'Lucky Jim is the most popular antihero of our time!' - Anthony Burgess

Kingsley Amis | Lucky Jim and his yardsticks for gentleness

Kingsley Amis would be next in our confabs, in this, our little series on gracefulness and gentleness.

Amis was part of the popular ‘angry young men collective’, a group of middle-class writers of the 1950s who were quite disenchanted with traditional British society and its priggish ideals.

When Amis was enlisted for military duty during the second World War, he pokes fun of these priggish ideals and ‘high brow’ standards that were by default, a part of Oxford’s charm and popularity! This is evidenced from the words of the army personnel while taking him on board, ‘An Oxford man was likely to be enough of a ‘gentleman’ to do all right as an officer’. Something that he gave first expression to, in his maiden novel, Lucky Jim!

His first novel titled, Lucky Jim, published in the year 1954, then went on to become his mouthpiece of sorts.

Lucky Jim is about a lower-middle class young man – Jim Dixon, who becomes a professor in medieval history! Jim is surrounded by despicable ‘high brow’ colleagues from the higher echelons of society, who have such high airs on them, and whom he loathes and despises very much.

In fact, the spark for writing this novel happened, after Amis had met up with the faculty members at Leicester University, which he had attended, in the year 1946. ‘‘Someone ought to do something about that lot’, he had then decided, and that’s how he had started working on his Lucky Jim! And howww!

Amis dedicated the book to Philip Larkin, who had played a pivotal role in shaping up the novel and its main character Jim!

Anthony Burgess has given glowing tributes to ‘Lucky Jim’, calling him ‘the most popular antihero of our time’.

Moving on to Lucky Jim –

Although Jim aka Jim Dixon was a professor at a reputed university, he did not fall to the snobbishness and the ‘high brow’ attitude of a particular, so-called ‘elite’ section of the faculty. He felt that the countless pretensions that these professors practised on them, in their University, be it while they walked or while they talked, wasn’t graceful and gentlemanly by any means!

Those snobbish pretensions only tended to show them in bad light, says the angry young man, Jim aka Jim Dixon! Hence Jim decides to be antiestablishment - loathing to the core - the precepts of ‘gentlemanliness’ practised at his place of work!

There were a host of other such affectations in his university’s cultural, social and academic life that he found equally foolish and absurd! The way they pooh-poohed brilliant thoughts and ideas, the way they put down their ‘inelegant’ colleagues and let down their ‘inefficient’ wards, the way they commented on anything of social and cultural value, was so funny and awkward to the likes of Jim!

Just a few interesting conversations from the novel, that bespeak to this snobbish, ‘ungentlemanly refinement’ amongst the ‘high brow’ed in Jim’s University for y’all. It should also be remembered that Amis always had a wonderful sense of humour, and sharing humour space with the likes of the legendary PG Wodehouse and his ilk! So here goes –

From Lucky Jim -

'I've written to Uncle asking him to let me know when he's coming back.'

Dixon wanted to laugh at this. It always amused him to hear girls (men never did it) refer to 'Uncle', 'Daddy', and so on, as if there were only one uncle or daddy in the world, or as if this particular uncle or daddy were the uncle or daddy of all those present.

'What's the joke, Jim?' Carol asked. Bertrand stared at him.

'Oh, nothing.' He returned Bertrand's stare. He wished there were some issue on which he could defeat Bertrand, even at the risk of alienating his father. Any measure short of, or not necessitating too much, violence would be justified. But there seemed to be no field of endeavour where he could employ a measure of that sort. For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavourably. He thought of a sentence in a book he'd once read: 'And with that he picked up the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck, and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.'

As ever, Margaret had thought of something to say: 'I was reading about your uncle only recently, Miss Callaghan. There was a piece about him in the local paper. He was presenting some water-colours to our Gallery here. I don't know what we should do without someone like him to keep things going.'

This remark, in itself virtually unanswerable, had the effect, familiar to Margaret's acquaintances, of dumbfounding its audience by the obviousness of its intention – namely, the intention of forcing them to talk. Some feet away the amateur violinist could be heard laughing huskily at something the local composer was telling him.

Where was Welch?

'Yes, he is very generous,' the Callaghan girl said.

'It's a good job there are some people still about who can afford to be, in that way,' Margaret said. Dixon looked up to catch Carol's eye, but she was exchanging a glance with her husband.

'Well, there won't be much longer, I fear, if the lads at Transport House go on running our lives for us,' Bertrand said.

