Kingsley Amis was tracked by MI5 over communist leanings
MI5 KEPT a file on Kingsley Amis, the author, after an intercepted letter referred to him as a “very promising” member of the Communist Party while at Oxford University.
His newly declassified dossier reveals that the Secret Service asked local constabularies for reports on the young academic and quizzed his Army commanders about his conduct.
The document, released today at the National Archives in Kew, showed Army superiors took a dim view of the young Amis as a deliberate contrarian.
However, the files showed that intelligence officers followed his later disenchantment with Marxism and came to the view that his youthful beliefs should not disqualify him from places on official tours or “a post affording opportunity for subversive activity”.
The young student, who would go on to write Lucky Jim and father novelist Martin Amis, was apparently first flagged to MI5 in 1942 when an intercepted letter mentioned his role in the Oxford branch of the Communist Party.
There were also reports in 1944 that he had been receiving regular supplies of the communist newspaper Daily Worker.
In the aftermath of the war, as MI5 shifted its gaze from German agents to Soviet espionage, Amis’s case was reviewed and a reference was sought from his commanding officer in the Royal Corps of Signals.
In a memo to Lt Col John Baskervyleglegg, of MI5, the unnamed commander said that he had not found the young, socialist officer to have a “particularly inspiring personality”.
He added: “He is obviously wellread, but a bit young and inexperienced in the ways of the world.
“In discussions he has always tended to take extremist views towards most aspects of life and gives the impression of trying to compensate for his rather nebulous personality by making extreme and controversial statements in the hope it will make an impression.”
He added that Amis’s immediate company commander did not report him to be showing “extremist tendencies” in his work, adding: “My own view is that, if he tried to, there are few people who would take him seriously.”
Following his career through a series of press cuttings, the file records Amis’s falling out with communism in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Writing in 1957 to the Daily Worker, now the Morning Star, Amis said he had utterly rejected Marxism and broken off with his communist friends.
He was knighted in 1990 and died in 1995 at the age of 73.