In One Fat Englishman (1963) Amis was perhaps less interested in presenting a consistent moral world than he was in examining the ways in which people from different social classes and countries use the English language. During his tenure as creative writing lecturer at Princeton in 1958–59 he delivered a series of lectures on science fiction, later organized into New Maps of Hell (1960), a book that offers insight into the author’s state of mind at the time of composition. Amis explains that he prefers science fiction to fantasy because the former “maintains a respect for fact or presumptive fact” while the latter “makes a point of flouting these” (17). Roger Micheldene, the malevolent protagonist of One Fat Englishman, is horrid but not fantastic. He is an experiment designed to show what becomes of a man who makes no attempt to curb his impulses and appetites and, in his flouting of conventional morality, recalls the discussion of Zola and Flaubert earlier in this book. Amis was drawn to science fiction in part because he felt it allowed the reader “to doff that mental and moral best behaviour with which we feel we have to treat George Eliot and James and Faulkner, and frolic like badly brought-up children among the mobile jellyfishes and unstable atomic piles” (1960, 115). The perceived amorality of One Fat Englishman1 has perhaps distracted attention from the novel’s ongoing discussion of Englishness, through which Amis expresses his views on both communication and social competition. He does this primarily through the introduction of numerous artistic antimodels in the form of publishers, writers, and academics, and by invoking Charles Algernon Swinburne referentially in the same way as William Empson and Graham Greene were invoked in previous novels. Amis was sufficiently intrigued by Swinburne to devote a chapter of his BLitt thesis to him, and the source of this intrigue becomes clear in One Fat Englishman. Perhaps unknowingly, Amis was beginning to resemble Swinburne by stirring up controversy to attract attention and increase book sales.
The greatest barrier to appreciating One Fat Englishman has been the hero, Roger Micheldene, an upper-class British publisher who offers a skewed perspective that is both disturbing and amusing. He has come to America for three ostensible purposes: to recover his brother-in-law’s manuscript from the publisher Strode Atkins; to examine the manuscript of a young American writer, Irving Macher, and assess its value for his publishing house; and to attempt the renewal of a one-sided romance with the beautiful but married Helene Bang. Superficially, he fails to achieve his goals because of fatal personality flaws – primarily sloth, wrath, and lust – and this failure has contributed to critical confusion over Amis’s own intentions. Micheldene is too lazy to approach Atkins about the manuscript, immediately makes an enemy of Macher, and obesity combines with existential wrath to disqualify him as an appropriate romantic partner for Helene Bang. But an overlooked factor in Micheldene’s downfall is his Englishness, a discussion of which launches the novel. The hero debates the nationality of Danish-American Helene Bang with Joe Derlanger, and when Derlanger asks whether the issue is of any importance, Micheldene replies: “Don’t you think that sort of thing always matters terribly?” (7). Even though Helene has lived in America for many years and speaks English fluently, Micheldene ignores her communicative ability and prioritizes birth and rank since he is a member of the English privileged class. He clings to stereotypes and prejudices that confirm his own cultural superiority; thus, when Derlanger expresses doubts about the accuracy of information about America provided by popular media, Micheldene insists that “it’s an introduction, anyway” (8), suggesting that there is no need to uncover deeper truths. As an introduction to Roger Micheldene, this discussion serves as a warning about the reliability of his linguistic and cultural broadsides. The title reminds us that he is only one Englishman, not a national representative, and we ought to be suspicious of his interpretation of events. Richard Bradford has noted the unsettling effect of the narrator’s confirmation of Micheldene’s “view of himself and the rest of the world as united in the pursuit of lust, greed, and self-promotion” (1998, 19) and although there is no discernible distance between the protagonist and Amis’s third-person narrator,2 this does not mean that Micheldene’s opinions and actions have authorial endorsement. Numerous critics have suspected as much, and Amis’s own admission that he liked aspects of Micheldene’s personality has contributed to this misreading.3 It is Micheldene’s account that needs to be viewed with skepticism, not authorial intentions.
