Before examining the success of Lucky Jim, a look at the failure of The Legacy will help in understanding the influence exerted by Philip Larkin on Amis’s narrative voice, while highlighting the differences between his writing and that of perhaps the most similar Movement novelist, John Wain. The latter admitted that he would never have written Hurry On Down if not for the example of The Legacy, parts of which Wain read while at Oxford (Wain 1962, 204). Amis worked on The Legacy before and during the composition of his BLitt thesis, and half of the plot concerns his quest to become published, detailing his battle with R.A. Caton, the owner of Fortune Press. The novel also reflects Amis’s concern for moral choices and several personal concerns at the time of composition.1 In relation to the development of his artistic vision, the stark contrast between the relatively balanced but uninteresting narrative perspective in The Legacy and the slanted, sardonic, but highly entertaining viewpoint in Lucky Jim suggests that Amis needed to vent spleen – to state his preferences negatively – to express himself well.
Although The Legacy and Lucky Jim are completely different, one often overlooked similarity between them reflects the author’s determination to become a famous writer. In both novels Amis took a temporarily irresolvable situation from his life and resolved it in fiction, and these situations reflect his desire for artistic independence. The first comes near the end of The Legacy, when the protagonist – also called Kingsley Amis – informs his publisher that he will not pay the required twenty pounds to purchase one hundred copies of his own poetry collection (1948, HEHL, 258). In his desperation to see Bright November in print, Amis had accepted similar contractual obligations, and this will be examined more closely in the subsequent discussion of publisher R.A. Caton’s role in Lucky Jim. The second situation concerns Jim Dixon’s departure from the university. Before he is fired, he tells several university colleagues what he really thinks of them and then accepts a more lucrative position as arts patron Gore-Urquhart’s personal assistant. Amis too longed to be free of his teaching obligations so that he could write full-time, and he would have liked to insult many of his co-workers, but in the absence of a fairy godfather or other financial prospects he remained silent (and employed) at Swansea University. Although Amis would criticize romantic poets for depicting both life and love not as it is but as they wished it to be (Amis 1957, 24), the two situations cited above are best understood not as cases of wish-fulfillment2 but as signs of the importance of artistic independence and creative expression. In his BLitt thesis, book sales are used as a measure of literary success, thus to be forced to pay for the publication of one’s own book signifies artistic failure. And while employment as a university lecturer was not quite the same as having an artistic sponsor, Amis did not want to be beholden to the university while he wrote. This is evident in the fact that once Amis was making enough money from book sales, he promptly quit his teaching job. As a young, unproven writer on an insecure footing as a university lecturer, Amis certainly understood the plight of the protagonists in The Legacy and Lucky Jim. The instability of the heroes’ positions is reflected in their repeated failure to express their emotions. When The Legacy’s hero wants to voice his true feelings but cannot, he feels a persistent pain in his throat (1948, 242); something similar will happen to Dixon, who resorts to pantomime and the pulling of faces.
The other half of The Legacy deals with, unsurprisingly, a legacy: Kingsley Amis has just been released from army service to finish his education at a commercial college (Amis 1948, 2). Should he join the family firm and marry to his older brother Sidney’s satisfaction before his twenty-fifth birthday, he will inherit thirty thousand pounds. If he does not fulfil these conditions, the money will go to an evangelical society (7). Though nineteen year-old Jane is “a girl of strong good sense” (7), Sidney claims she lacks intelligence and manners (126), and withholds approval. After the brothers fight, Kingsley moves into a boarding house. He almost gives in to Sidney, agreeing to break things off with Jane, but then changes his mind and determines to marry her (226). In the meantime, Kingsley has also become involved with a former girlfriend, Stephanie, of whom his brother approves, and the novel ends in uncertainty. Kingsley says that he will not see Jane for the foreseeable future, though he might become more involved with Stephanie. Meanwhile Sidney is now conniving to prevent his sister Mary’s union with Paul Whetstone on the grounds that he is not good enough for her, even though Paul and Sidney are friends (272).
The novel failed to find a publisher for numerous reasons,3 including its sombre mood, over-writing, and the unclear perspective of the first-person narrator. These problems were all resolved in Lucky Jim under Philip Larkin’s tutelage, as shall be shown. The analysis of the protagonist’s feelings in The Legacy is often unnatural, as when Kingsley internally remarks, “A highly specialized apprehension moved in me” (10). In other words, he is nervous. Sometimes it is unclear what the author wants to convey beyond his own cleverness. Perhaps the most objectionable phrase in the novel comes when Kingsley says that his “future course of action [is] refracted by otiose agitations” (227). Handwritten additions to the typescript intriguingly indicate that Amis realized improvements were needed, but failed to recognize that he was making the novel worse by adding description. One such example comes at the end of a Kingsley speech to which the author added in pen, “wrapping myself in a heavy cloak of facetiousness” (114). Another serious problem is the absence of a clear narrative perspective. One of Amis’s most remarkable achievements in Lucky Jim was the funnelling of the story through the narrator’s sardonic sensibility, so that almost every observation reflects a particular world view. But in The Legacy passages that do not convey a point of view, such as the following, are numerous: “We passed a cook-house and dining-hall from which came a loud mixture of conversations. Two men stood outside, washing their eating utensils in a large tin bath filled with hot water. One of them, who wore Army spectacles, looked in our direction, shaking the water from his cutlery” (12). The reader can have no idea of the significance of this description, nor of the prolonged attention given to the barking and growling of the dog, Rodney, when Kingsley visits Stephanie and her mother (111). In contrast, Lucky Jim’s narrator always conveys Dixon’s feelings when people stare or dogs bark; we know whether he is irritated or pleased, and this partiality makes the writing come alive.
