Journey Into the Past Page 2

  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

  LUCKY JIM

  To Philip Larkin

  Oh, lucky Jim,

  How I envy him.

  Oh, lucky Jim.

  How I envy him.

  —old song

  1

  ‘They made a silly mistake, though,’ the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory. ‘After the interval we did a little piece by Dowland,’ he went on; ‘for recorder and keyboard, you know. I played the recorder, of course, and young Johns . . .’ He paused, and his trunk grew rigid as he walked; it was as if some entirely different man, some impostor who couldn’t copy his voice, had momentarily taken his place; then he went on again: ‘. . . young Johns played the piano. Versatile lad, that; the oboe’s his instrument, really. Well anyway, the reporter chap must have got the story wrong, or not been listening, or something. Anyway, there it was in the Post as large as life: Dowland, yes, they’d got him right; Messrs Welch and Johns, yes; but what do you think they said then?’

  Dixon shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Professor,’ he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor.

  ‘Flute and piano.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Flute and piano; not recorder and piano.’ Welch laughed briefly. ‘Now a recorder, you know, isn’t like a flute, though it’s the flute’s immediate ancestor, of course. To begin with, it’s played, that’s the recorder, what they call à bec, that’s to say you blow into a shaped mouthpiece like that of an oboe or a clarinet, you see. A present-day flute’s played what’s known as traverso, in other words you blow across a hole instead of . . .’

  As Welch again seemed becalmed, even slowing further in his walk, Dixon relaxed at his side. He’d found his professor standing, surprisingly enough, in front of the Recent Additions shelf in the College Library, and they were now moving diagonally across a small lawn towards the front of the main building of the College. To look at, but not only to look at, they resembled some kind of variety act: Welch tall and weedy, with limp whitening hair, Dixon on the short side, fair and round-faced, with an unusual breadth of shoulder that had never been accompanied by any special physical strength or skill. Despite this over-evident contrast between them, Dixon realized that their progress, deliberate and to all appearances thoughtful, must seem rather donnish to passing students. He and Welch might well be talking about history, and in the way history might be talked about in Oxford and Cambridge quadrangles. At moments like this Dixon came near to wishing that they really were. He held on to this thought until animation abruptly gathered again and burst in the older man, so that he began speaking almost in a shout, with a tremolo imparted by unshared laughter:

  ‘There was the most marvellous mix-up in the piece they did just before the interval. The young fellow playing the viola had the misfortune to turn over two pages at once, and the resulting confusion . . . my word . . .’

  Quickly deciding on his own word, Dixon said it to himself and then tried to flail his features into some sort of response to humour. Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he’d make it actually when next alone. He’d draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils. By these means he would, he was confident, cause a deep dangerous flush to suffuse his face.

  Welch was talking yet again about his concert. How had he become Professor of History, even at a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics. Then how? As usual, Dixon shelved this question, telling himself that what mattered was that this man had decisive power over his future, at any rate until the next four or five weeks were up. Until then he must try to make Welch like him, and one way of doing that was, he supposed, to be present and conscious while Welch talked about concerts. But did Welch notice who else was there while he talked, and if he noticed did he remember, and if he remembered would it affect such thoughts as he had already? Then, abruptly, with no warning, the second of Dixon’s two predicaments flapped up into consciousness. Shuddering in his efforts to repress a yawn of nervousness, he asked in his flat northern voice: ‘How’s Margaret these days?’

  The other’s clay-like features changed indefinably as his attention, like a squadron of slow old battleships, began wheeling to face this new phenomenon, and in a moment or two he was able to say: ‘Margaret.’

  ‘Yes; I’ve not seen her for a week or two.’ Or three, Dixon added uneasily to himself.

  ‘Oh. She’s recovering very quickly, I think, all things considered. She took a very nasty knock, of course, over that Catchpole fellow, and all the unfortunate business afterwards. It looks to me . . . It’s her mind that’s suffering now, you see, not her body; physically she’s absolutely fit again, I should say. In fact, the sooner she can get back to some sort of work the better, though it’s really too late, of course, for her to start lecturing again this term. I know she’d like to get down to things again, and I must say I agree. It would help to take her mind off . . . off . . .’

  Dixon knew all this, and very much better than Welch could hope to, but he felt constrained to say: ‘Yes, I see. I think living with you, Professor, and Mrs Welch, must have helped her a lot to get out of the wood.’

  ‘Yes, I think there must be something about the atmosphere of the place, you know, that has some sort of healing effect. We had a friend of Peter Warlock’s down once, one Christmas it was, years ago it must be now. He said very much the same thing. I can remember myself last summer, coming back from that examiners’ conference in Durham. It was a real scorcher of a day, and the train was . . . well, it . . .’

  After no more than a minor swerve the misfiring vehicle of his conversation had been hauled back on to its usual course. Dixon gave up, stiffening his legs as they reached, at last, the steps of the main building. He pretended to himself that he’d pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper.

  Thinking of this, he only smiled dreamily when, after a pensive halt in the stone-paved vestibule, Welch said he had to go up and collect his ‘bag’ from his room, which was o
n the second floor. While he waited, Dixon considered how, without provoking Welch to a long-lived, wondering frown, he could remind him of his invitation to come and eat tea at the Welches’ house outside the city. They’d arranged to leave at four o’clock in Welch’s car, and it was now ten past. Dixon felt apprehension lunging at his stomach as he thought of seeing Margaret, whom he was to take out that evening for the first time since she’d cracked up. He forced his attention away on to Welch’s habits as a car-driver, and began trying to nourish outrage as a screen for the apprehension, tapping his long brown shoe loudly on the floor and whistling. It worked for five seconds or less.

  How would she behave when they were alone together? Would she be gay, pretending she’d forgotten, or had never noticed, the length of time since he last saw her, gaining altitude before she dipped to the attack? Or would she be silent and listless, apparently quite inattentive, forcing him to drag painfully from small-talk through solicitude to craven promises and excuses? However it began, it would go on in the same way: with one of those questions which could be neither answered nor dodged, with some horrifying confession, some statement about herself which, whether ‘said for effect’ or not, got its effect just the same. He’d been drawn into the Margaret business by a combination of virtues he hadn’t known he possessed: politeness, friendly interest, ordinary concern, a good-natured willingness to be imposed upon, a desire for unequivocal friendship. It had seemed only natural for a female lecturer to ask a junior, though older, male colleague up to her place for coffee, and no more than civil to accept. Then suddenly he’d become the man who was ‘going round’ with Margaret, and somehow competing with this Catchpole, a background figure of fluctuating importance. He’d thought a couple of months earlier that Catchpole was coming along nicely, taking the strain off him, reducing him to the sustainable role of consulting tactician; he’d even rather enjoyed the assumption that he knew something of how these campaigns were conducted. And then Catchpole had thrown her over, right over on to his lap. In that posture his destiny as the only current recipient of these unmanning questions and confessions could hardly be eluded.