Amis’s first four novels, with the exception of Take a Girl Like You, featured artistic antimodels through whom he voiced irritations and prejudices, and also provided comic relief. In One Fat Englishman several characters connected with art, academia, and publishing serve as antimodels and they show in a variety of ways how bad artists fail to satisfy the needs of their audience. Irving Macher represents a type of writer, perhaps more common in America than in England in the 1950s, such as Henry Miller or Philip Roth, who deliberately shocked the delicate sensibilities of some readers while titillating those of others through provocative or controversial sexual material. Though still an undergraduate, Macher has written a clever, malicious social satire of the blind called Blinkie Heaven. Amis did not look favourably on Jewish-American novelists4 and this bias probably emerges in Macher’s negative depiction. His comedic use of the blind, offensively referred to as “blinkies,” points to Macher’s own metaphoric blindness, since he persecutes others even though he belongs to a historically persecuted group. He baits the reader into confirming the truth of racial slurs, as the following admission suggests: “My parents have money and I like and admire them for it. It used to bother me a little, knowing so much of it was around and hearing about it all the time, but not any more. Money’s good” (19–20). Thus, Macher challenges the reader to accept the fact that some Jews actually do like money.5 His intention of forcing Micheldene to behave in a natural, unscripted manner would be acceptable if he had not written a novel intended as “pure offensiveness” (32). In other words, he fails to live up to his own standard of behaving in an unpremeditated manner because both his actions and art are carefully calculated to achieve an effect. A further reason to suspect that Amis would not have approved of Macher as an artist is that he had strongly rejected the telling of others’ stories in his previous two novels. Not every fiction writer is compelled to use life experience, but Amis makes us question the personal relevance of a satire of the blind by a wealthy Jewish American.
The second important antimodel in the novel is Mollie Atkins, who manages a crafts shop. Amis did not have a high opinion of folk art, and his objections are voiced through the description of her character and shop. In his BLitt thesis, Amis argued that the law of supply and demand dictates that some artists will make money while poor sales will force others to alter their product or find another profession. For this reason he found R.A. Caton’s proposal that he purchase copies of his own book so disturbing, and even imagined himself refusing the proposal in The Legacy: he wanted to be a genuine artist, not a (self) subsidized one. However, in reality sponsors allow some artists to continue producing bad art. Mollie hates her husband, the Anglophile Strode Atkins, but stays with him because “I need to use money and I have no money and I have no trade or skill” (77). Not surprisingly, her shop is a commercial failure and the following description of its interior recalls Jim Dixon’s diatribe against Merrie England. Micheldene peers
in [the shop] past racks of hairy neckties and asymmetrical stands of shoes and sandals too ugly not to be hand-made. Glass and pottery rejects of various sizes and uncertain function stood on triangular shelves. Here and there on the rush mats that covered parts of the floor were groups of wrought-iron vessels in which the very industrious or the very apathetic might one day boil water or even make a soup. (68)
Art that is neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing serves no purpose for Amis, and the simple claim to being handmade should not be an invitation to overlook flaws in content or composition.
The novel also features three academic antimodels, each of whom fails to apply the lessons of higher education to personal communication. In its simplest terms, this means that they have never learned how to communicate properly. Ernst Bang, a North Germanic philologist and the husband of Helene, is a convincing speaker with negligible listening skills who talks over (rather than to) his conversation partners. Joe Derlanger is an English professor who is unable to verbally express his frustrations, so he resorts to destroying physical objects. And Strode Atkins has dedicated his life to analyzing aspects of English culture and language about which no one else cares. Each of these academics shows that art becomes meaningless when the needs of the audience are ignored, thereby confirming the central point of Amis’s BLitt thesis: the importance of effective and appropriate communication.
