Those guys made art out of their grudges, resentments and prejudices, none better than Larkin, Kingsley’s difficult pal from their undergraduate days at Oxford. Larkin, who detested children and had none of his own, was a spectral presence in Martin’s boyhood and the subject of some of his most searching and productive mature criticism.
Larkin, who Amis called “the novelist’s poet,” is his crucial precursor. “Inside Story,” Amis’s avowedly autobiographical last novel, broaches the idea that he may have been Martin’s actual father as well. That’s the claim made by Phoebe Phelps, Martin’s lover in the late 1970s, who tells Martin, many years later, that she heard it from Kingsley himself, who was trying to get her to go to bed with him.
All it takes to debunk this revelation is a glance at a few book jacket photos. Martin’s resemblance to Kingsley is impossible to miss. And at least superficially, the apple landed very close to the tree. Martin grew up into a comic novelist and a prolific periodical scribbler, just like dad. He was gregarious and well traveled, which Larkin was decidedly not.
But the fantasy of Larkin’s secret paternity in some ways improves on the actual literary succession. What Martin Amis inherited from Larkin, genetically or otherwise, was a streak of kindness, a tenderness that Kingsley in his writing almost entirely lacked.
Larkin, a gloomy bachelor with a wretched romantic life, a proud provincial decidedly not clean of prejudice, was a great love poet. His meanest appraisals of the human condition admit a glimmer of affection, which sometimes deepens into a glow. You find that in Amis too, sometimes where you least expect it: amid the apocalyptic tremors of “London Fields,” the fratricidal savagery of “The Information,” the decadence and thuggery of “Lionel Asbo.” And in everything he wrote about the writers he revered.
In his poem “Posterity,” Larkin imagines how he might look to a future biographer, a fictional academic named Jake Balokowsky. “One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys,” is how he sees Jake seeing him. It’s possible to think of Amis along similar lines, as a man of his time, even if it was a very different time. Much as it’s impossible to picture Larkin young, it’s hard to think of Amis as anything but. And now, all of a sudden, he’s no longer young. He’s permanent.
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.