(2 of 3)
Not in this novel. As he tries to cope with Steve's problem, Stanley begins to feel that every female he meets is in league against him. Dealing with Nowell again is bad enough: "She makes the past up as she goes along. You know, like communists." Worse is Dr. Trish Collings, who oversees Steve's hospitalization. She seems bent on blaming Stanley for his son's condition ("You resented him as an intruder"), and her behavior is alternately flirtatious and vengeful. Susan alone offers Stanley comfort and support: "Remember I'm not like the others." Ultimately, of course, she proves herself no different from what Stanley calls "any other deranged bleeding completely wrapped up in herself female."
Is this novel unfair to women? Probably. Is the question worth asking? No. Stanley and the Women is a local indictment of particular, carefully drawn characters. The females in the world of this book all commit "offences against common sense, good manners, fair play, truth," at least in the eyes of Stanley, who is smug, casually anti-Semitic in a way "that came naturally to someone like me born where and when I was," and nobody's idea of a deep thinker. Stanley's lone attribute is his capacity for comic outrage. His hapless struggles with the denizens of the modern age, including selfish or angry women, provide frustrations and their antidote. As Dr. Nash tells Stanley, "The rewards for being sane may not be very many but knowing what's funny is one of them." Stanley and the Women offers a session of healthy laughter.
By Paul Gray
Kingsley Amis has a theory about why Stanley and the Women, which provoked little outrage in England, nearly did not make it to the U.S.: "Our feminists aren't as loony as the ones in America, although they're trying to catch up." Still, the author denies that his novel is anti-female. "All comedy," he says, "all humor is unfair." He elaborates: "There is a beady-eyed view of women in the book, certainly, and as its author I had to spend some time thinking along those lines. But a novel is not a report or a biographical statement or a confession. If it is a good novel, it dramatizes thoughts that some people, somewhere, have had. Haven't most men, at moments of high exasperation, thought, 'They're all mad'?"
Amis is in Swansea, on the coast of Wales, for his annual late-summer sojourn away from the bustle of London. At 63 he is plumper than he was in 1949, when he arrived at the University College of Swansea as a lecturer in English. He still finds the place and its people congenial: "My countrymen claim the Welsh are deceitful. Well, they're no more deceitful than the English, and they're more genial in the bargain. The English will cheat you, do you down, but do it morosely." The author spends these vacation mornings at work, trying to get down a minimum of ten typewritten lines per session on his next novel: "Its three sympathetic characters are a mother, a daughter and a homosexual. That ought to surprise a lot of people." Early afternoons are reserved for rounds of Scotch and water with old friends at the Bristol Channel Yacht Club, where Amis is an honorary member. Among the attractions of this handsome Edwardian structure, the author confides, is "a lack of embarrassing enthusiasm for things. Like yachting."