Amis’s feelings towards Swinburne’s work and character are complicated, and the references to him in One Fat Englishman suggest that while he was intrigued by the poet’s capacity for creating controversy, he was also perhaps still oblivious to the Swinburnian tendencies in his own character. In his BLitt thesis Amis seems both attracted to Swinburne’s repeated violations of Victorian propriety and repelled by his theatrical self-promotion. “Reputed immorality,” Amis wrote, “was not [in the nineteenth century] the almost unqualified benefit to sales that it is today” (1950, 93), and over ten years later he would take advantage of the public’s increasing hunger for sexual scandal by writing about an immoral Englishman who tries to sell Swinburne’s lascivious notebooks. Parallels between the writing careers of Amis and Swinburne also help to explain the latter’s presence in One Fat Englishman. While Lucky Jim had instantly secured a large, young readership for Amis – not unlike Swinburne’s “steady recruitment of young readers” from among university freshmen noted in the thesis (108) – an overabundance of sexual content, effectively limited Swinburne’s appeal to the outer audience. In spite of the inclusion of questionable moral content Swinburne maintained a “large and constantly renewed intermediate audience” (93) which Amis called “sectarian appeal” (70), a trend that resulted in “a continuous variation between enthusiasm and hostility in ... successive critical receptions” (110). Amis too had become sectarian, disqualified from winning the consistent approval of a wider audience by his tendency to provoke and disturb. Amis had also been critical of Swinburne’s exhibitionism, noting in the thesis that those who attended private poetry readings were treated “as listeners to a performance, not consultants for comment and advice” (77). He deemed this “showing off” because “it was not the courting of praise which motivated [Swinburne], simply a desire to hold the floor” (101). Ironically, some accounts of Amis’s behaviour at readings suggest that he too was capable of exhibitionism and this has led to skepticism over Paul Fussell’s rather generous interpretation of him as an “anti-egotist” (1994). William Pritchard recalled Amis reacting to his introduction at a symposium by swinging “his clasped hands above him like a heavyweight acknowledging the crowd” (1995, 138) and Janice Rossen compared him to a fighter who “perceives, imagines, or creates enemies everywhere and thinks instinctively in terms of competition” (1998, 9). A further point of comparison between Amis and Swinburne is found in the composition of One Fat Englishman. Amis read the novel in draft to Elizabeth Jane Howard, solicited advice, and incorporated a scene she wrote in which Mollie Atkins makes love with Micheldene (Leader 2006, 518). Though Swinburne tended to send his poetry to the printer without having it proofread, he too accepted the criticisms of an influential female reader, Lady Trevelyan (Amis 1950, 95).6
The most important connection between the two writers, however, lies in the use of salacious material for financial profit. Joe Derlanger first tells Micheldene that Strode Atkins has come into the possession of Swinburne’s notebooks “Not very legally,” and that three people in England have claimed them as the property of different libraries: “Strode’s supposed to be waiting for them to cool off so that he can push them to some fellow who likes that type of stuff. You know, whipping and the rest of it” (47). Later Micheldene gains entry to Atkins’s office, discovers the notebooks,7 and, after reading that Watts received three lashes and Swinburne fifty, “was certain that while the contents of the notebook might not be the best of Swinburne, or the most creditable of Swinburne, or even the most rewardingly discreditable of Swinburne, they were Swinburne. As such they demanded to be removed from American hands. Their other demands could be gone into in due course” (160).
Micheldene’s motivation is of course not the recovery of British intellectual property but personal profit and, over twenty years later, Amis followed his protagonist’s example by selling his own manuscripts and personal papers to an American library.8 A probable source for these fictional Swinburne notebooks is the publishing history of Lesbia Brandon, a novel written between 1875 and 1877, which was suppressed until 1952 (Henderson 1974, 95).9 Amis was certainly aware of Lesbia Brandon, citing it in his thesis as evidence of an “immaturity of mind” which does not feel the need to communicate. “Nothing, indeed,” remarks Amis, “dates more quickly or mortally” (1950, 103). Aside from Swinburne’s failure to communicate with his audience, his invocation in One Fat Englishman has relevance to Amis’s development as a writer because it marks the first literary expression of his interest in homosexuality. He was intrigued by deviant sexual behaviour and, in a 1974 review of a Swinburne biography, expressed doubts about “serious omissions involv[ing] Swinburne’s sexual life. Were those birchings ever more than a token or a game? Was he on homosexual terms with Richard Burton or was he not? Above all, what were his precise relations with his sadistic cousin, Mary Gordon, and how and why were they broken off?” (1991, The Amis Collection, 193).
As proof of Swinburne’s homosexuality, Jean Overton Fuller has pointed to his correspondence with the painter Simeon Solomon, who expressed mock-horror at Swinburne’s epistolary description of “whipped and quivering posteriors,” and jokingly claimed to have been innocent until they met. Fuller concludes: “the conviction was borne in on me that their sexual perversion, and that of their friends, was related to the floggings they had received at school, and that they were not therefore wholly responsible for their peculiarity” (1968, 178).
