What is today’s reader offered by the work of Kingsley Amis? This may not seem an especially pertinent question to ask of a writer who only died in 1995, but in art the recent past can sometimes appear more outmoded and inaccessible than distant history. The living writer is close to the common well of experience; once the writer has died, and can no longer articulate our contemporary world for us, he is exposed to the more brutal judgment of time. What in his work is timeless? What, if anything, makes it worth preserving?

Of course, definitive answers to these questions aren’t always found: dead writers continue to go in and out of fashion, their work suddenly meaningful again in one era then failing to make sense in the next. It is often the most passionately contemporary writers—Kingsley Amis was one—whose reputations decline most steeply in their absence, for obvious reasons. Relevance becomes irrelevance; the same devotion to the here and now that brought them popularity and fame ensures their obscurity once here and now have become there and then. Yet the observation of ordinary life nearly always forms the cornerstone of great and lasting art. It is the quality of that observation that is put to the test over time, that will determine whether the work is trivial or lastingly true.

Kinglsey Amis made his name in the 1950s with the publication of his first novel, Lucky Jim, a work that seemed to define a new era not just in its portrayal of the evolving world of higher education that is its setting but in literary values too, advancing as it did a more youthful and democratic conception of literary style and subject matter that reflected changing modes of social behavior. In Lucky Jim Amis reprised the black comedy of Evelyn Waugh and re-clothed it in the provincial workaday garb of the ordinary middle classes, and if in doing so he belied something of his artistic seriousness, he was rewarded for it with instant acclaim. His story of a young provincial-university lecturer’s sufferings at the hands of academic bores, pretentious snobs, prissy disapproving women and spoiled culturally elitist young men was a huge commercial and critical success. It laughed at everyone who needed laughing at in that cramped, class-bound decade; it gave a likeable validity to the new forms of life, to social and sexual freedoms it showed as modest, funny, authentic.

Amis was himself a university lecturer during this period—he taught at Swansea, where he lived for many years with his wife and three children—and so he knew whereof he wrote. Indeed, the integrity of Lucky Jim, and of Amis’s work generally, derives from its autobiographical impulse. Though he wrote assiduously in different forms and genres—he considered himself a poet first and a novelist second—it is for its hold on unadorned life that his writing was and is esteemed. Yet if Amis kept close to the sources of his own experience, it may partly have been out of a kind of humility, almost a shyness in the face of questions of art. Self-deprecation, usually in the guise of comedy, is a hallmark of an Amis project; humor was his mode of attack and of address. And if humor is also a defense, against, among other things, the accusation that one is taking oneself too seriously, Amis may have relied on his identity as a comic writer to shield him from the larger consideration—both private and public—of his stature as an artist.

Nowhere is this clearer than in his handling of the short story form, whose particular possibilities for advancing the representation of modern experience he understood and acknowledged while firmly distancing himself from them: “the things that only the short story can do,” he wrote, “the impression, the untrimmed slice of life, the landscape with figures but without characters, make little appeal to me.” His own stories, he said, were mere “chips from a novelist’s work-bench.” He goes on, more revealingly, to observe that the contemporary short story tends to be published in “those pale and sickly present-day equivalents of the Victorian fiction magazines, the periodicals subsidized by the Arts Council or one of its offspring. A writer, or any other kind of artist, who partly or largely need not depend on pleasing the public, who in effect has his fee guaranteed whatever the quality of his product, is tempted to self-indulgence and laziness.” Better to stick to the novel, “which as yet is unlikely to contain any material subsidized by the Arts Council.”