Kingsley
Amis, the former Angry Young Man, lives in a large, early-nineteenth-century
house beside a wooded common. To reach it, one makes a journey similar to that
described by the narrator of Girl, 20 when he visits Sir Roy
Vandervane: first by tube to the end of the Northern Line at Barnet; then,
following a phone call from the station to say where one is, on foot up a stiff
slope; and finally down a suburban road. But instead of being picked up en
route by Sir Roy’s black chum, Gilbert, I was intercepted by Amis’s tall and
imposing blond wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis’s study was a
picture of bohemian disorder. Scattered across the floor were several teetering
piles of poetry books and a mass of old 78 r.p.m. jazz records, while the big
Adler typewriter on his desk wa
