Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950

Introduction: The Amises, Tradition, and Influence: Genealogical Dissent

Introduction The Amises, Tradition, and Influence: Genealogical Dissent The existence of several established broadsheets in the capital is often assumed to be a sign of diversity and health. What you end up getting, though, is a relativist's echo chamber-what Kingsley called pernicious neutrality. Every "public feud" or "literary dogfight " or "undignified scrap" must have two sides to it, mustn't it, or how will it run? - Martin Amis, Experience:A Memoir If the past is any indication, literature will never become a family business . Perhaps too much is at stake, or perhaps the solitary act ofwriting does not transmit its allure in ways that other, more public professions do. In our highly publicized, hypermediated times, it is always easier to glamorize the doctor, the lawyer, or the sports hero than the iconoclastic exile-the lonely, struggling writer. Whatever the reason, even the most educated individuals struggle to remember more than a handful of literary families. One recalls immediately the intellectual dynasties of the Brontes, the Huxleys, the Rossettis, and the Trollopes, and one envies the fertile, familial coteries that nurtured the likes of Ford Madox Ford and Virginia WoolE1 In contemporary times, one thinks ofa number ofhusband and wife pairs, including Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, among others. The sister tandem ofA. S. Byatt and Margaret 3 4 Introduction Drabble also suggests itself, as do the impressive brothers Shiva and v. S. NaipauL But by and large, the production of literary works has historically remained a solitary and exclusive endeavor, conducive more to the garret than to the hearth. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the history of Western literature provides few examples offather-son pairs. Alexandre Dumas pere etfils spring first to mind, followed closely by Evelyn and Auberon Waugh. But then the mind falters. Eventually, one may recall the Ginsbergs, the Mathers, and the Updikes in America, the Gosses and the Mills in England, and the Mauriacs - Fran<;ois and Claude- in France. When one further restricts the criteria, however-requiring, for instance, long-term productivity and equality of reputation- a few of these pairs become problematic: David Updike's career is still in ascendancy , for example, and the Gosses, Mathers, and Mills seem overly polymathic to warrant inclusion, concerned with literature too tangentially or with less commitment than the model might require. There remains , however, one literary pair who can rival these others for historical primacy and preeminence: arguably, no other father-son tandem has produced a corpus as sizable and significant as that ofSir Kingsley Amis (1922-95) and his son, Martin Amis (b. 1949). They have maintained not only a quality of writing but also a duration of productivity that other literary families simply have not matched. As Martin told Melvyn Bragg in 1989, "there is no point in writing at all unless you think you're the best. Every writer thirsts for Johnsonian longevity of esteem and posthumous survival-but will never know ifhe gets it."2 Between them the Amises have published over thirty novels; a handful of short-story collections; numerous screenplays for television and film; and literally hundreds of reviews, essays, and articles ranging in topic from English university expansion and the state ofmodern fiction to alcoholic beverages and the video game Space Invaders. Kingsley was twice nominated for Britain's Booker-McConnell Prize, which he won in 1986 for The Old Devils, and though Martin has been shortlisted for the award once only-for Time's Arrow, or The Nature ofthe Offense, in 1991- in other years his name's absence from the list has fueled the controversy that his work, and the Booker Prize in general, perennially attracts. As James Diedrick and others have noted, the similarities between the Amises sometime border on the uncanny: both The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • 5 writers garnered the Somerset Maugham Award for their first published novels; both attended Oxford University; both satirize the social changes that confronted England since World War II; and both have been called, often with equal conviction, pornographers and the defining writers oftheir literary generations, ceaselessly vocal at the center of Inid- and late-century debates over the future of English fiction in both its realistic and postmodern forms.3 That their work differs in presentation and theme soon becomes obvious to any attentive reader. Such a reader will also recognize that these authors apparently reside in an antithetical literary relationship, opposing each other's most cherished stylistic values. This too is not surprising . The works of an author such as Kingsley Amis, whose first novel, .LuckyJim, appeared in 1954, and those of a generationally younger one such as Martin Amis, whose first, The Rachel Papers, appeared in 1973, should, after all, diverge dramatically. At least the history ofthe twentieth century novel proves as much. Yet for most ofthe last thirty yearsfrorn the early 1970S, when Martin began work on his first novel, to 1995, when Kingsley passed away-these two writers shared a parallel yet turbulent relationship not only as popular and critically important novelists but also as book reviewers, critics, and social commentators. Many people regarded Kingsley as a man of letters long before Paul Fussell appended the label for good, and it is becoming impossible to avoid ascribing the same appellation to Martin.4 When one compounds the Amises' professional similarities with their unique familial relationship , one begins to comprehend the hothouse tensions that continue to surround these two successful and highly controversial authors. Whether critics ask to be admitted to the club or have to be clubbed into admission, as John Barth once quipped, there exists almost uniform consensus regarding the Amises' historical significance. Despite the revisionist critical agendas of the past quarter century, most scholars and reviewers still admit-albeit at times begrudgingly-that Kingsley's and Martin's positions within the canons oftwentieth-century English literature remain secure. Given this fact, it is relatively surprising that so little scholarship has explored the famous, or infamous, literary quarrels between the two Amises. Such renowned critics as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, and Bernard Bergonzi make brief, passing references to the Amis father-and-son relationship, but to date only one writer has 6 Introduction attempted to synthesize the mutually informative work ofthe Amises.5 Nothing approximating a comprehensive study has yet to appear, although in the year 2000, Martin's Experience:A Memoir did address the subject firsthand, albeit through the lens ofclose personal involvement. In the chapters that follow, my primary purpose will be to examine the essays, interviews, and novels of Kingsley and Martin Amis with an eye open for instances in which they seem to instigate or to maintain a creatively generative father-son dialogue. My critical method will employ a collage or "snapshot" approach, looking for subjects upon which both Amises wrote as well as particular novels that function as logical pairs or companion texts. I intend to show that the Amises' wellpublicized disagreements always exceeded the narrow limits of familial peevishness. As they became increasingly vocal about their literary and political disagreements, their dialogues gradually evolved into sophisticated literary debates whose primary topic was a classic one: "Whither the novel?" Animated by a potent combination of personal and professional, oedipal and historical energies, the Amises' relationship also helps scholars contextualize many of the complex forces that inform issues of literary tradition, influence, and inheritance. Analysis of the Amises' writings reveals the extent to which they were consciously engaged in competition over four ofthe most pressing issues in twentieth-century literature: the psychodynamics of literary inheritance ; the status and the future ofthe realistic novel; the historical transition from modernism to postmodernism; and the humanist condition of post-World War II life. As this study will show, the Amises' personal and professional relationship eludes categorization in numerous extant critical models. To effectively categorize it requires a unique combination of several different models of influence as well as particular theories of interauthor and