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Amis’s novels or pornography, or both, for Amis’s fictional treatment of sexual intercourse is notably reticent). Peterhouse was hospitable but not much interested in literature as a subject. (It was symptomatic that an economic historian among the Fellows couldn’t see what was funny about the title of Dixon’s article in
Lucky Jim
.) Also Amis’s tutoring duties, which he carried out conscientiously, were quite taxing. In 1962 he met Robert Graves, the visiting Professor of Poetry at Oxford, whose work he had always admired, and this led to a visit to Graves’s home in Deya, Majorca, that summer, which was so enjoyable that Amis decided to resign his fellowship in 1963 and spend a year with his family on the island. It was a surprising decision for a writer who had famously attacked the literary cult of ‘abroad’, in
I Like It Here
, and Leader plausibly speculates that Amis had reached some kind of dead end in his life from which he was desperate to escape, like the anti-hero of the novel on which he was then working,
One Fat Englishman
. I shall return to this interesting novel.
     
    The planned year with the family in Majorca did not happen. At this juncture Amis met the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, appropriately and fatefully at a literary festival seminar on Sex in Literature. Jane, as she was known familiarly, was posh, talented, and beautiful, in her second unhappy marriage. They began a passionate affair, perhaps his first real
love
affair, which eventually brought about the end of both marriages. Hilly went to Majorca with the children and Amis moved in with Jane in London. In due course they occupied a rather grand house on the northern outskirts of London called Lemmons and looked after Amis’s two boys, Philip and Martin, while Hilly had custody of Sally. For a while everything went swimmingly. Amis continued to turn out novels every two years or so, some of them clever exercises in genre fiction, like
The Green Man
(1969) a ghost story,
The Riverside Villas Murder
(1973) a period whodunit, and
The Alteration
(1976) an alternative-world tale. Over the same period Amis renounced his early socialist leanings and – partly under the influence of his old friend the historian Robert Conquest (whose First Law was ‘everybody is reactionary on subjects they know about’) and partly out of a mischievous delight in bucking the cultural trend – became a notorious media pundit of right-wing views, supporting the American war in Vietnam and opposing the expansion of university education with the slogan, ‘More will mean Worse’. Meanwhile Jane bore the brunt of maintaining a country house lifestyle without adequate funds, and got very little writing done herself. Fault lines developed in the marriage. Amis was drinking heavily, with damaging effects on his libido which sex therapy failed to cure – an experience he explored with astonishing candour in
Jake’s Thing
(1978). Reading this book Jane came to the conclusion that he not only didn’t love her any more, but didn’t much like her, and after a couple more years of increasingly acrimonious relations, she left him.
    Amis’s physical health and morale declined steeply. Only the lifelong discipline of writing every morning between breakfast and the first drink at noon kept him going. Even so, it took him four years instead of his usual two to produce a new novel, and
Stanley and the Women
(1984) proved so bitterly (and craftily) misogynist that some women publishers in America did their best to suppress the book. To excessive drinking he added excessive eating, and grew obese. He had a fall and broke his leg. He desperately needed someone to look after him, and providentially Hilly, now married to an impecunious member of the House of Lords, Alastair Kilmarnock, was willing to take on the job in return for living rent-free with her husband in Amis’s house. Martin attributes to Hilly’s return his father’s recovery from the slough of despond