But no one ever succeeded in proving that the writer's life was detachable from the writer's art.

All they showed was that in certain highly artificial conditions it was theoretically possible to detach them. After that, human curiosity took over.

Simultaneously there marched into the arena a set of questions which no purity-of-the-text merchant has ever really managed to answer. What if the writer writes a series of books in which his or her own characteristics, prejudices and temperamental flaws march side by side with those of the characters? What if the writer . . . to go a stage further . . .

does everything in his or her power to render life and work indistinguishable? And what if . . . to proceed to the furthest stage of all . . . that writer happens to be Kingsley Amis?

None of these enquiries can be altogether ignored in any account of The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader's biography of one of the most influential and certainly one of the bestpublicised British novelists of the second half of the 20th century. As an "authorised" life . . . Amis junior's spiritual thumbprint lurks on almost every page . . . it is a case for the defence, which, to its credit, hardly ever declines into special pleading, if only because no amount of special pleading could ever rescue the subject from the brimstone-crammed pit into which he so resolutely dug himself.

Not the least of the book's achievements . . . and this is a wellwritten, well-intentioned book, let down only by its inordinate length . . . is the light it sheds on the literary profession's age-old curse and blight, the Satirist's Tragedy. As played out here, in nearly 1,000 pages of gory detail, it consists not only of growing old, or of taking up positions that your younger self would have shrieked over a quarter of a century before, but of turning incrementally into the thing you despised. This pitiless debunker of pompous, selfregarding old men became one himself, a process that was as much visual as behavioural. As Leader's lavish photospreads confirm, late-period Amis . . . popeyed, wattled and damson-faced . . .

bore an uncanny resemblance to his old sparring partner Evelyn Waugh.

Eleven years after his death, he is firmly established in literary culture as one of the great monsters . . . boozy, quarrelsome, womanising and vengeful by turns . . . and yet, equally clearly, beneath the bluster and the regular detonations of temperament lay a fearful and rather solitary man, terrified of death, bereft of inner resources, not so much disbelieving in God as regarding him as a personal enemy.

Amis's key preoccupation as a writer . . . the key theme of much 1950s fiction, if it comes to that . . . is male selfishness, the absolute necessity for all those bright, ambitious school boys purposefully at large in the postwar meritocracy to have their cake and eat it. One of Amis's novels . . . from the significant late 1960s period in which he began to feel much less at home in the world that had offered the material for his early tornado years . . . is titled I Want It Now.

Amis certainly wanted it now. The wine, the women, the success.

At the same time, it would be a mistake, in discussions of what went wrong . . . and something did go wrong, irrevocably and quite early on . . . to ignore the several sides of Amis that turn out to be profoundly attractive. He was a model of creative industry. The letters to Larkin about jazz and girls are practically Joycean in their linguistic fireworks.

Clearly The Life of Kingsley Amis is intended to establish Amis as a spectacular ornament of the late20th-century fictional scene. What emerges from this compendium of f**ks, fights and frenzied hard work, though, is merely a personality. It seems likely Amis will be remembered as a "dominant force in the writing of his age", as Leader puts it . . . that is, controversy-monger, symbolic monster and all-round presence . . .

rather than the creative Titan that biographer (and son) so obviously, and forgivably, imagine him to be.