Reputations

‘Lucky Jim’ at 50

Kingsley Amis's Debut Remains One of the Funniest Novels Ever Written

By ROGER KIMBALL

Mr. Kimball is the managing editor of The New Criterion. His "The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art" is forthcoming from Encounter Books.

Publication in The New York Sun - April 1. - 2004. – Section: Arts & Letters. –P. 15.

Somewhere obscure and unpleasant — a desolate village in South America, perhaps — there lives the publisher who turned down Kingsley Amis's first novel, “Lucky Jim” for "not having alive or exciting enough characters." Unlucky sod. If only he could have been momentarily transported a year or two into the future. He might have seen my friend who happened to be in London when the book was published in January 1954. “Lucky Jim” was the talk of the town. My friend snagged a copy and started reading it while riding the underground. That was back in the days when propriety, or at least a certain starchiness, ruled public behavior. One sat quietly while riding on public transport. One did not giggle. One did not wheeze with helpless laughter. One did not roar with merriment. One didn't, but my friend did, much to the consternation and concern of his fellow passengers.

My friend had the right response. “Lucky Jim” is one of the funniest novels ever published. It tells the story of Jim Dixon, anxious young history don at a small, aggressively undistinguished provincial university. How Dixon got into teaching is a bit of a mystery, especially to Dixon himself. He just slid into it after the war. He has just managed to produce - but not yet publish - a scholarly article: “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.” It was, Dixon thought to himself, "a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article's niggling mindlessness. Its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon nonproblems." You can see why "Lucky Jim" is even today, regarded as an important source of information about university culture.

Dixon's life is a torment — not a grand torment, just a series of baffling frustrations, petty non-consummations, irritating impoverishments. Still on probation, Dixon lives in mutinous terror of Professor Welch, his bumbling, mind-numbingly vague department head, among whose sins is a keen interest in arty things like medieval recorder playing and part-singing. Will Dixon be kept on? Will he? Professor Welch ("no other professor in Great Britain...set such store by being called Professor") issues only ambiguous hints - and maddening little trials, like asking Dixon to give a public lecture on "Merrie England" at College Open Week at the end of term. When Dixon comes right out and asks about his prospects, Welch reveals himself a master of equivocation:

Welch's head lifted lowly, like the muzzle of some obsolete howitzer. The wondering frown quickly began to form. "I don't quite see..."

"My probation," Dixon said loudly.

The frown cleared. "Oh. That. You're on two years' probation here, Dixon, not one year. It's alt there in your contract, you know. Two years."

"Yes, I know, but that just means I can’t be taken on to the permanent staff until two years are up. It doesn't mean that I can't be...asked to leave at the end of the first year."

"Oh no," Welch said warmly; "no." He left it open whether he was reinforcing Dixon's negative or dissenting from it, ...

"Well I'm just wondering what's happening about it, that's all."

"Yes, I've no doubt you are," Welch said.

Dixon has romantic worries too. His "girlfriend" is Margaret Peel, a colleague at the university. The scare quotes are important, because Margaret is Dixon’s girlfriend only by proximity. She is distinctly unattractive specimen. (And, alas, she is one of the few characters in the novel who is based on a real person: Monica Jones, a girlfriend of Amis's close friend, the poet Philip Larkin). Margaret dresses poorly; she has an irritating tough; she can't get her make-up right; and she is given to saying icy thinks like "How close we seem to be tonight, James" – she always calls Jim "James" - "All the barriers are down at last aren't they?" When "Lucky Jim" opens, Margaret is recovering from a half-hearted suicide attempt (an overdose of sleeping pills). She claims to have been brutally jilted by a chap called Catchpole, and Dixon more or less inherits Margaret and her battery of neuroses. Margaret's opposite is the beautiful Christine Callaghan, the girlfriend of Welch's deliciously awful artist-son Bertrand. Dixon first lays eyes on her at an arty-weekend at Welch's house. "The sight of her seemed an irresistible attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions." Dixon tad joined the party at the Welch's in a feeble effort to ingratiate himself with his boss. When asked whether he read music - not a note, really - he guardedly replied "after a fashion." So Welch enlists him as one of two tenors in a group recital that includes Evan Johns, a nemesis of Dixon's who boards in the same house with him.

