Academic Angst

In one sense Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) is very much a book of its time; but in another sense it is timeless. When I came to reread it recently, I feared it might not have worn well. It was, after all, pub­lished seventy years ago; it was received then as a satire on the stultified and snobbish society of 1950s provincial Britain. I first read it in about 1970 when I was in my teens, and it still seemed relevant then; but attitudes have changed considerably since, just as I have myself, alas. I need not have worried. The tone of the book still rings true today. And it remains very, very funny. Take, for example, Amis’s famous description of a hangover:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wan­dering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not so much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by the secret police.

Lucky Jim was Kingsley Amis’s first published novel, begun while he was still in his twenties and not very happily employed as an assistant lecturer at University College, Swansea. In later life he acquired a reputation (which he did little to discourage) as a reactionary curmudgeon. There is none of that in Lucky Jim. Amis’s eponymous anti-hero, Jim Dixon, expresses leftish views and has difficulty in suppressing his youthful rebelliousness of spirit. He defers to authority only out of necessity or cowardice, and he special­izes in pulling faces when he imagines nobody is looking: a form of passive resistance. These might be his ‘shot-in-the-back face’, his ‘Edith Sitwell face’ or even his ‘Sex Life in Ancient Rome face’. Much of the action of the book takes place inside Dixon’s head, as he considers his predicament, ponders his future, examines his own motives, struggles with his conscience, debates with himself, weighs his choices and calculates when he will allow himself another cigarette. Because of this intimacy, we side with him, even when he misbehaves. Like Amis, he is a temporary lecturer in a redbrick uni­versity, bored by his job but fearful of losing it. He is almost but not quite resigned to a life of mediocrity and tedium. Occasionally he dreams of escaping to a wholly different kind of life in London, though this seems out of reach. Somehow he has become ensnared by a colleague, Margaret Peel, a neurotic and needy woman. Dixon knows that he cannot be happy with Margaret but he feels commit­ted to her, even when warned that she will drag him down. Dixon is suspicious of ‘highbrow’ culture, which seems to him to lend itself to affectation and pretentiousness. He would like to re-order his life along straightforward principles, though this proves difficult. While buying drinks for Margaret and himself, he notices the barmaid and thinks ‘how much he liked her and had in common with her, and how much she’d like and have in common with him if only she knew him’. Trousering his change, he carries the drinks over to Margaret, who sighs and remarks incongruously, ‘How close we seem to be tonight, James.’

A fat-faced man on the other side of her turned and stared at her. ‘All the barriers are down at last, aren’t they?’ she asked. Finding this unanswerable, Dixon gazed at her, slowly nod­ding his head, half-expecting a round of applause from an invisible auditorium. What wouldn’t he give for a fierce purging draught of fury or contempt, a really efficient worming from the sense of responsibility?

Various military references indicate that Dixon, like Amis, has recently served in the armed forces. Amis had been one of a genera­tion of young men whose undergraduate studies had been interrupted by war service, and who would return to university older, more expe­rienced and much less deferential than before. In keeping with Amis’s own feelings, Dixon likes and even reveres Bill Atkinson, an ex-Army major who shares his lodgings, ‘for his air of detesting everything that presented itself to his senses and not letting that detestation become staled by custom’. The young Amis tried to depict life as it really is, and believed in doing what you want to do, rather than what other people want you to do, or what you sometimes think you ought to do. Detesting was a touchstone of truth, a means of differentiating between the real and the bogus. After the huge success of Lucky Jim, Amis would become identified as an ‘Angry Young Man’. An entertaining subplot of the book concerns a paper Dixon has written, which he so despises that he would have defiled and set fire to the typescript had he not been cowed into hypocritical obeisance. The paper is entitled ‘The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485’:

It was the perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s nig­gling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non-problems.

Even its opening sentence is a cliché: ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic . . .’ He submits the paper to a new learned journal advertising for contributions in the Times Literary Supplement but, despite pressing, he is unable to obtain any definite information about when it will appear; the evasive editor, L. S. Caton, then departs across the Atlantic to take up a chair at a South American university. Eventually Dixon sees a version of his own article printed in an Italian journal under Caton’s name. As a temporary member of the university staff, Dixon is anxious that his position may not be renewed at the end of his probationary period, his future being dependent on the good opinion of his head of department, the tedious old windbag Professor Welch. Dixon is obliged to pay court to Welch, who remains incorrigibly ambiguous about his prospects. Grinding his teeth as he tries in vain to get Welch to commit himself one way or the other, Dixon feels ‘like a boxer still incredibly on his feet after ten rounds of punishment’. Welch invites Dixon for a weekend that proves disastrous. He meets Welch’s son Bertrand, an artist whose pomposity is immedi­ately apparent in the way he speaks. Asked if he will be staying long, Bertrand replies, ‘I doubt it. Upon consideration I feel it incumbent on me to doubt it. I have miscellaneous concerns in London that need my guiding hand.’ Bertrand is bearded, wears a beret and is a pacifist, all reasons to make Dixon dislike him. On the other hand he very much likes Bertrand’s girlfriend Christine, not just because she is beautiful, but for other reasons too, for example because she has a hearty appetite. Most of all she seems genuine, in a way that Margaret does not: she calls him Jim, unlike Margaret, who always addresses him as James. When Christine sees the devastation he has caused in his guest bedroom by failing to extinguish a cigarette before falling asleep, she bursts out laughing. She helps him to clear up the mess, an act of complicity that ignites an erotic charge between the two of them. The Welch weekend is the first of three set-pieces in the novel, the second being a summer ball, from which Dixon absconds with Christine. Riding beside her in the back of a taxi, he reflects, not unreasonably, that ‘nice things are nicer than nasty ones’. She asks him whether she should marry Bertrand; he advises her not to, and when questioned why, replies that ‘each of you belongs to the two great classes of mankind, people I like and people I don’t’. Later they kiss in the dark. Dixon’s contest with Bertrand, and their rivalry for Christine, runs through the narrative. Towards the climax of the novel their enmity erupts into a fist fight, leaving Bertrand, stunned, on the floor (though Dixon emerges with a black eye). But this is a Pyrrhic victory: Christine decides that her future is bound up with Bertrand, while Dixon reluctantly accepts that he must stay with Margaret. The third set-piece is the end-of-term lecture on ‘Merrie England’ that Dixon has unwisely agreed to give, in the hope of salvaging his chances of obtaining a permanent position at the university. It is an important event, with local worthies present. Even more unwisely, Dixon drinks too much beforehand. The result is a fiasco, both excruciating and hilarious. Afterwards he is asked to leave the univer­sity as soon as possible. He appears down and out, having lost his work, his girl and his hopes for the future. But almost in the same moment, he is offered a job in London, becomes free of Margaret, and then learns that Christine has broken off with Bertrand. Against the odds, Dixon emerges triumphant. His success is all the sweeter because unexpected. Kingsley Amis would have a long career, writing more than twenty further novels. Some of them are good, but none has the freshness of Lucky Jim. It is a young man’s book, energetic and subversive. I envy those who can read it for the first time.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Adam Sisman 2024