Swinburne’s presence in One Fat Englishman, then, serves as a reminder of Amis’s twin obsessions with provoking the audience and representing alternative points of view. He would not introduce his first homosexual character until Captain Max Hunter in The Anti-Death League, his seventh novel, though he had considered using one in That Uncertain Feeling. In that novel’s notes, Amis described a “homosexual hotel manager who reveals self in conversation though not to [Lewis]. A sidelong glance indicating he likes [Lewis]. No more” (HRC). This idea was abandoned, as was the original Difficulties with Girls, an ambitious novel attempted in the 1980s with a homosexual narrator.10 The inclusion of Swinburne in Amis’s fifth novel may have been prompted by his acquaintance with Colin Howard, a homosexual who was Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brother. In 2007, when Amis was posthumously accused by Terry Eagleton of being a misogynist and homophobe, Colin Howard wrote to his defence: “For someone to glibly call Kingsley homophobic and racist incensed me. It is just lazy nonsense” (in Cockcroft 2007).11 Both gay and lesbian characters would appear in many of Amis’s late novels, and they are often more sympathetically portrayed than their heterosexual counterparts.
While Amis invokes Swinburne to ponder his own position on moral issues and the author’s relationship with the audience, textual allusions to Evelyn Waugh in One Fat Englishman more directly concern tone and content. Though they never met, Waugh privately sneered at Amis. He considered the Angry Young Men to be boorish representatives of the clamouring lower-middle class, as this 15 July 1955 letter to Christopher Sykes indicates: “I have a theory about the modern Teddy-boy school of novelist & critic – [John] Wain, [Kingsley] Ames, [sic] etc. It is that they all read English Literature for schools and so take against it, while good critics & writers read as a treat and a relaxation from Latin & Greek” (Waugh 1980, 445).
Less than a year later, in an 11 January 1956 letter to Nancy Mitford, he had amended the spelling of Amis’s name but not his opinion of its owner: “glad you have not heard of Mr. Kingsley Amis. Not a worthy man” (1980, 457). With this fundamental antipathy in mind, it would seem difficult to dispute Douglas Lane Patey’s contention that when Waugh listed jazz as one of his four irritations in the autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold he was satirizing Amis and Larkin (1998, 321). However, the sentence preceding this catalogue creates a significant connection between Amis and Waugh. Pinfold’s “strongest tastes were negative,” writes Waugh (1957, 11), and as the portrait of Roger Micheldene once again proves, so were Amis’s. The overwhelming atmosphere of negativity in the novel has troubled critics who had reservations about comic novels that were not much fun. David Lodge, for example, admitted to not having known what to make of One Fat Englishman in 1963 because he had not enjoyed it, “and enjoyment was very much at the heart of my interest in Amis’s earlier fiction” (2002, 37). Amis was not only venting spleen, as he had done in his satiric epistolary exchanges with Larkin, but writing a deliberately Waughian satire. While there have been dubious suggestions that Amis borrowed from Waugh in writing the ending to One Fat Englishman,12 the most obvious debt to him is in Micheldene’s mantra – “Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in” (35) – which inverts a line from Officers and Gentlemen: “Enclosing every thin man there’s a fat man demanding elbow room” (1955, 145). Amis reviewed this novel and was critical of the lack of bite in Waugh’s comedy at a time when his own satire was becoming harsher with each novel.