intergenerational transmission. To this combination I have appended the label genealogical dissent, implying the analogies of both familial descent and, of course, generational opposition and succession. BriefAnecdotal History: The Mid-I98os and Mid-I990S As the dedicated journalists of England and America are fond of reporting , the Amises' relationship was rarely free ofcontroversy in either TheAmises, Tradition, andInfluence 7 the personal or professional theaters. But although their instances of intellectual conflict or emotional head-butting were sometimes numerous and nasty, their opposition was always tempered by mutual respect and love. As Martin proclaims toward the end of Experience, "If these pages have so far been free of a sense of grievance, it is not because I have been trying to keep it out. It is because it isn't there."6 Indeed, the Amises' relationship -like all long-term relationships- thwarts generalization , simultaneously eluding and inviting classification. Although Martin's assertion does not satisfactorily summarize the Amises' familial wranglings, it is supported by actions as well as by words. When :Kingsley's marriage to his second wife, novelist ElizabethJane Howard, unraveled, it was Martin and his siblings, Philip and Sally, who engineered their father's remarkable relocation to the home ofhis first wife, Hilary, and her third husband, Alistair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. Before that, Kingsley's well-known fear of isolation was alleviated by his children's nightly visits and stays. Toward the end ofhis life weekly dinners with Martin and the celebration of grandchildren peppered his days with diversion and joy. Julian Barnes, Martin's former friend and a fellow novelist, has proffered one ofthe best interpretations ofthe Amis family bond, suggesting that they accepted their love as a given, wholly unshakable, despite their public disagreements. According to Barnes, Kingsley's professional rejection was to Martin "a hurt that will never go away." However, it functioned beneficially as well. For one thing, Barnes explains, it acted as a critical "vaccination": when your own father can stand neither your books nor your politics-which are "a lot of dangerous, howling nonsense"-what then do the opinions ofstrangers really matter? Martin echoes this perspective in the opening pages of Experience, commenting ' "Fame is a worthless commodity. It will occasionally earn you some special treatment.... It will also earn you a far more noticeable amount of hostile curiosity. I don't mind that-but I'm a special case. What tends to single me out for it also tends to inure me to it. In a word- Kingsley." Later, he addresses the question in more detail: "They seemed to think that it must have been extra difficult for me, coming out from behind my father, but it wasn't; his shadow served as a kind ofprotection ." Although Kingsley acknowledged that a "strong, even furious opposition ofviews" distinguished their relationship, he never failed to 8 • Introduction regard his son as one ofhis "best and closest" friends. "I admire him very much as a man," he told Mira Stout in 1990. "He's responsible, and above all sane. I like sanity." Martin assents to this taut connection as well: "It's a very enjoyable adversarial type of relationship in that we agree a lot more about literature than we do about politics, but we don't agree that much about literature. So it's argumentative but close."7 When considering the Amises' relationship, it is helpful to remind oneselfofthe playful self-consciousness oftheir familial negotiations, if only to counterbalance unfair attempts to polarize their relationship, to misread professional difference as personal antipathy. With Kingsley's death in 1995, Martin lost not only a spirited father but also an intellectual equal, and as history (and Martin Amis himself) attempts to conceptualize the Amises' professional tensions, one should not forget that, above everything else, human closeness powered their relations. Outright rejection, of course, would have resulted in silence. Instead, playful rivalry energized their work and their lives. Even today, years after Kingsley's death, their relationship remains creatively inspirational, as Martin continues to seek communion with his father's spirit, having composed both personal and political memoirs, each ofwhich employ Kingsley as an emotional fulcrum. "What I miss," Martin recalled to Valerie Grove months after Kingsley's death, "is ringing Kingsley up to check a language point. And he'd ring me up to ask, 'what would a contemporary idiot say when he meant this?' I miss that."8 Two vignettes best illuminate the playful rivalry, both personal and professional, of the Amises' relationship. The first, and perhaps the most comical, assessment comes from Martin's memoir, Experience, where he recounts an early conversation between Kingsley and his sons. "At some point in our late teens," Martin writes, "Kingsley asked my brother and me what we wanted to do in life. 'A painter,' said my brother, who became one. ~ novelist,' I said. 'Good,' said Kingsley, rubbing his hands together rapidly, even noisily, in that way he had. 'That means the Amises are branching out into the other arts while keeping their stranglehold on fiction.'" The second, and more serious, assessment comes from Kingsley. Although he could never tolerate his son's politics and found his novels willfully experimental, Kingsley once confirmed a basic similarity between their work, which Martin is fond of TheAmises, Tradition, andInfluence • 9 citing: "I think if anyone's reading us in 50 or 100 years' time, we shall seem like very much the same kind ofwriter. We're more similar than we seem in some ways; we have a similar sense ofverbal, spoken humor. We compete with each other on that, always have, in a family-jollity way."9 As one would expect, such familial competition eventually found its way into the Amises' fiction. Kingsley's Stanley and the Women (1984), for example, teasingly features an unstable son who returns to his father's home, where he is living with his second wife. In a moment of rage, the son shreds a copy of Saul Bellow's Herzog. As chapter I ofthe present study will show, Bellow is one ofMartin's acknowledged literary mentors and a surrogate literary father. Significantly, he is also one of Kingsley's literary nemeses. As chapter 5will also show, numerous parallels exist between the characters in this novel and Kingsley's marriage to his second wife, adding a further biographical connection. Elsewhere in the novel, father and son debate the existence ofillusion and reality in words that approximate Robert Scholes's discussion of fabulation and realism, two topics that informed many of the Amises' literary grapplings and that lie at the heart oftheir individual brands ofcomedy and satire. Such positioning in this and other novels helps illuminate their respective positions within the historical evolution from modernism to postmodernism. Not to be outdone, Martin's novels routinely feature characters that struggle through strained familial relationships. In one novel, however, he specifically refers to the legendary relationship with his father; Money: A Suicide Note (1984) features a fictionalized character named Martin Amis who speaks to the narrator, John Self, who will eventually employ Martin to revise a screenplay. At their initial encounter, Self embarrasses him, striking at the root ofevery author's commercial phobias . "'Sold a million yet?'" he asks. Even though Martin responds with a "flash of paranoia, unusual in its candour, its bluntness," Selfdoes not relent: "'Your dad, he's a writer too, isn't he? Bet that made it easier.'" "'Oh, sure,'" Martin answers sardonically. "'It's just like taking over the family pub."'lO Instances like these abound in the plethora of profiles readily found in British and American periodicals, and they provide a great deal of vicarious entertainment. However, one year especially stands out as a focal point or benchmark in the Amises' history. That 10 • Introduction was 1995, and it became both an apogee and a terminus, an annus mirabilis and annus horribilis, for these two iconic English writers. By the time it ended, the Amises' relationship would be irrevocably melded with fame, controversy, and tragedy. Midway through that year Eric Jacobs published his authorized biography of Kingsley Amis, resurrecting discussion of the Amis family feud. The text contained excerpts from Kingsley's letters to many lifelong friends, including fellow poets Robert Conquest and Philip Larkin. Surreptitiously attained- by Kingsley, incidentally, and not