Clapped Out Casanovas: Amis, The Green Man and The Old Devils
By Will Barber Taylor
Lucky Jim, the novel that has indelibly been connected to Kingsley Amis is a novel about youth, or at least relative youth. Jim Dixon is a man trapped between the university dream and its reality — the idealism of youth and the cynicism of entering the world of work. It is one of the greatest novels about work that you are likely to read and certainly one of the best about discovering what work is, alongside Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City.
Yet, it would be remiss to characterise Amis’ work on Lucky Jim as the summit of his powers. Later in life, as he entered middle age Amis wrote some of the funniest and most prophetic books of his career — the travails of those Clapped-out Casanovas. Amis wrote several of these books including Stanley and the Women, One Fat Englishman, The Folks That Live On The Hill and Jake’s Thing. However, the two that best represent Amis’ talents are The Green Man and The Old Devils, the subjects of this piece.
Whilst the other novels do have their points (with perhaps the exception of Stanley and The Women — in many ways Amis’ nastiest book and one that tips over the delicate balance between funny and bitterness. The fine line between comedy and tragedy has often been noted but there is an equally fine line between comedy and cruelty and Stanley and The Women’s unbridled misogyny places it firmly in the latter camp) they do not have the same zest as these two wonderfully realized novels.
In The Green Man, Amis combines a love of the tales of M R James with the classic tropes of the British Sex Comedy. Bawdy humour has always been a part of comedy — Shakespeare’s plays are filled with innuendo and the humour derived from sex or sexual desires is a common part of the English literary canon. By the 1960s and 70s, the sex comedy had become particularly prevalent on the big screen with the Confessions of a series starring Robin Askwith and the Carry On films being commercially successful films that drew sizeable audiences. These elements are present in Amis’ clapped-out Casanova, Maurice Allington. Owner and manager of The Green Man, Allington is an alcoholic, unfit and yet still tempted by the sins of the flesh. The novels sees Maurice confronting the previous owner of The Green Man — the 17th century scholar and occultist Thomas Underhill. Underhill is a pernicious force, intent on sacrificing Allington’s teenage daughter in a similar manner to that he used to murder and rape young women when he was alive. Underhill’s presence in the novel transforms it from what could have been a relatively simple tale of a drunken, licentious publican coming to terms with his own morality into something both more interesting and entertaining. Both Allington and Amis see disturbing parallels between Allington’s own behaviour and that of Underhill’s — Underhill is the extreme example of worship of the dark side of life, of the avarice of lust for life, for sex and for power. The Jamesian twist of Underhill’s malevolent presence adds an extra touch of morality to Amis’ work and allows The Green Man to have a timeless quality that many of the more traditional sex comedies of the 60s and 70s lack. In them, sex and their approach to it is not viewed critically in any way.
Amis, although indulgent as many authors of the mid 20th century were, to making somewhat ludicrous assumptions about the attraction and virality of middle aged over the hump men allows Allington to have moments of reflection not just upon his Don Quixote like approach to sex but to his relationship with his daughter. The morality of The Green Man lies in Allington’s realizing the consequences of pursuing a life solely dedicated to pleasure and nothing else — that the shortness of life means it should not simply be wasted on self-indulgence. This isn’t to say that Allington is totally reformed; certainly, by the end of the novel there is no full road of Damascus conversion for the incorrigible rake. Rather, he is able to ponder what has brought him to this point and how he can endeavour to be a better person.
The clapped-out Casanova is able to see that there is more to life than his own libido. The way Amis conveys this gives the novel a real sense of reflection. It is not simply an excellent ghost story with a wonderful interweaving of a somewhat ridiculous menage a trois Allington hopes to concoct between himself, his wife and the wife of his friend and the local GP, but a work of fiction that deals with morality and our actions in a truly human way. We can certainly disapprove of Allington’s actions and yet we can understand them; the fragilities that Amis brings out, particularly those associated with the passage of time, the desire to recapture a moment of youth are universal. Nostalgia is a uniquely human curse and one which we are all subject to. It is as capricious as it is sudden in how it becomes all consuming. Amis renders this perfectly and believably in Allington but his representation of the Clapped-Out Casanova and the folly of age reaches its true peak in The Old Devils.
