Celebrating sixty years of Martin Amis

Sixty years ago this Tuesday—the 25th August—Martin Amis popped into the world. No doubt he'll be celebrating in some style; the circumstances will be certainly be grander than those of the post-war Oxford into which he arrived. There, the 27-year-old poet and postgraduate student Kingsley Amis was in the middle of writing a B.Litt. thesis on "English Non-Dramatic Poetry" (which would, in 1950, be failed by Amis's chief examiner, the "silly, unhelpful, posturing oaf" Lord David Cecil) and was shortly to take up an extremely badly-paid position as a junior lecturer at the University of Swansea.

Amis's wife of one year, Hilly, had already given birth to the couple's first son, Philip—the reason for their hasty marriage—in 1948. Shortly after her second son's birth, the couple decamped to a small house in Swansea where the young Martin spent his earliest months sleeping in a drawer while his father rationed cigarettes and marked exam papers to supplement the household income. It was neither a gilded nor an auspicious beginning, although Philip Amis's godfather and namesake, Philip Larkin, had already made something of a name for himself with the publication of two dourly realistic novels and one Yeatsian collection of poems.

All this was to change in the most dramatic fashion with the 1954 publication of Kingsley Amis's novel Lucky Jim. It was a triumph that led Kingsley on to one of the longest and most distinguished literary careers in post-war British letters, not to mention—as many critics have noted with barely-veiled venom—the similarly distinguished career of his son, who himself acknowledged that almost any publisher would have printed his own first novel out of mere "vulgar curiosity."

Today, much as his father once did, Martin Amis occupies a position of unusual fascination in the world of British letters—and for reasons that have increasingly converged with those that saw Kingsley, in his later years, labelled a reactionary and a misogynist. I've written about both father and son several times for Prospect, most recently looking forward to Martin Amis's long-awaited and long-delayed new novel; but this birthday seems as good a time as any to look backward, and to remember that there was never anything inevitable about either Amis's success, let alone success on the scale each managed to achieve.

As I've been discussing recently over at the Observer, it's easy today to forget just how radical and how rigorous Kingsley Amis's approach to literature and the duties of a writer were when he worked them out—in Philip Larkin's good company—during and after the second world war. And it's easy, too, to forget how hard his son has fought to define and defend literature as a transforming pursuit in the 20th and 21st centuries. If you're new to either Amis, don't waste your time on the secondary debates. Go and buy The Old Devils and Money today, and take it from there, stopping off at The Amis Collection and The War Against Cliché if you're impatient of fiction. You won't be disappointed.