Jacobs-from Oxford's Bodleian Library, these letters made patently clear the combative nature of Kingsley's strong opinions as well as the emotional and intellectual typhoon Martin confronted when he opposed his father.11 One of these letters famously found Kingsley lambasting Martin's politics, lamenting that his son had "gone all Lefty and of the crappiest neutralist kind, challenging me to guess how many times over the world can destroy itself, writing two incredible bits of ban-it bullshit in the Obs[erver] (ofcourse), one a 'paperback round up' (ofbooks about the nuclear winter etc.), the other a TV review (ofprogrammes saying Reagan wants to blow up the world." "Luckily," he concluded, "having now a 2nd baby has given him ... other things to think about." Soon afterward, and in a now famous line, Kingsley would label Martin "a fucking fool, and the worse, far worse, for having come to it late in life, aetat. [aged] nearly 37, not 17."12 To this day, one can attribute to this letter much ofthe controversy, or public misunderstanding, that has surrounded the Amises during the last fifteen years. Certainly, no one is used to speaking of one's children as "fucking fools," at least not in public. Then again, the Amises used such parlance frequently in family communication, and Kingsley was not speaking in public but in private correspondence. Of course, this fact does not fully diffuse the quip, as Kingsley obviously knew his letters would eventually be published (he had already begun negotiations toward this end), and in other letters the same terminology is used without emotional moderation. Jacobs's biography, however, entered such hitherto private conversations into the realm of social discourse, with deleterious results. Not surprisingly, other letters must also be acknowledged . A 10 May 1979 letter to Philip Larkin simultaneously evinces paternal pride and authorial envy when Kingsley queries, "Did I The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • II tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE? Last year he earned £38,000. Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit." This letter is preceded by earlier ones that express the same mixture of envy and pride, referring occasionally to "lazy Martin" or "Savage little Mart" and announcing elsewhere that "Scoundrelly Mart has sold his novel to the Yanks for $3,000 advance. Pretty good, eh?" Finally, on 3 August 1982, Kingsley directly disparaged Martin's novels, among those of other writers, asking Larkin, "Have you actually tried to read Clive Sinclair and Ian MacEwan and Angela Carter and M**t** *m**? [sic] Roll on is all I can say boyo. Fucking roll on."13 One final instance from the late I980s completes the initial foundation ofthe Amis public controversy: In mid-I987, The National Portrait Gallery invited the Amises to pose together to commemorate their significance to English literature and letters. Kingsley, however, refused, prompting an expose on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph. Although he would later admit to regretting the commotion, Kingsley's attitude seemed patently clear to many people: he would not be memorialized with his son. In a letter to John Hayes, director ofthe National Portrait Gallery, Kingsley discussed this clear misunderstanding, but as is common with fame, the public image would form without his input: "Many thanks for your letter inviting me to sit for a portrait with my son Martin. This is one of the most amazingly inept and tactless suggestions that has ever been made to me. Martin fully agrees with this judgement. Whoever put it forward originally is obviously waiting for a vacancy at Harpers and Qyeen or Tatler." Kingsley concluded tersely, "If this refusal leaves your artist with time on his hands, you might get him to knock up a picture of the Two Ronnies."14 Of course, Kingsley had already posed for a portrait with Martin in the late I970S, with the two men flanking Elizabeth Jane Howard. Certainly, no one would argue that it is easy to transcend the oedipal energies ofa father-son dynamic. In many ways, Martin benefited from his father's approval, especially when he chose to become a writer, something Kingsley could not claim. In a 1954 letter to Larkin, Kingsley noted that his own father disapproved of his profession and found his poems rather morbid. Later in life, he would commemorate his father through the elegy, "In Memoriam W.R.A," which laments the separation offather and son, concluding with the refrain 12 • Introduction Forgive me ifI have To see it as it happened: Even your pride and your love Have taken this time to become Clear, to arouse my love. I'm sorry you had to die To make me sorry You're not here now. Similarly, when Martin comments in Experience on Kingsley's rise to wealth in the 1980s, he employs the language ofpsychiatry to conceptualize the subconscious dialectics of father-son tensions: "So my father, during those years, had much to defend. He was indifferent to his surroundings , indifferent to acquisition, but the big spread, as I say, was perhaps his clinching reply to his father, in the argument that is never over."15 That notion of generational tension and filial critique-what Martin terms the "clinching reply" to one's father-is what distinguishes the Amises among the small subset of literary families and inspires the present study. Both men were aware of the uniqueness of their entanglements- and oftheir professional supremacy. Silently appropriating his father's words in an interview inJanuary 2001, Martin beamed, "It's because I'm a genetic elitist, a living V-sign to democratisation-or better say, a single finger, because there's only one of me. If all that 'It's been easy for me' stuff were true, then there'd be a lot more little AS Byatts and JG Ballards." When the interviewer followed up with the question, "So you belong to a literary super-race?" Martin gleefully replied , "Yes! A master-race! With a stranglehold on fiction!"16 Neither Martin nor Kingsley ever denied their heated disagreements over literature and politics, especially during the mid- to late 1980s, the high point of Kingsley's fascination with Margaret Thatcher and his fears about communist invasion. As recently as 2002, however, Martin would feel obliged to comment upon these disagreements, not only in his memoir Experience and the companion text Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), but with some exasperation throughout the question-and-answer sessions that attended the books' publication tours. Early in Experience, for instance, Martin discusses his debates over nuclear weapons with his father, concluding that a perusal TheAmises, Tradition, andInfluence • 13 of The Letters ofKingsley Amis (2000) leaves him with but one interpretation , that "most of the time he was just winding me up, because his correspondence is largely free ofobviously provocative folly." Similar remarks occur, of course, in the concluding letter to Kingsley in Koba the Dread, which ends with the simple invocation, "Your middle child hails you and embraces yoU."l? Importantly, Experience also clarifies that a "fucking fool, in [Kingsley 's] lexicon, meant someone just about bright enough to know better." To be fair, this neutralized reading of"fucking fool" is not exactly supported by Kingsley's other letters, as in a December 1983 missive to Philip Larkin that proclaims without moderation, "Yes Craig Raine is a fucking fool. Terrible poet too. All that Martian bullshit."18 In a coincidence whose significance could not have been lost on Kingsley, Craig Raine was Martin's tutor at Oxford. He was also the chieffigure ofwhat is sometimes referred to as "Martian" literature, as exemplified in Raine's most famous poem, ''A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," the perspectival experimentation ofwhich Kingsley hated. (Of course, the ironic pun implied by the word Martian would not have been lost on Kingsley's comic sensibility.) Elsewhere in Experience Martin allows readers a further glimpse into one of the Amises' political debates, which culminated in his ultimatum that his father "Get some new dirt on [Nelson] Mandela while I'm in America. Because your old dirt is hopeless." Kingsley's response was terse, but telling: ''Agreed. Just one thing. You're a leafin the wind oftrend." Eventually, these political arguments would migrate to the pages of Martin's work. Just one year after Kingsley's "fucking fool" letter to Conquest, Martin would respond to his father's charges in a collection ofshort stories about nuclear and apocalyptic fear titled Einstein's Monsters (1987). The celebrated introductory essay to the