Journey Into the Past

by Kingsley Amis

  KINGSLEY AMIS (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he went to the City of London School on the Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961 became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing and teaching (“I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day”). Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in 1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband.

  KEITH GESSEN is a founding editor of n+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men. Among his translations from the Russian are Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich and, with Anna Summers, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

  LUCKY JIM

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  Introduction by

  KEITH GESSEN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Lucky Jim

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Lucky Jim is a young man’s book, in fact the book of two young men. They weren’t exactly angry young men, but they were extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they had graduated from both Oxford and the Second World War to find themselves in an England that was in terminal decline. It was bankrupt. It was losing the overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in charge were snobs and incompetents. Worst of all, no one seemed to appreciate the young men’s genius: neither the women they met nor the publishers to whom they sent their works.

  When Kingsley Amis began writing Lucky Jim in early 1951, he was twenty-eight years old and an assistant lecturer at a provincial university in Wales. He had written a novel that no one wanted to publish; a book of poems that had been published very badly; a monograph on Graham Greene, commissioned by a shadowy Argentinean outfit, which was never printed and for which Amis was never paid; and a postgraduate thesis, produced in the hope of improving his standing at his university, that had been flunked by his committee at Oxford. Over a year later, still working on Lucky Jim as he turned thirty, Amis wrote his closest friend an exasperated letter.

  What am I doing here? Or anywhere, for that matter. If only someone would take me up, or even show a bit of interest. If only someone would publish some books of mine, I could write some. Still a lecturer at 45 CHRIST Senior Lecturer at Durham at 45 CHRIST . . . You know the sort of thing that’s going to happen to me? With my teeth even worse than they are (I have had gingivitis for some time) dressing in camel-hair waistcoat and bow-ties, I shall be laughing and talking loudly in the pubs at lunch-time, a one for the girls, imagining I am impressing the young men by my keen contemporaneity, passing myself off as a grand chap, referring to my successful friends. . . . All this of course will be taking place in one of the smaller and poorer provincial cities.

  Amis was feeling pretty bad.

  The recipient of this letter, Philip Larkin, wasn’t feeling so great himself. The same age as Amis, he was at this point the more accomplished man of letters, having already published a book of poems and two novels. He was also more secure professionally: Partly out of desperation, partly out of inclination, he had embarked on a career as a university librarian. But Larkin had trouble with women. He had trouble meeting them; he had trouble seducing them. He wasn’t even sure that he liked them. What made matters worse, at least from his friend Kingsley’s point of view, was that Larkin’s inability to meet women was superseded only by his inability, once having met them, to disentangle himself. He seemed to combine hidden hostility with an exaggerated scrupulosity. He lost his virginity at the age of twenty-three and proceeded to get engaged to the young woman who had taken it. His next major affair, begun in the late 1940s, was with Monica Jones, a lecturer in the English department at the University of Leicester, where Larkin was a librarian, and it would last, with some hiccups, for the rest of Larkin’s life.

  Amis and Larkin had met as first years at Oxford in 1941 and quickly become good friends. They had some things in common: Both were from “respectable” but unremarkable middle-class backgrounds—Amis’s father was a middle manager for a mustard manufacturer, Larkin’s a successful civil servant—which distinguished them from their wealthier classmates. It was a point of pride with them to be unimpressed by Oxford. At their first encounter, according to Larkin, Amis did a terrific imitation of a man getting shot, then mimicked the sound of the gun that shot him. “For the first time,” Larkin later wrote, “I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.” The two were drawn together by their affection for jazz and their alienation from college. Oxford was snobbish, cloistered, and made to feel all the more so by the war. Was there much point in studying Chaucer when German bombers could be heard at night on their way to targets in the industrial centers to the north? Amis and Larkin didn’t think so, and spent as much time drinking as studying; then, a year after arriving at Oxford, Amis was called up. Larkin, rejected for his poor eyesight, remained at a much-reduced Oxford to finish his degree.

  Amis was assigned to the Royal Signal Corps, which would eventually take him to France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, though as a signalman he never saw any actual fighting. The army gave Amis an opportunity to see the world (“No signs of my having developed syphilis have appeared yet, and this is the twenty-third day, so I am feeling a bit more hopeful,” he reported to Larkin from Belgium early in 1945), and it left him with a lifelong hatred of authority. As his biographer, Zachary Leader, puts it, Amis finished the war as many other people in Britain did—with a sense that “the wrong people were in charge, had the money, had to be listened to and treated with respect.”

