War leaves everyone destitute, champs as well as losers. At least that seems the case in some quarters in England following its WWII victory. But out of the drained sensibilities comes Lucky Jim, whose primary motive is to avoid being chumped. His new arms are not mod Joyce’s “silence, exile and cunning,” but scoff, erosion, and contumely. He finds himself immersed in a milieu devoid of usefulness, stupefied:
It wasn’t the double-exposure effect of the last half-minute’s talk that had dumfounded him, for such incidents formed the staple material of Welch [Jim’s mentor] colloquies; it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was the perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. ‘Let’s see,’ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: ‘oh yes; The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485. After all, that’s what it’s…’
Page 9 of “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954; New York Review Books Classics 2012 with an Introduction by Keith Gessen.
Jim’s problem (to date still unresolved for so many in galleries of classrooms) is simply what to do, and while Beckett is now back in Paris resolving “Nothing to be done,” Jim Dixon is back in England, having made his way through a back door into contemporary academia, which doesn’t necessarily equate to a decent job:
‘Well, you know, Jim. You can see the Authorities’ point in a way. “We pay for John Smith to enter College here and now you tell us, after seven years, that he’ll never get a degree. You’re wasting our money.” If we institute an entrance exam to keep out the ones who can’t read or write, the entry goes down by half, and half of us lose our jobs. And then the other demand: “We want two hundred teachers this year and we mean to have them.” All right, we’ll lower the pass mark to twenty per cent and give you the quantity you want, but for God’s sake don’t start complaining in two years’ time that your schools are full of teachers who couldn’t pass the General Certificate themselves, let alone teach anyone else to pass it. It’s a wonderful position, isn’t it?’
177
Some guys will do anything to avoid working on commission:
Dixon agreed rather than disagreed with Beesley, but he didn’t feel interested enough to say so. It was one of those days when he felt quite convinced of his impending expulsion from academic life. What would he do afterwards? Teach in a school? Oh dear no. Go to London and get a job in an office. What job? Whose office? Shut up.
177-178
But why would office life, in sickness or in health, not be preferable to the games teachers play, particularly the major league players:
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 Yeat’s poetry, both men eventually came to think that the modernists had made English-language poetry vague, pretentious, and verbose…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.
Page x-xi of Keith Gessen’s Introduction.
While much of today’s poetry remains “vague, pretentious, and verbose,” some reaches further into the pit of the common reader’s hand reaching out for not meaning but significance lately lost thanks largely to poetry being conquered in academia by the philistinism of the sociologists and psychologists, not to mention the political polemicists. Yet, as Keith Gessen points out in his “Lucky Jim” NYRB Introduction: “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” (xiii). But how accurate is that statement? Not to say that everything is not idiotic, but that everyone thinks that everything is idiotic. And anyway, anyone can feel that way. It doesn’t take a college degree. And it might be true for high-schoolers these days, or high school dropouts, or college graduates in search of a job in their area of obsolete, irrelevant, or antiquated study, or retirees from any number of careers or pseudo careers. If everything is idiocy, one can at least prefer one’s own.
The problem is not only what to do but how to do it and how to think about what to do and how to think about doing it and to feel about all of it and how to remain free in spite of all of it, if one can even keep track of what is meant by it. And all without undo influence from the idiots one once might have admired but have now come to scorn but not enough to ignore. Gessen puts hate as the great motivator for both Amis and his pal Larkin. But hate is far too strong a word to describe what they were all about, or what Jim is about. To be unable to achieve satisfaction is not to hate the losing streak, the white shirts, the wrong cigarettes, the useless information, the starved imagination. One might though hate that one still feels one wants to be a part of it, even if that part entails making fun of it. If you live a life of pure loathing, what’s left you in the end to loathe but yourself?
And “Lucky Jim” is a comic novel, not one of fear and loathing, and with literary precursors. If Jim (or Amis) makes fun of “The Canterbury Tales,” it’s in their being removed from life and buried in a classroom. Given his tastes and dislike of the phony and the mannered, it’s understood he values Chaucer’s use of flatulence to create lasting, well digested literature. He doesn’t hide the compost. He loves it. And he’s not angry about it. And if Jim “hates” Welch’s son, Bertrand, his evil nemesis, it’s for good reason. Bertrand makes an excellent foil character. One feels an author’s love for his Iago, Lady Macbeth, Polonius. In any case, Henry Miller had already written his Tropics, and they’re not about graduate school. Ginsberg is working on Howl, but neither are the Beats angry young men. They are bent on living. They will eschew an air-conditioned nightmare, thank you.
And an elderly Jim would no doubt prefer self-loathing to schadenfreude. Smug and complacent, he is not. And he’s not falsely self-deprecating. He doesn’t insult himself as bait for what he might fear an otherwise hostile audience. He’s not self-satisfied. He recognizes his faults but doesn’t take credit for them.
An interesting companion reading to “Lucky Jim” might be Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women,” published two years earlier, or her “Jane and Prudence,” a year earlier, or “Less than Angels,” a year later. It hardly seems the same world, but it is. One might find Pym’s heroines rescued from the arms of a horned and horny but hardly hating Kingsley Amis.
The Coming of the Toads 