book- "Thinkability"- refers explicitly to his conversations with Kingsley, confessing that on this subject, he was ruder to his father than he had been since his teenage years, often ending their discussions with his own version of"fucking fool" - something along the lines of"Well, we'll just have to wait until you old bastards die offone by one."19 As anyone familiar with these writers knows, Kingsley was by far the less charitable when it came to expressing his opinions, regardless of whether the subject was Martin's politics or his books. Another letter to 14 • Introduction Conquest took as its theme Martin's fourth book, Other People:A Mystery Story (1981), which Kingsley disparaged above all the others. "Between ourselves," Kingsley wrote, "I only read about half, too boring. Little sod said on TV you had to read it twice. Well then HE's FAILED hasn't he?" When Martin's fifth novel, Money, was published three years later to great critical acclaim, Kingsley responded even more famously: by way ofsilent review, he sent the novel flying through the air, at precisely the point, Martin suspects, where the Martin Amis character entered the novel, "breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself."20 The year 1995, however, also marked a high point for Martin Amis hysteria. His novel The Information, a tale ofliterary envy and competition , was ready for publication, and he was seeking a historic £500,000 advance, sending British journalists to the table, knives in hand. Although Kingsley would later accuse the Times of exaggerating his more restrained comments, he was nonetheless reported to be "taken aback by his son's success."21 For Kingsley, the controversy surrounding The Information reinforced a particularly troubling trend: it was becoming increasingly difficult to deny that Martin's reputation had started to eclipse his own. Was it possible, Kingsley wondered, that the novel had outgrown his more traditional realistic forms, metamorphosing into Martin's more labyrinthine and playful postmodern tropes? Had the son succeeded in overturning his father's earlier substitution, reworking the modernistic techniques that Kingsley had so stridently worked to supplant? The questions gave him pause, and to Eric Jacobs he confessed to worries that educated readers - especially younger ones-were becoming more likely to "associate the surname Amis with the Christian name Martin than with Kingsley." For his own part, Martin recalls an episode during a television interview where Kingsley was asked to comment upon Martin: "He could barely conceal his anger," Martin explains . "The programme was meant to be about him." Nowhere, however , is this professional jealousy more apparent than in a comical 1984 letter to Philip Larkin in which Kingsley simultaneously laments and celebrates the process ofgenerational erosion that confronts all writers: "Of course Martin Amis is more famous than I am now. His PLR money was £800 for 4 novels. Mine was £3,300 for 15 (plus £350 for EVERYTHING ELSE) so he's nearly caught me up. But you give the The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • 15 boy a rest. The truth is, Phil, that we all suffer from the limitations of the age we were born in. Just as the generation before us had no time for Ulysses, so in our turn weeeeghghgh ... [sic]."22 Although Kingsley would rally his forces for the masterful Booker Prize-winning novel The OldDevils (1986), it was clear by the mid-I98os that Martin's career was the one to watch, a point reinforced by the 1995 publication ofJames Diedrick's Understanding Martin Amis, the first monograph devoted exclusively to Martin's work and a companion piece to Merritt Moseley's Understanding Kingsley Amis, which had appeared two years prior. The year 1995 came to a sad end, of course, on October 22, when Kingsley died from complications related to a fall that had happened months earlier. Obituaries throughout Britain and the United States registered the intensity of the loss. Although Kingsley had begun his career as an opponent of the literary establishment, at least in its more artificial forms, his death deprived the literary world ofone of its most eloquent, popular, and accomplished writers. It deprived it as well ofthe Amises' controversial and entertaining relationship. In the midst of 1995's maelstrom of publicity, Kingsley's death would prove to be the defining event in Martin's midlife crisis, a process that had begun a year earlier when the Amises discovered that a relative, Lucy Partington, had been murdered by Frederick West, one of England 's most notorious serial killers. By the end of 1995, Martin would have even more to deal with. He would discover a daughter he never knew existed; divorce his first wife and marry his second; and undergo extensive and widely publicized dental reconstruction in the United States. Next, he would have to suffer the controversy surrounding the publication of The Information, the severance of his professional relationship with his agent Pat Kavanagh, and the loss of his long-time friendship with Julian Barnes, Kavanagh's husband. Finally, he would watch his father pass away, and he would fight with EricJacobs over the unauthorized publication of Kingsley's death-bed diary. Almost with relief, Martin concluded in a profile written about him by Andrew Billen, "The trouble with memoirs is that they are so un-universal. Although the relationship between my father and me was kind of unique- ... both roughly equivalent figures with equivalent bodies of work, given the chronological difference- there is still something 16 Introduction universal about the father-son relationship compared to the halfforgotten fuss over The Information."23 Regardless of the professional jealousies and brooding envy that Martin seems naturally to provoke, one must admit that his choice of profession was remarkably brave given his father's thoroughly established reputation. The incendiary history ofLuckyJim alone would have been sufficient to silence, or at least discourage, the production of most authors' sons. Of course, Martin had earlier acclimated himself to this burdensome climate. In interviews, for instance, he is fond of citing a competition in The New Statesman for the most oxymoronic book title. One of the winners, he recalls, was "a gentle joke"- My Struggle, by Martin Amis.24 Given the pervasive schadenfreude of the literary (or the modern) world in general, Martin knew he would encounter initial charges of nepotism. After all, he was the son of one famous novelist and the stepson ofanother (Elizabeth Jane Howard). Philip Larkin, his father's best friend, was also the godfather of Martin's brother, Philip, and Martin was the godson ofBruce Montgomery, another writer. Add to this combination the fact that he enjoyed notorious success with women- much as his father had before him- and that his prose exhibits a mastery and aggressiveness not seen since Vladimir Nabokov, and you have the potential for entrenched literary envy. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Martin's writing often features a combative , assured tone, whether he is reworking his father's forms and themes or those of earlier literary masters. For fellow writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones, this tone resonates with psychological force: ''A style like Martin Amis's represents both a fear and a desire. It represents a radical doubt about the business ofwriting, an authorial identity crisis that can be postponed by having each sentence declare the presence of the author."25 Of course, it is possible to argue that Martin never really rebelled against his father, simply retracing his footsteps by adopting the same metier. Martin explains in Experience that Kingsley had actually deglamorized the novelist's profession. "It's a strange surprise, becoming a writer," he states, "but nothing is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day. The pains, and perhaps some of the pleasures, of authorship were therefore dulled to me."26 But in another, more cogent sense, it is important that Martin intentionally confronted his father on The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • 17 both personal and professional fronts: throughout his novels and essays, Martin contested Kingsley's most cherished technical and narrative values . Asserting the validity ofsyntactical, structural, and narrative experimentation , he directly challenged his father's status as cultural and literary icon, an affront that Kingsley would not leave unchallenged. In a short article in the 26 June 1995 issue of The New Yorker, Martin addressed the personal and historical energies that animated his