Kingsley vs Martin: The Amises

Q. So, the father

A.

Born:16 April 1922, London

Educated: City of London School and St John's College, Oxford

Wartime service: Royal Corps of Signals

Jobs: Lecturer in English, University College of Swansea (1948-61) and Cambridge (1961-3)

Work: Wrote over 40 books, 20 of them novels, including: Lucky Jim (1954), which was hugely successful, arguably his best work, filmed in 1957; That Uncertain Feeling (1956); I Like it Here (1958); One Fat Englishman (1963); The Green Man (1969); Jake's Thing (1978); Russian Hide and Seek (1980); Stanley and the Women (1984); and The Old Devils (1986), for which he was awarded the Booker Prize - 'The only year they got it right,' says son Martin

Character: A man of outrageous wit and genius, he gained a reputation as a 'supreme clubman, boozer and blimp'. A radical in his young adulthood, he was later known for his curmudgeonly and conservative critique of contemporary life and manners

Knighted: 1990

Died: 22 October 1995, London

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Q. And the son

A.

Born: Martin Louis Amis, 25 August 1949, Oxford

Educated: At 'crammers' (he was described as 'unusually unpromising'); Exeter College, Oxford (breezed a first-class honours in English)

Current job: Author

Previous jobs: Reviewer/writer for the Observer, Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman

Principal works: The Rachel Papers, 1973, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award; Dead Babies (1975); Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982); Money: A Suicide Note (1984); Einstein's Monsters (1987); London Fields (1989); Time's Arrow: or the Nature of the Offence (1991); The Information (1995); Heavy Water and Other Stories (1999); and Experience (2000)

Influences: Bellow, Nabokov, Joyce

Likes: Darts, tennis, snooker, pinball

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Q. Any holy spirit

A. Not exactly, though Kingsley consumed heroic amounts of the less metaphysical kind, apparently.

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Q. Did they get on

A. They had a famously awkward relationship. Kingsley said that he found in Martin's work a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style...that constant demonstrating of his command of English', and claimed that he didn't read much of it. Martin came late to his father's writing, having said that as a teenager he knew that his father wrote a kind of 'mainstream fiction', though didn't actually bother to read any until he found another boy laughing so hard at Lucky Jim that he was throwing up. Martin is much more complimentary of his father's work than Kingsley was of his son's, and dedicated London Fields to him.

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Q. Is it possible to quantify who's the bigger or better of the two

Not really. They have both occupied the position of the top man of letters of his generation, though their writing and their concerns are very different. What unites them both is a strong sense of language and a shared brilliance. Kingsley's star fell for a while, and he found it hard to live up to the promise of his early work. But his last novels, particularly The Old Devils, were a return to form, and his reputation both here and abroad is now on the rise again.

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Martin, on the other hand, is still very much at the top of the tree. He has, however, had some bad press in recent years, with a divorce, a falling out with best chum Julian Barnes - over Amis's decision to leave his agent, Barnes's wife, for another who could do more for him financially - and spending half a million quid on dental work. Such was the sympathy felt for him and for what was perceived as his rather pampered upbringing that when the New Statesman ran a competition asking for unlikely book titles, one winning entry was My Struggle by Martin Amis.

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Which of the two will cast the longest literary shadow remains to be seen. Kingsley was seen as a man of the 1950s and 60s, while Martin's era may well be pigeon-holed to the 1980s and 90s by posterity. Either way, they've both influenced British writing to degrees largely unmatched by their contemporaries and they have the distinction of being a father and son both working at the same time in the same field. As Junior said recently: 'It is difficult to find a parallel for two writers who have a body of work out there at the same time.'

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Q. How can you find out more

The year 2000 was a bumper year for Amisiana, both p�re and fils. Kingsley's Selected Letters (ISBN 0006387837), edited by Zachary Leader, are a matchless insight into the mind of the author, particularly those written to his life-long friend, the poet Philip Larkin, to whom Amis wrote: 'I enjoy talking to you more than to anybody else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful feelings that I don't want anybody else to know about.'

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Martin Amis published his memoir, Experience (ISBN 0099285827), which covers his relationship with his father, his own writing career and his 'traumatic' dentistry. It is also an intimate portrait of fractures and healing in his family life, including the discovery of a long-lost daughter and the disappearance and murder of his cousin, one of the victims of Fred and Rosemary West.

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The third title to be published last year was Lucky Him - nice pun - The Biography of Kingsley Amis (ISBN 0720611172), which is the first real investigation of Amis Senior's work as autobiography. Kingsley always claimed that there was no autobiographical element in his work, but the author of this Martin Amis-endorsed book, Richard Bradford, shows that, in fact, Kingsley's life was pretty much all the work was about from the very beginning. In Lucky Jim, for example, there are sharply drawn, cruelly comic portraits of his brother-in-law and father-in-law. Putting the latter in a novel was a matter of necessity, apparently, as Amis told Larkin: 'I don't see how I can avoid doing him in fiction if I am to refrain from stabbing him under the fifth rib.'

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There was also a well-received BBC TV adaptation of Kingsley Amis's 1950s novel A Girl Like You early in the year.

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By Simon Smith