One Fat Englishman, by Kingsley Amis
I doubt it's fashionable, yet, to like Kingsley Amis again, but if it's not then I'll do my best to help the wheel on its turn. I've been a fan for some years now. More or less since his death, in fact. I remember standing aimlessly in Waterstone's one afternoon not long after he died - I'm sure you know the feeling - and coming across a paperback called The King's English which caught my interest. Partly because it was him and he'd just died, obviously. Partly because I was going through a language-obsession at the time (years before Eats, Shoots and Leaves, this). And partly because it wasn't one of his novels, and I didn't feel quite ready for them just then. But when I got it home, The King's English was so frank and wise, silly and confessional, and so bloody funny that the old bugger had me converted within hours. And I've never looked back. But enough: it's time I told you something about One Fat Englishman.
Although he normally made a point of not conforming to American usage or taste in the smallest particular, Roger did not want to look affected today... He opened the top few buttons of his shirt, peeled it from his chest, blew several times into the aperture, and rebuttoned.
Roger Micheldene is a publisher. Fat, forty and very much out of water in Pennsylvania, Micheldene is a drunken, lecherous old-school boor of an especially and embarrassingly English kind whose collision with the Republic over the water (I'm feeling the influence of the Amis style - soory) dents that country considerably less, and Micheldene considerably more, than he'd like to imagine. His main aim in life is to bed women. Preferably Helene Bangs, the Danish-American wife of a professor at Budweiser College. But if she's not around or interested then anyone else's wife or indeed anyone female and available will do. Apart from that he drinks, rages and insults his way around the American social scene in the Jack Kennedy era from the swimming pool to the frat party to the jazz clubs of New York, all the time showing a general contempt for all things American and considerable prejudice against Jews, blacks, homsexuals (the novel came out in 1963: Micheldene won't have known the word gay so couldn't have used it even if he'd been like that), children and much else that gets in his way. And he involves himself in a number of scrapes.
"Challenge Me?"
"Most certainly I challenge you."
"All right". Arthur opened what was evidently a dictionary and soon said: "Here we are. Niter. Potassium nitrate. A supposed nitrous element-"
"Rubbish, that's n,i,t,r,e."
"Mm-mmm"..."See for yourself."
"I... But this is a bloody American dictionary."
"This is bloody America."
There's an inexplicable, doomed, pitiful affair with Helene Bangs; a drunken, then a sober fumble with Mollie Atkins; and an attempt to seduce a young girl who quite fancies biting. There's a lost lecture, a harangue directed at a catholic priest, a car set upon with a metal bar, the denunication of a child criminal and a fateful feud with Irving Macher, the clever young Jewish novelist whose work Micheldene finds infuriatingly publishable. I won't put it together for you, but it's quite a slight story ultimately, though great fun. As always with Amis, you're carried along at a cracking pace on what I can only think of as a comic cushion of air. Or perhaps a magnetic field that somehow keeps everything up.
A shorter but blacker Negro on Roger's other side turned his head... He said with an air of indulgent explanation :
"Wa hang heez a beez mah gat sam reez a ran moo pah yah dan, man."
"I fear I fail to understand you."
This occasioned no surprise or resentment.
And now to what's really interesting about the book, and about Amis. Why do so many people assume his work embodies, promotes, even, a toxic mix of racism and sexism? Yes, there is quite a bit of sexism and racism in this novel, all of it in the mind of Roger Micheldene. And some of the racism in particular is enough to make the delicate early twenty-first century reader wince.
Never call a Jew a Jew unless you can be sure of making him lose his own temper by doing so
But to read One Fat Englishman as some kind of racist, sexist manifesto seems to me to prove that you don't understand what a novel is, or perhaps that you think the "unreliable narrator" was a fabulously clever idea invented in the 1980s. Many of the American characters in this novel (and they are almost all American) are shown as off-beat, slightly strange, funny, quirky - all that. But all of them, without exception, are shown affectionately - and understood. They're relaxed, they're natural and they're good. Mollie Atkins shows us the sophisticated marital laxness of 1960s American life, but she strays only because her husband is such a bore. He, in turn, is a kind, forgiving, oddly likeable middle-class bore. Irving Macher comes to represent everything Micheldene hates about America, made flesh and actively vengeful, but he does no real harm and anyway (or anyhow) we understand entirely because Micheldene so thoroughly deserves what he gets. His is the problem, and he is the joke.
We're out of the redcoat era now, even if you aren't... It isn't your nationality we don't like, it's you.
One Fat Englishman explores the encounter between the very worst kind of snobbish, superior, snuff-taking Britisher - Amis's most frighteningly grotesque imagined version of his older self, perhaps - and the astonishing, irrepressible, culturally dominant, inexplicably yet fabulously unBritish United States. The reader is left liking that place, and hoping Micheldene has been made better by it.
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