relationship with his father. Recounting the exigencies ofpromoting The Information , he paused to comment on what he labeled a "literary law"-that writers of an older generation should "scorn their youngers and revere their elders." Such an attitude, he noted, hovered like a specter over his nightly question-and-answer sessions, finding repeated expression in the query whether his father liked his work. The answer, emphatically, was no. "My father has read my first, third, and seventh novels," Martin explained, "and none of the others. He can't get through them. He sends them windmilling through the air after twenty or thirty pages." To anyone who has read The Information, these words should resonate as an inside literary joke: no one at the character Richard Tull's publishing house can read more than ten pages of his newest novel without succumbing to debilitating headaches or other mysterious physical ailments. To Martin, however, familial approbation was cause for neither anger nor alarm; it was instead a fundamental artistic imperative, endemic to the writer's profession: "Older writers should find younger writers inimical," he explains, "because younger writers are sending them an unwelcome message. They are saying , 'It's not like that anymore. It's like this.' In the present context, 'that' and 'this' can be loosely described as the thought-rhythms peculiar to your time. Implicit in these thought-rhythms are certain values, moral and aesthetic."27 As Martin is no doubt aware, his comments summon a number of important literary dynamics. First, his phrase "thought-rhythms" invokes the stylistic intonations of Saul Bellow, one of his literary mentors , who provided a counterpoint to Kingsley's less didactic form ofsocial realism. Furthermore, such a phrase simultaneously conjoins both an ideological and a stylistic mandate, confirming an ongoing literary dialogue, an evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest contest that cannot be transcended or denied. In short, his words describe a law ofgenerational 18 • Introduction conflict, ofliterary succession, that is at least as old as Plato's attack on Homer for subjective falsification. And just as with Plato and Homer, what was at stake in Martin and Kingsley Amis's quarrels was mimesis, the fidelity of realistic representation, the legitimacy of method as a means for inscribing truth. Interrogating many of these issues in their novels, essays, and interviews, the Amises' own brand of genealogical dissent remains unprecedented among extant studies of literary tradition ' influence, and inheritance. Tradition, Influence, and Anxiety The contentious relationship between Kingsley and Martin Amis thwarts simple classification. To begin with, their contemporaneous careers do not fit neatly into unidirectional theories of influence, as both men influenced each other, especially when Martin's reputation began to flourish in the 1980s while Kingsley's went into decline. In addition, it is insufficient solely to categorize the Amises within historicist studies ofrealism or postmodernism, as that subordinates their personal dynamics within socioliterary evolutions. Instead, the Amises instigated and maintained a creatively generative dialogue both within their works and their familial negotiations. Their complex blend of artistic inheritance draws from earlier models of tradition, influence, and realism but ultimately emerges as an entirely independent entity, considerably more than a professional assimilation, personal quarrel, or historical evolution . To their revolutionary combination of personal and professional, genealogical and generational transmission, I append the term genealogical dissent, especially because such a label simultaneously engages the themes of generational tension and family ties that animated the Amises' struggles. Stated otherwise, Kingsley and Martin Amis argued not only with each other in an endless battle of manifest dissension (or dissent); they also intuited and outwardly contested the intonations of historical tradition and literary descent. Both practically and philosophically , their personal and professional arguments engaged many of the critical conflicts that shaped twentieth-century literature. Yet their conflicts always originated in, and returned to, their familial genesis. In order to understand fully the ways these dual narratives of public and private engagement inform the Amises' relationship and writing, TheAmises, Tradition, andInfluence • 19 it is necessary to employ a cross-critical method. In this regard, four theories-from four scholars with different contexts and fundamental ambitions - have contributed to my conceptual model. Two are famous theories oftradition and influence propounded by T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom. Although Eliot's influence on Bloom is clearly apparent, Bloom's more Freudian praxis diverges significantly from Eliot's firmly historicized evaluation. The other two theories, put forth by George Levine and Jerome Meckier, address realism and revaluation. Partially reworking Bloom, Meckier has proposed a theory of"parodic revaluation " and "revaluative substitution" that elucidates the "hidden rivalries" contained within much Victorian and modern fiction. His theory works to extend Levine's controversial theory of realism as an assimilative, endlessly accommodating form by foregrounding the historical contexts that Levine endeavors to marginalize. Together, the work ofthese four scholars helps to lay a preliminary foundation for conceiving the Amises in terms oftheir historical and interpersonal interaction. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), Eliot famously asserts the need for writers to accumulate a "historical sense" by which they must become aware not only ofthe "pastness ofthe past," but ofits continual "presence." This sense of historical tradition inspires feelings of identity and belonging, a recognition of one's place among contemporary generations and those which preceded it. Tradition, ofcourse, cannot be perfectly equated with influence, although some crossover is to be expected. In addition, Eliot's Arnoldian concept oftradition is necessarily flexible and assimilative: original works certainly can and do modify the preexisting order. But in Eliot's praxis, individual writers cannot escape the pull or the intonations of the past. Ultimately, there can be no transcendence from history: all will "inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." Faced with this burden, writers undergo a process of necessary depersonalization, surrendering their egos to the larger waves ofliterary precedent. Eliot then evaluated a writer's "progress " in this regard by a standard of increasing impersonality. Reworking William Wordsworth's dictum that poetry should emerge from "powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity," Eliot asserted instead that the act ofwriting demanded not "a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion." It necessitated "a continual self-sacrifice, a 20 Introduction continual extinction ofpersonality," which he likened to chemical catalysis , his metaphorical rationale for modernist poetry's emphasis upon juxtaposition. In Eliot's formulation, originality therefore became a problematic construct: talent subordinated itselfto literary ancestry, and creativity was measured by the barometers of historical tradition. "We shall often find," Eliot wrote, nearly conflating tradition and influence, "that not only the best, but the most individual parts of a poet's work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." "No poet, no artist of any art," he continued, "has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation ofhis relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."28 Kingsley and Martin Amis certainly share Eliot's reverence for historical tradition and are separately influenced by it. Kingsley once lamented , "You can't be expected to do much by putting pen to paper without having a rough idea of what your predecessors have done." Similarly, Martin has claimed, "A new tradition can only evolve out of an old one; it cannot be induced."29 In direct contrast to Eliot, however , neither Kingsley nor Martin endorse Eliot's concept of an everexpanding canonical bookshelf. On the contrary, both Amises actively assert their literary personalities, deliberately interrogating the standards of the past as they seek to rework and displace them. Tradition functions not as an acid bath ofindividual ego but as a fiercely competitive arena in which egos continually and consciously strive for market share and dominance. The Amises' writings