Lucky Jim is a young man’s book, in fact the book of two young men. They weren’t exactly angry young men, but they were extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they had graduated from both Oxford and the Second World War to find themselves in an England that was in terminal decline. It was bankrupt. It was losing the overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in charge were snobs and incompetents. Worst of all, no one seemed to appreciate the young men’s genius: neither the women they met nor the publishers to whom they sent their works.
When Kingsley Amis began writing Lucky Jim in early 1951, he was twenty-eight years old and an assistant lecturer at a provincial university in Wales. He had written a novel that no one wanted to publish; a book of poems that had been published very badly; a monograph on Graham Greene, commissioned by a shadowy Argentinean outfit, which was never printed and for which Amis was never paid; and a postgraduate thesis, produced in the hope of improving his standing at his university, that had been flunked by his committee at Oxford. Over a year later, still working on Lucky Jim as he turned thirty, Amis wrote his closest friend an exasperated letter.
What am I doing here? Or anywhere, for that matter. If only someone would take me up, or even show a bit of interest. If only someone would publish some books of mine, I could write some. Still a lecturer at 45 CHRIST Senior Lecturer at Durham at 45 CHRIST . . . You know the sort of thing that’s going to happen to me? With my teeth even worse than they are (I have had gingivitis for some time) dressing in camel-hair waistcoat and bow-ties, I shall be laughing and talking loudly in the pubs at lunch-time, a one for the girls, imagining I am impressing the young men by my keen contemporaneity, passing myself off as a grand chap, referring to my successful friends. . . . All this of course will be taking place in one of the smaller and poorer provincial cities.
Amis was feeling pretty bad.
The recipient of this letter, Philip Larkin, wasn’t feeling so great himself. The same age as Amis, he was at this point the more accomplished man of letters, having already published a book of poems and two novels. He was also more secure professionally: Partly out of desperation, partly out of inclination, he had embarked on a career as a university librarian. But Larkin had trouble with women. He had trouble meeting them; he had trouble seducing them. He wasn’t even sure that he liked them. What made matters worse, at least from his friend Kingsley’s point of view, was that Larkin’s inability to meet women was superseded only by his inability, once having met them, to disentangle himself. He seemed to combine hidden hostility with an exaggerated scrupulosity. He lost his virginity at the age of twenty-three and proceeded to get engaged to the young woman who had taken it. His next major affair, begun in the late 1940s, was with Monica Jones, a lecturer in the English department at the University of Leicester, where Larkin was a librarian, and it would last, with some hiccups, for the rest of Larkin’s life.
Amis and Larkin had met as first years at Oxford in 1941 and quickly become good friends. They had some things in common: Both were from “respectable” but unremarkable middle-class backgrounds—Amis’s father was a middle manager for a mustard manufacturer, Larkin’s a successful civil servant—which distinguished them from their wealthier classmates. It was a point of pride with them to be unimpressed by Oxford. At their first encounter, according to Larkin, Amis did a terrific imitation of a man getting shot, then mimicked the sound of the gun that shot him. “For the first time,” Larkin later wrote, “I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own.” The two were drawn together by their affection for jazz and their alienation from college. Oxford was snobbish, cloistered, and made to feel all the more so by the war. Was there much point in studying Chaucer when German bombers could be heard at night on their way to targets in the industrial centers to the north? Amis and Larkin didn’t think so, and spent as much time drinking as studying; then, a year after arriving at Oxford, Amis was called up. Larkin, rejected for his poor eyesight, remained at a much-reduced Oxford to finish his degree.
Amis was assigned to the Royal Signal Corps, which would eventually take him to France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, though as a signalman he never saw any actual fighting. The army gave Amis an opportunity to see the world (“No signs of my having developed syphilis have appeared yet, and this is the twenty-third day, so I am feeling a bit more hopeful,” he reported to Larkin from Belgium early in 1945), and it left him with a lifelong hatred of authority. As his biographer, Zachary Leader, puts it, Amis finished the war as many other people in Britain did—with a sense that “the wrong people were in charge, had the money, had to be listened to and treated with respect.”
