Amo, Amas, Amis

By John Elson

MEMOIRS by Kingsley Amis

Summit; 346 pages; $25

Reading this collection of essays and sketches is a bit like listening to a bristly British clubman, over whiskey-and-sodas, who has been cursed with total recall. Kingsley Amis was the archetypal Angry Young Man, as well as a very funny one, when he wrote Lucky Jim back in 1954. Amis can still be funny, when in the mood, but he is also still out of sorts: Memoirs seems to have been compiled as much to settle old scores as to relive the past.

Encyclopedic is the list of people and objects that have offended the Amis sensibilities: shrinks, the British army, body odor on crowded Prague streetcars, bebop, racist profs at Nashville's Vanderbilt University (where he taught for a semester). Then there are such literati as Arnold Wesker, John Wain, Malcolm Muggeridge and Leo Rosten, author of the H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N stories, whose cardinal sin, apparently, was failing to ply a dinner guest (Amis) with sufficient booze.

Some jaunty and possibly well-practiced barbs are aimed at women, mostly categorized by Amis as shrews or lays. Noting that many male writers find inspiration while showering or shaving, he adds, "One reason for the inferiority of women novelists to men, if indeed they are inferior, may well be that comparatively few of them shave with any regularity."

Still, Memoirs is not all misanthropy and -ogyny. Amis gives a generous portrait of his shy, witty fellow Oxonian, the poet Philip Larkin, who like the author had to endure that most mannered of academic dons, Lord David Cecil. One sprightly chapter contains a mercilessly comic imitation of a lisping Cecil pointlessly beginning a lecture. ("When we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean . . . looks like Chauthah?") Cecil had the ill grace to flunk Amis for his B. Litt. thesis, but the author uncharacteristically lets bygones be. Perhaps it's too hard to stay angry with someone so wholly and genuinely eccentric. It was, after all, one of Lord David's sons who, when asked what he planned to be when he grew up, responded, "I'm going to be a neurotic like Daddy."