1948 Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin forged their friendship as undergraduates at Oxford (their drunken nights are commemorated in Larkin’s poem, ‘Dockery and Son’) and confirmed the relationship with a lifelong, immensely comic (and often scatological) correspondence. On 2 March 1948, Amis wrote to his chum Larkin, now a junior librarian at the University College of Leicester, to say:
I will arrive in Lester [sic] at lunch time on Friday [5 March], precise details by card or wire to follow. Will u meet me at the station or what? Inform by card where. Hasta vista.
It was Amis’s first visit to Leicester. He himself was in Oxford, collecting a degree, but about to apply (successfully) for a junior lectureship at Swansea. Neither man (first-class degrees both of them, from a real university) had much regard for red-brick. Both were writing, ambitiously. Larkin had already done a couple of novels. Amis was thrashing around, looking for a subject. In the 2 March letter he thinks he may have got a lead from the ghost stories of M.R. James (much later this would emerge as his fantasy of alcoholic haunting, The Green Man, 1969).
Larkin picked up Amis at Leicester station and walked with him to his ‘digs’ in Dixon Drive, which he shared, glumly, with ‘a dough-faced physicist co-lodger’. The library opened on Saturday morning and required Larkin’s attendance. The two men walked to the university, located opposite the municipal cemetery (later immortalised in Larkin’s poem ‘Toads Revisited’). The buildings were a decommissioned Victorian lunatic asylum. Even by the standards of that municipal architecture it was not a distinguished edifice.
Larkin parked Amis in the Senior Common Room while he went off to work. As Amis recalled: ‘I looked around a couple of times and said to myself, “Christ, somebody ought to do something with this”.’
Something was done, after much confabulation with Larkin, with Amis’s first novel, the story of Lucky Jim Dixon and his trials at the converted lunatic asylum university.