Larkin had less of a problem with authority—he always got on well with his library supervisors—but he and Amis shared a disdain for the literary hierarchy they were inheriting from the centuries. At Oxford, both young men spent a good portion of their time abusing the literature they were supposed to study. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Larkin wrote Amis about Old English poetry. “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.” Their professors had nothing to say, and could hardly be heard saying it. J.R.R. Tolkien, Amis complained, “spoke unclearly and slurred important words, and then he’d write them on the blackboard but keep standing between them and us, then wipe them off before he turned around.” The young men invented a game called “horsepissing,” in which they’d replace words from classic literary texts with obscenities—“I have gathered up six slender basketfuls OF HORSEPISS,” for example—which they’d write, among other places, in their own and each other’s copies of famous books. Larkin’s gloss on Keats’s “ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star / Into her dream he melted,” was “YOU MEAN HE FUCKED HER.” It was a game they never tired of or outgrew. Returning to Oxford after the war and specializing in medieval literature, Amis discovered a hatred for Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and The Canterbury Tales. His adviser, Amis wrote Larkin, “pronounced himself very pleased with my essay on the levels of Chaucer’s fart.” In further academic news: “I’ve discovered a way to my tutor’s heart. He likes all those shags like Pickarso . . . and Klee . . . so I say things like ‘blue period’ and ‘delicate colour sense’ instead of things like ‘Saga-like’ and ‘piling-on of images’; and instead of things like ‘Blue arseholes’ and ‘frothy whorls of menstrual fluid.’” In Lucky Jim, Mr. Michie emerges from the war with a deep respect for the curriculum. Amis was the opposite, though it can’t be said that he was unresponsive to what he read. Each new week of school brought him something new to hate.
Amis and Larkin graduated into a literary world still dominated by the modernism of Eliot and Pound, and haunted by the shadow of William Butler Yeats. Though Larkin went through a long apprenticeship to Yeats’s poetry, both men eventually came to think that the modernists had made English-language poetry vague, pretentious, and verbose. In Lucky Jim, Amis’s provincial hero, Jim Dixon, ponders the neighborhoods he might move to in London, their desirability massaging his tongue. “Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill Gate, Pimlico, Belgrave Square, Wapping, Chelsea. No, not Chelsea.” Chelsea represented the artsy crowd, the modernist crowd, the posh crowd that had taken English literature too far into the realm of abstraction, had turned it into an elite pursuit. Not that the rest of contemporary literature was any better. “Somebody once told me,” Amis reported to Larkin, “that Dorothy Parker, was good, at writing, short stories. The other day I bought a book of hers for a shilling, and I am sorry now.” On Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: “I may have missed the irony, but I cannot believe that a man can write as badly as that for fun.” And as for the most famous young poet of the immediate postwar years, the bardic Dylan Thomas, here is Amis in 1947:
I have got to the stage now with mr toss that I have only reached with Chaucer and Dryden, not even with Milton, that of VIOLENTLY WISHING that the man WERE IN FRONT OF ME so that I could be DEMONICALLY RUDE to him about his GONORRHEIC RUBBISH, and end up by WALKING ON HIS FACE and PUNCHING HIS PRIVY PARTS.
It wasn’t just a long literary seminar in reverse. Amis and Larkin complain about women as often as they complain about writers. “I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for Parliament,” Larkin, who was stooped, balding, and myopic, writes to Amis. “The only advance I ever made to a woman was productive of such scorching embarrassment that the wound is still rawly open.” Amis, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of hair, responded by regaling Larkin with tales of the multiple women he was juggling, both before and after he married Hilary Bardwell in 1946. Of an amorous and very frank correspondence with a woman he was trying to seduce, Amis reported that “It is nice to be able to write the words ‘I want to fuck you’ in a letter and send it off without qualm,” then asked: “What do you think of all this?” Larkin had never written such a letter. In turn he told Amis about compiling a list of “10 awful incidents from my life that I prayed to forget.” He asked: “Do you ever do things like that?” One can be reasonably certain that, no, Kingsley Amis did not compile depressing lists of awful things that had happened to him. Many years later, Larkin would memorialize the differences between him and Amis in a magnificent poem, “Letter to a Friend about Girls.” But during this period it must have been alternately fascinating and painful to hear about Amis’s many conquests, when Larkin had so few of his own.
