A Visit from God

I have always liked reading and pubs, and reading in pubs. By reading I mean sitting alone in a corner of the pub with a pint of bitter and a good book, not the Good Book – that might attract unwelcome attention. There are several conditions to be met. The pub should be quiet, and music-free. It should have few customers, and these also quiet and dotted around the smallish bar at a fairly unsocial equidistance from each other. Any conversation should be infrequent and sotto voce, limited perhaps to the names of racehorses or someone who hasn’t been in lately because he died last week. The best time is after two o’clock, when the lunchtimers have returned to work or afternoon telly. There is at least one such place remaining. It is called The Green Man and is situated in a rural West Midlands village. I am not going to name the village, because the brewery will immediately swoop and render it intolerable. As it is, it still has a public bar, a saloon bar, a snug and a small walled garden. It was in this garden that, fittingly, I first read Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man.

This is almost the perfect pub book. It is set in a pub, its protagonist is the publican, it is an effective and exciting thriller, a ghost story, a social satire full of wit, a sombre reflection on the fragility of love and life, and the only novel I know in which God makes a personal appearance. The ghost story is a difficult thing to bring off in modern times. It seems to require the unnerving silence of a large and almost empty Victorian house, the deep shadows and dim light of candles and lamps, and a time when religious belief is waning but some old superstitions and legends are still remembered. But Amis’s novel was published in 1969 and is set in the Sixties, in an old house turned into a pub called The Green Man, with traffic on the road outside, and television and plenty of company inside. In this place and time, Amis succeeds in introducing an utterly convincing ghost from the seventeenth century and achieves what the good ghost story should do; suspend disbelief at supernatural goings-on and induce terror in the reader. Amis was an admirer of M. R. James’s ghost stories (see Slightly Foxed, No. 4), stories that usually concern an educated middle-class man whose curiosity disturbs and revives some ancient curse, or a scholar or clergyman who meets a horrible death and whose surviving papers reveal some Faust-like bargain with the powers of evil. The monsters that these men summon and that eventually devour them are not wholly tangible and are all the more terrifying for that, constructed out of thick cobwebs, curious old pictures, oddly carved furniture, bedsheets, earthworks or old and twisted trees. The telling of the tale is often aided by the production of ancient accounts or journals that detail in accurate period language events in the past that impinge upon the present. Amis’s story is soundly constructed in the James tradition. His ghost, Dr Underhill, is a clergyman; the monster he summons to do his evil work is a manifestation of the natural world, a terrifying figure, a literal Green Man, constructed of branches and creepers and rotted tree trunk. But Amis was a highly original writer, and he rings some interesting changes. I’ll try not to give too much of the plot away but just set the scene and, I hope, whet the appetite. The narrator, Maurice Allington, is the landlord of The Green Man – adulterous, the downer of a bottle of whisky a day, a man of uncertain temper and decided tastes. Allington hates most strangers, white burgundies and the local vicar. His ideal customers are the locals who ‘put back their pints steadily and quietly in the public bar’; the saloon bar is a more uncertain area, often filled with strangers, some tolerated, some loathed, especially the sippers of half-pints, which habit, in a male, suggests to him a certain timidity in facing life. Allington’s family, in the private quarters of the pub, comprises a 13-year-old daughter whose mother was killed in a road accident, his present wife, who is much younger than he, and his father, nearly 80 and ailing. The novel opens with Allington waiting for friends to arrive to dine, while in the bar a customer asks him about the legend of the pub ghost, Dr Underhill, who lived in the house in the late seventeenth century. Underhill’s wife and a local farmer were both murdered, literally torn to pieces in the road outside. Underhill’s ghost is alleged to appear at the dining-room window, looking out at where the murders took place. Allington’s friends, Jack Maybury and his wife Diana, arrive. Jack, a doctor, is concerned about Allington’s drinking and advises him to cut down. Allington lusts after Diana and manages to arrange a meeting with her for the next day. The evening is an eventful one. Allington sees his first ghost, a woman in a long gown on the landing. He is distracted, but when he turns back, she has disappeared. While having drinks, Allington’s father collapses with a fatal stroke. His few last words indicate that he has seen something terrifying in the room. That night, Allington has a nightmare of some monstrous creature in the woods near the house. He begins the next day with a stiff whisky, then meets Diana and makes love to her on the edge of the wood. Walking there a little later he is seized by an attack of overwhelming panic. Any plain telling of the plot of a work of fiction