Abstract
Near the middle of Kingsley Amis’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, there is a very funny scene in which John Lewis and Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams are almost discovered making love in the lounge of Vernon Gruffyd-Williams’s house. Lewis, escaping into the hall, avoids bumping into Gruffyd-Williams and his guests by concealing himself in a cloakroom under the stairs. The whole of the next chapter (10) is given over to a farcical account of Lewis’s travels around the house, part of the time disguised as a plumber, part of the time as a Welshwoman; and his escape in the Welshwoman’s clothes out of the house, onto a bus, and, finally, through the streets of the town to his own front door. Though it is a not untypical Amis situation, its general aspect, and some particular incidents, recall scenes from Whitehall farces of the forties and fifties, or from Ealing films of about the same period. Indeed, it provided one of the high spots of the film Only Two Can Play, a free adaptation of this novel which, though released in 1962, employed the services of several of the old Ealing hands of the 1950s.
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© 1984 Patrick Swinden
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Swinden, P. (1984). Kingsley Amis. In: The English Novel of History and Society, 1940–80. Studies in 20th Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-17514-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-17512-3
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