Books: Lucky Jim & His Pals

The most astutely symbolical novel of igth century England was Dickens’ Great Expectations. Young Pip. packing his bags for London to become a gentleman, fulfilled the dream image of a confident and ambitious middle class. Since 1954, an equally symbolic novel has come to stand for the small expectations and raddled nerves of null century Britain — and especially its middle-class intellectuals—under the Welfare State. The novel: Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.

Its hero, James Dixon, is a barely competent provincial instructor in medieval history who has no desire to be a gentleman; he wants merely to be a safe and smug academic bureaucrat. His character has not been tempered on the playing fields of Eton, and he is as proud of his beer tastes as he is irritated by his beer income. To hold on to his teaching post he becomes involved in a series of tawdry, inept and sometimes hilarious maneuvers. This display of self-serving clownmanship has catapulted his saga through 18 printings and left countless Britons alternately fuming and guffawing.

Lucky Jim’s 35-year-old creator is foremost among a group of postwar writers, e.g., John Wain, John Osborne, Thomas Hinde, Peter Towry, John Braine, who have given British writing in the ’50s a specific trend and a unique temper.

In their hands the old school tie has become a garrote for genteel traditions. Moral and political neutralists, they expend their limited energies avoiding social commitments. As writers, they have taken fhe drawing-room comedy and turned it into kitchen-sink satire. As a new social breed, they have spearheaded the revolt of the Non-U’s (for Non-Upper Class), a petty intelligentsia of teachers, technicians, journalists, veterinary surgeons and welfare officers, characterized (in the words of one critic) by “their long-playing records and their ponytail-haired wives.” Drab, insular and irritable, the “new men” suggest that, in the semi-Marxist Welfare State, it is the people who wither away.

In Merrie England. Although Lucky Jim took the Somerset Maugham Award, the grand “Old Party” of British letters loosed a choleric blast at the “whitecollar proletariat.” Said old (83) Somerset Maugham: “They do not go to the university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they have got one. scamp it … Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are scum.”

Novelist C. P. Snow (The New Men) issued a prompt rejoinder as to why the kept canaries of the Welfare State warble such sour notes from their badly gilded cages: “Lucky Jim will not accumulate enough money to change his way of life. He is never going to starve, but he cannot have a dramatic rise in the world … It is an unexpected result of the Welfare State that it should make the social pattern not less rigid but much more so.”

Since Kingsley Amis is an amiable satirist, Jim Dixon grins and bears the fact that he has attained status without achieving size. At worst, his is the venom of a reasonably contented rattlesnake. Under pressure, Dixon retreats to the practical joke as readily as Walter Mitty did to the hero-fantasy; when socially and emotionally discomfited, he makes faces—”his Edith Sitwell face,” “his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.” At novel’s end he tries to articulate his flashes of Angst in the pan during a drunken public lecture: “The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It’s only the home-made pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd . . .” He keels over “without even telling them.”

Jim No. 2 & Joe. To hear what Lucky Jim is really too gentle to tell, the reader must turn to an unlucky Jim—James Porter, irascible hero of John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (TIME, April 22). Look Back is a high-decibel three-act diatribe, mainly on mom, wife, God and country. Hero Jimmy has just written a poem called “The Cess Pool.” His wife hovers over an ironing board—one of the endemic props of this school of social realism, together with dirty dishes and wet “nappies”‘ (diapers). At the slightest provocation Jimmy turns into a verbal epileptic, particularly concerning his wife —”When you see a woman in front of her bedroom mirror, you realize what a refined sort of a butcher she is. Did you ever see some dirty old Arab, sticking his fingers into some mess of lamb fat and gristle? Well, she’s just like that.”

When he is not being hysterical. Hero Jimmy gets to the heart of what is the matter: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the oldfashioned, grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you.” Says Jimmy’s mistress of Jimmy: “He thinks he’s still in the middle of the French Revolution. And that’s where he ought to be, of course.”

In a bestseller, Room at the Top, by John Braine, published in England just ten weeks ago, the third face of Lucky Jim emerges: that of the intellectual spiv ruthlessly making his luck. Joe Lampton is only a town clerk, but he knows what he wants—an Aston-Martin sports car, a villa in Cannes, and a girl who will look just right in either. When the daughter of the local industrial tycoon pops the question, “Joe, do you really love me?” Joe coos back sweet nothings in the shape of five zeros: “A hundred thousand pounds’ worth.” Room at the Top suggests for the first time that the Welfare State can be used as a runway for a take-off into the upper economic air by a young man who is not too finicky about throwing his friends over the side to gain altitude.