The other thing that had brought them together was a hatred of the family—not just their own particular families, but families in general. Larkin’s family was worse than Amis’s, by any measure—Sylvia Plath would write a famous poem comparing her father to a Nazi, but Larkin’s father actually was a Nazi—he kept a bust of Hitler in his office until the start of the war. As for Amis, his main beef was with his in-laws. “Hilary is very nice, as you will agree,” he wrote to Larkin about his fiancée. “But her family, who put in sporadic, unneeded visits are nasty. She has two brothers, who are EXCREMENTALLY EVIL. One has sandals and saffron trousers, and No Socks, and a green shirt, and plays the recorder (yes) and likes Tudor music.” This family would appear in Lucky Jim, pretty much intact, as the Welches.
Later on, when asked about his contribution to Lucky Jim, Larkin would refer understatedly to “a period of intensive joke-swapping just after the war.” And there are certainly plenty of jokes in the correspondence. But it also served as a kind of test run, a way of egging each other on—just how nasty could one be, just how disrespectful, just how profane? Was it enough merely to hate stuff? The answer that began to emerge in the letters, which continued to amuse and comfort the two men as the years wore on, was that hatred and irritability could be an almost inexhaustible store of humor, liveliness, and insight. If you hated intensely enough, deliberately enough, with enough determination and discrimination, you just might end up with something new, unexpected, true to life.
But of course then as now the world was filled with young college graduates convinced of the sheer absolute idiocy of everyone, living or dead. The trick was to find a subject to focus all that rage on. In 1948, the struggling Amis visited Larkin at the University of Leicester. “I looked round a couple of times and said to myself, ‘Christ, somebody ought to do something with this,’” he later wrote. “Not that it was awful—well, only a bit; it was strange and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got on to from outside, like the SS in 1940, say.” Not long after this visit, Amis began work on Lucky Jim.
In Lucky Jim, Amis gives us all of Larkin’s problems, and adds some extra of his own. Jim Dixon is a junior professor at a university that is, pointedly, neither Oxford nor Cambridge; he has an idiot boss who is also a bore and a snob (“No other professor in Great Britain . . . set such store by being called Professor”); he has written an academic article that he detests and must produce a lecture that he will despise; he has been commissioned to go spend a miserable weekend at his boss’s house; and—a problem so horrible he almost dare not mention it—there is “Margaret,” his love interest.
The problems were real, in the sense that they were based in the experience of the author and his friend. But the reader has to wonder, why are they such a problem? Lecturing in a provincial city? Surely better than working in the coal mines of Manchester. Not being able to break up with Margaret? Better, perhaps, than no Margaret at all. Meanwhile Professor Welch, though a doddering old man, does not seem like a particularly malignant or abusive authority or much of an authority at all. And yet Jim wins our sympathy; his anger seems earned and his sufferings seem genuine. How is this possible—and why, when the book came out, did so many people embrace it and Jim? The novel went through four printings in its first three weeks in February 1954 and was greeted as a near-revolutionary literary event.
The answer is at least partly historical. “Junior professor” may sound like an okay job, but not in those years of postwar “austerity Britain,” as it’s come to be called. The country had not only suffered significant damage from German bombing during the war, it had also expended far more money on fighting it than it had in the bank, and it had also in the process begun to lose its empire. In 1948, the Marshall Plan, of which Britain was the largest beneficiary, began to ease austerity measures, but money, and space, were still tight. When modern American readers of Lucky Jim first encounter Jim’s hoarding of cigarettes—“he wasn’t allowed to smoke another cigarette until five o’clock”—they can be forgiven for thinking that Jim is trying to cut down on his smoking for reasons of health. It soon becomes clear, however, that Jim can’t afford to smoke more often. Jim also can’t afford to go on dates, and he certainly can’t afford to live in London while indulging a desire to write or paint, as Welch’s two sons can. Not only can he not afford a London apartment, he can’t even afford a place with a modicum of privacy. Jim’s room is constantly being barged in on by guests both welcome and (mostly) unwelcome. Even at the more spacious Welch home, where Jim is a guest, his bedroom has its entrance through a shared bathroom.