proclaim authorial autonomy and independence, repudiating the erasure of subjectivity that Eliot propounded. For the two authors, literary personality and production are indelibly intertwined: lining up masters and misfits from the historical past, they willfully reworked extant forms and precedents, intentionally attempting to displace literary tradition. In this respect, their example of dually (or duelly) combative and self-conscious literary influence more closely resembles that famously described by Bloom, although with significant variances. Bloom shares Eliot's sense ofthe burden ofhistorical tradition, the enduring presence ofthe past. However, whereas Eliot theorizes tradition The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence 21 within a decidedly historical framework, Bloom describes influence in transhistorical terms, as an omnipresent creative standard that crisscrosses literary periods. For Bloom, as for Eliot, all writers come late upon the scene. They are inescapably aware of the fact that their work always takes place, as Bloom claims, "after the Event." Departing from Eliot's construction, Bloom construes influence as Freudian and decidedly masculinist anxiety, an oedipal conflict in which writers deliberately rebel against their literary ancestors, who function as symbolic fathers, imposing and austere.3D Creative originality becomes absolutely crucial, both as psychic defense and autonomous necessity. Authorial maturity or its opposite- death and silence- depend wholly upon it. In this battle for literary survival and supremacy, Bloom argues, one must deliberately "misread" the works ofone's predecessors, intentionally supplanting their authority and influence through acts ofwillful misprision. In a series of four books - The Anxiety ofInfluence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976) - Bloom popularized a controversial theory ofinfluence that cast historically revered writers as ominous presences threatening to silence subsequent writers through superior creative strength. To surmount this oppression, successful writers exhibit a Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean will to power. They employ a series of devices or defenses to engage in subconscious literary competition, battling the echoes of the past for the mantle of immortal truth. As numerous scholars have noted, Bloom's conception of influence verges upon intertextuality: he asserts that influence "means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts." Moreover, a "poetic text"-exclusive of and divorced from the limits ofgenre-is not "a gathering ofsigns on a page," but "a psychic battlefield" over which writers struggle for eternity, "the divining triumph over oblivion."31 To clear an imaginative space for the legitimacy of their voices, new writers must undergo a process of "accommodation and assimilation" to which Bloom ascribes the notions of "misprision" or "misreading." Belatedly aware of their precursors' accomplishments, new writers "swerve"- in an act of artistic clinamen- from their poetic fathers by misinterpreting the meaning oftheir analogical texts. This substitution ofmeaning ushers forth a new but false creation, resident in the middle ground between originality and parody. Finally, in a moment ofliterary 22 • Introduction restitution-variously referred to by Bloom as a "revisionary ratio" or tessera-the latecomer restores and refines the differences between this "ancestral text" and the new work.32 Stated differently, writers misinterpret precursor texts to clear a symbolic path for their own creative expression , and their artistic success (or maturity) depends upon the strength oftheir literary "misreadings." These misreadings also conform to differing levels of deliberation and awareness. "Strong" misreadings enable writers to triumph over their "anxiety ofinfluence," transcending the burden ofhistorical example. "Weak" misreadings, by contrast, further ensnare a writer in symbolic indentured servitude. As long as they fail to rework and thereby assimilate their precursors, they remain ineffective and unoriginal, trapped in a state of symbolic castration, impotence , or death- a creative silence that forecloses individual assertion as well as literary immortality. New writers must write not only against the intonations of the past but against their own admiration as well. Dangerously , respect begets silence. In accordance with the Bloomian model, both Kingsley and Martin Amis assault the conventions oftheir literary fathers. In addition, both view literature as an unceasing battle that can be won or lost, with disastrous consequences. As Richard Tull remarks in The Information, in a thoroughly Bloomian tone, "Writers should hate each other ... ifthey mean business. They are competing for something there is only one of: the universal. They should want to go to the mat." Similarly, Kingsley expounded to the editor of Time and Tide that "the cheapest contemporary novel has more to teach us than these painful reminders ofwhat we have long outgrown." Of course, Kingsley valued such a remark far more in the 1950S, during Movement poetry's (and the "Contemporary" novel's) rebellion against modernist experimentation, when his own work could still be classified as "Contemporary," a label whose meaning has unfortunately slipped over the years.33 His opinion differed notably during the heyday of postmodernism, when Martin and other authors sought to revaluate and repudiate the return to realism that characterized much literature ofthe Contemporary period. Despite these surface similarities, however, Bloom's oedipal framework cannot fully encompass the complexities of the Amises' personal and professional maelstrom. Without any shadow of a doubt, Martin The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • 23 demonstrated that he could compete with his father on a level playing field. However, his works must be read as more than successful instances of efficient misreading, of exorcism by misprision. Although Bloom illustrates the Freudian psychology that underlies some of the dynamics ofinfluence (despite its masculocentrist framework), his paradigm ultimately cannot account for the Amises' familial amiability-as opposed to their professional antagonism. It also cannot account for the mutuality or the complementarity of their authorial negotiations. Significantly , Kingsley Amis cannot be labeled a "great inhibitor" as regards Martin Amis. On the contrary, the Amises' professional disagreements worked to solidify each author's critical and creative modus operandi. Their relationship was not unidirectional in the sense that John Milton's influence upon William Blake was: the Amises belonged to different generations, but they were important contemporaries with overlapping oeuvres. Throughout their lives, and with each successive publication, Kingsley and Martin redefined the parameters oftheir ongoing artistic conflict. One can trace, for instance, the reverse influence of Martin's reputation upon Kingsley, especially after Money was released , when few people would argue that Kingsley remained the shining light in the Amis literary constellation. Triumphantly, Kingsley's fears of Martin's ascension and the threatened eclipse of his own achievement arguably produced The OldDevils, the novel that garnered Kingsley the Booker Prize. This constant regeneration of influence, this simultaneity of impact , demands that one examine the Amises' conflict in less mythic diction and on a more localized battlefield than Bloom's oedipal framework allows. Kingsley's and Martin's "anxiety of influence" is best conceived , therefore, not as a transhistorical weight threatening to oppress creativity, but as a decidedly historical and generational conflict that stimulated- indeed, generated- their positions within the evolution of the twentieth-century novel. Because ofthe Amises' familiarity, the historicity oftheir productions, and the regenerative nature of their deliberations , one must supplement Eliot and Bloom with theories that address the historical evolution of realism. In this respect, the work of Levine and Meckier is helpful, for it has the added benefit ofbeing less generalized, or sweeping, than either Eliot's or Bloom's approaches. 