Roger Micheldene’s vision is essentially a parody of Waugh at his vitriolic worst, and the tone of the novel is aptly summarized in a description in A Handful of Dust of the behaviour of domesticated foxes. They “lived in pairs,” writes Waugh, and “some were moderately tame but it was unwise to rely upon them” because of their tendency to bite (1934, 308). In the aforementioned review, Amis describes the typical Waughian hero in a way that foreshadows the snuff-taking, lapsed Catholic Micheldene: “At odds with the modern world, longing for the certainties of a past age which are preserved chiefly in the public school, bitterly romantic or ... neo-Jacobite” (1955, 373). An additional component in Micheldene’s character is the relentless pursuit of sensual pleasure, which Amis depicts sympathetically, if not positively. This too is hinted at in his evaluation of Guy Crouchback as “really a terrible fellow” due to a lack of “the unpleasant vigour” of characters such as Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited and Tony Last (1955, 373). Vigour, incidentally, was a characteristic that Amis himself was renowned for possessing.13
A fundamental difference between Waugh and Amis becomes apparent when one compares Roger Micheldene with the heroes in Waugh’s novels. While Micheldene’s aggression draws him into society in search of sparring partners, the misanthropy of Waugh’s snobbish heroes makes them seek out solitude. The solitary life becomes the only viable means of coping, for, as explained in Put Out More Flags, “one man alone could go freely anywhere on the earth’s surface; multiply him, put him in a drove and by each addition of his fellows you subtract something that is of value, make him so much less a man.” Waugh rationalized this as a by-product of “the crazy mathematics of war” (1942, 220) but it stems from the fundamentally snobbish belief that he and his heroes are better than everyone else. Thus, while Amis and Waugh were united by the tendency to express their preferences negatively, which included highlighting human folly, Amis did not lament the waning influence of the English aristocracy. As an ambitious member of the lower-middle class, he saw this development as cause for celebration. In Decline and Fall, the imprisoned protagonist expresses the “growing conviction that there was something radically inapplicable about this whole code of readymade honour” (1928, 163). Though the code no longer applies, characters such as Guy Crouchback cling to it. Before eviction from his rooms, he is warned against trusting in the goodness of others: “You treat everyone as if he were a gentleman. That officer was definitely not” (1955, 25). Amis was dismayed by Waugh’s portrayal of Crouchback, and said that he was unable to see him “as a man trying in vain to find a place for himself in a great battle of our time” because he refuses to work. “What about all those jobs in the ranks of, say, Signals or the RASC? Unthinkable, naturally,” writes Amis, referring to his own military service in Signals (1961, 421). Thus, he composed One Fat Englishman with one eye on Waugh, depicting a snob who refuses to engage with his peers and is put on metaphoric trial in America to answer the charge of enjoying undeserved privilege.
When one considers the textual significance of Englishness, the novel may be seen as an extended trial of Roger Micheldene’s character according to his ability to manipulate the English language correctly and appropriately. In a letter of 6 December 1962, Amis reported that he was “going to comb Daniel Defoe’s ‘True-born Englishman’ for a possible quote” to use as the title for what would become One Fat Englishman (2001, 610–1). He seems not to have found anything appropriate, though the reason he had settled on Defoe becomes clear in the poem’s text. True-born Englishmen do not exist, Defoe claims:
For Englishmen to boast of Generation,
Cancels their Knowledge, and lampoons the Nation.
A True-Born Englishman’s a Contradiction,
In Speech an irony, in Fact a Fiction. (ll. 370–3)
Defoe rebukes the English for associating vices with rival nations: “Rage rules the Portuguese; and Fraud the Scotch: Revenge the Pole; and Avarice the Dutch” (ll. 143–4). Although the English are descended from marauders and invaders – “From the most Scoundrel Race that ever liv’d” (l. 236) – they have forgotten their humble origins and, after describing the English breed, Defoe satirizes the English temperament, claiming that “Manners make the Man” (l. 430). He then insists that people be judged by their actions and not their lineage:
What is’t to us, what Ancestors we had?
If Good, what better? Or what worse, if Bad?
Examples are for Imitation set,
Yet all men follow Virtue with Regret. (ll. 1205–8)
If, as Defoe claims, “’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great” (l. 1216), then Roger Micheldene is the antithesis of greatness, devoid of virtues and an expert in vice: “Of the seven deadly sins,” says Amis’s narrator, “Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger” (10).
However, Amis’s concept of Englishness differs from Defoe’s in its concentration on language. In The King’s English, the guide to English usage containing many of Amis’s personal irritations and obsessions, one particular entry, “berks and wankers,” emphasizes the importance of discriminating language use. He labels and passes judgement on “two types of person whose linguistic habits [most people] deplore if not abhor.” First, the berks are described as “careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin” (23). Wankers, on the other hand, “are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin” (23).
