Defending Kingsley Amis

I'm going to quote from a modern writer and leave you to guess, for the moment, who he's talking about. 'If you did exactly what they wanted'... Excuse me, I think we'll... it will have more point and be fairer to your powers of guesswork if I put it in the present tense.

So, 'If you do exactly what they want all the time, you're being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, but if you stand up to them, you're resorting to Cold War tactics and pursuing imperialist designs and interfering in their internal affairs.'

Not a very difficult test. The Russians, of course? Well, no! The author prefaced this crotchety bit of truth by a starting phrase, 'Like the Russians, if you do exactly what they want' etc. etc. Who is he and who is he talking about? This is a frightful bit of journalistic exposure likely to bring down on the poor man's head the outraged howls of half the human race. I'd better ease gently into his identity and take some of the downpour of abuse on myself by saying that he's one of the two living novelists whose books I snap up the day of publication, and I speak as one who never, almost never, reads a modern novel.

But since the publication of 'Lucky Jim' in England and 'The Tunnel of Love' in America, I don't believe I've missed a novel by the English Kingsley Amis, or the American Peter De Vries. It probably tells something about me which we won't go into, but among British critics, Peter De Vries is known as the American Kingsley Amis, and among American critics, Kingsley Amis is known as the English Peter De Vries. They certainly have a great deal in common, an essentially comic view of society, both of the pillars of society and of the people who, if not wanting to topple the pillars, at least like to see them shiver.

Most of their work is about men and women in love, or thinking they're in love, or wondering if they ought to be, or regretting that they were. In any case, both Amis and De Vries never flag in their ability to go on creating couples, practically always intelligent, in which the woman is flighty or predatory or ruthless – realistic would be her word – and in which the man, especially when he's on his way to the assignation, to the moment of passion, is ludicrously clumsy or ineffective, absent-minded or preoccupied with something that's going round about the house.

De Vries has a mean obsession with outrageous and sometimes wonderful puns. Amis has a great gift which his college friend, Philip Larkin, said he had in life – a gift for mimicking the essential expression by which we know a type of voice or a famous face. Thus, somebody wanting to seem tough to a friend put on his Humphrey Bogart face.

Well, both of them share a very similar view of women. They begin by being awestruck by the form divine, but pretty soon they're wary and then suspicious and then irritated or sunk in despair. They don't exactly look on woman as the enemy. They think, in the beginning, she's a strange and wonderful creature, probably just arrived from another planet, but long before the end, she's either a puzzle or a being so foreign that it's hopeless to think you'll ever know her.

Well, as you'll have gathered, these two satirists are not every man's meat and they're both, I've noticed, anathema to romantics. So along comes a character in Mr Amis's latest novel and sounds off, blasts off, about nobody but women. When he says, 'Like the Russians, if you do exactly what they want all the time, you're being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, but if you ever stand up to them, you're resorting to Cold War tactics and pursuing imperialist designs and interfering in their internal affairs.'

So, a character in a novel by Mr Amis makes a nasty generalisation about women, about women in general. So then what happens? Mr Amis, himself, is accused, in this country, of abusing, denigrating, insulting women. Suddenly people who've never heard of Kingsley Amis see his picture in Time, the magazine and a legion of angry women are ready to throw up the barricades – the barricades, anyway, against the admission of this new novel to the United States.

Now, let me say, at once, there's been no move on the part of the customs authorities to declare the work contraband. Mr Amis has not yet suffered the fate of the late Professor Dennis Brogan who, I remember, once arrived on the docks here during the Communist hunt of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. Professor Brogan had in his bags the latest published volume of 'The Letters of Thomas Jefferson', author of the Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States, instigator of the Bill of Rights, a sainted founding father, if ever there was one.