  Larkin had less of a problem with authority—he always got on well with his library supervisors—but he and Amis shared a disdain for the literary hierarchy they were inheriting from the centuries. At Oxford, both young men spent a good portion of their time abusing the literature they were supposed to study. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Larkin wrote Amis about Old English poetry. “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.” Their professors had nothing to say, and could hardly be heard saying it. J.R.R. Tolkien, Amis complained, “spoke unclearly and slurred important words, and then he’d write them on the blackboard but keep standing between them and us, then wipe them off before he turned around.” The young men invented a game called “horsepissing,�
�� in which they’d replace words from classic literary texts with obscenities—“I have gathered up six slender basketfuls OF HORSEPISS,” for example—which they’d write, among other places, in their own and each other’s copies of famous books. Larkin’s gloss on Keats’s “ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star / Into her dream he melted,” was “YOU MEAN HE FUCKED HER.” It was a game they never tired of or outgrew. Returning to Oxford after the war and specializing in medieval literature, Amis discovered a hatred for Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and The Canterbury Tales. His adviser, Amis wrote Larkin, “pronounced himself very pleased with my essay on the levels of Chaucer’s fart.” In further academic news: “I’ve discovered a way to my tutor’s heart. He likes all those shags like Pickarso . . . and Klee . . . so I say things like ‘blue period’ and ‘delicate colour sense’ instead of things like ‘Saga-like’ and ‘piling-on of images’; and instead of things like ‘Blue arseholes’ and ‘frothy whorls of menstrual fluid.’” In Lucky Jim, Mr. Michie emerges from the war with a deep respect for the curriculum. Amis was the opposite, though it can’t be said that he was unresponsive to what he read. Each new week of school brought him something new to hate.

  Amis and Larkin graduated into a literary world still dominated by the modernism of Eliot and Pound, and haunted by the shadow of William Butler Yeats. Though Larkin went through a long apprenticeship to Yeats’s poetry, both men eventually came to think that the modernists had made English-language poetry vague, pretentious, and verbose. In Lucky Jim, Amis’s provincial hero, Jim Dixon, ponders the neighborhoods he might move to in London, their desirability massaging his tongue. “Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill Gate, Pimlico, Belgrave Square, Wapping, Chelsea. No, not Chelsea.” Chelsea represented the artsy crowd, the modernist crowd, the posh crowd that had taken English literature too far into the realm of abstraction, had turned it into an elite pursuit. Not that the rest of contemporary literature was any better. “Somebody once told me,” Amis reported to Larkin, “that Dorothy Parker, was good, at writing, short stories. The other day I bought a book of hers for a shilling, and I am sorry now.” On Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: “I may have missed the irony, but I cannot believe that a man can write as badly as that for fun.” And as for the most famous young poet of the immediate postwar years, the bardic Dylan Thomas, here is Amis in 1947:

  I have got to the stage now with mr toss that I have only reached with Chaucer and Dryden, not even with Milton, that of VIOLENTLY WISHING that the man WERE IN FRONT OF ME so that I could be DEMONICALLY RUDE to him about his GONORRHEIC RUBBISH, and end up by WALKING ON HIS FACE and PUNCHING HIS PRIVY PARTS.

  It wasn’t just a long literary seminar in reverse. Amis and Larkin complain about women as often as they complain about writers. “I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for Parliament,” Larkin, who was stooped, balding, and myopic, writes to Amis. “The only advance I ever made to a woman was productive of such scorching embarrassment that the wound is still rawly open.” Amis, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of hair, responded by regaling Larkin with tales of the multiple women he was juggling, both before and after he married Hilary Bardwell in 1946. Of an amorous and very frank correspondence with a woman he was trying to seduce, Amis reported that “It is nice to be able to write the words ‘I want to fuck you’ in a letter and send it off without qualm,” then asked: “What do you think of all this?” Larkin had never written such a letter. In turn he told Amis about compiling a list of “10 awful incidents from my life that I prayed to forget.” He asked: “Do you ever do things like that?” One can be reasonably certain that, no, Kingsley Amis did not compile depressing lists of awful things that had happened to him. Many years later, Larkin would memorialize the differences between him and Amis in a magnificent poem, “Letter to a Friend about Girls.” But during this period it must have been alternately fascinating and painful to hear about Amis’s many conquests, when Larkin had so few of his own.

  The other thing that had brought them together was a hatred of the family—not just their own particular families, but families in general. Larkin’s family was worse than Amis’s, by any measure—Sylvia Plath would write a famous poem comparing her father to a Nazi, but Larkin’s father actually was a Nazi—he kept a bust of Hitler in his office until the start of the war. As for Amis, his main beef was with his in-laws. “Hilary is very nice, as you will agree,” he wrote to Larkin about his fiancée. “But her family, who put in sporadic, unneeded visits are nasty. She has two brothers, who are EXCREMENTALLY EVIL. One has sandals and saffron trousers, and No Socks, and a green shirt, and plays the recorder (yes) and likes Tudor music.” This family would appear in Lucky Jim, pretty much intact, as the Welches.