It would appear that the fate of the English language can only be entrusted to people like Amis himself: discriminating Everymen who “try to pursue a course between the slipshod and the punctilious,” which is “healthy for them and the language” (23).14
Among the many defenders and interpreters of Englishness, Amis is remarkable for his emphasis on appropriate language use. He might, for example, have agreed with the basic political argument for Englishness advanced by George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English: “The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden” (1941, 96).15 Amis too thought that the autonomy of the public schools ought to be abolished and educational institutions should be filled with “State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability” (79). But he has more in common with the hedonists Orwell criticizes than the socialist revolutionaries destined to bring “the real England to the surface” (96). “During the past twenty years,” Orwell laments, “the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm” (88).
This is always the concern of Amis’s early heroes, who divide their time between sniggering and trying to get more than their fair share. Amis’s advocacy of a code of individualism has been labelled a “meritocracy” (Head 2002, 52; Bradbury 1993, 320), the “real motor” of which “is not, after all, a desire to level the playing field but a desire to prove one’s superior worth” (English 1994, 136). Randall Stevenson too has pointed out that there is little political idealism in early Amis, for at the end of most novels the meritocratic hero “turns out [not] to have been interested in changing society, but only his own place in it” (2004, 402). Thus, when Orwell concludes his treatise on the future of his country by stating, “I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward” (96), Amis might have added the qualification that he believed in the individual Englishman’s right to go forward, should he prove himself linguistically capable.
The other key component in Amis’s version of Englishness is competition. Language is used not only to measure one’s social worth but as a weapon to do battle with berks, wankers, and other foes. Russell Fraser, who met Amis at Vanderbilt University in the late 1950s, recalled that “America’s slovenly way with words got his goat. Often touchy, never ‘aggravated,’ he would show you the door if you advertised ‘disinterest’ when all you were was bored. His insistence on getting things straight verged on pedantry, setting his rational side against the provincial one” (1996, 4). Amis could become combative over minor language points, as evidenced by a 1975 discussion of Ian M. Ball’s study of varieties of English. Amis attacked Ball for oversimplifying the distinctions between British-English and American-English and failing to explain the role of other national variations. He noted some of Ball’s minor, yet egregious, textual errors, claiming that one does not carry a biro in England but has one on one’s person, and a “blower” is not, strictly speaking, a telephone, except in the phrase “on the blower.” In conclusion, he accuses Ball of quibbling for contrasting the American phrase “I’d better leave now” with the English “I’d best leave now.” Amis calls this “Nonsense; and even if it weren’t, what of it?” (41). He does not evaluate Ball any more than, in his BLitt thesis, he evaluates Victorian poets. In both cases, he engages in fault-finding and explains his own preferences through negative example. All his life Amis thrived on competition and two months before his own death admitted to feeling sad at the passing of friends because “When someone dies you can no longer have it out with them” (1995, “Curmudgeons,” 3).
With such a strong emphasis on language and Englishness in One Fat Englishman it is not difficult to see the novel as an extended linguistic and communicative trial of Roger Micheldene. While the protagonist attempts to take advantage of his inherited social position, Amis challenges the validity of privilege. Jim Dixon’s Merrie England speech and John Lewis’s job interview are also linguistic tests of the worthiness of the heroes to rise in society. The authorial message in the first two novels is the same as that of One Fat Englishman: the ability to manipulate language in competition determines the company one keeps. Those who fail to live up to the Amisian linguistic code will find themselves surrounded by berks and wankers. As noted earlier, Amis admitted to liking Roger Micheldene and his reasons for doing so were doubtless connected to wit and intellect. Eric Jacobs described Micheldene as “odious” (1995, 229) and Amis agreed that he was “awful” but asked the reader to give him serious consideration “without condoning anything that he does” because he did not consider him beyond redemption (1973, 276). Since he is good at manipulating language and naturally competitive, he still has hope, and in the novel Amis offers him three chances to prove himself through linguistic games. The first is a variation on charades called simply “The Game,” in which one player leaves the room while the others choose an adverb, such as “lecherously” or “disinterestedly.” When the player returns, he or she instructs the others to “Go polish that mirror or light a cigarette or wind your watch in the way indicated” (37), and the process is repeated until the word is correctly guessed. Micheldene’s word is “Britishly,” and his final instruction to Helene Bang is to “Make love to that standard lamp like it” (40). When she gives the lamp shade a “single peck,” the others laugh and Micheldene surrenders. Upon hearing the answer, he becomes offended and quits. His host, Joe Derlanger, protests: “This is supposed to be a game, for Christ’s sake. What are you trying to prove?” (41). His word choice is significant, for it is Amis who is proving the hero’s unworthiness of enjoying privilege.
