The Life of Kingsley Amis, by Zachary Leader

Sympathy for the old devil

Not long after the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin to thank him "for stopping me from being a shit and encouraging me to be funny in the right way". Larkin had suggested extensive changes to his friend's first novel, which had been rejected by the publisher Michael Joseph. Those who believe Amis was never as funny thereafter may draw their own conclusions; those who endured Amis's sporadic bouts of monumental rudeness - often as not inflamed by drink - may wish the shittiness had been better contained.

The overriding impression left by Zachary Leader's marvellous new biography is that of a comic talent best enjoyed in aphoristic vein, or when seeking to annoy, and of a curmudgeon who could be both endearing and appalling. Amis's saloon-bar philistinism and hatred of the arty or pretentious was combined with exceptional knowledge and understanding of literature. His aggression and intolerance mixed with the neuroses of an only child who was terrified of the dark, suffered panic attacks, refused to fly or take a lift, dreaded answering the telephone, and never learnt to drive.

"An undersized, law-abiding, timid person," Amis grew up in the south London suburbs: his father was a City clerk whose joviality went hand-in-hand with a sense of social grievance; his mother worried about her child suffering from malnutrition and constipation. At City of London School, Amis took an active role in the debating society, moving a motion that "it is better to wash behind the ears than brush the hair". An unexpected music-lover, he once declared that singing in the school choir was "the apex... of non-sensual pleasures", and "only a world without love strikes me as... decisively more terrible than one without music."

As an undergraduate in wartime Oxford, Amis was a contemporary of Larkin, John Wain and Alan Ross at St John's, making his mark as a wag, a heavy drinker and something of a ladies' man. "He had good, clearly defined features and beautiful wavy hair of which he was enormously proud. Kingsley and his comb were never far apart," a contemporary recalled. He caught the tail end of the war, serving with Signals in Normandy and Germany, and then returned to Oxford: he failed his BLitt, blaming in part that "silly, unhelpful, posturing oaf" Lord David Cecil, the imitation of whose lisping tones was to become one of his party pieces.

Avid for "girls and drinks and jazz and books", he met his first wife, Hilly. Her father, "an extraordinary old man like a music-loving lavatory attendant" and devotee of Morris dancing, provided the model for Professor Welch in Lucky Jim. "We each had half a glass of wine with our lunch, so you can imagine that it was a real family party!" he reported to Larkin after a meal with his future in-laws.

Amis's closest friend at Oxford was Larkin: a few years later, he relished the idea of "you as the Auden and me as the Isherwood de nos jours". Whereas Larkin started out as a novelist but is best remembered as a poet, Amis took the opposite path. Inspiration may have come "with the force of a mastodon's fart", but the poems themselves were notable for clarity, wit and careful construction: as a member of what became known as the Movement, he derided the poetry of Dylan Thomas as flatulent nonsense. "We pickle a rod for our own backs when we are patient with the obscurity of the great," Amis warned, while Henry James was mocked as "a turgid, windy and pretentious old arsehole".

By the time Amis embarked on his academic career - at Swansea, Princeton and Peterhouse, Cambridge - he had begun to make his name as a novelist. Bearing in mind the usual caveats about not reading novels as autobiography, and Amis's own admission that "all my heroes start from me and in a sense stay with me", Leader counterpoints the life and work to good effect. Despite his reputation as a xenophobe, Amis had a soft spot for Mediterranean holidays; he loved America, and his time at Princeton, where he "cut a swathe through the faculty wives", was an orgy of drink and fornication.

"Peterhouse can't expect to be taken seriously about anything now that it's given a fellowship to a pornographer," FR Leavis complained. Amis's unhappy stint at Cambridge coincided with the collapse of his marriage to Hilly, who could bear his boozing and philandering no longer. He changed wife, agent and publisher, and abandoned academia for the life of a full-time writer. By the time he married Elizabeth Jane Howard, and moved into a large house in Hertfordshire, he had happily assumed the role of a right-wing agent provocateur who enjoyed nothing better than discomforting do-gooders and the high-minded, holding forth at the bar of the Garrick about the humbuggery of lefties. This sometimes proved too much for the younger generation in particular - among them his son Martin's close friend, Julian Barnes.

Amis's later years make melancholy reading. His second marriage ended acrimoniously ("By God she was hard to live with but living without her seems absolutely pointless."). At one stage his drinks bill exceeded £1000 a month; he moved in, as a permanent lodger, with long-suffering Hilly and her third husband. Comic relief was provided by a summons to Buckingham Palace: he worried about farting in front of the Queen, and put himself on a strict "non-bean and onion diet".

Being best remembered for one's first book is a heavy cross for any writer to bear. Amis's novels were almost always reviewed respectfully and at length, but all too often they seemed funnier and sharper when quoted than when read as a whole. The Old Devils, Booker winner in 1986, was a rare exception to the rule.

It has become the fashion to denounce long biographies as telling us more than we need to know, but Leader's is a triumphant vindication of its 900-plus pages. It's a pleasure to read, and the accumulation of detail gives a real sense of a life being led. Amis was all too prescient when he claimed, apropos the expansion of university places, that "More Means Worse"; when it comes to his biography, more means even better.

Jeremy Lewis's 'Penguin Special' is published by Penguin