Algernon (Darth Anyan)'s Reviews > Lucky Jim

... but whatever the subject for discussion might be, Dixon knew that before the journey ended he’d find his face becoming creased and flabby, like an old bag, with the strain of making it smile and show interest and speak its few permitted words, of steering it between a collapse into helpless fatigue and a tautening with anarchic fury.

As we start the literary journey, our guide Jim Dixon doesn’t feel much like a lucky man. He’s trapped in a thankless job, teaching history at a provincial university in post-War England and having to endure the company of his boss. This tenured professor and head of the History department is a major bore and a snob, but Dixon hopes he can persuade him to renew his temporary lecturer job at the end of the academic year. The effort makes Jim bitter and angry and restless.

... he felt real, over-mastering, orgiastic boredom, and its companion, real hatred.

The novel was sold to me in recommendations as one of the comic masterpieces in modern English literature, but I confess I was slightly baffled by the angry vibe of the opening scenes. Luckily, I persisted, and very soon I was laughing out loud in the solitude of my quarantined apartment at the avalanche of misfortune that Jim Dixon manages to get tangled in as he visits with his boss for an evening of ‘high culture’ or tries to disentangle himself from his needy, clinging girlfriend or struggles to deliver a lecture on ‘Merrie England’ while stinkingly drunk.

Part of my enthusiasm comes from recollections of my first teaching job and some sentimental mishaps as a young man. Kingsley Amis truly puts this academic world into the spotlight, with all its pretensions and petty rivalries, the stifling pressure of paperwork and the rigid, often pointless structure of the curriculum. And of course, for both Dixon and young me, the never-ending penny-pinching and worrying about the future, rationing cigarettes and beers and going out with the gang until the next payday. Teachers, especially substitute ones, were never high on the paycheck scale.

It was a 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.

Jim Dixon puts his hopes in a post-graduate thesis he wrote to improve his chances to have his contract renewed, even as he considers the whole effort futile, playing by the rules of an antiquated system he despises. This rebellion in mr. Dixon, his refusal to conform to expectations and to fit into a world he holds in contempt is what made me dub him a ‘rebel with a cause’. A little further reading after I finished the novel provided confirmation that Amis, even if the novel is not in any measure autobiographical, made good use of his own personal experiences and social encounters within the academic world, so much so that some characters like the Welches or Margaret can be identified from letters exchanged with his best friend, Philip Larkin.

‘the wrong people were in charge, had the money, had to be listened to and treated with respect.’

This passage from one of Amis’ letters holds the key to the anger manifested in Jim Dixon. The pulling of faces throughout the novel (crazy peasant face, Martian invader face, Eskimo face, Edith Sitwell face and so on) , his drinking bouts and his not-so-innocent pranks are the methods Jim Dixon deploys in an effort to maintain his sanity. They are also the source of much of the merriment that finally comes through the page as Jim makes valiant efforts to fit into the world of the Welches ( But it’s very pleasant to come down here and to know that the torch of culture is still in a state of combustion in the provinces. Profoundly reassuring, too. ) or to stay by the side of the volatile Margaret. Our sympathies (at least mine, I can’t really speak for other readers) are pulled in the direction of this self-destructive yet so wickedly funny anarchist who is not yet resigned with the way of the world :

All positive change was good; standing still, growing to the spot, was always bad.

... he threw back his head and gave a long trombone-blast of anarchistic laughter.

In the junk-room he nudged aside an archery target, making his crazy peasant face at it – what flaring imbecilities must it have witnessed?

With the addition of a couple of new characters, the pompous London painter Bertrand Welch and his demure fiancee Christine Callaghan, Jim Dixon is thrown even deeper into the soup, raging at the Bertrand’s duplicity yet deeply attracted by the girl’s beauty and natural conversation. When the going gets tough Jim Dixon finally has a chance to prove to the reader he is not just a clown with a bad attitude, and that was the moment when the novel went up one star in my appreciation. Jim demonstrate a keen intelligence and empathy for other people’s feelings, even the ones he holds in little regard. He also has scruples about deliberately hurting them and he yearns for a more natural, more honest interaction. I saved a couple of examples:

Whatever passably decent treatment Margaret had had from him was the result of a temporary victory of fear over irritation and/or pity over boredom. That behaviour of such origin could seem ‘so sweet’ to her might be taken as a reflection on her sensitivity, but it was also a terrible commentary on her frustration and loneliness. Poor old Margaret, he thought with a shudder.

Christine, so distant and disdainful at the first encounter, proves herself a kindred spirit, even if she doesn’t manifest the same appetite for smashing things up and getting into trouble. She makes an appeal to Jim to drop the cynical mask, not be so quick to judge and to give other people a fair treatment.

Don’t you think people ever do things because they want to do them, because they want to do what’s for the best? I don’t see how it helps to call trying to do the right thing caution or lack of guts. Doing what you know you’ve got to do’s horrible sometimes, but that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t worth doing.

A similar reversal of expectation is expressed in a discussion about the teaching profession – it’s a tough job, and often mishandled, but it’s something worth doing right. Dixon’s antics are a way to point out what needs to change.

‘It’s a waste of time teaching history, is it?’
‘No. Well taught and sensibly taught, history could do people a hell of a lot of good. But in practice it doesn’t work out like that. Things get in the way. I don’t quite see who’s to blame for it. Bad teaching’s the main thing. Not bad students, I mean.’

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My third reason for giving full marks to the novel is the masterful control of plot and language mr. Amis demonstrates. Having read several modernist novels preceding the publication of ‘Lucky Jim’ from the likes of Virginia Wolfe, Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, even as I admire the results, I can’t help but notice how they were headed into an elitist, eclectic direction. Amis may be coarse and provocative, but he is careful and effective in his phrasing, he has a natural flow for dialogue and a sharp wit that cuts through every fake attitude or sentiment.
In opposition to the likes of P G Wodehouse, who I also admire but who is basically an escapist writer, Amis is engaged with society and militant and passionate and articulate.

The question of luck comes up towards the end of the proceedings, challenging our system of values in a world that has become even more obsessed with the outward appearance of youth and beauty and success since the novel was published. It sure creates psychological trauma that deserves more study and more support.

It was all very bad luck on Margaret, and probably derived, as he’d thought before, from the anterior bad luck of being sexually unattractive. Christine’s more normal, i.e. less unworkable, character no doubt resulted, in part at any rate, from having been lucky with her face and figure. But that was simply that. To write things down as luck wasn’t the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration.

Finally, being angry and rebellious is OK and actually expected in the younger generation, but there will come a moment when you need to anchor your life in something more positive. Jim Dixon will be truly lucky when he discovers this purpose.

He thought what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he’d none to celebrate it with.

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I have come late to the party with this famous novel, but among the things that have become clear to me is that writers like David Lodge (“Changing Places”) or Richard Russo ( “Straight Man”) who penned funny books set in the academic world, didn’t spring out of nowhere and might have some tribute to pay to those writers who opened up the field before them.