The date is celebrated by two new publications and an article in The Times
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coll ... -55s869rrz

Amis believed that women were marvellous things to have sex with, but otherwise a nuisance; that higher education ought only to be made available to the bright; that equality is a chimera because “some people are better at some things than others are”; and that despite the best medical advice, drinking heavily is huge and satisfying fun — none of this is likely to go down well with the younger generation who run publishing today. Still, the good news is that Penguin Modern Classics has reprinted these two volumes — a collection of his non-fiction writing and of his poetry.

In Ode to Me, he dwells on how youth doesn’t endure, sexual competence goes, old age happens (at 50) and illnesses are horrible:
“So bloody good luck to you mate
That you weren’t born too late
For at least a chance of happiness
Before unchangeable crappiness
Spreads all over the land.”

Needless to say, real love is hard to find and a bind when found (“Sex is a momentary itch,/ Love never lets you go” is how he puts it in An Ever-Fixed Mark), roses come equipped with their “lattice of barbs” and extinction (“the one-man pass-out parade”) is around every corner, so a chap had better watch it.

The Amis Collection is full of his disdain for self-indulgence and dread of showing off. He liked a Muriel Spark novel about Venice because “it doesn’t go on about Venice” — “going on about places in novels is nearly always self-indulgence” — but gold stars are rarely awarded. Gore Vidal’s talent “has declined precisely as his fame has grown”. Max Beerbohm “has nothing to say” and “makes not a single claim to importance of any kind”. Rudyard Kipling’s “silliness” is exposed, as is “the meagreness of most of [Somerset] Maugham’s notions about life and art”.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is “hardly funny at all”, its prose being “lush and arid at the same time”. Angus Wilson is “yawn-engendering” and when Amis says of Anthony Burgess, “He has done it again,” this is followed by: “What exactly it is that he has done is not altogether clear.” An effort by poor old William Cooper is “the least dramatic, least significant, least interesting book I have ever read” — this from the Amis who said that all Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, Milton, Spenser, on and on, was “ape’s bumfodder”.

The man didn’t seem capable of applauding anything. Sherlock Holmes and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe are “wild fantasies strung together on pseudo-logic”. The Diary of a Nobody “went straight to my guts as a rabidly laughter-free performance”, quite as bad as Sellar and Yeatman of 1066 and All That, who were “just never funny from the year dot”. The criticism of William Empson, “an expert on psychology and new stuff like that”, was “unbelievably arid and unenlightening”, and CS Lewis was “a miraculously learned and intelligent Ian Paisley”.

The one he really hated was Dylan Thomas, whose gifts dried up early and who spent his brief adult life “urinating against the living-room wall, defecating on the floor, stealing shirts, the silver, the gramophone”. Even with Larkin, Amis’s praise is faint, like a schoolmaster in an end-of-year report. “As good as ever here, if not slightly better,” he says of High Windows.

Amis seemed to thrive on being a curmudgeonly philistine, a Colonel Blimp sort, getting tight with his mates in the Garrick Club, harrumphing against anything too modernistic as “perverted, affected, foreign, incomprehensible and connected with absinthe drinking”. Amis must be the last reactionary to have flinched from Picasso, saying he had a “duffer’s hand” and “shortage of natural talent”. Miró “was another awful man”.

Amis was also tone deaf — Mahler “lacks talent” — and abroad was beastly. “There was nothing to see in Alicante,” Portugal is “dingy and dusty” and the only way to communicate with a Frenchman is in mime and grunts. It’s a black mark against Robert Graves that he chose to live in Mallorca, “a most unusual step for a heterosexual not wanted for fraud”. Holidays, in any event, are a conspiracy “got up by women”, and what leaving home mostly did to Amis was to upset his lavatory routines. He couldn’t stand fancy restaurants, incidentally, and felt that Rules in Covent Garden ought to have been converted into an Albanian takeaway.

Although he says actors are “stupid, ignorant and eaten up with themselves”, it is Amis who is giving a knowing and virtuosic performance, inviting his readers to rise from their seats and hurl abuse right back. This collection demonstrates what a good lecturer he must have been at Swansea and Cambridge universities, grabbing attention by saying Cornwall is “an uninviting pseudo-nation” or that Native American languages are “unsuited to the expression of civilised concepts”.

Underneath the jokes and deliberate exaggerations — the best film he saw was King Kong dubbed in Italian, his favourite writer was Len Deighton — many of Amis’s points are sound. He preferred directness to complication, clarity to obscurity. He didn’t like high-rise blocks, action paintings or sculpture made from wire funded by the Arts Council. The abolition of the Authorised Version by the Church of England was fatuous, “throwing the past away”. The decay of language alarmed him; he was a fusspot about hyphens, semicolons and received pronunciation. Amis was the first to spot the inherent dangers of league tables, which prove nothing about the quality of students’ work.

Change, he always maintained, does not mean progress or improvement, just as more — more universities, more degree passes — actually means less. Were he alive today to witness wokery, identity politics, the “decolonising” of the curriculum and the trans mob overthrowing the laws of biology, I’ve no doubt Amis would explode and disappear. Nevertheless, his comic zest was unparalleled and throughout his ranting and raging I always laughed. Who’s to match him today?

Collected Poems by Kingsley Amis, Penguin Modern Classics, 139pp; £12.99. The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction by Kingsley Amis, Penguin Modern Classics, 495pp; £12.99