A close reading of The Legacy also reveals the themes, set pieces, and minor obsessions that recur throughout Amis’s fiction. He would often squeeze humour from the unnatural English speech patterns of foreigners, and Max de Jong represents the first character used for this purpose. Among his tortured constructions is, “Are you at being able to come, Kingsley?” (20). Although his speech is contrived and unrealistic, de Jong’s presence suggests the importance of proper language use for Amis, and his recognition of the potential for humour when it is misused. Most of his subsequent novels would feature a climactic interview and Jane alludes to this predilection when she travels by taxi with Kingsley to meet his brother and says, “I can’t help feeling like a candidate for interview” (67). Another of the acid tests for a character’s worth comes in the familiar Amisian pub scene. Characters with authorial validation are always quick to buy a round for their companions while irritants shirk their duty. In listing Jane’s positive attributes, Kingsley tells Sidney that she is “very independent about everything; always buys her round, and so on” (7). At the pub a fortune telling machine at the bar will also inform Kingsley, “It’s your round, chum” (157).
The Legacy is not unrelievedly bad; it improves midway with the entrance of Scotsman Jock McClintock.4 Aside from imparting humour and much needed energy, he points to the importance of antimodels for Amis, who best expressed himself when venting spleen, not in maintaining narrative neutrality. McClintock moves into the same boarding house as Kingsley and immediately has a disagreeable meal, which allows the author to delight in describing the horridness of the food along with the Scot’s irritating habits (141). McClintock provides more comic relief in his second appearance via gruffness and unpredictable changes in mood and manner. Immediately after greeting an elderly man in the street, McClintock abuses him (148) and, when he and Kingsley prepare to enter the boarding house, he says in anticipation of breakfast, “Wonder what foul concoction the bag has in store for us this morning” (159). McClintock’s energy is almost wholly negative, yet it allows Amis to entertain the reader while revealing complexities in human behaviour. One such complexity emerges in a plot twist. Mr Masters, an elderly resident of the boarding house who is in ill health, takes Kingsley aside and informs him that his friend McClintock secretly despises him: “He was protesting, as I understood him, against your attempts to claim membership of a class to which, so he said, you do not belong. He called you conceited.” According to Masters, McClintock thinks Kingsley is “affected,” and considers his very name “inexcusable” along with “your attitude of knowingness in conversation, your snobbery towards people better than yourself, and your slowness, as he called it, on the uptake” (203–4). A shocked Kingsley confronts McClintock, who insists that Masters has lied. The old man, says McClintock, behaved similarly in the past to set another friend against him. The scene comes at the end of the novel and, with no further evidence forthcoming, the reader is left not knowing who or what to believe. This is the first instance in Amis’s fiction of aporia, a device which has been defined by literary theorists in a variety of ways5 but generally denotes a textual knot that resists untying (Barry 2002, 79). In The Legacy aporia is significant because it signals Amis’s desire to conduct experiments in content; but it can also be problematic, if not inappropriate, since the basic desire for plot resolution requires that this knot be untied. As shall become apparent in subsequent chapters, Amis liked to lead readers down blind alleys and tease with puzzles to show that not everything in fiction or life can be resolved. However, in terms of language and structure, his novels are highly conventional; he always insisted on clarity in both prose and poetry. Another of The Legacy’s fatal flaws is its un-Amisian use of language. While some of the odd locutions, extraneous details, and obtuse turns of phrase are deliberate, most are due to the author’s immaturity. Such problems would not surface in any of his later novels until his final one, The Biographer’s Moustache, in which the decline of his literary powers is evident in the fractured prose and repetition.
In considering Amis’s literary style, a brief comparison with John Wain, another key figure in the Movement, clarifies the former’s pre-eminent interests in language and art. The differences between the two become apparent in their attitudes towards poet and critic William Empson. Wain’s admiration of Empson6 led him to write an appreciative essay, “Ambiguous Gifts: Notes on the Poetry of William Empson,” and a poem of his own entitled “Eighth Type of Ambiguity,” adding love to Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity; Amis’s distaste for Empson is detailed in the chapter on Take a Girl Like You, which is interpreted as a reaction against Empson’s stylistic ambiguities. In Wain’s essay, “an intelligent celebration of the best of Empson” (Haffenden 2006, 352), he declares that a “‘puzzle interest’ is evidently part of the pleasure [Empson] gets from all poetry” (1957, 174); Wain exhibits a similar interest in his first novel Hurry on Down, as the hero Charles Lumley periodically utters variations on “And I a twister love what I abhor,” the penultimate line from Empson’s poem “The Beautiful Train.” It is unclear why Lumley is attracted to the line,7 but its repetition must have struck Amis as pretentious. Lumley has as little interest in literature and art as Dixon does, and it would seem incongruous for a young man who has turned his back on a university education, then accepted a series of working-class jobs, to be obsessed with an impenetrable line of poetry. It does help Wain to show off his erudition though. Nick Bentley cites the repetition of Empson’s line as proof that “a modernist attitude to language is also incorporated into the novel itself” (2007, 150), which further complicates the satire of the modernist writer Froulish.