But the immigration inspector, in this case, took Professor Brogan's possession of this book as probably good cause why the professor should be denied entry to these United States. Turned out the inspector had never heard of Thomas Jefferson. He did know from consulting a long list he carried that there was something calling itself the Jefferson Society – a group of radicals listed on the Attorney General's hit list as subversive. Professor Brogan sketched in his rapid Glaswegian prose – he talked normally about five, six hundred words a minute – a life history and character sketch of the beloved, original Jefferson. He was let in. A grotesque incidence? Of course.

But the Amis furore, though not stirred by any government witch hunt, seems to me to be, if not grotesque, then bizarre enough, comic enough, to have gone into one of his novels. The fact is that Mr Amis can't get his novel published here. Well, I mean that's stretching it rather, but the two or three very reputable publishing houses that saw the new novel turned it down because it was a weak effort, or, as we'd now say 'a minor work' – not at all! It's been very favourably reviewed in Britain and so far as I know, Mr Amis has never had any difficulty getting his work, major or minor, published also in the United States. Why then?

Mr Amis's agent – a man, by the way – says that the publishers backed off because of opposition from lady members of their board of directors. Board of directors is an odd phrase for a publishing house and if there is such a thing, it shows how far women have come lately that they should be on a board of directors. Never mind! Let's just say, which would be fair enough, that some women on the staff were the objectors. I'm trying to think of a book containing a character who knocked men in general that was turned down because some man on the staff of the publishing house felt hurt.

Mr Amis was quoted here as saying, and saying on his own behalf, that feminism in Britain had not gone to such loony lengths as it had in the United States. That was a brave, maybe a rash statement. It sounded as if he were allying himself with the odious character in his novel who takes such a dim, petulant view of women. It's certainly come to something in what the big, double-dome critics call the human condition when you can't invent a character in a novel who is unfair or nasty about one whole sex.

After all, they're still performing 'The Taming of the Shrew' in which everything ends happily because the termagant Catherine is tamed and does her husband's bidding. I wonder how Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer feel about that! And I see that somebody's about to put on in New York, Strindberg's, 'The Father', which is nothing short of a hymn of hate against the whole of womankind. If ever there was a macho maniac, literally to the point of paranoia, it was that same August Strindberg. But, his works are published here and unless all the boards of directors of all the publishing houses get stacked with women, I assume he'll go on spreading his nauseating ideas.

I think that most of my listeners could easily make a list of books well-known and highly respected works of literature which contain many bilious passages about, against, women. Shakespeare, more than anybody. As for works against men, I should guess that the most popular humorist in the United States is a very funny lady named Erma Bombeck. She writes a column which, in itself, is a supreme test of journalism, being funny three or four times a week, but she keeps up a remarkable standard. And who do you think is her victim, her target? Men! The absurd, feckless, stumbling creature she shares her heart and home with.

Does anybody read James Thurber any more or look over his drawings? He, himself, lumped them under the general title, 'The War Between Men and Woman', very sad and very funny. And I'll come right out and say, very healthy, for the day we all pretend that nothing distinguishes men and women except certain structural differences, we shall turn into a sorry race of hypocrites, mainly.

'I was a woman in a man's world.' Who said that? Mrs Jeane Kirkpatrick, that's who. She has been, for the past four years, the American ambassador, or chief delegate, to the United Nations and while she doesn't say it, others and men have said it for her that she defended the United States with such spunk and intellectual vigour – one delegate said she took all the fun out of the ritual condemnations of Israel that the Communist block and its satellites came to think twice about ruffling the eagle's feathers. She's retired now. She wanted to have an even higher and lonelier place in a man's world. Secretary of State would have done nicely but Mr Reagan said he was sorry, not because she was a woman, because there was no important place in the administration left for her. It would have been the same if she'd been John Kirkpatrick.

I'll wind up this whole preposterous business with a statement I'm making on my own account about men.

Like the Russians, if you do exactly what they want all the time, you're being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace. But, if you stand up to them, you're resorting to Cold War tactics and pursuing imperialist designs and interfering in their internal affairs.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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