Within the triangle of Amis, Osborne and Braine, the rest of the Lucky Jim school is encamped. John Wain (Hurry On Down ) is an Amis in whom the quinine water has changed to straight quinine. Thomas Hinde (Happy As Larry) explores the Welfare State Bohemia with a hero who feels that cadging a livelihood is “more honest,” and Peter Towry (It’s Warm Inside) writes the comedy of carping domesticity. The upstart philistinism that molds and mars the entire group is succinctly stated by John Braine’s hero when he says that everything is “simply a question of money.”

End of an Era. Lucky Jim and his pals mark the end of an intellectual era—the era of Utopian belief in man’s earthly salvation through socialism and sociology, related to the igth century evolutionary notion that history is a process of perpetual improvement. That era’s brilliant, fashionable upper-class leftists—Auden, Ishenvood, Spender et al.—are dismissed by Amis and Co. as playboys on a slumming party. The “new men” have actually been poor, and understandably they smirk when they pick up the memoirs of a posh erstwhile pink like Philip Toynbee (son of A Study of History’> Arnold J.) and read:”It was there, at Castle Howard, that I fell in love with Laura Bonham-Carter; and what I best remember about the first breathless evening is a dinner in the Canaletto room . . .”

But the most significant quarrel that Amis and Co. have with their literary predecessors is not that they had money but that they had causes. As Novelist John Wain puts it: “It was the last age, consciously and feverishly the last, in which people had the feeling that if they only took the trouble to join something, get a party card, wear a special shirt, organise meetings and bellow slogans, they could influence the course of events. Since 1946 nobody above the Jehovah’s Witness level has taken this attitude.”

Behind the Amis vogue is a conscious retreat from Utopia. The “new men” have withdrawn from politics—and politics has withdrawn from them. Amis himself spelled it out in a pamphlet entitled Socialism and the Intellectuals. Fumblingly written but painfully sincere, it may be the first authentic manifesto of an apolitical literary age. Amis confesses that he finds politics a bore, and that he votes the Labor ticket as a kind of conditioned reflex—two admissions which infuriated British Laborites and old-line liberals. Analyzing his own apathy, Amis makes the pertinent reflection that intellectuals are political romantics who can be stirred by extreme situations: “Romanticism in a political context I would define as an irrational capacity to become inflamed by interests and causes that are not one’s own, that are outside oneself. When we shop around for an outlet we find there is nothing in stock: no Spain, no Fascism, no mass unemployment.”

As for identifying with the working classes, it is a “mug’s game.” Nor do Amis and Co. propose to rally round their presumed benefactors, the Socialists, for whose triumph their predecessors fought so hard: “The Welfare State, indeed, is notoriously unpopular with intellectuals. It was all very well to press for higher working-class wages in the old days, but now—why, some of them are actually better off than we are ourselves . . .”

The Caitiff Angels. The least resentful of all Lucky Jims, Kingsley Amis follows Voltaire’s advice and cultivates his own garden behind the sprawling ten-room house in Swansea, Wales, where he lives with his blonde wife Hilary and two sons and a daughter, all three under ten. He is a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea, dislikes London literary society, likes jazz, Guinness stout, science fiction, cricket and Rugby matches, and making faces like Lucky Jim at parties.

If Amis and the rest of his school part company, it will be because he is its only conscientious craftsman and its only notable wit. Even so, his humor travels no better than the average joke in Punch, and U.S. editions of Lucky Jim and a second novel. That Uncertain Feeling, have barely topped the 5,000 mark in sales. His fellow writers would probably fare even worse, for they write with a sloppy, cliche-ridden arrogance that has been absent from serious U.S. fiction since the heyday of James T. Farrell and the cult of social protest.

Ironically, the writers of the Lucky Jim school have something to say. They have become authentic chroniclers of Britain’s shrinking pains. They are sociocultural D.P.s. uprooted from the class of their birth and ill at ease in the accents of their betters. Enviously they yearn for the privileges of the aristocracy, without its responsibilities. They have a fierce as well as a flabby honesty. It can be said of each of them, as one critic said of Lucky Jim: “He has one skin too few. but his is not the sensitiveness of the young man in earlier twentieth century fiction: it is the phony to which his nerve ends are tremblingly exposed, and at the least suspicion of the phony he goes tough.”

In a way. their egotism is preferable to the deadly altruism of the ’30s, whose intellectuals minded everybody’s business and loved mankind with a dreadful abstract love often indistinguishable from hatred. But Lucky Jim and pals also possess the defect of their egotistical virtue. Determined not to pledge a false allegiance, they reject all allegiances as false.

In the third canto of the Inferno, Dante, with Virgil as his guide, enters the outer confines of Hell and there sees a vast throng of confused spirits set upon by wasps and hornets. He asks

Virgil: “Who are these that seem so overcome with pain?” And Virgil answers: “This miserable mode the dreary souls of those sustain, who lived without blame, and without praise. They are mixed with that caitiff choir of the angels, who were not rebellious, nor were faithful to God; but were for themselves.”