Kingsley Amis' Return

On the reissue of Amis' novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils in the United States, Matthew Walther says that discussion of the novelist's noted eccentricities distracts from the quality of his literary output:

Amis’s loyalty to the Crown was absolute. He even claimed to have had wet dreams about Queen Elizabeth II, all of which consisted of him throwing an eager hand upon Her Majesty’s royal bosom and her responding, “No, Kingsley, we mustn’t.” He called Margaret Thatcher “one of the best looking women I had ever met” and compared seeing her in person to “looking at a science-fiction illustration of the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220.”

Amusing stuff, but it tends to distract from the truth: namely, that Amis wrote some of the best fiction of the last century, including at least three classics (the two present reissues and The Alteration) and a handful of novels (Take a Girl Like You; Girl, 20; and The Green Man) that I would recommend to anyone. Anyway, it’s likely that Amis cultivated his intransigent public persona in order to drum up publicity and get a laugh from friends like Robert Conquest. This becomes especially clear after reading his letters to Conquest and Philip Larkin, in which he seems almost obsessed with making chop steak out of as many progressive sacred cows as possible.