Poor Jim, and yet it’s hard not to feel that Jim’s biggest problem is himself. Jim is put-upon and abused and treated unfairly, true, but then it’s not as if he’s a saint. When Jim is not being outright lazy—in the academic realm, for example, it is his policy “to read as little as possible of any given book”—he is busy committing acts of minor vandalism. He draws on his fellow boarder Johns’s oboe magazine; he sneaks off, without apologizing, after accidentally striking a colleague with a kicked rock; he prank-calls the Welches for no particularly good reason after burning their blankets with a cigarette. He steals Professor Barclay’s taxi! For all his long protestations and lamentations about his lack of interest in Margaret, he definitely puts the moves on her at the Welches’. The only person he admits to admiring is the former army officer Atkinson, and the reason is not that Atkinson is kind and gentle but instead that he has an “air of detesting everything that presented itself to his senses, and of not meaning to let this detestation become staled by custom.” Jim, systematically neglecting his devoted student Mr. Michie, can seem pretty contemptible himself. Also, he is a drunk.
And yet we like him. We are on his side. Why? Perhaps the wealthy benefactor Gore-Urquhart gets it right when he says near the end that Jim may not have the qualifications, but he hasn’t the disqualifications. He isn’t Bertrand, for one thing; he isn’t a snob or a fake; he isn’t a suck-up. He is somewhat left wing (see his famous brief speech about the just distribution of buns), but above all he is staunchly, instinctively opposed to authority. And he has scruples. It takes a little while for these scruples of his to manifest themselves, but they’re there. They’re there in his treatment of those who are not doing as well as he; they’re even there in the way he wages his campaign against his arch-enemy Bertrand.
Goodness or scruples were never a focal point of the Amis–Larkin correspondence, but precision with language, a certain scrupulousness about language, certainly was. “Why can’t I stand people who say once again,” Amis wondered once to Larkin, “as if when other people said again they meant . . . ‘twice again’ or ‘three times again’ when what they mean is AGAIN.” Many writers have, of course, felt this way about language, but if for someone like Orwell the cliché was a way for governments to cover up atrocities, for Amis it was also an opportunity. Received ideas papered over reality; words hid the essence of things; and given due attention the awful essence of things could be very very funny. Take, for example, the famous description of Jim’s hangover:
He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
An elaborate literary metaphor is followed by intimations of, among other things, ancient archaeology and modern totalitarianism in the description of what is, after all, a historic hangover, beautifully setting off the banal everyday conclusion. Here, as elsewhere in the book, handling of the different registers is not only full of energy but pitch-perfect.
Jim’s fundamental scrupulousness, his inability to say what he does not mean (at least not without making a horrible face), allows him, little by little, to involve other people in his minor acts of sabotage, to forge alliances. Dignified Christine, grim Atkinson, even collegial Beesley and wealthy Gore-Urquhart (who doses Jim with the Scotch that will help make his “Merrie England” lecture such an unexpected event)—all are eventually mixed up in Jim’s various schemes and pranks. And this unlikely, unexpected social dimension of the book is what accounts for its humor and appeal. It’s the uncontrollable swelling laughter of the student audience that makes the description of the “Merrie England” lecture a comic masterpiece, growing ever funnier as Jim goes on and on. If this humor is directed against them, the snobs and the swells, at the same time it implies an us: the readers of Lucky Jim. Though Jim Dixon would have rejected the pose of the rebel as just another pose, reading this novel is like joining the Resistance, even if the entire activity of the Resistance is to make faces, get drunk, and participate in various forms of “horsepissing,” whether physical, verbal, or physiognomical. In that sense the book does reconstitute a kind of “merrie England”: A nation is a group of people who laugh at the same stuff.
So who is Lucky Jim, in the end? Amis began Lucky Jim as a book about Larkin. When he sent it to Larkin, Larkin’s advice was to make Jim more like Amis. It was Amis who raged at adult life, who chafed so visibly at authority, who had a vast repertoire of faces at his disposal. “How many Dixon faces do you think there ought to be?” Amis asks Larkin in October 1952, while going through his second draft. “I mean a lot, 10 or so, or just 3 or 4?” Larkin’s answer does not survive but it must have been “a lot”—an informal count yields nine faces—Jim’s “shot-in-the-back face,” his “tragic-mask face,” his “crazy-peasant face,” his “Martian-invader face,” his “Eskimo face,” his “Edith Sitwell face,” his “lemon-sucking face,” his “mandrill face,” and his “Evelyn Waugh face”—plus several planned and described faces, including the one for which he abandons his Evelyn Waugh face, “one more savage than any he normally used.” Jim Dixon in the end is an Amis-Larkin hybrid who manages to be sweeter and more engaging than either of the men on their own. In later years, young library staffers would find encouragement in their dealings with the otherwise forbidding Larkin in being told the rumor that he was the model for Lucky Jim. Whereas Amis’s wife Hilary could write an article about their early courtship called “How I Married Lucky Jim.” And this was also right. They were both Lucky Jim.