'Oh, I don't think this crowd have done too badly,' Goldsmith put in. 'After all, you can't…'

'Their foreign policy might, I agree, have been a good deal worse, with the exception of their spectacular inability to pour water on troubled oil.' Bertrand looked quickly round the group, then went on: 'But their home policy… soak the rich… I mean…' He seemed to be hesitating. 'Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn't it? I'm just asking for information, that's all. I mean that's what it seems to be, don't we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn't it? or am I wrong?'

Pretending not to notice Margaret's warning frown and Carol's expectant grin, Dixon said quietly: 'Well, what's wrong with it, even if it is that and no more? If one man's got ten buns and another's got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.'

Bertrand and his girl were looking at each other with identical expressions, shaking their heads, smiling, raising their eyebrows, sighing. It was as if Dixon had just said that he didn't know anything about art, but he did know what he liked. 'But we don't think anybody need give up a bun, Mr Dixon,' the girl said. 'That's the whole point.'

'Hardly the whole point, I should have thought,' Dixon said at the moment when Margaret said 'Don't let's get involved in a set-to about…' and Bertrand said 'The whole point of this is that the rich…'

It was Bertrand who won the little contest. 'The point is that the rich play an essential role in modern society,' he said, his voice baying a little more noticeably. 'More than ever in days like these. That's all; I'm not going to bore you with the stock platitudes about their having kept the arts going, and so on. The very fact that they are stock platitudes proves my case. And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'

The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical.

It seemed to encourage Bertrand. 'Yes, I do,' he said even more loudly, so that all his listeners looked quickly at him. 'And shall I tell you what else I happen to like? Rich people. I take pride in the contemporary unpopularity of that statement. And why do I like them? Because they're charming, because they're generous, because they've learnt to appreciate the things I happen to like myself, because their houses are full of beautiful things. That's why I like them and that's why I don't want them soaked. All right?'

'Come along, dear,' Mrs Welch called from behind them. 'If we wait for Father we'll be here all night. Shall' we make a start? If you'll come over here we can all sit down.'

'All right, Mother,' Bertrand said over his shoulder, and the group began to dissolve, but before he moved himself he said, his eyes on Dixon: 'That's quite clear, is it?'

Margaret pulled at Dixon's sleeve and he, not wanting to go on fighting after the end of the round, said amicably: 'Oh yes. You seem to have been luckier in the rich people you've come into contact with than I have, that's all.'

'That wouldn't surprise me in the least,' Bertrand said with some contempt, standing aside so that Margaret could pass him.

Dixon said angrily: 'Well, you'd better make the most of them while you've got them, then, because you won't have them much longer, you know.'

He began to push past after Margaret, but the Callaghan girl halted him by saying: 'I'd rather you didn't talk in that strain, if you don't mind.'

Speaks much-o-much to the doublespeak that’s in vogue amongst the so-called snobbish elite in academia, especially in British institutions of his times, of highbrow academics who feel it’s quite below their dignity to even talk to an ‘inelegant’ academic or an ‘unrefined’ student!

That’s hence Jim decides to mock and to scoff at the ‘gentlemanly’ standards of his university, calling it a sham and a disgrace, with little warmth and grace!

This little confab hence tends to drive home the very fact that, qualities and rubrics that define a ‘gentleman’ are highly ambiguous, and take different significations, to each its milieu. To some, it might connote Englishness, to some it might mean masculinity, to some it might infer elegance in fashion, and to some others it might tend to denote etiquette and grace!

At the same time, it would do well for us to also bear in mind that, the term has attained pejorative labels also over the years, connoting to mean, a highly hypocritical attitude towards ‘the other’, outmoded behaviour, snobbish pretensions and a ‘holier-than-thou’, ‘knowledgeable than thou’ attitude! Values that have no sway today in any way!

Lucky Jim is testimony to the latter!

As the renowned reviewer James P. Degnan observes, ‘In place of the sensitive soul as hero, Amis creates in his early novels a hero radically new to serious contemporary fiction: a middle-class hero who is also an intellectual, an intellectual who is unabashedly middlebrow. He is a hero whose chief virtues, as he expresses them, are: ‘politeness, friendly interest, ordinary concern and a good natured willingness to be imposed upon, suspicious of all pretentiousness, of all heroic posturing, the Amis hero … voices all that is best of the ‘lower middle-class, of the non-gentlemanly’ conscience’.

And hence Jim’s aversion for all things ‘gentlemanly’ that’s been practised all along in his University!

To be continued…

image: amazondotcom, tinkleseries