A bursting snuffle of laughter came from Dixon's left rear. He glanced around to see Johns's pallor rent by a grin. The large short-lashed eyes were fixed on him. "What's the joke?" he asked. If Johns were laughing at Welch, Dixon was prepared to come in on Welch's side. "You'll see," Johns said. He went on looking at Dixon. "You'll see," he added, grinning. In less than a minute Dixon did see, and clearly. Instead of the customary four parts, this piece employed five. The third and fourth lines of music from the top had Tenor I and Tenor II written against them; moreover, there was some infantile fa-la-la-la stuff on the second page with numerous gaps in the individual parts. Even Welch's ear might be expected to record the complete absence of one of the parts in such circumstances.

Dixon is saved at the 11th hour, 59th minute by the arrival of Bertrand and Christine. Margaret had told Dixon that Bertrand was bringing a girl called Sonia Loosmore, a ballet dancer, with him. Mistaking Christine for the ballet dancer, Dixon speaks of the "glamour" of her profession. "I know there must be a lot of hard work and exercise attached to it," he says, "but the ballet, well..."

Bertrand was going red in the face and was leaning towards him, struggling to swallow half a bridge roll and speak. The girl repeated with genuine bewilderment: "The ballet? But I work in a bookshop. Whatever made you think that I...?" Johns was grinning. Even Welch had obviously taken in what he'd said. What had he done? He was attacked simultaneously by a pang of fear and the speculation that "ballet" might be a private Welch synonym for "sexual intercourse."

"Lucky Jim" has a certain period flavor. It poignantly evokes the small but ubiquitous deprivations of postwar Britain: the hoarding of cigarette ends, the effort to make £3 last the nine days until the next paycheck. It was no doubt such aspects that led Somerset Maugham to pan the book, complaining about its celebration of the "white-collar proletariat" who wee "scum." (A sweet irony for Amis, then, that "Lucky Jim" won the Somerset Maugham Prize.) But "Lucky Jim's" comedy was not at all frayed collars and cramped living. It also deals with what might be described as perennial conundrums of the human condition. Consider, for example, the scene in which Dixon escapes from the Welch's and goes to a pub, where he avails himself ambitiously of the beer. He reels back to the Welch's after everyone else has gone to bed and tops off his previous potations with half a bottle of port. He manages to get up to his bedroom, where he has a final cigarette before turning in. Then comes the next morning.

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 as 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 secret police. He felt bad.

He feels worse when he discovers that a cigarette had burned 1) a large part of a bed sheet; 2) a smaller but still large part of a blanket; 3) a not inconsiderable bit of a "valuable-looking rug"; and 4) part of the top of his bedside table. It took a few moments for the full horror to sink in: "had a wayfarer, a burglar camped out in his room? Or was he the victim of some Horla fond of tobacco? He thought on the whole he must have done it himself, and wished he hadn’t." The only time I saw Sir Kingsley (he got his K in 1990) was at The Garrick Club in London. It was shortly before his death in 1995. He was standing by himself at one end of the bar. I believe he knew how Dixon felt. In my view, "Lucky Jim" is Amis's best book. Not that there aren’t marvelous things in other of his novels: the great cocktail party in "Stanley and the Women," for example, any number of things in "Girl, 20."But for all-round brio and comic velocity, "Lucky Jim" is in a class by itself. Dixon's lecture, towards the end of the book, is a masterpiece. So is Dixon's little revenge upon Evan Johns. So is the portrait of Bertrand Welch. I'm sure you have already read "Lucky Jim." But on the occasion of this golden anniversary, hadn't you better resolve to read it again?

(Tuesday, November 30, 2004)