Kingsley Amis: in search of the Simple Life

Abstract

A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.