#the old devils

[shelbycarpenter]

[scriniumplenum]

The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

I wanted to read a novel by Kingsley Amis as he remains a very well-regarded stylist, at least in the UK. And someone said this was funny.

I found it quite hard going, to be honest. It is about a group of people - I hesitate to call them 'friends', not least because the humour of the book derives entirely from their cynical, selfish attitudes and fundamentally negative views about life and its meaning - who gather after many years in Wales, where they grew up.

Some of it is about getting old; references, made funny be being matter-of-fact and deadpan, to physical changes that come with age. Much of it is about drinking; it is one of the few books I have read that takes a realistic view of what serious drinking (as opposed to alcoholism) amounts to.

The characters are two dimensional, in keeping with the cynical detachment of the narration. There are some mildly amusing moments but it is not a laugh out loud book.

And the style can be difficult to follow. It should rattle along but some sentences have to be reread several times to get the meaing, such as:

"Muriel lit a cigarette in one continuous operation rather than as when addressing Dorothy - piecemeal, like somebody driving a car at the same time."

You get the meaning but the language is imprecise and a bit loose. I put it down to laziness on the part of the author, I think.

Anyway, not a great book, but sufficiently diverting to be worth finishing.

[nyrbclassics]

"and fly they bloody well did"

"Peter's getting-up procedures were less taxing to the spirit than [his friends] Charlie's or Malcolm's but they were no less rigid. They had stopped being what you hurried heedlessly through before you did anything of interest and had turned into a major event of his day, with him very much on his own, which was right for an oldster's day. Among such events it was by far the most strenuous performance. The section that really took it out of him was the actual donning of clothes, refined as this had been over the years, and its heaviest item was the opener, putting his socks on. At one time this had come after instead of before putting his underpants on, but he had noticed that that way round he kept tearing them with his toenails.       Those toenails had in themselves become a disproportion in his life. They tore the pants because they were sharp and jagged, and they had got like that because they had grown too long and broken off, and he had let them grow because these days cutting them was no joke at all. He could not do it in the house because there was no means of trapping the fragments and Muriel [his wife] would be bound to come across a couple, especially with her bare feet, and that was obviously to be avoided. After experimenting with a camp-stool in the garage and falling off it a good deal he had settled on a garden seat under the rather fine flowering cherry. This restricted him to the warmer months, the wearing of an overcoat being of course ruled out by the degree of bending involved. But at least he could let the parings fly free, and fly they bloody well did, especially the ones that came crunching off his big toes, which were massive enough and moved fast enough to have brought down a sparrow on the wing, though so far this had not occurred."

—A description of daily dressing, and cutting toenails, from Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils, about a group of elderly couples living in Wales. This is from the point-of-view of Peter, elsewhere described as "a large, lumpish figure."

[nyrbclassics]

Kingsley Amis, Who Died This Day in 1995, As An Angry Young Man

Among all the two men’s accomplishments, Lucky Jim remains unique. Larkin, especially, would do much to make poetry of depressed and declining middle age ('Life is first boredom, then fear/Whether or not we use it, it goes.'), and Amis’s later work is not insensible to the grotesquery of trying to live the rest of your life as if you were 25. Lucky Jim is their one document of youth, their youth. It is in a way as optimistic as it is angry. Jim’s rages are impotent rages, his small acts of vandalism useless and self-destructive – and yet he undertakes them in the belief that they are not meaningless, that the world he is disparaging can be changed. Lucky Jim is a weirdly hopeful book, written when the failures of the men whose sensibilities and lives it captured, as well as the successes, still lay very much in the future. In 1951 all these things were something to imagine and laugh at. Lucky Jim is a lucky book, snatched improbably from time, the product of a collaboration, both editorial and spiritual, that neither writer, once firmly established, could afford to attempt again.

—From Keith Gessen's introduction to Lucky Jim, up at the New Statesman, about the germination of the book in Kingsley Amis's friendship with Philip Larkin. Amis died seventeen years ago today, but we hope to keep his books alive by publishing ten of them over the next few years—Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are first, to be followed by The Green Man and The Alteration. And the great thing about Amis's career is that there is a novel for every age (and mood).

[nyrbclassics]

Kingsley Amis: In Drink and Word

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done so once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

—Kingsley Amis is known as much for his drinking as his writing, in an article at Hyperallergic he is called "the great alco-bard of English letters." And today we start our attempt to balance the scale and return Amis senior to his rightful place as one of the great 20th-century British novelists, with the publication of two of his best books: The first is of course Lucky Jim, his maiden work, a huge success (re-read annually by Joseph M. Schuster in The Millions), and often called the funniest book ever written (including in today's B&N Review); and the second is The Old Devils, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize and considered by his son Martin to be his finest novel. The American Conservative has a good article on why Kingsley fell out of favor in the U.S. (quick hint: celebrity, politics, opinions, and a famous son), but if all you are interested in are the drinks, come Raise a Glass to Kingsley next Thursday at Housing Works Bookstore for an event hosted by Vol. 1 Brooklyn and have a glass of gin on us. Just try to avoid a hangover like Jim Dixon's.

[nyrbclassics]

My father always claimed to be completely uninterested in posterity. I said, it doesn’t mean anything to you, whether you’re going to be read in 50 years’ time? And he said, it’ll be no fucking use to me, will it? I’ll be dead. But I think that was sort of bravado, I think it did matter to him. When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it’s just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you’re old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young—whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it’s not like that.

—Martin Amis at New York Magazine's Vulture blog

We'll be publishing a total of 10 books by Kingsley Amis in the next few years. The first two up are Lucky Jim and Old Devils, coming this September.

[andhu]

The Old Devils

By Kingsley Amis

This actually started out my recent Booker binge. I wanted to read something clever, wittily written, and comic. I thought of Amis's Lucky Jim, and figured I could do with some more Kingsley in my life. I set about on a search for what was considered the best Amis novel, and I stumbled on the winners archive on the Booker website. 'Kingsley!' I thought, and bought this without a second's hesitation.

The novel was far from what I thought it'd be but there's no doubt that it checks all the boxes. The Old Devils is written with an exceptionally skilled hand. Amis knows when to go on, he knows when to back off. He is a master storyteller.

But.

This is one of those stories where you're not in it for the plot. The plot does go to some unusual and unexpected places, mind you, but that's not what you're reading for. It took me a very long time to understand this. If this bothers you, ask yourself this: does real life have a fast-moving plot?

This 'flaw' is what plays to Amis's biggest strength. Every person in this novel is absolutely real, and everything they do and go through is real. These are flawed, irrational, beautiful people. The narrative is peppered with truths about life, and all of it comes from the latter end of the middle. You can't write a novel like this without life experience and a serious acquisition of wisdom.

I had to persevere and put in some effort as I didn't like any of the characters (except Charlie) much but I stuck through, even though my reading was broken off with The Siege of Krishnapur but ultimately this was a very rewarding read with a lot of commentary on people, age, love, life, and Wales. I can see why The Old Devils gets the praise it did.

Read on Kindle, started 12th May, finished 4th June.

[girlmeetsbanjo]

when i say devil, you know who i mean - these animals in the dark, malicious politicians with nefarious schemes, charlatans, and crooked cops - the moonshine still gives you five to ten, the old devils are at it again...

the old devils * william elliott whitmore

the parish * austin, texas * 12/13/11