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A Memoir of My Father

by KINGSLEY AMIS

My father stood five foot eight or nine: average height or a little over for one born at the end of the 1880s, rather short compared with his grandchildren's generation. With a stocky frame and some breadth of shoulder, he had a good build for games-playing.

This was a passion of his life, and he kept it up longer than most men, playing vigorous tennis well into middle age and actively skippering the local cricket side in his sixties. His eye outlasted his wind, to the end he remained a stylish batsman, with a late cut I have rarely seen surpassed. His glance was direct, appraising, humorous and warm, yet also, at times, troubled and petulant. He had a decent big nose that caused him, so he said, to be occasionally mistaken for a Jew by Jews; our name, with its closeness to Amos, may have contributed to this. He would tell anecdotes about it — embroideries, I imagine now, on a couple of ambiguous interchanges — with a typical mixture of amusement and unemphatic irritation.

kingsley with second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard

In fact he was Nonconformist English from, ultimately, East Anglia, and if, much more ultimately, the Amises had come from France, there was no trace whatever of any of that by the time they produced my father, the most English human being I have ever known. This was one of the things I had against him in my teens. Nobody in the novels I was reading then was without his Russian grandmother, Italian aunt, Austrian step-sister, and even my school friends all seemed to have their bits of Scotch and Irish. The best I could do was a couple of American cousins, my father's sister's children — hopelessly unexotic.

Not only were my environment and upbringing insular almost to a fault — I went abroad for the first time, and then not voluntarily, in 1944 — it was also fiercely non-crazy: another let-down after the novels. My father's father had done a lot to set the tone. It is true that, beyond admitting to Norfolk origins, he would never say where or what he had come from, but I realized quite early that this reticence must spring from nothing more romantic than snobbery. He was a glass merchant in a fair way of business until Woolworth's came along and undersold him. There was one good story about the time, demonstrating to a potential customer, he broke an unbreakable tumbler, but, again, that was an accident: Habitual glass-smashing is not typical of chapel people.

It was, I believe, literally at chapel that my father first met my mother. Like his, her parents were Baptists of the Denmark Hill community. Her father, a self-taught musician, played the organ on Sundays. A lot of the rest of the time, when he was not serving in a local outfitter's, he played the piano or, according to my mother, had his nose in a book. The book was likely to be one of the standard English poets that filled his shelves. I should have liked to know what he thought about these, but he died when I was a child.

Chapel, as such, was a thing of the past by the time I was old enough to care about such matters. Reacting against his upbringing — boldly as it might have seemed then, mildly enough by present standards — my father had turned his back on any form of worship and, I suspect, on the Christian faith as well. I only suspect this, because he was not one for that sort of discussion, but I doubt if he would have needed to add much to the stray remark he let fall once or twice about there having to be some meaning to life, or a similar post-Protestant shred of belief.

Anyway, he never put the slightest pressure on me to have anything to do with religion, explaining that he knew far too well what it felt like to be forced to attend chapel. The most he would do was to rebuke me for using the name of Christ as a swear word, and even this, superstition rather than piety, he dropped when I was grown up.

At the same time, of course, it was totally characteristic that, when plunged into unusually deep despair about my shortcomings, he was likely to put them down to my complete lack of religion. And I should not be truly his son if I had never felt that he had something there. But that was as far as doctrine went, no distance at all compared with the tremendous inroads of the morality associated with that doctrine. Matthew Arnold would have worried less about the survival of Christian ethics in an age without literal faith if he could have had a couple of chats with my father.

For parts of the training I received I can only be heartily grateful. I cannot claim to be more honest and responsible and thrifty and industrious than most people, but I am pretty sure I would be less distinguished in these fields if I had been brought up quite outside the shadow of the chapel. On the other hand, as I came to sense the image in which my father was trying to mould my character and future I began to resist him, and we quarrelled violently at least every week or two for years.

It was not, I think, that I was unusually intractable by nature, nor that he took less kindly than most men to having his deeply felt wishes flouted, or at least contested, by somebody he had power over. Certainly, he had embarked on parenthood comparatively late, so that by the time I started noticing that he could be wrong about things he was already in his middle forties and, perhaps, less resilient than earlier. He had not, moreover, re-embarked on parenthood, and this had the common effect of sharply personalizing our conflict.

with his son martin

An only child is short not so much of allies, of supporters, as of means of dilution and diversion, another body to share the weight of parental care. This isolation may make him over-ready to defend his interests. For my own part, I had acquired from somewhere a very liberal helping of adolescent intellectual's arrogance, while inheriting in full measure my father's obstinacy. The last factor alone was enough to launch us regularly on one or another conversational collision course, immediately recognized as such by both, indeed by all, parties, but not to be deviated from at any price.

We were divided on the issue of sex to fully the expected degree, my father a card-carrying anti-self-abuser-cum-anti-fornicationist, myself opposed to neither. There was once a very big scene over the first of these, full of warnings about thinning of the blood and eventual hopeless insanity. I had the remarkable good sense not to believe this.

Thereafter I went my own sexual way under a pact of silence and dissimulation. This suited my father, who was normally as reticent about this as about other basics. Apart from the fact of my own existence, no sort of detail of his sexual life ever reached me. I have often been tempted to think it was never a very active one, but experience teaches that nothing is likely to fall more wildly astray than this sort of judgment, even as regards contemporaries whom one knows intimately.