In a 6 November 1953 letter to Wain, Amis said that he “thoroughly enjoyed Hurry on Down” and his judicious, respectful assessment reveals both his literary tastes and interest in artistic antimodels:
It is very funny in parts and does succeed above all in getting across a grotesque and twisted view of life (which is what I try to do, though it’s not the same view – this is where we’re similar), which is the best part as far as I’m concerned. I enjoyed the Froulish and Rosa bits best, the twister-abhor and Oxford scenes least. I think a few parts are over-written: my only complaint. Glad to hear about your sales. (2001, 341)
Amis’s interest in Edwin Froulish is natural, for Wain’s sham writer combines the worst elements of Bertrand Welch, Professor Welch, and L.S. Caton, the antimodels from Lucky Jim. But while Amis uses antimodels to make statements about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of art and to demonstrate his own superiority to his literary ancestors, the role of Froulish for Wain is primarily comic relief. He is a poseur, a horrible writer, and an even worse person, sponging off his prostitute-girlfriend while he is supposed to be writing a novel. Mostly he stays at home and smokes, leaving his dingy lodgings only for weekly pub visits. When he is invited to give a public reading of his unfinished novel, he throws his collar and tie into the fire as a “contrived effect.” The novel begins: “A king ringed with slings, ... a thing without wings but brings strings and sings. Ho, the slow foe! Show me the crow toe I know, a beech root on the beach, fruit of a rich bitch, loot in a ditch, shoot a witch, which foot?” (57). Froulish admits that his novel has neither title nor plot, though the “central situation” involves six people stuck in the lift of a skyscraper (58). The non-reaction of Lumley, who is present at the reading, is significant; indeed, Lumley shares Froulish’s lodgings. While he does not endorse the sham writer’s behaviour, he does not censure it either. His non-reaction is related to his stated social goal: to “put himself beyond the struggle” of the classes and achieve “neutrality” (238). This is never an acceptable goal in the Amisian fictional world. One Fat Englishman (1963), for example, insists upon proving one’s worth through competition, and Girl, 20 (1971) condemns the impartiality of the protagonist. However, in Hurry on Down Wain and his protagonist tacitly support any and all forms of social rebellion, and therefore Froulish is only mildly satirized. In their own ways, both the sham writer and Lumley are threatening the status quo.
As a way of showing social resistance, bohemianism, which Amis hated, is tolerable for Wain. Lumley arrives at a party to find nine other guests whose “appearance, in general, gave the impression of what is usually known as bohemianism, but without its redeeming features; they looked studiedly theatrical instead of harmlessly eccentric, and gave no impression, en mass [sic], of intelligence or sensitivity” (103). The Amisian view is that art, music, and literature can only ever be good or bad and bohemianism is beyond redemption. Wain laughs at the poseurs in the party scene, but without venom; this is reserved for an amorous homosexual man in grey suede shoes who repeatedly propositions Lumley. Wain, unlike Amis, does not take umbrage at either bohemianism or Froulish’s pseudo-modernism because his goal is the realignment of the social, not the literary, order.
When Amis wrote to Larkin on 10 July 1955 about Wain’s Living in the Present, he questioned his literary authenticity. He criticizes the novel for “not seeming to be by a writer,” adding: “I hate his business of setting himself up as an expert on working-class life: in this book his cockney humour seems to me a good deal less authentic than say Wodehouse’s. All the bad characters look nasty” (Amis 2001, 434). Humphrey Carpenter notes that while his ancestors were working class, “Wain himself had been born, if not with a silver spoon in his mouth, then with plenty of them on display in his parents’ substantial home” (2002, 38). Wain was stuck between two worlds, since he had not, like Larkin and Amis, earned his place at Oxford but he also was not old money, and did not fit in with those students who considered it their birthright to be at Oxford (41). This biographical note helps to explain the repeated references to neutrality in Hurry on Down, but it also makes Wain a dubious champion of the lower-middle class. Artistic authenticity – which entails proving the quality of one’s work while appealing to a commercial audience – becomes one of Amis’s obsessions throughout the 1950s and 1960s. To argue for the authenticity of his own writing, he would employ antimodels to help the reader recognize the differences between Kingsley Amis, the sham artists who act the part of the temperamental artist, and overvalued literary predecessors. Amis strove to entertain the reader unpretentiously, with consummate linguistic control. His concern for art and belief in the superiority of his own writing led him to complain publicly about the critical tendency to link his writing with Wain’s. On 24 January 1958 he sneered at a Times Literary Supplement reviewer’s charge that Wain had “got in first” and that “alleged parallels” in their first three novels showed that Amis had copied Wain. Amis labels the thematic similarities between Lucky Jim and Hurry on Down (“rescue-by-millionaire”), That Uncertain Feeling and Living in the Present (“trouble with the children”), and I Like It Here and Samuel Deronda (“parties and publishers”) “pointless and disingenuous” (Amis 2001, 526). Wain, however, clearly considered being first an accomplishment of which to be proud. In the 1977 foreword to Hurry on Down he states that if there was in fact a Movement then he should be “credited – or blamed, if you will – for having started it” (Wain 1953, xii).