  Later on, when asked about his contribution to Lucky Jim, Larkin would refer understatedly to “a period of intensive joke-swapping just after the war.” And there are certainly plenty of jokes in the correspondence. But it also served as a kind of test run, a way of egging each other on—just how nasty could one be, just how disrespectful, just how profane? Was it enough merely to hate stuff? The answer that began to emerge in the letters, which continued to amuse and comfort the two men as the years wore on, was that hatred and irritability could be an almost inexhaustible store of humor, liveliness, and insight. If you hated intensely enough, deliberately enough, with enough determination and discrimination, you just might end up with something new, unexpected, true to life.

  But of course then as now the world was filled with young college graduates convinced of the sheer absolute idiocy of everyone, living or dead. The trick was to find a subject to focus all that rage on. In 1948, the struggling Amis visited Larkin at the University of Leicester. “I looked round a couple of times and said to myself, ‘Christ, somebody ought to do something with this,’” he later wrote. “Not that it was awful—well, only a bit; it was strange and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got on to from outside, like the SS in 1940, say.” Not long after this visit, Amis began work on Lucky Jim.

  In Lucky Jim, Amis gives us all of Larkin’s problems, and adds some extra of his own. Jim Dixon is a junior professor at a university that is, pointedly, neither Oxford nor Cambridge; he has an idiot boss who is also a bore and a snob (“No other professor in Great Britain . . . set such store by being called Professor”); he has written an academic article that he detests and must produce a lecture that he will despise; he has been commissioned to go spend a miserable weekend at his boss’s house; and—a problem so horrible he almost dare not mention it—there is “Margaret,” his love interest.

  The problems were real, in the sense that they were based in the experience of the author and his friend. But the reader has to wonder, why are they such a problem? Lecturing in a provincial city? Surely better than working in the coal mines of Manchester. Not being able to break up with Margaret? Better, perhaps, than no Margaret at all. Meanwhile Professor Welch, though a doddering old man, does not seem like a particularly malignant or abusive authority or much of an authority at all. And yet Jim wins our sympathy; his anger seems earned and his sufferings seem genuine. How is this possible—and why, when the book came out, did so many people embrace it and Jim? The novel went through four printings in its first three weeks in February 1954 and was greeted as a near-revolutionary literary event.

  The answer is at least partly historical. “Junior professor” may sound like an okay job, but not in those years of postwar “austerity Britain,” as it’s come to be called. The country had not only suffered significant damage from German bombing during the war, it had also expended far more money on fighting it than it had in the bank, and it had also in the process begun to lose its empire. In 1948, the Marshall Plan, of which Britain was the largest beneficiary, began to ease austerity measures, but money, and space, were still tight. When modern American readers of Lucky Jim first encounter Jim’s ho
arding of cigarettes—“he wasn’t allowed to smoke another cigarette until five o’clock”—they can be forgiven for thinking that Jim is trying to cut down on his smoking for reasons of health. It soon becomes clear, however, that Jim can’t afford to smoke more often. Jim also can’t afford to go on dates, and he certainly can’t afford to live in London while indulging a desire to write or paint, as Welch’s two sons can. Not only can he not afford a London apartment, he can’t even afford a place with a modicum of privacy. Jim’s room is constantly being barged in on by guests both welcome and (mostly) unwelcome. Even at the more spacious Welch home, where Jim is a guest, his bedroom has its entrance through a shared bathroom.

  Poor Jim, and yet it’s hard not to feel that Jim’s biggest problem is himself. Jim is put-upon and abused and treated unfairly, true, but then it’s not as if he’s a saint. When Jim is not being outright lazy—in the academic realm, for example, it is his policy “to read as little as possible of any given book”—he is busy committing acts of minor vandalism. He draws on his fellow boarder Johns’s oboe magazine; he sneaks off, without apologizing, after accidentally striking a colleague with a kicked rock; he prank-calls the Welches for no particularly good reason after burning their blankets with a cigarette. He steals Professor Barclay’s taxi! For all his long protestations and lamentations about his lack of interest in Margaret, he definitely puts the moves on her at the Welches’. The only person he admits to admiring is the former army officer Atkinson, and the reason is not that Atkinson is kind and gentle but instead that he has an “air of detesting everything that presented itself to his senses, and of not meaning to let this detestation become staled by custom.” Jim, systematically neglecting his devoted student Mr. Michie, can seem pretty contemptible himself. Also, he is a drunk.