‘Fuck off. No, fuck off a lot.’
Kingsley Amis to a fellow member of the Garrick Club
(from The Life of Kingsley Amis, by Zachary Leader, Jonathan Cape 2006)
Kingsley Amis was a devout member of the Garrick Club, that famous bastion of Victorian (and ongoing) men’s-club culture which stands at 15 Garrick Street, WC2. Founded in 1831 by the eminent actor David Garrick, the club has always attracted members from the artistic, literary and cultural establishment, and boasts a fine art collection and an equally fine bar. One of its members was A.A. Milne, who bequeathed the rights to Winnie the Pooh to the club; one can only goggle at the deal that the Garrick subsequently made with Disney. Amis hymned the Garrick thus:
‘When bores and pedants drive you up the wall,
Come to the Garrick and forget ‘em all.’
Amis’ devotion to drink is illustrated amply in his early-1970s book On Drink – which remains an entertaining guide to drinking culture and etiquette, although it may be best not to use it as such if you want to retain your more moderate friends. Some of his drink recipes are unique:
‘Queen Victoria’s Tipple:
½ tumbler red wine,
Scotch.
‘The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once.’
Then there’s this:
‘Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver:
1 hefty shot gin,
1 (½ pint) bottle of Guinness,
Ginger beer.
Put the gin and Guinness into a pint silver tankard and fill to the brim with ginger beer. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the attribution, which I heard in talk, but the mixture will certainly revive you, or something. I should think two doses is the limit.’
On Drink also contains a very useful section on ‘The Hangover’. Amis divides it into its two constituent parts: the physical hangover and the metaphysical hangover. The symptoms of the latter are defined by the author of Lucky Jim in revealingly autobiographical terms:
‘You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.’
Amis then suggests recuperative options for hangover reading and hangover listening. Suggested reading includes Milton’s Paradise Lost, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch (on the basis that ‘there are plenty of people about who have to put up with a bloody sight more than you do’), Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodeouse – but explicitly excluding Evelyn Waugh. His listening choices are primarily Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Brahms, and Miles Davis – the latter recommended only when he’s not playing with John Coltrane.
The Garrick gave Amis a platform upon which he could unleash his ‘Kingers’ persona: a full-throated, blimpish xenophobe. Some apologists say it was a merely an act, but the racist quips are no less appealing in print than they can have been when heard live, his listeners struggling to dismiss the offensiveness as just a curmudgeonly routine (except for those who actually agreed with his sentiments, and there would have been more than a few of those at the Garrick). In 1996, a year after Amis’s death, a memorial service was held at St Martin in the Fields church, just yards away, and the after-party was held at the Garrick. The very right-wing journalist Paul Johnson ducked out, complaining that the service had seen Amis posthumously kidnapped by the left. Amis was a conflicted and contradictory figure. In his memoir Experience Martin Amis offers some context and amelioration for his father’s public (and private) statements. He even mentions that Kingsley abandoned a novel because he feared the hero’s homosexuality might be taken by his Garrick chums as a confession on his part. He also suggests that Kingsley’s copious writings on booze were a kind of justification for the amount of time he spent consuming it.
Anyone curious about the ambience of the Garrick is advised to check out the London-set John Wayne vehicle Brannigan, a genuinely terrible action film from 1975, which includes a scene filmed inside the club. Wayne’s co-star was Richard Attenborough, a long-time Garrick member who managed to persuade the club to open its doors for filming. The Garrick is also the place where Brendan Behan got smashed in advance of his famous live Panorama interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1956.