Volume 41, Number 11 · June 9, 1994
A Real Funny Guy
By John Banville
The Russian Girl
by Kingsley Amis
Viking, 296 pp., $22.95
Some years ago British television ran a documentary on the life and work of the novelist Kingsley Amis. We were afforded privileged views of Amis at his typewriter (a machine built c. 1957, I should say, high-set and smoothly curved, rather like the hood of a Rolls-Royce), drinking with his cronies in dark-brown pubs, and sitting comfortably in an armchair delivering judgments on the state of contemporary fiction, etc. The scene was predictable, and much too cozy. One brief passage, however, has stayed in my mind. On a return visit to Swansea in Wales, where he had worked for a time as a young man, Amis was filmed walking along the quiet suburban street where he had lived in those days. The street was empty save for an elderly lady with a shopping bag, who had stopped in vague amazement to watch the filming. As Amis was passing her by he gave her a rueful, humorous, and self-mocking glance, as if to say, Yes, missus, this is the kind of thing we writers have to subject ourselves to in order to make a crust. It was an endearing moment, in which one glimpsed the warm and funny man that Amis used to be before he decided, some time in the 1960s, to turn himself into a literary Colonel Blimp.
Review, 2516 words
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