Besides the presence of a sham artist, one of the important and revealing similarities between Hurry on Down and Lucky Jim lies in the heroes’ failure to articulate their feelings. In the cases of both Charles Lumley and Jim Dixon, a university education has led to an emotional muddle, as the acquisition of more complex means of articulation seems to inhibit direct or natural communication. In the socially awkward Lumley’s speech, multiple sentences often collapse into single, jumbled units such as “Mind if I come in perhaps cup of tea?” (9). Like Dixon, he struggles to explain his feelings about his job and romantic interests, thus he chooses at times to remain silent about both. In spite of these and other superficial connections – the presence of fairy godfathers, university satire, and tangled emotional relationships with co-workers – the novels and their messages are widely divergent. At various points in Wain’s work, the narrator identifies as Lumley’s goal the shedding of middle-class attributes (26) and the renunciation of class (65), and the novel even features a lengthy set-piece in which the hero delivers a socialist speech on the importance of honest work (163–6). There is very little concern for socio-political problems in Lucky Jim or its successors for, while Wain’s overriding concern is class8 and his hero’s position within the social structure, Amis focuses on the individual and what it means to be a legitimate, successful creative artist.
In Memoirs, Wain is portrayed almost as though he were one of the fictional antimodels whose negative characteristics can be used to draw attention to the corresponding positive traits in Amis himself. He characterizes Wain as a writer with “a certain banality of conception and style” who is conceited and rapacious (1991, 42). He recalls meeting him in America in 1958 or 1959 and being advised about his novel-in-progress, “Make it a good one this time, eh?” (43). According to Amis, Wain told mutual friends that he kept refusing his invitations to visit him in Swansea because he feared Hilly “‘would break down the bedroom door’ to get her hands on him.” After his wife vehemently denied any attraction to Wain, Amis confronted him and was told the remark had been made in jest. “From that moment,” writes Amis, “I considered myself released from any duty to keep to myself what I thought of his books” (44). Amis manages to get in another dig through a radio presenter’s proposed introduction of Wain as “the poor man’s Kingsley Amis,” which resulted in his former friend becoming “stroppy” and threatening to leave the studio (44). The portrait concludes with a slight attributed to Larkin:
Isn’t England a marvellous free, open country? Take a fellow like old John Wain, now. No advantages of birth or position or wealth or energy or charm or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now. Where else but in England could a thing like that happen? You know, a few years ago I think he got to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Just imagine. (45)9
As Brian Harrison notes in The History of the University of Oxford, while this institution has a fine tradition of producing writers and nurturing creative and critical talents, Oxonian intellectuals are prone to nasty, public rows, one of which was the battle between Wain and Stephen Spender, played out in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, over whether or not the latter was deserving of the poetry professorship (1994, 441).
When Amis stated that he disliked Wain’s fictional portrait of Oxford, he was probably objecting to the author’s socialist agenda as it emerges in a university party. Spotted by a fellow graduate in the hospital where he works as an orderly, Lumley is invited to the party. He is first irritated by the landlady, “a forty-ish blonde aspiring wildly to a chic slightly above her own level” (161). Then Wain describes the party-goers, Lumley’s undergraduate experience, and the fight between Lumley and the boorish Burge. These events combine to reveal an overriding concern for social competition. People who get above themselves bother the protagonist, and it seems that frustration over his inability to do anything about this situation leads to his decision not to participate in the class struggle. His acceptance of a series of menial jobs as window-washer and delivery driver signifies his refusal to join the middle class, though his education separates him from the working class. Amis’s obsession, however, is not class but pretension, as we shall see in the analysis of Lucky Jim. All of Amis’s protagonists are required to compete and prove their ingenuity in one way or another.
In his autobiography, Sprightly Running, Wain would identify the difference between himself and Amis as one of balance. “My vision of life is more extreme than his, both darker and brighter; his work is based on a steadying common sense, a real hatred of imbalance and excess; mine, by comparison, is apocalyptic” (1962, 205). Balance in relation to art is of great importance for Amis. By taking art seriously and going out of his way to reveal shams in his early novels, he fights perceived artistic injustice, and when he introduces ambiguities into his novels he is not just teasing the reader, but insisting that not everything can be known or neatly resolved.
Few modern novels have been as inventively interpreted as Lucky Jim (1954), which has had different things to say to each succeeding generation of readers.10 Critics tend to agree that Amis and his hero, Jim Dixon, were rebelling against something, though there is less agreement on the target of this rebellion. Dixon is a young, unpolished lecturer at an English red brick university who trades in his neurotic, intellectual girlfriend for a buxom, wholesome one, and his post as history lecturer for “boredom detector” (215), or personal secretary to Gore-Urquhart, a wealthy Scotsman living in London. Dixon’s new job will require him to screen the people that Gore-Urquhart might not need to see personally. Dixon is lucky to get the girl and escape academia in the provinces for the excitement of London, and Amis too was lucky, achieving immediate fame with his first published work of fiction. Malcolm Bradbury thought Dixon’s struggle was against “genteel high culture, aestheticism and bohemianism, the hangover of Bloomsbury” (1993, 321). This would be difficult to dispute, for Dixon is clearly bored by all things intellectual. He dismisses the comments of Plato or Rilke on love (72) and Aristotle or I.A. Richards on beauty (107), using “or” in both cases to show that boring writers are all the same, regardless of the era or language in which they write. Humphrey Carpenter has identified a struggle against contemporary morality in Lucky Jim, claiming that the novel is predicated upon an “amoral moral” which states “that you should take care of your own feelings before you consider other people’s” (2002, 72), a view that many critics have found problematic, if not disturbing.11 A similarly reductive view is the one offered by David Gervais, which argues for Amis as a disseminator of “anti-high brow little Englandism” because he pokes fun at people who misuse the English language. Gervais characterizes Amis and John Wain as “pseudo-rebels who were actually engaged in constructing new little myths for a new little England” (1993, 212).