runs the risk, as Amis says in another context in the book, of sounding ‘not altogether unlike having the plot of Romeo and Juliet summarized by a plasterer’s mate’, so it is enough to say that the foregoing details form only the prologue to the events of the following few days when the ordinary world of drink and conversation and sex becomes entwined with the supernatural, taking in, along the way, a vision of the seventeenth century, conversations with the late Dr Underhill, the suspension of time during a visit by God (a young man who takes whisky with Allington), grave-robbing, the summoning of a demonic being, exorcism and as happy an ending as is possible under the circumstances. Is this giving too much away? I don’t think so. The book is a collection of brilliant set pieces delivered in a compelling straightforward narrative. Without straining for effect Amis manages to write about the impossible and make it seem real. His character, Allington, is a heavy drinker: alcohol helps, literally, to keep demons at bay. And Amis, for all his charm, wit and apparently extrovert personality, was a man often terrified by sudden panic attacks, claustrophobia and an abiding fear of being left on his own for any length of time. Like his fictional publican, Amis drank every day, though he always defended himself against the accusatory label of ‘alcoholic’ by protesting that alcoholics are people who drink by themselves, while he loved the company of other drinkers and talkers; for him the mark of a man was the ability to hold a drink, take insults on the chin and, above all, be entertaining. The need for company was a constant obsession. Since childhood, Amis had had a fear of darkness and isolation, and, for all its humour, the portrait of Jim Dixon in his first novel Lucky Jim (1954) is of an isolated and beleaguered man. Jim lives in his own head; the world, and most of its grotesque inhabitants, is against him, and the only two ways of escaping from the world, or changing it for the better, are through drink and sex. Well, Amis was a relentless womanizer too, at least until middle age, when sex was replaced by relentless drinking. For a writer who debunked false emotions and high-flown language, the nearest he came to any sort of elevated statement is in the words he puts into Maurice Allington’s mouth in The Green Man. Allington is describing how he is drunk ‘with that pristine freshness, that semi-mystical elevation of spirit which, every time, seems destined to last for ever’. To me, The Green Man, the novel of Amis’s most closely concerned with drink, is also his most profound and compassionate book; a book about the protection love offers against evil. There is an argument to be made that the novels of Amis’s middle period, from The Anti-Death League (1966) to The Alteration (1976), are the most varied and interesting, certainly more ambitious than the early social comedies and not yet soured by the rancour of some of the later work. It is the middle-period books that seem to reveal the inner Amis as a deeply troubled and far more emotionally complex person than the one met in the biographies and reminiscences of his friends. He was, like many other novelists, a superb actor, able to assume many roles and disguises in his fiction and in life. Amis in his last years is often pictured as a curmudgeonly and awkward character, but not everyone found him to be so. John McDermott, who wrote one of the first and best books on the author (Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist, 1989), has told me what an amiable and charming man Amis was, an extremely boozy lunch companion of course, but he was always that. The alcoholic routine Eric Jacobs describes in his biography of Amis would be punishing to a very much younger man, let alone one in his late sixties or early seventies. Whatever the ravages of the previous night, Amis would write for about three hours every morning and the drinking day would start at 12.30 with the first of two or three large malt whiskies in his local pub, or at his club, the Garrick. This would be followed by a bottle of wine with lunch, and a large Grand Marnier, or perhaps two glasses of red wine afterwards. A snooze in the afternoon, then he would resume work at five for an hour or two. More malt whisky; at supper, beer. The evening was rounded off with more whisky. And so, unsteadily, to bed. It is said by some moralistic observers that drink destroyed Kingsley Amis. So it did. Physically he became grossly overweight. By his early fifties he was impotent, by his sixties he was unable to walk very far, by his seventieth year he had become a tottering, and often falling, semi-invalid. But mentally he remained remarkably acute. He worked every day, publishing ten books in the last decade of his life. To Amis, drinking was a pleasure, providing a haven from the very real terrors that afflicted him and enabling him to continue working at a high level. He had established a style of living that enabled him to survive; if this meant the ingestion of large amounts of alcohol that was just tough luck. The character of Maurice Allington is probably the closest to a self-portrait that Amis allowed himself to come. Allington is selfish, tetchy, drunken, adulterous, but also funny, loving, honest and perceptive about his own failings. By the end of The Green Man, the balance hangs in his favour.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © William Palmer 2008