24 • Introduction Realism and Revaluation In The Realistic Imagination (1981) and "Realism Reconsidered" (1988), Levine theorizes that realism should be considered an evaluative mode for which conflicts of authority assume primary significance. Defining realism as an "historical impulse that manifests itself as a literary method," Levine contends that realistic works enact a symbolic transaction or debate, paralleling the shape of a Hegelian dialectic. "When a literary method comes to be called realistic," Levine writes, "it tends to imply several things: first, that there is a dominant and shared notion of reality in operation, upon which the writer and his audience can rely; second, that this notion is self-consciously replacing an older and currently unsatisfying one which is open to parody and rejection; third, that there is moral value ... in the representation ofthat reality."34 Realism thus exhibits a progressive, not static, impulse: it moves from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, constantly begetting its opposite and internally generating its generic environment. In addition, it becomes necessary to speak of plural realisms for the simple reason that depictions of reality constantly war with previous, outmoded versions. Finally , there exists an intrinsic moral value to such debates: the modernist rallying cry of art for art's sake, which underlies Eliot's ideas, for example, was always more than an artistic dictum or parodic reappraisal ; it was also a potent social weapon and an ideological imperative, an affront to previous literary evolutions. Levine's theory has much in common with Meckier's account of the artistic competition that attended Charles Dickens's rise to fame throughout the 1830S and 1840S. In Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction (1987), published six years after The Realistic Imagination, Meckier argues that such nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope used their novels to engage in "realism wars" with Dickens, presenting rival versions ofreality that contested his own satiric portrayals ofscience, religion , and nineteenth-century English society. While some of these authors did not publicly acknowledge their feuds, their texts betray their hidden rivalries. Meckier argues, for instance, that in Felix Holt as well as Middlemarch, George Eliot opposes Dickens's Bleak House by revaluating his melodramatic, apocalyptic satire of scientific inquiry. The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • 25 Contesting his "devolutionary" themes with her more ameliorative, "evolutionary" ones, Eliot crafted Middlemarch as "her most concerted attempt to rescue contemporary science from subversive refashionings of its findings into a satirist's weapon." The novel confirms Eliot's decidedly Victorian humanism in the face of"Dickens's increasing doubts about the redemptive possibility of human nature." In Meckier's schema, this comprises one aspect ofparodic revaluation: criticism that the earlier text or author has depicted modern reality either too severely or too narrowly. In the twentieth century, Evelyn Waugh would provide the second aspect of this paradigm- revaluation that suggests that a novelist "has glossed over unpleasant realities, including harsher implications within his own material." Waugh's Decline andFall and A HandfuloJDust , for instance, take Dickens to task for clinging to the "enduring value of humanistic virtues," maintaining a positivistic form of secular humanism that seemed pointless, if not dangerous, in the postWorld War I environment.35 Meckier's model diverges significantly from both Bloom's and Levine's and potentially comes closest to the Amises' own literary grapplings . As would Bloom, Meckier acknowledges that Dickens functioned for other Victorian novelists as a symbolic literary father, imposing and omnipotent, who had to be reworked and repudiated. In stark contrast to Bloom, however, Meckier contends that the principal dynamic that animated these struggles is not anxiety but rivalry: through deliberate, self-conscious parody, these authors indict Dickens for falsifying , or misrepresenting, the limits of the world. In other words, they did not need to subconsciously misread Dickens's novels in acts ofoedipal misprision, as Bloomian maneuvers maintain. Instead, they sought to challenge, correct, and displace Dickens's falsifications through calculated revision and response. Similar to the Amises, these authors' conflicts with Dickens-or the multiplicity of"Dickenses" found in his work-did not stifle creativity but vitalized it. Their rival, competing works attest to a state of literary trench warfare, a Darwinistic contest over realistic representation as well as the very nature ofreality itself Meckier's model has much in common with Levine's notion ofrealism as an evolutionary and evaluative mode; however, one benefit of Meckier's paradigm is that it strives to maintain the specific generational and historical divisions that Levine's seems to erase. For Levine, 26 • Introduction realism becomes an exceptionally fluid and assimilative mode, constantly enfolding its previous manifestations. Indeed, such a dynamic becomes a source of strength for his ideas. Levine notes, for instance, that all realist writers must ultimately confront the mode's internal flaw-the "projection ofselfon intransigent reality." Consequently, they cannot escape the realistic agenda, because representation is inextricably tied to language. "[T]he way to the unnameable," Levine asserts, exists only "through the conventions of the nameable."36 Whether they appear in their classical or revaluative and parodic forms, verisimilitude and meaning remain foreboding formal demands. The act of creating thus becomes self-reflexive. In essence, authors seek to reach through language to a symbolic "world beyond words," attempting to erase the artifice oftextuality and to depict an external reality that exists independently of its description. In so doing, however, authors must constantly confront the dual limits of their imaginative creations as well as their use oflanguage. Tropes ofrepresentation such as metaphor and metonymy endlessly complicate the enterprise ofrealistic fiction. Levine's formulation , much like Bloom's, thereby accentuates the transhistorical urge toward original production that distinguishes much literary production , especially since the romantic era. Consequently, his model expels the need for generational or historicized divisions such as the modernist revaluation of classical realism, the Contemporary novel's reappraisal of modernism, or the postmodernist revision of the Contemporary novel, all ofwhich become subsumed within realism's more expansive assimilationist agenda. By contrast, Meckier's model maintains both the generational and the revaluative aspects ofliterary influence and thus applies itselfmore exactly to the Amises' distinctly historicized literary struggles. Rather than fighting the Sisyphean burden of an oppressive voice transcending historical periods, Kingsley and Martin Amis often take issue with the literary generation immediately preceding them, even if-or especially if-doing so indicts the practices of either the father or the son. In this respect, they approximate WalterJackson Bate's proclamation that writers seek to gaze beyond their contemporaries to find in past eras a mode ofauthority "remote enough to be more manageable in the quest for [their] own identity."37 Despite their noticeable stylistic and thematic differences, the Amises do share a common impetus in that they both symbolically reject their literary "fathers" and embrace The Amises, Tradition, andInfluence • 27 their literary "grandfathers." Stated otherwise, they often disparage the dominant members of the literary generation immediately preceding them in favor of earlier ones who provide what they felt were necessary correctives to historical literary trends. Kingsley's earliest novels, published in the mid-I950s, make clear his rebellion against such exemplary modernists as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, writers famous for their pioneering work in narrative technique and structure. Accusing these authors of betraying their audience, Kingsley lambasted their formal complexities and verbal acrobatics. Throughout his life, he insisted that narration should not deny its moral foundation, something to which both Meckier and Levine are sensitive. For Kingsley, the act of communication was never neutral; nor was it an exercise in technique. Instead, it was a sacred trust whose violation betrayed the author's duty, which historically (since the time ofHorace, at least) has been to entertain and to instruct, to be both dulce et utile. The only antidote Kingsley found for the errors of his preceding generation was to turn to more conventional realistic models. The comic satires of Henry Fielding furnished him with solace and inspiration, and he was inspired by the traditional realism of George Eliot and the distinctively English irony, rhythm, and wit in the early