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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.
But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.
1 This essay appears in a different form in Old Lines, New Forces. Ed. Morris, Robert K.. (Fahleieh Dickinson Univ. Press 19771Google Scholar.
2 Kingsley Amis, “My Kind of Comedy,”The Twentieth Century, July, 1961, p. 46.
3 The illiteracies are deliberate, for complicated plot reasons. The whole poem is near‐Amis in style, could almost have come out of his last collection, A Look Around the Estate. Compare the sardonic poem “New Approach Needed” addressed to Christ on the cross: “Come off it / And get some service in / Jack, long before you start / Laying down the old law…”
4 David Lodge makes this point in the interesting section on Amis in his The Language of Fiction (New York, Columbia D.P.), pp. 243–67Google Scholar.
5 Vulgarity lurks in the come‐now‐no‐nonsense stance of Amis's controversial journal‐ism and criticism; most palpably in the tenor of his hawkish pronouncements on the war in Vietnam.
6 “My Kind of Comedy” p. 51.
7 F. R., and Leavis, Q. D., Dickens the Novelist (London, 1970), p. 141Google Scholar.
8 Is there a Parson, much be‐mus'd in Beer, A maudlin Poetess, a rhyming Peer, A Clerk …?Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot The spectacle of a Leavis springing to the defense of the “clerisy” in this indiscriminate way has its own sad ironies, and seems doubly unfair to Amis who, rightly or wrongly, has got himself a notably reactionary reputation as defender of “traditional” educational values. His Philistine pose has always been a game with the public, asking to be recognized as such. Even the anti‐academic Lucky Jim was a very “literary” book, full of disguised quotations in fact.
9 Politically of course they have been depressingly akin. One cannot avoid comparing Waugh's ugly enthusiasm about Italian fascism in North Africa in the thirties with Amis's even. uglier championship of American imperialism in Vietnam in the sixties.
10 Cf. Green, Martin, Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning, Little, Brown (Boston, 1973), pp. 78–81Google Scholar.
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