When Amis was asked in 1991 whether he considered himself a moralist or an entertainer, he replied, “Both, I think. Unfortunately, if you get the label ‘comic’ hung round your neck, it stops the reader paying attention to the other things you may be doing” (Amis, “I’m a great man for tyrannies,” 89). His determination to resist critical labels is evident in his correspondence, as he is consistent only in his willingness to accept praise. In a 1956 letter to Austin Baker he writes: “I am so glad you enjoyed my books. And let me say at once that your interpretation of them as primarily comedies is most refreshing to me. I certainly intended them to be that a long way before they were anything else.” Amis adds that he is tired of being seen “as a kind of social pamphleteer” (2001 Amis, 459). In the same year, however, he would express gratitude to one Samuel Hynes for seeing the moral seriousness in his fiction: “I am glad you picked on the moral part of my books for comment. English reviewers seem to regard me as either a farcical comedian or a kind of seedy immoralist, or else they wrap me in a cocoon of ‘social comment’ and think I really hate the people I write about” (469). He has also been reductively viewed as a purveyor of “lad-lit” who “provided British readers with a romantic, comic, popular male confessional literature” (Showalter 2002, 24). While there are elements of this genre12 in Amis’s novels, most of the same elements are easily identified in the work of almost any British male novelist writing after the Second World War. Whether or not Amis belongs in this genre is perhaps of less significance than the fact that fitting him into a recognizable genre becomes a justification for not taking him seriously. For Showalter, Amis is just another of the “British lads ... obsessed with class distinctions and divisions. Not gentlemen, but not yobs, they defiantly practise the rituals of the working class while aspiring to something better – better education, better jobs, better women” (2002, 24). In Lucky Jim the three aforementioned themes – bohemianism, morality, and Englishness – are of central importance and they recur throughout Amis’s novels. The endless critical dispute over which dominates arises because so much is going on in his fiction that critics necessarily focus on one theme in order to make sense of him; with issues surrounding morality, language, politics, and relations between the sexes to occupy them, most commentators have never taken the time to consider Amis as an artist.
In Lucky Jim the artistic subplot revolves around the shady figure of L.S. Caton, who becomes the vehicle for a discussion of authorship and authenticity. These issues were at the forefront of Amis’s mind because of the inspirational and editorial roles played by Larkin in the novel’s genesis. Though Amis admitted to getting the idea for an academic spoof after visiting Larkin’s Leicester University senior common room in 1946 (Amis 1974, Profile 4, 22),13 he conceived of the plot and Jim Dixon’s future occupation two years later independent of Larkin. In a 20 May 1948 letter to Larkin, he writes: “I think I could make a large sum of money by hiring myself out as a listener to bores: I am better at being told things I do not want to know than anybody else, except you” (Bodleian). And two months later he would muse: “I think a nice plot for a novel wd be abt. a man who has a girl he can’t seduce and a job he wants to get, and somebody like hilary morris seduces the girl and gets the job, which is something desirable and awarded by men shown as sensible. Ehay?” (10 July 1948, Bodleian). Thus, while situations and models for characters may have come from their shared experience and the role of Larkin in the creative process was of great importance, the central situation involving Bertrand Welch, Dixon, Christine Callaghan, and Gore-Urquhart emerged from Amis’s own mind. Larkin was most helpful in convincing Amis to use the manic, bantering tone hitherto reserved for their correspondence. Because this tone was something they shared in private, Amis had some misgivings about turning their letters and jokes into fiction and these feelings are addressed through L.S. Caton, who absconds with Dixon’s article on shipbuilding, then publishes it in Italian translation under his own name.
Amis’s authorized biographer, Eric Jacobs, declared that “No donnish or critical exegesis was required to explain the meanings of his fiction; it spoke for itself” (1995, 364), and this type of critical attitude has allowed Amis’s concern for authenticity and the role of anti-models to go unexamined. Before looking at L.S. Caton as an antimodel, though, Amis’s commentary in Lucky Jim on the role of the audience needs explication. Throughout he is critical of pandering to an audience without properly entertaining it, as Margaret Peel’s comment on the painter Bertrand Welch suggests: “I thought he was all right when you got him on his own. I think he feels that when he’s got an audience he’s got to play up to it and impress everyone” (46).14 Initially, however, Dixon has no audience and his play-acting and face-pulling serve to obscure his identity, not to attract attention. One could even make a case for him as the purest kind of artist, since he derives joy from creation without any thought for public recognition. Clearly he most enjoys the impersonation process and not the goal, because he is undeterred by failure. He makes two prank telephone calls to the Welch home – both of which are seen through – to avoid speaking with Mrs Welch about the destruction of her bed sheets (99) and to get information from Bertrand Welch (190). He then composes an illiterate threatening letter to an irritating colleague, Johns (153), which, like the phone calls, only temporarily works. He writes the letter anticipating Johns’ immediate reaction, and this shows an awareness of the audience: “He could hardly hope, even so, to deceive Johns,” thinks Dixon. “But the letter would at any rate give him a turn and his dig-mates a few moments’ amusement when it was opened, according to his habit, at the breakfast-table and read over cornflakes” (153). When Amis composed wickedly funny letters to Larkin, he did not need a large audience either. The pleasure derived from the act of composition and anticipation of the reader’s reaction was sufficient to motivate him to write.
