Quotes from One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis

 

Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger. The first time the two men met, an incident with a briefcase lock had suggested to him that here was a formidable rival in the last-named field

The notion of the universe as the handiwork of the Almighty received a severe check at Pargeter.

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

 

Irving Macher runs off with Helen

Americans pursue the dollar; the British had an empire. Fascinating to see the underlying assumptions and goals of a culture laid bare in its idiom. Fascinating, but not surprising. Language is before anything else the great social instrument

The character’s promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources. For the novel’s American setting, Amis was drawing on his experience as a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 1958–9, when, he informed his friend Philip Larkin in a letter on his return, ‘I was boozing and fucking harder

for Kingsley, according to his son Martin, in his memoir Experience, it displaced sex: ‘getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980 [. . .] a complex symptom, re

In 1962, by which time he was writing One Fat Englishman, he met the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard at the Cheltenham Literary Festival (appropriately, they were co-members of a forum on Sex in Literature) and commenced a passionate affair with her. Shortly after Hilly discovered this, she accompanied Kingsley on a trip to Italy and Yugoslavia, and when he fell asleep on the beach one day, she wrote on his exposed back in lipstick: 1 FAT ENGLISHMAN – I FUCK ANYTHING. (A photograph of this vengeful graffito was reproduced in Eric Jacobs’ biography of 1995.) Before the novel was published, the marriage had effectively ended, and in due course Amis married Jane

In 1962, Amis met Yevgeny Yevtushenko. ‘You atheist?’ the Russian poet asked him. ‘Well yes,’ Amis replied. ‘But it’s more that I hate him.’

 

Dean Micheldene Macher Helene Bast married to Ernst

Grace middle aged American

 

The Scandinavians are dear people but they’ve never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they? Any more than the Germans.

But not only that. Recent experience suggested that that belly, exposed in a moment of inattention or abandon, could cause total withdrawal of favours previously granted. In other words, it tended to stop them. Cold. At any time

With a slight smile of complacency at his own forethought, he reached into his jacket pocket for his sunglasses and put them on. Provided he could remember to move his head about slightly from time to time, nobody would now be able to tell where he was looking. Any involuntary bulging of the eyeballs would likewise be masked. It occurred to him, as he watched carefully for Helene’s reappearance, that he might throw away these advantages…

A third kind of pain got going in Roger. Retrospective in nature, it came from not having reached out a foot and tipped Macher, chair and all, into the water as soon as he opened his horrible mouth.

The distance of the houses from one another, their wooden construction, the absence of horticulture and fences or walls, the woodland setting, all combined to give the area the look of a semi-temporary encampment for a battalion of parvenus. Not a bad image of America as a whole, eh?

You go on at me talk to God

‘This searing, sizzling, lacerating ICBM of a book will pick you up, throw you down and trample on you—’ Daily Express

What was in one way most galling to Roger about Blinkie Heaven was that it was not, as he had first suspected, entirely staffed by the kind of character America had made its primary fictional concern. There were blind people, true, and the odd Negro, but they were not backed up by the expected paraplegic necrophiles, hippoerotic jockeys, exhibitionistic castrates, coprophagic pig-farmers, armless flagellationists and the rest of the bunch. People like shopkeepers, pedestrians, New Englanders, neighbours, graduates, uncles, walked Macher’s pages. Events took place and the reader could determine what they were. There was spoken dialogue, appearing between quotation marks.

Even while doing this he could see enough of the Caucasian female to make him invoke the Prince of Peace (secreto, or nearly) and wonder briefly how many gin and tonics he must have put down that evening at Joe Derlanger’s place

A complexion that appeared to have been left out in a violent hailstorm for about ten years was her most signal drawback

 

He gave a much better smile back, with more eye-work and a quiet hallo. This, born of long practice, was aimed at alleviating that continuous trouble over names and faces which besets sufferers from alcoholic amnesia. It could be taken either as a token of tremendous intimacy or as the routine greeting of a very nice, but not necessarily very heterosexual, man

Bed with her e or not but you obviously want to very much and as long as you do want to you’ll keep trying, being you. I was just asking how you’ve been making out recently.’

 

‘I fail to see how—’

 

‘Now quit this fail to see bit, old boy. If you really can’t see then try harder. I want to know where I stand with you, that’s all. I think that’s normal and reasonable. I know a lot already, believe me, but there’s a little more I’d like to know. Are you with me so far?

Are you in love with the fair Helene?’

 

He said immediately: ‘Yes. Very much. I have been for years.’ Without being strikingly bold this was a good, sound piece of play. So far from resenting an avowal of love directed elsewhere, they positively welcomed it (unless of course they were beginning to consider themselves candidates for such an avowal, which was not going to happen here). It was as if they thought even a mortgaged heart was better than none.

 

‘Any ambitions? Long-term

Rog, old boy,’ she said, ‘I hate to say it, but you certainly are one fat Englishman. It was like fighting a grizzly bear

Now that we’ve been married fourteen years and I have a much larger stock of information at my disposal, I hate him. There has been some change in my feelings, though. As of the last five or six years I also consider he’s a jerk.

Strode husband of Mollie Atkins

American women seemed entirely without finesse. He preferred frank submission to frank pursuit except, theoretically, from the kind of woman who frankly made no move of any kind in his direction.

 

‘. . . comes a time when you can’t get exactly what you want . . .’

 

What was she droning on about? Suzanne Klein’s attentions were probably a result of the twofold insecurity of being Jewish and American (and the consequent aggression). Her youth was only a temporary advantage beside such fundamental handicaps

Look, Roger, I know you’re stoned, but if you go on this way you’re going to say something you’ll be sorry for.’

 

‘You’re probably quite right, my dear. Trouble is those are the only things I really enjoy saying.

‘Come down here. Come down at once, you long-frocked clown. I know you’re in there. No use trying to hide from me. Let me in this instant, you spiritual dentist.

Where’s Colgate?’

 

‘My name is Miller. There is no Colgate here, I assure you.’

 

‘Must be. Priest chap. Dog-collar.’

 

‘Pardon me one moment, sir, but this word . . . nous? I don’t—’

 

‘Oh, do forgive me, I forgot I was in America. What is it, five schools in the whole country still teaching Greek? Nous: intelligence, penetration, reasoning faculty.’

The people I’ve got it in for are you and your lot. Making a good living out of telling the rest of us we put all the bad things there ourselves. Lust. Yes, I distinctly remember women being invented. Same as drink. Father, I am a dipsomaniac. Well, don’t blame me, my son – distillation wasn’t referred to anywhere on those bloody tablets at Mount Sinai. You did that. Father, I am a drug addict. You can’t say I didn’t warn you, my son, I told you not to touch that apple

Auctoritate mihi commissa,’ Roger intoned, ‘ego te condemno in nomine Patris,’ – he immersed Colgate’s nose and mouth – ‘et Fili

it just showed up an inherent snag about all dealings with women: that they involved women. Ernst’s revelation