Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Sir Kingsley

Amis coverage is at flood tide. No sooner did I decide to blog about the Atlantic's take [subscriber only] on the new elephantine bio of the late British novelist, then the heads-up copy of Sunday's Times Magazine hits my email box, with another big essay on Amis -- and Evan, too, beat me to the punch, I see.

Anyone who read Martin Amis's memoir "Experience" knows his father's decline was a grim, dipsomaniacal affair; Martin judges "alcoholism" to be a vulgar, American-style concept, but, still, that word does conjure up the relevant set of images in Kingsley's case.

In the Atlantic, Hitchens's tidy assumption that Amis needed his alcohol in order to create art -- needed, in fact, to be destroyed by it in the end -- sounds remarkably obtuse, a strange case of stock-response and cliche-embrace from a usually clear-eyed writer:

It is sad to find that his muse of al­cohol -- the gift of Bacchus -- was what got him in the end, but there are several novels, beginning with One Fat Englishman, in which he quite clear-sightedly sees this coming, and one might in valediction remember what Winston Churchill said about brandy, which was that in life's eternal wager, he had gotten more out of it than it had taken out of him. Indeed, you couldn't have one Kingsley without the other ... [my emph.]

Bollocks. Who knows about the glory days? But at the end, less booze would have meant better work, and more happiness -- for all involved.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:22 PM

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