In contrast to Dixon’s spontaneous and natural entertaining, several other characters behave in a contrived way that makes them offensive to the audience. Margaret Peel enters the novel in the second chapter to thank Dixon for dealing with her suicide attempt tactfully and, though her gratitude “seemed genuine” (22), the reader’s suspicions are aroused by her unnatural behaviour. Her laugh is compared to “the tinkle of tiny silver bells” (23) and she wears too much make-up, which is inexpertly applied, leaving lipstick visible on her teeth (43).15 At the dance, she is compared to “a great actress demonstrating the economical conveyance of strong emotion” (111), making her the opposite of the feminine, wholesome, and straightforward Christine Callaghan. When Dixon leaves Margaret for Christine, the break is described as “genuine” (249), reminding the reader of the inapplicability of this term to Margaret’s character. If she is intended to represent an inauthentic woman who, when unable to arouse male interest, resorts to a fake suicide attempt, then Ned and Bertrand Welch serve as examples of an inauthentic academic and artist respectively. Ned Welch’s obsession with status and appearance is evident from the novel’s opening page. “No other professor in Great Britain ... set such store by being called Professor,” thinks Dixon (7). Since Welch does not seem to be working very hard, Dixon wonders: “How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics” (8). He soon discovers the answer, as he is asked “to fill certain gaps in [Welch’s] knowledge of the history of peasant arts and crafts in the country” (173). With Dixon conducting Welch’s research for him at the public library, he is prevented from working on his own Merrie England address, a necessary step in securing his standing at the university. Like his father, Bertrand Welch seeks to advance his career with the minimum of effort. He courts Gore-Urquhart’s niece, Christine Callaghan, in the hopes of becoming the art patron’s private secretary. “I’m at the moment busily grooming myself for the part,” he confesses. “Patronage, you see, patronage: that’s what it’ll be. I’ll answer his letters with one hand and paint with the other” (48). He is, in effect, turning into his father: a pseudo-intellectual who gets others to work for him.
Interestingly, authenticity in Lucky Jim is not synonymous with honesty, for it is perfectly acceptable to deceive others provided one does so in an entertaining way. Affectation, however, is a serious crime. Bertrand Welch is intended to appear ridiculous when he snootily announces, “And I happen to like the arts, you sam” (51). Dixon, on the other hand, does not take himself or his profession seriously. The author’s preference for explaining artistic ideas through parody emerges in Dixon’s pranks, which the reader will find far more entertaining than Professor Welch’s monologue on his other son, “the effeminate writing Michel.” Oblivious to Dixon’s lack of interest, “Welch went on talking, his own face the perfect audience for his talk, laughing at its jokes, reflecting its puzzlement or earnestness, responding with tightened lips and narrowed eyes to its more important points” (178). He is symbolic of the worst type of artist, who lacks an audience because he has no understanding of its wants or needs. For Dixon, academia is a tedious game and because he is bored by it he neglects the needs of his students, who comprise his audience. This makes him a bad teacher and places him somewhere in a gray zone between legitimate and illegitimate academics. He characterizes his relationship with students in the following way: “They waste my time and I waste theirs” (214). Academic research is equally uninteresting, and Dixon’s policy is “to read as little as possible of any given book” (16). When he is asked by a colleague, Beesley, if his article on ship-building is good, he replies: “Good God, no. You don’t think I take that sort of stuff seriously, do you?” (33). Dixon is asked to prepare an evening lecture on the subject of “Merrie England” for the College Open Week and although he realizes the success of the lecture could determine his academic future, he takes it with as little seriousness as his ship-building article.
