Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Dixon began to feel definitely alarmed.  Had Welch's long-heralded derangement finally come to pass?  Or was this a bitterly sarcastic way of alluding to Dixon's own disinclination to approach any possible arena of academic work?

I have often thought I should read something by Kinglsey Amis, important British man-of-letters, fan of genre literature (he wrote a lot about James Bond, for example) and co-editor with Robert Conquest, the Anglo-American poet and historian, of SF anthologies.  So from a Howard County library I borrowed a 2012 New York Review of Books Classics edition of Amis's first published novel, Lucky Jim, which is like 265 pages long in this edition.

James Dixon, the Jim of the title, is a young academic who doesn't like to read very much (his "policy it was to read as little as possible of any given book") and for eight or nine months has held a junior position at a mediocre English college lecturing on medieval history even though he doesn't know what the word "scholasticism" means (Dixon doesn't let lack of comprehension of its meaning keep him from using the term every day, however) and mixes up Aquinas and Augustine.  Dixon is on what they call a "two-year probation" and is in a constant state of fear that he will be let go by the erratic head of the History Department, Professor Ned Welch, and much of the novel's volume consists of Dixon trying to stay on Welch's good side--for example, by getting his admittedly boring article on the economic effects of innovations in shipbuilding in the 15th century published--and seeing his efforts upended by his own vices and shortcomings as well as bad luck.  Dixon has also been casually dating a female lecturer, Margaret Peels; he is not very attracted to Margaret at all, but feels trapped in a relationship with her out of pity and inertia and social pressure.  As the novel begins the semester is about to end, and it has been some weeks since Dixon's paper was rejected by a respectable journal and since Margaret, after being dumped by another man she was dating, one she was apparently dating much more seriously than she was Dixon, tried to commit suicide.  And it is only a few hours before Dixon is scheduled to head out to Welch's country house where a bunch of provincial smarties, including Margaret, will be participating in an "arty week-end."

Dixon, who doesn't even really want to be a college professor and whose main interests are drinking and smoking, is something of an outsider, and a causeless rebel who acts out for peevish childish reasons instead of any ideological conviction, expressing privately his contempt for everybody in caustic inner monologues and the making of faces and outwardly via the indulgence in some pretty intrusive practical jokes.  A music professor, Johns, is a particular target of Dixon's pranks; Dixon lifts a music magazine from Johns's mailbox and draws a mustache and fangs on the photo of a composer on its cover, and later forges a threatening letter to Johns that accuses the man of taking sexual liberties with his secretary and vows revenge.  All through the novel Dixon is pulling scams and deceptions like this, often to cover up his blunders but also, apparently, just for the hell of it.

The plot follows two main threads--Dixon's strivings to impress, or at least not appall, Welch, and Dixon's relationships with women.  The former plot thread is full of obvious sorts of comedy: Dixon claims he can read music and so at the arty week-end gets shanghaied into singing songs he's never heard before at an amateur concert, but of course he can't read music and is a poor singer anyway; Dixon gets drunk and falls asleep while smoking, burning holes in the sheets and table and carpet in his room at Welch's country house; Welch enlists Dixon to deliver a lecture on one of Welch's favorite topics and Dixon gets drunk right before his career-critical performance.

The latter plot thread, Dixon's relationships with women, is a little more serious.  This novel has many characters and they all have tangled relationships with each other...I considered drawing myself a chart with arrows signifying everybody's blood, sexual, and adversarial connections, but didn't quite reach that point.  Welch's son Bertrand is a painter, and, as is to be expected of an artist, he has all kinds of sexual affairs, including with the wife, Carol, of one of Dixon's colleagues in the History Department, Cecil Goldsmith.  Bertrand's latest girlfriend is the beautiful Christine Callaghan, who works in a London bookstore, but she has been resistant to surrendering her virginity to Bertrand, so Bertrand has still been seeing Carol on the side, though carefully, so as not to drive away Christine because he wants to get in good with Christine's Uncle, an important patron of the arts.  This uncle is looking for a sort of personal assistant, and Bertrand wants that job.  Dixon meets the obnoxious painter and the fetching virgin at the arty week-end and is immediately attracted to Christine, and Carol, apparently trying to buttress her own position or just out of spite, encourages Dixon to go after Christine; Dixon achieves some preliminary success, which leads to bitter conflict with Bertrand Welch, who of course threatens to put Dixon's job in jeopardy by tattling to his father.

