradford dissects the overarching theme in Amis's novels: the tension or conflict between what one wants to do and what one ought to do, and how that tension "energizes [one's] style." He takes pains to point out that Amis's literary value is not dependent on his works' autobiographical underpinnings; he reveals the skill and power of Amis the writer at transmuting life into art. But he also crafts an appropriately multifaceted portrait of Amis the man: a serious writer of comic fiction, an intellectual with an appetite for low culture and, of course, a prodigious womanizer ("Amis went to bed with practically anyone he found attractive and willing"). This bio is not perfect. Transitions within chapters are sometimes abrupt (or nonexistent); details get recycled in a few places; he doesn't really undertake the challenge of analyzing Amis's psychology. But the writing is consistently clear and the insights literary and biographical are formidable. It's the art that makes Amis worth reading, but Bradford's book illustrates that Amis's novels are "the most entertaining and thought-provoking autobiographies ever produced." 16 pages of b&w photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0720611172
• ISBN 13: 9780720611175
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400