In The Old Devils we are not presented with one late aged lothario but a cast of them. Set in Wales, the novel follows a group of former friends who are troubled by their pasts when Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon return to live amongst them. Weaver is clapped out in several senses of the word; he’s emotionally confused, and it seems that his only pleasure is to belittle and cuckold his former university friends. His literary work is clapped out as well — he is devoid of that spark of poetical or literary originality that he was once proclaimed for. He lives in the shadow of Brydan, Amis’ parody of Dylan Thomas, a man who is proclaimed as a great Welsh poet despite not speaking any Welsh. Weaver owes his career to being treated as “Brydan’s heir” but is also trapped by it; he is constrained by a vision of Wales that no longer exists and his attempts to return to his homeland to reconnect with it are fraught by a lack of self-belief and a deep seated insecurity.
His wife Rhiannon feels equally out of time — still lusted after comically by their former friend Malcolm Cellan-Davies, a Medievalist obsessed with romantic Welsh literature, who still has a boyish crush on Rhiannon which hasn’t changed in the decades since they were last all together. That Alun Weaver is having an intermittent affair with Malcolm’s wife adds to the sense of age being suspended for some of the characters in the novel — whilst Alun is abundantly aware of his age, he is at the same time willing to dismiss it. He wants to be seen still as a younger and imaginative, lusting force. Malcolm is totally unaware of this fact and seems at times on the verge of what Shakespeare so aptly described as “second childhood.” Both follow Amis’ archetype of the Clapped-Out Casanova and yet both are different in their approaches to age and change — Weaver fights against the dying of the light, desperate to recapture his youth and feelings of loss potentially whilst Cellan-Davies wishes to fully embrace the past to the extent that he is lost in it. He cannot truly appreciate how his wife feels about him or understand the way in which his surroundings have changed — his drunken verbal assault of a publican and the occupants of one pub, dismayed at how Wales’ pubs have changed, whilst he and the others join Weaver on his attempt to find Brydan’s Wales is a classic example of this.
The brilliance of Amis’ work is that The Old Devils isn’t simply about getting older or about lost love and potential or even the way in which we try to project our own nostalgia onto others — it is also about how landscapes change. The Brydan burger bar and the commercialisation of the dead poet, the repackaging of where he lived as part of an experience is a testament to how the Wales that our central characters once knew has gone. Commercialisation is not a modern phenomenon, and it is easy to think this novel, given its publication date, as in part a reaction to the growing consumer culture sparked by the Thatcherite Revolution. Yet the point Amis is making is greater than this — it is one not just of reflection of how countries change but how we all change and our inability to often recognize that change. Perhaps the clearest character to understand this is Peter Thomas — as tried and worn out as can be (there are multiple comments about how Peter has let himself go and is distinctly overweight,) Peter is still able to recognize that time should not make you a prisoner against future happiness. It is a realization that might seem simple to comprehend but it isn’t. The lure of half remembered past conquests of any kind make the mind dull to the need for change.
Amis’ Clapped-Out Casanovas are a wonderful example of high humour and prophetic self-reflection — they are men who are damaged by a pattern of behaviour that they are unable to resist falling into again and again and again. This makes them wonderfully enjoyable characters to encounter on the page or screen, but they are also prophetic examples of the harm that an inability to reflect upon how one’s life choices can damage a person. Amis’ work is comedic but there is a subtle line of morality running through his tales of the Clapped-Out Casanovas — not one of rebuking against enjoying life or even necessarily of becoming some trappist monk but one that makes the point that the past cannot bind us for if we attempt to live solely through how we once were we will never be able to move forward. That we shouldn’t be pickled in the past — we should fully embrace life as it is now, for all its faults.