The second test is also a game – Scrabble – and it ends, like the first, in a breach of rules. Micheldene’s opponent is the Bangs’ ten-year old son Arthur who, by pure luck, draws better letters and builds a substantial lead. Helene describes the game as an “ordeal” for the Englishman, suggesting that it is more trial than leisurely pastime. His attempt to “resign” is met by his opponent’s insistence that he must “play right through.” The end comes when Micheldene challenges the validity of “niter,” which Arthur intends as the spelling of “one-nighter.” Luckily for Arthur, the word is listed in the American-English dictionary as “potassium nitrate.” Micheldene insists that the word is spelled “nitre” in British-English and that it should not be accepted because Arthur had intended a different, invalid word. The challenge is not recognized and Micheldene responds by overturning the board with his knee (60–1), then refusing to continue.
The third trial is initiated by Irving Macher, the merits of whose novel Micheldene has come to America to test. Macher deliberately antagonizes him throughout by luring away his weekend date, Helene Bang, and having his accomplice Suzanne Klein seduce him then bite his chest. One of the pranks played on Micheldene by Macher becomes the third trial, the outcome of which serves as definitive proof that he is unworthy of rising to the top of Amis’s meritocratic world. This trial is initiated by the theft of Micheldene’s lecture notes, replaced by Macher with a comic book. When the hero finds his notes missing, he cancels the lecture. The English department head, Maynard Parrish, tries to convince him to change his mind, praising him as “one of the most articulate and verbally resourceful” people he has met: “Surely it cannot be beyond the powers of one such as you to improvise” (89).16 Although Micheldene is articulate and resourceful, he is burdened by wankerish pride and the false belief that membership in the privileged classes excuses him from competing. Amis tries him on the basis of his abilities, rather than his background, and the verdict is delivered through Irving Macher: “It isn’t your nationality we don’t like, it’s you” (168). The difference between Amis’s form of Englishness and the models advanced by Defoe and Orwell is that one need not be a virtuous member of the political left to survive in the Amisian world. One’s actions – selfless or otherwise – are not especially important, provided one is articulate and willing to endure.
Micheldene is, therefore, proven to be a wanker by inappropriate use of language and repeated communicative failures. When he is licensed to use his linguistic skills in battle he refuses to compete while on other non-competitive occasions he gives offence or creates ill-will by attempting to gain an advantage on perceived enemies. The reader is made aware of Micheldene’s communicative difficulties through the use of legalese. At a party in Greenwich Village, he is rebuffed by a woman who “had pleaded lesbianism” (66); he interprets a receptionist’s cool demeanour as proof of American sexual insecurity: “They thought that because you spoke like an Englishman, you must be homosexual, which only testified to their deep doubts of their own masculinity. It was true that this girl was a girl, not a man, but the principle held” (69); and when Helene Bang refuses his advances, he “judg[es] her excuses beneath his attention” (56). The use of “plead,” “testify,” and “judge” in conjunction with sexual rebuffs suggests both that a romantic encounter with one as obese as Micheldene would be a trial for his partner and that he bullies women into going to bed with him because he lacks charm. Many of his communicative and linguistic failures are due to his unnecessary antagonizing of others. Conversations turn into competitions in which he attempts to score points (56). This becomes an odd defensive strategy; thus, in an argument with Macher, he thinks that he has “scored” a point (86), while an embarrassing exchange with Mollie Atkins “put[s] him a couple of points down conversationally” (76).