work of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse. As the work of these authors implies, Kingsley's satiric and stylistic masters followed a path relatively uncluttered by the narrative experimentation that so marked literary modernism. These authors developed their characters within the contexts offirmly established social networks and portrayed them in language that refused to sacrifice either lucidity or reason. They posited a fixed moral landscape, insisting upon the essential validity ofsocial as well as literary artistic values. Martin's novels, by contrast, articulate an intentional challenge to his father's status as iconic literary authority; they contest his wellknown artistic values, favoring narration that is highly symbolistic, style that is aggressive and multireferential, and structure that intentionally frustrates readerly expectations. Directly contradicting Kingsley 's more traditional beliefs and realistic presentations, Martin evinced respect for the stylistic innovations usually attributed to modernism and postmodernism, returning glory to those writers his father excoriated . Directly provoking his father, he urged that self-reflexivity and authorial involution should be perceived not as flawed indulgences but 28 • Introduction as natural consequences ofthe novel's evolution. Arguing that the playful introversion, the writing about writing, that is commonly associated with postmodernism was "clearly an evolutionary development," he compared his father to being "in the position of someone in fifteenthcentury Venice or Florence saying: 'You know, I don't like this perspective stuff. Get back to when we didn't know about perspective."'38 In response, Kingsley charged that his son's overtly interrogative, internally generative style was artistically irresponsible. For him, these narrative gambits fell under the heading "Fucking Around with the Reader"-they were violations of an "orderly contract between writer and reader" that should be respected, if not maintained, at all cost. To Kingsley's horror, the text itself became a battleground for theoretical debate and teleological uncertainty. Additionally, he faulted the "compulsively vivid" nature ofMartin's style. If a narrative imparted no human lesson, Kingsley maintained, it degenerated to an exhibitionist display ofverbal ability; it became a language game, ostentatious, solipsistic , and affected. Rebelling against such willful experimentation, preferring his own, more controlled experimentation with genre, Kingsley was irritated by Martin's intentional manipulation ofwhat he once referred to as the "communication imbroglio."39 Although Martin admits that narrative experimentation does have its limit-that it can exceed levels ofcredibility and tolerance- he continues to contradict the theoretical precepts his father conscientiously propounded . Thematically, his novels foreground the fragmenting effects that poststructuralist literary theory, nuclear anxiety, and entropy have on one's efforts to create anything ofmetaphysical stability, whether it be family, love, or realistic texts. Although both writers produce comic novels , employing a form of moral satire that is seriocomic in nature, their depictions ofthe existential and ontological struggles oflate-twentiethcentury life remain separate and tangential. Not surprisingly, when considering contemporary writers, the Amises' opinions differed dramatically as well. Kingsley never warmed to the experimental achievements that distinguish the work of current luminaries such as Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, or Graham Swift. As the conclusion to the present study discusses, Martin himselfcontinues to scrutinize his relationship to mimesis and postmodernism, continuing his dialogues with literary tradition and his father. TheAmises, Tradition, andInfluence 29 For these reasons, the Amises' unique version ofgenealogical dissent ultimately eludes classification within Bloom's, Eliot's, Levine's, or Meckier's parameters. Although Kingsley and Martin share Eliot's reverence for tradition, they impose themselves much more actively upon it in works that are potent expressions ofliterary personality. Some ofthe psychological energies that inspire Bloom's theory ofinfluence do operate within the Amises' relationship. However, Bloom's framework provides no methodology for contextualizing either the historicity or the mutuality of the Amises' struggles-the overlapping revaluative impulses that move not only from Kingsley's work to Martin's, but also in reverse. Levine's hypothesis ofrealism as an assimilative Hegelian dialectic that consistently reincorporates and reinvents itself does account for realism's ability to consume difference, yet it unfortunately also marginalizes the historical contexts that are so crucial to the Amises' debates . Meckier's theory ofhidden rivalry and parodic revaluation begins to approximate the Amises' own, but it also, like Bloom's, cannot account for the brazen intentionality of their struggles. In contrast to Meckier and Bloom, the Amises' literary conflicts were never concealed : their rivalry was neither hidden nor an example of surreptitious misprision. Rather, it was a direct and self-conscious form of literary competition, a literalization- or "familialization"- of literary rivalry. Finally, and perhaps most important, none ofthese theories can accommodate the Amises' unique familial relationship, for it remains extrinsic to their theoretical frameworks. The Amises therefore furnish literary scholars with a unique and especially complex model ofliterary transmission and inheritance. Their relationship operates on more levels than many extant models allow; they conduct dual battles on both historical and personal fronts; and they interrogate numerous literary and extraliterary tensions that cut to the heart of twentieth-century literature and life. In short, theirs is a specialized version ofgenealogical dissent: the synergy oftheir personal relationship carries over into their professional lives, and throughout their novels and essays, their debates help to inscribe a whole generational shift ofliterary assumptions and values. In the chapters that follow, I intend to show how these revaluative tensions and energies operate not only in the Amises' novels but also 3° • Introduction within their personal literary canons. Because it is helpful to depict these dynamics in terms of each author's narrative proclivities and prejudices- the endlessly multiplying stream of borrowings and burdens that is instantly conjured by the word influence-I will begin by examining the Amises' responses to other writers, both past and contemporary . Their reactions will delineate mentors and misfits, leaders and losers, exempla and excrescences, and establish the Amises' personal "great traditions." Given the mutuality ofmy subject, however-its dual (or perhaps dueling) emphasis upon Kingsley andMartin Amis-I will invoke a necessary schematic for this analysis, seeking authors about whom both Amises have written. The Amises have obviously been influenced by more sources than I will treat in this study, but their essays reveal numerous instances of rival or competing discourse, especially when analyzing six key writers from American and English literature. Because the Amises have held such impassioned and well-defined views about American and English fiction, I will segregate such writers by their respective countries. This schism is doubly effective, however, because the chief influences on Martin happen to be American, whereas Kingsley never relented in excoriating the inability ofAmerican writers to produce an influential oeuvre. Treating the whole ofAmerican literature, as represented by Kingsley and Martin's reviews or essays, would itselfcomprise a lengthy book. However, three writers in particular stood out above the others and became the topic of numerous father-son debates. The Amises never wavered in their disapprobation or acclaim for these writers, and their particular reactions provide a primer for each author's narrative procedures. These authors are Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth, and each in his own peculiar way situates the Amises at their respective poles regarding stylistic experimentation, prophetic tone, and sexual explicitness in prose. This literary triumvirate functions as a loose holy trinity for Martin, but for Kingsley it represented the first seals unleashing literary armageddon. What renders this dynamic supremely fascinating is the way Martin intentionally embraces, as surrogate literary fathers, the very authors whom his father wholeheartedly disdained. ...