Unlike Dixon, Amis did take the production of art seriously and he traces his own struggle to find a poetic voice through his hero’s more basic struggle to articulate feelings and ideas. At first, Dixon is unable to do so publicly, and he releases his frustrations through private acts of rebellion that are creative but also futile and childish. One example comes from the weekend at the Welches’ house, when he writes an unflattering message about his host in the steamed bath mirror, employing backwards letters, archaic spelling, and “bum” as the final word (64) – all trademarks of Amis’s correspondence with Larkin in which he would, like Dixon, not infrequently “let loose ... loud and prolonged bray[s] of rage” (5).16 The message is amusing, but since it is not directed at an audience it serves no purpose. As the novel progresses, Dixon’s rebellion becomes less private17 until he has a physical confrontation with Bertrand Welch and is able to tell Margaret, as a prelude to breaking off their relationship, “I’ve had enough of being forced into a false position” (158). The Merrie England lecture at the novel’s end is both a culmination of Amis and Dixon’s journeys towards authenticity and a summary of the different stages in their journeys. The lecture begins with “an excellent imitation of Welch’s preludial blaring sound” (222), which reminds us of Amis’s initial “horse-pissing” stage. Next Dixon speaks in unconscious imitation of the university principal (224), just as Amis unconsciously imitated Auden in his early poetry (Amis 2001, 109), and this inevitably leads one to forget “how to speak ordinarily” (225), as Dixon does. He experiments with a strong northern accent but only succeeds in “infus[ing] his tones with a sarcastic wounding bitterness” (226) which corresponds to the unpublished Amis’s collaborative period and the failure of The Legacy. At the end of the address, Dixon finds his “normal voice” and begins to express his true feelings about the Middle Ages – “The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history” (227) – before losing consciousness. To find his voice, Amis too needed to lose his inhibitions and incorporate the wicked sense of humour that worked so well in private correspondence. Thus, Dixon follows the Amisian path to discovering an original voice and a sympathetic audience. With the exception of Gore-Urquhart, however, Dixon’s audience is wholly unsympathetic. It does not understand him and is incapable of appreciating his humour. To get some sort of reaction from the audience, he speaks against it by mimicking the college principal and Professor Welch. In effect, Amis did the same thing when he ridiculed his own father-in-law and academia in Lucky Jim, thereby defining his audience through a process of elimination. However, Amis still resembles the socially awkward Dixon in wanting to be liked and appreciated. This is apparent in Dixon’s reaction to Margaret’s unfortunate use of lipstick, which pleased him “more from the implied compliment than from the actual effect” (57).
While the novel’s antimodel, L.S. Caton, has traditionally been seen as the elaboration of a joke shared with Larkin, he serves the important function of raising questions about originality and artistic ethics. As antimodel, Caton shows that Amis was concerned about whether or not Lucky Jim would be viewed as an original work of fiction, but also that he was not terribly worried by ethics. Caton’s character and behaviour provide clues as to Amis’s future artistic method, as shall be shown. On a more immediate level there is little doubt that Amis was exacting revenge by transforming his nefarious publisher R.A. Caton into an academic fraud. The real-life Caton kept him in a state of nervous tension for several months by sporadically answering his inquiries into the status of Bright November, Amis’s first poetry collection, and then delaying publication. Although Caton is said to have “done more than any other small publisher to promote poetry during the difficult war years,” with Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Larkin in his stable of poets, he was not an easy man to do business with (Jacobs 1995, 128). As The Legacy recalls, Amis accepted harsh contractual terms requiring the purchase of fifty copies of his own book.18 Caton did not need to place such conditions on young authors – he owned ninety-one houses in Brighton and made a considerable profit by printing soft-porn novels (Jacobs 1995, 129) – but he was a shrewd businessman. He was also notoriously elusive and did not like to answer the telephone (Jacobs 1995, 129), as Amis discovered during a visit to Caton’s office in the fall of 1947. When the phone rang, Caton asked him to answer and “‘tell ’em Mr. Caton’s gone out for a few minutes’” (Amis 2001, 140). Much of this is re-enacted in The Legacy, when the protagonist visits his publisher, who calls him “Ames,” asks when his book will come out and is told immediately, “Well, things are very difficult” (60). The unobtrusive Kingsley, “not wishing to provoke a refusal to publish,” leaves the office with the vague promise that his book will appear at the earliest by the end of March, over three months later (61). Zachary Leader has summarized Caton’s character as “dilatory, inefficient, mean, secretive and doubledealing” (2006, The Life, 189). The standard interpretation of Caton’s role as a fictional character is the one offered by Christopher Hitchens: “Amis took revenge against an editor named Caton by using his name for hateful or shifty parts in his first five books and then killing him off in The Anti-Death League” (2002, 107). In truth, only his role in Lucky Jim is of interest, for in each subsequent novel he makes only the briefest of cameo appearances by writing a letter, making a telephone call, or through word of mouth.
The first reference to Caton in the book revisits details surrounding the publication of Amis’s poetry collection. After failing to get his article into an established academic journal, Dixon has submitted it to “a new historical review with an international bias” advertised by “that Caton chap” in the Times Literary Supplement, on the rationale that “a new journal can’t very well be bunged up as far ahead” as the older ones (14). Dixon considers his title, “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485,” perfect “in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness” (14). Similarly, Amis submitted poems with which he was not wholly satisfied to R.A. Caton because he wanted to get published as quickly as possible and he was unhappy with the “CORNY [title that] reminds me of Jaybee Priestley” (2001, 131). After Lucky Jim came out, he wrote to Larkin calling his poetry collection “the worst book ever written by a promising young poet” and determined to get his agent to stop Caton from re-advertising the book (Amis 2001, 357).19
The next mention of L.S. Caton in Lucky Jim comes with the news via post that Dixon’s article has been accepted: “Without formality the writer announced that he’d liked the shipbuilding article and proposed to publish it ‘in due course’. He’d be writing again ‘before very long’ and signed himself ‘L.S. Caton’” (30). Dixon rejoices, thinking that “Welch would find it harder to sack him now” (30), but is advised by Beesley to “pin [Caton] down to a date” of publication (32). Matters become urgent when it is discovered that Caton has been appointed Chair of History of Commerce at the University of Tucuman in Argentina. “You’d better get through to him a bit sharpish, before he escapes on the banana-boat,” warns Beesley (171). Caton answers Dixon’s telephone call but refuses to give an approximate publication date. “I’m sorry to hear of your difficulties, Mr. Dickinson,” says Caton, “but I’m afraid things are too difficult here for me to be very seriously concerned about your difficulties. There are plenty of people in your position, you know; I don’t know what I should do if they all started demanding promises from me in this fashion” (194). The conversation ends with a “metallic tapping” and Dixon’s summation: “A rival to Welch had appeared in the field of evasion-technique, verbal division, and in the physical division of the same field this chap had Welch whacked at the start: self-removal to South America was the traditional climax of an evasive career” (194).