What might roughly be called art was much more productive of overt friction between us. Art, not a word of a concept my father had much truck with, consisted for him of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Edwardian ballads (almost none of which ever came my way again) he and my mother and their friends sand at the piano, West End stage success in which music comedies of the Leslie Henson/ Fred Emney type came to predominate, and detective stories by such as R. Austin Freeman, Francis Grierson and John Rhode. This list, admittedly not exhaustive, seemed and seems to me woefully short, especially for somebody by nature neither stupid nor incurious. Anyway, I had my own ideas of what art consisted of.

The art that most reliable provided a domestic casus belli was music. This was because it was the one for which my father, in his way, a way I had no time for at all at that stage, really cared. He wanted me to like Gilbert and Sullivan and took me to the The Pirates of Penzance and The Yeoman of the Guard; I meanly exaggerated my boredom.

He tried to get me interested in the ballads; I disparaged their lyrics and wanted to know why there was no Schubert or Wolf under the lid of the piano stool. I would go on to accused him of not really liking music, to which he would retort, with annoying relevance, that that would come better from someone who, like him, could play some of the stuff. But a more important irritant was the nature of music itself. If I chose to waste a fine afternoon in an art gallery or to ruin my eyes over a book when I could have been out in the fresh air, then that — at any rate in my father's more tolerant moods — was up to me. Music kicked up a roe, and I really could not expect to have the damned wireless or gramophone blaring through the house all the hours there were and upsetting mother. Especially that sort of music...

Actually it was most sorts. My father's catholic distaste ranged from Dvorak to Troise and his Mandoliers, from Benny Goodman to Haydn. He was not content with just registering objection in each case: he would deliver a critical verdict, often in the form of an analogy. There was a piece of Duke Ellington's, for instance, (I think from the Black, Brown and Beige suite anyway, something about as far from primitivism as jazz had then got) which put my father in mind, or so he said, of a lot of savages dancing round a pot of human remains. 'The Swan of Tuonela', on the other hand, called up successive images of a small animal in pain and a large animal in pain. Perhaps it was the element of horrible truth in this which prevented me from seeing how funny it was and made me come up, as I surely must have done, with one of my blanket charges of dislike of all music.

These and related problems could have been easily solved in a different kind of household and house. We lived until 1940 in a short series of suburban villas in which a kitchen, bathroom and box-room were added to the two-up-two-down formula. The partition walls were not specially thick, and most sounds went through them. And the room where one was in the evenings was naturally the one with the wireless in it.

Those who have grown up with the BBC Third Programme and Music Programme might find it difficult to imagine how little music was broadcast in the thirties. One would go months without a chance to hear individual works in even the standard repertoire. So I would very much want to listen to Brahms's Second Symphony any time it was available, and my father, after a day at the office and and getting on for an hour's journey home, would very much not. And there we were.

with his first wife

The smallness of the flat and of its successors was made mildly claustrophobic at times by my father's constant concern to prevent my getting away from him, in several senses of the phrase. He and my mother could not have restricted my choice of friends, and my chances of seeing them, more assiduously if there had been a long family history of male prostitution or juvenile dipsomania.

When I was at home, as when not at school I usually was, I kept finding that reading in public was deemed rude, while reading in private was anti-social. There was a thing called joining in the family circle that has left me with a life-long non-enjoyment of sitting over the remains of a meal. This pattern persisted. Whenever, after my marriage, my family and I visited my parents or they came to stay, everything had to be done with everybody present: no recipe for getting the best out of people.

As if we had not had enough on our plates already, my father and I came to differ about politics. But I need spend no time on that: he was an ex-Liberal of the Lloyd George denomination who went Tory after the first war and for years was active in his constituency and in the local Ratepayers' Association. After what I have said about other disagreements, my reaction here is rather depressingly easy to imagine. In this field as in others, my father inevitably failed to turn me into the sort of person he wanted me to be.

That sort of person was, of course, a version of himself; a more successful version, for he got no further than a senior clerk's responsibilities and pay in the mustard firm he worked for, and considered himself a failure. He was never bitter about this, but meant to see to it that I had a better chance than he. Here he succeeded at considerable financial cost: scholarships notwithstanding, he had to go on supporting me and being deprived of a youth's earning capacity. Although he never had much idea of what I was about, he was delighted when I began to make my way as a writer — while not forgetting to deliver the expected warning that I must not make the mistake of thinking I could actually support myself m this fashion. All the time, I think, he would really rather I had gone into commerce, a word I can still not hear without starting to feel drowsy.

Boredom, I am sorry to say, came to be my chief reaction to my father's company, though I did not want to feel like this and grew better at hiding it — I hope. As ageing people (among others) will, he would recount and reminisce without relevance: cricket, the City, friends he had made since I left home, a chap in the pub, a chap in the tram. I am sure he on his side was not much entertained when, on request, I would tell him of my doings in a world as alien to him as commerce was to me. There was not a lot to be done about this, given the burning sincerity of all boredom. It is depressing to think how persistently dull and egotistical we can be to those we most value, and how restless and peevish we get when they do it back to us.

But this would be the wrong note to end on. The era of the quarrels was also, not surprisingly, the time of greatest intimacy. In those years my father would exploit a talent for physical clowning and mimicry that made him, on his day, one of the funniest men I have known. Every story called for the full deployment of facial, vocal and bodily resources, was conscientiously acted out. My mother used the same techniques, so that at one stage I thought they were standard in anecdote-telling, and to this day find something lacking when they are not used. It is in mid-story that I see my father most clearly, quite a dapper figure in one of his grey or light-brown business suits (though he never could tie a tie properly), hobbling across the room in the style of some decrepit director of the firm, or forcing his face into lines of disquietingly silly uncouthness as he became the man next door.

1967

"Her Shining Eyes" - Mindset (mp3)

"Her Shining Eyes (Jallen remix)" - Mindset (mp3)