Amis dedicated the book to Larkin, but in the aftermath of its success, the two grew apart. Different explanations have been given for why. Amis was now famous and there were tremendous demands on his time—he was being commissioned to write reviews and asked to make numerous media appearances, and all the while still teaching. Larkin may have had his own reasons for keeping his distance. There were some transparent references in the book to his relationship with Monica Jones, and Jones, understandably, did not appreciate it. (“Kingsley wasn’t just making faces all the time,” she later said of Amis, “he was actively trying them on. He didn’t know who he was.”) Larkin may have had less noble reasons, too: Having published two novels of his own without anything like this kind of response, he may have found his friend’s sudden success a little hard to take. “It is miraculously and intensely funny,” he wrote to a friend about Lucky Jim, “with a kind of spontaneity that doesn’t tire the reader at all. Apart from being funny, I think it is somewhat over-simple.”
Another reason, besides the ordinary ones, may also be guessed at. They had been brought together by their mutual hatred of the universe, which for a while did a fine job of confirming their feelings about it by rejecting and ignoring them. As they began to find their way in the world—Larkin may have been jealous but he nonetheless published his breakthrough book of poetry, The Less Deceived, just a year after Lucky Jim—it became a little harder to hate it, at least with the same intensity. And so their letters to each other dwindled: What was there to say?
They were rescued by the sixties. Amis and Larkin managed to greet the transformations, disturbances, and new thinking with shared hostility. It brought them a whole gamut of things to hate, like immigrants, feminists, and antiwar protesters. These were less justifiable (and less interesting) things to hate than authority, but at least it kept them going. Larkin would memorialize the decade with his famous poem about sexual liberation:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Amis would do the same in a more obviously comic vein in a poem he addressed to himself on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, in 1972:
So bloody good luck to you, mate,
That you weren’t born too late
For at least a chance of happiness,
Before unchangeable crappiness
Spreads all over the land.
And they began again to be in regular touch, as they would remain until Larkin’s death from cancer of the esophagus in 1985. The later correspondence is in many ways funnier, though less charged with ambition and competition, than the earlier—Amis complains that he has become fat; Larkin complains that he is even fatter, and furthermore that no one ever writes him except to demand money, whereas he would prefer a letter that began, “I am directed to inform you that under the will of the late Mr Getty” or “Dear Mr Larkin, I expect you think it’s jolly cheeky for a schoolgirl to—.” By then they had become two of the most influential writers of the postwar period, having done a great deal to bring English literature out of the academy and into the world. In later years, as they became grand old men of letters, it became harder to hate things, and sometimes both Amis and Larkin tried too hard. But they had made a very valuable point. It was all right to hate things; it could be interesting; and you could make literature out of it. Also, it was funny.
But among all the two men’s accomplishments, Lucky Jim remains unique. It is a document of youth, their youth. It is in a way as optimistic as it is angry. Jim’s rages are impotent rages, his small acts of vandalism useless and self-destructive—and yet he undertakes them in the belief that they are not meaningless, that the world he is disparaging can be changed. Lucky Jim is a weirdly hopeful book, written when the failures of the men whose sensibilities and lives it captured—alcoholism, fatness, and two very painful divorces, for Amis; and alcoholism, fatness, and the sort of cruelty to the people, especially women, closest to him that his single-mindedness demanded, for Larkin—as well as the successes—fame, money, and a knighthood, for Sir Kingsley; and for Larkin, adulation and several very satisfying opportunities to turn down plum assignments, including Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Poet Laureate (Ted Hughes became laureate instead, and Larkin joked to Amis that “being the cause of Ted’s being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with”)—still lay very much in the future. In 1951 all these things were something to imagine and laugh at or fear. Lucky Jim is a lucky book, snatched improbably from time, the product of a collaboration, both editorial and spiritual, that neither writer, once firmly established, could afford to attempt again.
—KEITH GESSEN