In Micheldene’s defence, he is not the only character suffering from communicative problems. Most of the people in the novel have trouble expressing their feelings or do so inappropriately. The Bangs talk over each other (15, 16, 93); Joe Derlanger destroys inanimate objects, including his own car, out of inexpressible frustration (134); and Strode Atkins, the innocuous but irritatingly verbose Anglophile, subscribes to a policy that the competitive Amis could never abide: “I make a rule that if I’m involved in any ... unpleasantness then I apologise afterwards. It’s nearly always been my fault anyway and if it wasn’t, what the hell? Better somebody apologises than nobody” (132). The linguist Ernst Bang says that “Language is before anything else the great social instrument” (147), thereby expressing the novel’s central communicative irony. One wonders, though, if Bang’s own inability to manipulate this instrument has led his highly attractive wife to sleep with disagreeable men like Micheldene and Macher.
The introduction of Amis’s first wanker-as-hero also invites a revisiting of his first two novels to measure the protagonists against the code of Englishness. Both Jim Dixon and John Lewis pass their linguistic tests, and their prize is the opportunity at a better job or girlfriend. Roger Micheldene, on the other hand, fails to accomplish his professional and romantic goals in America, but he escapes material punishment. Though his rejection by Helene Bang is a chastening of sorts, which reduces him to tears aboard ship, he recovers almost immediately and manages to work himself into a “Rage at the non-arrival of his whisky” (171). His disappointment at failing to retrieve his brother-in-law’s manuscript and to procure Macher’s novel for his publishing house is similarly mitigated by the appropriation of the lucrative Swinburne notebooks (171). Micheldene’s true punishment, then, like Dixon’s and Lewis’s rewards, is linguistic. On ship he is met for the second time by the Purser, “an outstandingly horrible man,” and this reunion leads to the ominous reflection that “it was good to be among one’s own people again” (170). Next Strode Atkins enters Micheldene’s cabin and he too, like the Purser and Micheldene, is obsessed with status. Atkins’ inability to discriminate between the trivial and the significant irritates Micheldene in the same way that Ian M. Ball would irritate Amis in 1975. Matters of pronunciation and ancestry intrigue Atkins: “I love English people and English things so much it almost disgusts me. Disgusts a lot of other guys too, I can tell you. But I seem to keep right on doing it for some reason or other” (26).17 He offers tedious monologues on language, and claims that his own ancestry can be traced back to the British historical figure Thomas Atkins (26) and a valley in West Virginia “in which pure eighteenth-century English is spoken” (27). Micheldene is bored by Atkins in part because he refuses to believe that any American could be his social equal. One of the characteristics of wankers, as defined by Amis, is their claim to belong to a higher social class than they actually do. Micheldene even makes a class distinction between himself and his own father, who attained upper-class status through the fortune he amassed “flogging ... bloody awful crockery and glassware.” Possessing wealth without cultural polish, he became indolent, believing that “Doing anything was what the lower classes did. So was caring about anything” (124). The son justifies his own snobbery as a reaction against his father, which has led him to appreciate the arts, fine wine and cuisine, and snuff. Thus, the companionship of the loquacious Atkins, who prizes lineage, serves as a reminder to Micheldene of his own humble roots. The linguistic nature of his punishment is further emphasized by the fact that Atkins’ appearance on ship renders him temporarily “beyond speech. Nor was this required of him for some time” (171).
One Fat Englishman, therefore, shows the importance of Englishness in Amis’s fictional world. He drew on Waugh’s comic tradition to make predictions that Waugh himself must have dreaded. In particular, he foreshadows a critically competitive society in which communicative ability is prized over class privilege and insists that class should not exempt Roger Micheldene from being tested by his peers. Amis was clearly bothered by class and envious of privilege, but he also derived joy from creative language use and in One Fat Englishman shows how it can be empowering. While Micheldene recognizes the power of language and is capable of rising to the top of Amis’s linguistic meritocracy, he refuses to submit to the trials posed by his peers, and his misuse of language determines his fate. When Amis composed his fifth novel, he drew on disparate sources to make his own contribution to the ongoing debate on Englishness. Defoe and Waugh interested him because of their different conceptions of language and what it means to be English, while Swinburne’s shunning of conservative morality in a sense accords with the suspension of moral judgments that attracted Amis to science fiction. He returned to the discussion of the audience conducted in his BLitt thesis and drew upon both Defoe and Waugh to satirize what he perceived to be mistaken views of Englishness. Although Roger Micheldene seems to believe that he inhabits an alternative reality in which anything is permitted, he finds himself judged against a linguistic and communicative code – the code of Englishness.