Dixon is unable to morally condemn Caton’s behaviour because he admires his ability to get ahead without doing real work. The protagonist has resorted to trickery and subterfuge throughout the novel and, when he appropriates the Barclays’ taxi, Christine notes that deceiving others has become a habit. “You’re getting good at this sort of thing aren’t you?” she says and he replies that he “didn’t use to be” (133).20 Kenneth Womack has taken a sympathetic view of what he calls the hero’s “good-natured, outward response to Caton’s thievery,” claiming that it “reveals both his recognition of the academy’s ethically fractured rites of competition and his evolving public self, a persona that no longer relies upon the construction of obnoxious faces to vent his emotions” (2002, 37). This is not entirely true, for Dixon’s mimicry causes Gore-Urquhart to produce “loud skirling laughter” while university staff members continue “staring at him with frozen astonishment and protest” (226). He impresses his future boss as unpretentious and entertaining but not morally pure, for this is a world of “comic justice,” as Patrick Swinden notes, “in which farcical vitality and advanced powers of ridicule are rewarded by material success” (1984, 197). The rogue in Dixon recognizes Caton’s act of plagiarism as “cunning,” and thinks it must be “how people get [department] chairs” (229). It is also a representation of Amis’s guilt over cannibalizing relations and friends in his fiction. Originally he had planned to offer a comic version of Larkin’s relationship to his somewhat neurotic girlfriend Monica Jones with Amis’s own father-in-law cast as Professor Welch (Jacobs 1995, 143). Larkin was dropped, but Jones and Leonard Bardwell survived as models. This leads to an alternative explanation for Dixon’s relative calm at finding Caton has stolen his work. It is a reflection not only of his lack of interest in academia but of Amis’s own inability to condemn the practice of borrowing others’ identities and experiences to further one’s professional career.21
L.S. Caton also indicates to the reader that Amis’s fiction will contain many insoluble puzzles and few essential truths. Postmodern criticism has drawn attention both to aporia and textual lacunas; the latter are defined as “visible hollow[s] or absence[s] relative to a surrounding level of meaning” (Harland 1999, 241). Caton is more absent than present in Lucky Jim and in subsequent novels he only communicates with the protagonists through indirect messages. In the terms delineated by E.M. Forster, Caton is neither flat nor round,22 symbolic of nothing beyond the fact that, as J. Hillis Miller has observed, in literature “a true secret, if there is such a thing, cannot ever, by any means, be revealed” (1995, 309). The reader never discovers whether L.S. Caton goes to Argentina of his own volition or whether he is fleeing something. Nor can the degree to which Caton has plagiarized Dixon’s shipbuilding essay be ascertained. Although Dixon has “never learnt any Italian” (229), the narrator declares on his behalf, “after a minute or two,” that Caton’s “article was either a close paraphrase or a translation of Dixon’s original article” (229). If Dixon is as shoddy a detective as he is an academic then his conclusions are suspect. In Amis’s third novel, I Like It Here, he would introduce another poor detective who arrives at a questionable albeit convenient conclusion. Amis’s purpose in both cases is not to undermine the authority of his heroes, but to demonstrate the human capacity for rationalization. One can never know the truth about either Caton or the article because “A true secret is all on the surface,” and “A literary text (and any text may be taken as literary) says what it says. It cannot be forced to say more than it says” (Miller 1995, 309).
Leaving reader expectations unfulfilled through indeterminate endings becomes a trademark of Amis’s style. Although he did this rather clumsily in The Legacy, the next chapters will show that indeterminacy in Take a Girl Like You and I Want It Now is both provocative and effective. In Jake’s Thing and The Biographer’s Moustache, Amis will tease readers by describing an inaudible speech, thereby creating a visual effect not unlike the Alfred Hitchcock technique of showing people speaking without sound. Amis teases to underline the fact that we cannot know everything, in denial of the modernist preference for symbols and patterns that point to greater truths. This is precisely the reason that positive artistic models, with the exception of the collaborative novel The Egyptologists, never appear in Amis’s novels. Not coincidentally, the death of L.S. Caton would precipitate a significant artistic change in Amis’s fiction. While Caton symbolizes the shamming academic who deliberately avoids human contact, preferring to maintain distance as he uses others and requests favours, Amis would begin to entangle his protagonists in the lives of the antimodels. He claimed that in killing off the character he was proving himself to be a serious writer,23 but as a vehicle for the exploration of artistic issues, his cameos served little purpose. At this early stage in Amis’s career, however, the introduction of L.S. Caton in Lucky Jim is tantamount to the profession of Amis’s artistic manifesto: ethics are not a serious concern when judging the legitimacy of an artist; there are no truths but anti-truths that help us to move closer to understanding art.