Lucky Him: the life of Kingsley Amis by Richard Bradford

Kingsley Amis's tragedy was that of most rebels who lack a clear political purpose: by an early stage in his career, he had come to realise that the thing he was rebelling against was himself. The upshot was a tense, uneasy personality whose contradictions displayed themselves in a series of tense, uneasy books that, towards the end of his life, were devoid of anything much except the personality. Political sympathy, moral fervour, artistic inclination: the props on which the average literary existence depends were stripped away until all that remained was a life, endlessly recreated – with varying degrees of duplicity – in art.

Kingsley Amis's tragedy was that of most rebels who lack a clear political purpose: by an early stage in his career, he had come to realise that the thing he was rebelling against was himself. The upshot was a tense, uneasy personality whose contradictions displayed themselves in a series of tense, uneasy books that, towards the end of his life, were devoid of anything much except the personality. Political sympathy, moral fervour, artistic inclination: the props on which the average literary existence depends were stripped away until all that remained was a life, endlessly recreated – with varying degrees of duplicity – in art.

Richard Bradford is by no means the first person to suggest that Amis's career, and in particular its professional and amatory aspects, provided him with an inexhaustible supply of raw material. But no one – certainly not Amis's earlier biographer, Eric Jacobs – has performed such a detailed job of analysis. No one, either, has so relentlessly exposed the central struggle of Amis's life. Broadly speaking, his novels offer the spectacle of an intelligent and sensitive man permanently at war with his decent instincts. When the less intelligent and sensitive side won out, the result, as in a book like Take A Girl Like You (1960), can seem simply gratuitous.

Though full of sharp insights, Lucky Him is hardly a biography in the accepted sense. There is a sprinkling of new anecdote, courtesy of Martin Amis, and The Legacy, his unpublished early novel, gets disinterred from the Huntington Library along with Other Ranks, a prentice work co-written on active service with his friend Frank Coles. Apart from these, Bradford has nothing to offer that was not in Zachary Leader's Selected Letters; the selection of photographs, most filched from Amis's own Memoirs (1991), is particularly feeble.

Where Bradford succeeds, better than nearly anyone who has previously written on Amis, is in uncovering the roots of the 1950s novels, the frenetic five-year period that realised Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling, I Like It Here and Take A Girl Like You. Like much else in Amis's life, the trail winds back to Philip Larkin, whom Amis described as "my inner audience".

By placing their letters from this period side by side, Bradford is able to establish their relationship to the books that boiled away in the background – a comic dialogue that he calls "a kind of scurrilous release from the cautiously framed exercise of the novel". Larkin, while finding Lucky Jim "miraculously and intensely funny", had private doubts about its want of imagination and admitted as much to an American academic. The novel "commemorates a period of intense joke-swapping just after the war", he told William Van O'Connor in 1958.

Bradford performs a similar dissection on Take A Girl Like You, tracking its origins back to some brisk little early Fifties homilies to Larkin about Amis's have-your-cake-and-eat-it attitude to his first wife, Hilly. This enables him to mark down the novel's finale, in which virtuous Jenny Bunn is effectively raped by Amis's alter-ego Patrick Standish, as "a brutal admission of defeat": the author acknowledging that his serial adulteries were wrong, that his wife's belief that fidelity was the only way to sustain their marriage was right, but being unable to stop himself.

Inevitably, this concentration on biographical building-blocks has one obvious drawback; it encourages the reader to wonder what there may have been in the subject's work beyond the life. The answer, perhaps, is not very much. If, with certain exceptions, Amis's novels become progressively less interesting, this is because the life follows a similar downward path.

His best late-period novel, You Can't Do Both (1994), moves back in time to adolescence and young manhood. By the end of his life, Amis was entirely detached from the environments he presumed to write about, and perfectly aware of the mess he had created around himself. As ever, it is the inanition that terrifies.

The reviewer is writing a biography of George Orwell