Things look bleak in the final fifth or so of the book.  Christine feels stuck with Bertrand, and Dixon feels stuck with Margaret, and she lives in London and he far off in the provinces anyway, so Christine and Dixon abandon their blossoming relationship.  Dixon, after a physical fight with Bertrand and his disastrous performance of the big lecture where he was supposed to put forward Welch's ideas, is told he will not be asked to stay for the next semester.

But then the novel ends happily, deus ex machina style.  Christine's uncle offers Dixon the London-based personal assistant job Bertrand wanted.  Margaret's former boyfriend appears and he and Dixon piece together the clues that indicate that Margaret is not a sensitive soul who tried to commit suicide but a manipulative neurotic jerk who faked the suicide attempt in order to gain control over Dixon and/or the other guy.  This revelation means Dixon has no obligation to maintain his relationship with Margaret and can pursue Christine.  And Christine is now available because Carol has told her about her ongoing affair with Bertrand, releasing Christine from any obligations to the promiscuous painter.  As the book ends we have every reason to believe that Dixon and Christine will live happily ever after, with Dixon even shedding his bitter cynicism and ceasing to play his practical jokes on people. 

Lucky Jim is alright, but I was rather disappointed in it; it has such a high reputation ("The comic novel of out time") that I was expecting something something fun and laugh-out-loud hilarious like a P. G. Wodehouse caper, or some tremendous life-changing masterpiece, like Proust or Lolita or something.  Instead, Lucky Jim is just a good ordinary mainstream novel.  It is cynical instead of light-hearted, and the jokes, while good, generally elicit smiles rather than guffaws and are sort of predictable--how many jokes that revolve around people being drunk have we encountered in our lives?

Nothing about Lucky Jim is difficult or challenging; you don't have to wrestle with anything or figure out any kind of puzzle.  The style is a bit verbose but easy to understand, and understated rather than passionate or exciting.  Amis only nibbles at the edges of political or social issues, he rarely tries to tell you something tendentious about life or to move you.  There is nothing deep and philosophical, nothing outrageous or shocking--Lucky Jim is not labyrinthine and tragic like something from Proust or Nabokov, it is not blunt and outrageous like Charles Bukowski's work or pretentious and outrageous like Henry Miller's.  And while it is not satisfying in the way a "hard" literary novel can be, Lucky Jim is also not really satisfying in the way a popular novel or genre novel can be--there is no catharsis when Dixon succeeds because he doesn't seem to deserve to succeed (it was not really clear to me why Christine and her uncle take to Dixon so readily, as he is always acting irresponsibly and Christine and the uncle seem like responsible people) and because he is not quite likable; similarly his foes are not so terribly monstrous that you really want to see them thrashed.  How much better a person is Dixon than the Welches and Margaret, and how much more interesting?--not very much.

Before returning Lucky Jim to the public library, I'll note some good things about it, and repeat that I don't think it is bad or a failure, just underwhelming.  Obviously, I like that the protagonist is an outsider who hates everything and that it portrays academia as a corrupt scam and academics as a bunch of lazy and self-important jerks who contribute nothing to society and believe--and promulgate--a lot of nonsense.  I was very interested to take in a minor character's analysis of academic grade inflation and the lowering of admissions standards due to political and financial pressures which have nothing to do with (and even undermine) the search for knowledge.  This sort of thing resonates with my own experiences over the course of my spotty career at 2nd and 3rd rate institutions of higher learning.

In one memorable scene Dixon engages in spirited ridicule of modern romanticizing of the medieval period*:

As he approached the Common Room he thought briefly about the Middle Ages.  Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages.  The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.  Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Age--Margaret's way of referring to the Middle Ages?

In this scene Amis lets himself go a little, courts a little controversy, and Dixon exhibits some strong feelings--the novel could have done with more of this.  Another example of Amis turning up the heat and of Dixon demonstrating some passion is the book's best and funniest scene, in which, in the final pages of the novel, Dixon chases down and then rides a bus, desperate to catch a train he (erroneously) thinks is about to leave, and vents his frustrations over the bus's slow progress in a long series of extravagant fancies.

I will probably give some of Amis's later work a try, but for the nonce I am eager to get back to the science fiction and fantasy stories which have been the meat and potatoes of this blog throughout its life.

*You may recall that I recently found Gene Wolfe's romanticizing of the medieval period charming and exciting.  My point, here and there, is not that I find these arguments particularly convincing, but that they are thought provoking and fun to read because they evidence some kind of deeply considered thought and exhibit some deep emotion.