Editing Kingsley Amis (section)

==Personal life==
===Political views===
As a young man at Oxford, Amis joined the [[Communist Party of Great Britain]] and left it in 1956.<ref>Martin Amis, ''Koba the Dread'' (2002).</ref><ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/28/mi5-kept-tabs-young-communist-kingsley-amis/ |title=MI5 reports on Amis. Retrieved 21 January 2019. |newspaper=The Telegraph |date=28 November 2017 |access-date=21 January 2019 |archive-date=21 January 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190121121758/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/28/mi5-kept-tabs-young-communist-kingsley-amis/ |url-status=live |last1=Farmer |first1=Ben }}</ref> He later described this stage of his political life as "the callow [[Marxist]] phase that seemed almost compulsory in Oxford."<ref>Amis, ''Socialism and the Intellectuals'', cited by Leader, 2006, p. 366.</ref> Amis remained nominally on the [[political left]] for some time after the war, declaring in the 1950s that he would always vote for the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]].<ref>Leader, 2006, p. 366.</ref>

Amis eventually moved further to the [[political right]], a development he discussed in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967); his [[conservatism]] and [[anti-communism]] are visible in works like the dystopian novel ''Russian Hide and Seek'' (1980).<ref>[[Neal Ascherson]], [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n10/neal-ascherson/red-souls "Red Souls"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190620094410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n10/neal-ascherson/red-souls |date=20 June 2019 }}, ''London Review of Books'', Vol. 2, No. 10, May 1980. Retrieved 20 June 2019.</ref> In 1967, Amis, [[Robert Conquest]], [[John Braine]], and several other authors signed a letter to ''[[The Times]]'' entitled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam", supporting the US government in the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>John Wakeman, ''World Authors 1950–1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors''. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, pp. 448–448 {{ISBN|0824204190}}.</ref> He spoke at the [[Adam Smith Institute]], arguing against government subsidy to the arts.<ref>[[Madsen Pirie]], ''Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute'', [[Biteback Publishing]], 2012, p. 140.</ref>

===Character===
By his own admission and according to his biographers, Amis was a serial [[adultery|adulterer]] for much of his life. This was a major contributory factor in the breakdown of his first marriage. A famous photograph of a sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written in lipstick by wife Hilary) on his back "1 Fat Englishman—I fuck anything."<ref>Leader 2006, opposite p. 565.</ref>

In one memoir, Amis wrote, "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time".<ref name="booze">''Memoirs'': "Booze".</ref> He suggests this reflects a naïve tendency in readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. He enjoyed drink and spent a good deal of time in pubs. [[Hilary Rubinstein]], who accepted ''Lucky Jim'' for [[Victor Gollancz]], commented, "I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer.... I didn't know Kingsley very well, you see."<ref>Quoted in Bradford, Chapter 5.</ref>

[[Clive James]] commented: "All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the [[Garrick Club]] even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the taxi."<ref name="ReferenceA">Clive James, "Kingsley without the women", ''[[The Times Literary Supplement|Times Literary Supplement]]'', 2 February 2007.</ref> But Amis was adamant that inspiration did not come from a bottle: "Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work."<ref name="booze"/>

This matched a disciplined approach to writing. For "many years" Amis imposed a rigorous daily schedule on himself, segregating writing and drink. Mornings were spent on writing, with a minimum daily output of 500 words.<ref>Jacobs, 1995, pp. 6 and 17.</ref> Drinking began about lunchtime, when this had been achieved. Such self-discipline was essential to Amis's prodigious output.

Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct."<ref name="ReferenceA"/> His friend [[Christopher Hitchens]] said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health."<ref>Kingsley Amis, ''Everyday Drinking'', New York: [[Bloomsbury Publishing|Bloomsbury USA]], 2008, editor's introduction.</ref>

===Antisemitism===
Amis had an unclear relationship with [[antisemitism]], which he sometimes expressed but also claimed to dislike.<ref>[[Anthony Julius]], ''[[Trials of the Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England]]'', [[Oxford University Press]], 2010, pp. 357–358.</ref> He occasionally speculated on the commonly advanced Jewish stereotypes. Antisemitism was sometimes present in his conversations and letters to friends and associates, such as "The great Jewish vice is glibness, fluency ... also possibly just bullshit, as in [[Karl Marx|Marx]], [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]], [[Herbert Marcuse|Marcuse]]", or "[[Charlie Chaplin|Chaplin]] [who was not Jewish] is a horse's arse. He's a Jeeeew you see, like the [[Marx Brothers]], like [[Danny Kaye]]." It is a minor theme in his ''Stanley and the Women'' novel about a paranoid schizophrenic<!-- !  check for tone -->. As for the cultural complexion of the United States, Amis had this to say: "I've finally worked out why I don't like Americans ... . Because everyone there is either a Jew or a hick." Amis himself described his antisemitism as "very mild".<ref>Julius, p. 358.</ref>