Free The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James Page A

love, the man who goes out of his mind says that he is being true to his heart. Love having vanished, Amis was left with memories of folly, and no feelings left to steer by, except the
one that underlay most of his life and all of his art. What could be more boring than marriage? A wrecked marriage. What could be more boring than a wrecked marriage? Another wrecked marriage. Time
for a drink. Long after the husk became impossible to live with, Jane walked out on him. She had been noble to stay.
    The book ends with the resurrection that preceded death. It was a blow when Jane left him, but also the end of an agony, because now he could go back home. Home has been defined as the place
where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, but Leader’s closing account is here to remind us that it wasn’t a case of Hilly, now Lady Kilmarnock, graciously allowing
the washed-up ex-husband to crawl in through the cat-flap of her castle. Those who need reminding, or telling for the first time, will have swallowed the impression put about by the media that
Hilly was exercising retributive generosity. The facts say that there was a lot of generosity on the part of Amis. Lady Kilmarnock and her husband were broke. Amis, now Sir Kingsley, with an
earning power that not even he could convert entirely into alcohol, was in a position to help.
    There was a lot in it for him – fearing the lonely dark above all other things, he was able to end his days in the crowded light – but he could distribute the seigneurial largesse
only because of his commanding position. In his last phase he was no less the grand figure, and to underline the fact he produced a book that brought much of his subtlety back into play. The Old
Devils marks an artistic recovery not just because the humour is funny again but because something of his tenderness returns – the quality with which he is seldom credited, but which
underlay all his literary powers, humour not excepted. In the cast of aged characters, the lovable woman has lost the bloom of Christine or Jenny. In fact she has gained a complete set of false
teeth. But Rhiannon is still, or once again, the authentic Amisian love object. She is the proof that while lust might once have mattered too much, it was always love that mattered most. In life,
even in his terminal misogyny, the one thing that never bored him was romance: the adventure that was still there at the end, in his mind if nowhere else. What was true for Larkin was equally true
for Amis: the love of beauty was high on the list of all the things that made death so terrible. Both men had been sustained all their lives by the ideal of love, and when they spoke coarsely,
either separately or together, it was to stave off fear of the oblivion that would take all that beauty from them.
    In the journalistic aftermath of both these important lives, evidence of their inner torments is viewed as the sure sign of their defeat. Viewing it as part of their triumph will take time, but
it is bound to happen, because finally art wins out. If it hadn’t already won out, there wouldn’t be any journalistic aftermath anyway: such a fuss is never about nothing. The typical
purveyor of Ted-and-Sylvia arts stories to the broadsheets must be excused for trafficking in the marketable theme of reputations unravelling, but the only reason such a journeyman can’t hear
the all-pervasive voice of Larkin and Amis is that he is speaking with it. Together, the two men gave the next generation the schooled yet bewitchingly conversational tone with which to talk about
art as an everyday event, and about artiness as its enemy.
    Their combined effect is omnipresent, and of the two it is a nice question which one resounds the most. Quantitatively it has to be Amis: not just because novels reach more people than poems
can, but because he was so funny. The last step, and the hardest to take, in assessing any comic writer, is to assert what should be an