Why lucky jim turned right

Wonderful piece. I like to think we all have those rare reading experiences of which, many years later, we remember not just what we read and felt but what our surroundings were — the place, the time of day, noises, smells, and what was going on in our lives.

As if they ever could. This book is a family favorite. I am very excited about the New York Review of Books press re-release of the novel! I used to think maybe there was something telling in the particular book a person kept coming back to. I found it took people, including me, about that long to adjust to the time period. But yeah. I can quote huge portions of it. And the long-lived wondering frown and the preludial sound. And and and…. Garp Travers: did you make it past Chapter 5?

Did it take off for you? Did you give up? Did you fail to find anything amusing? I love what Ryan wrote about having a relationship with a book. My book group is about to discuss Lucky Jim on my recommendation, and I know some people will react as Garp did.

Lucky Jim has one of the most beautifully written descriptions of a hangover in all of literature. The toenail-clipping sequence, alone, is worth the price of the book. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. There are a lot of issues at play: hate, misogyny, capitalism i. I had an page manuscript that I had taken 10 years to finish; literary fiction is never a clear moneymaker, long novels are problematic from, if anything, a production point of view all that paper, all that ink, the increased shipping costs , and yet my editor took me on for a nice five, not six-figure, advance.

Even better, she had also just taken on a prizewinning Korean American author whom I admired, whose first book had also come out with an independent press.

My editing process at Beacon Press was fairly straightforward because the novel was ready to go. With the current novel, there are structural issues, and a team of editors have rolled up their sleeves, put the tome on a metaphorical lift, and gotten just as sweaty and dirty tinkering with its guts as I have. And it can have results.

Books are indeed published by corporations, which need to sell to stay in business. Each one is written by an author or co-author. In an overcrowded publishing market, bad attention can be just as valuable, perhaps more so, as good attention. The second thing to consider is unintended collateral damage. Recently I picked up a second-hand copy of the first edition of One Fat Englishman, which prompted me to reread it. In the light of Amis's subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, it seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel - also much funnier, in its black way, than I remembered.

It now seems obvious that Roger Micheldene was in many respects a devastating and prophetic self-portrait. The character's promiscuous womanising and inordinate drinking certainly had autobiographical sources.

For the novel's American setting, Amis would have been drawing on his experience as a visiting fellow at Princeton University in , when, he informed Philip Larkin in a letter on his return: "I was boozing and fucking harder than at any time - On the second count I was at it practically full-time - you have to take what you can get when you can get it, you sam [sic].

Amis's casual infidelities were a constant source of friction between him and his wife Hilly, but in , when he would have been working on One Fat Englishman, he fell seriously in love with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom he met that autumn at the Cheltenham Literary Festival appropriately enough as co-members of a forum on sex in literature ; he commenced a passionate affair with her. A photograph of this vengeful graffito is reproduced in Eric Jacobs's biography.

Before the novel was published, the marriage had ended. Although Kingsley was not really fat at this time, he became so in due course, and as gluttonous as Roger Micheldene. But whereas for Roger this was an appetite that competed for priority with the sexual at one point, having picked up a girl at a bring-your-own-picnic, he worries about "the problem of retaining contact with Suzanne without giving her anything to eat" , with Kingsley, according to his son Martin in his memoir Experience, "getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of - a complex symptom, repressive, self-isolating.

It cancelled him out sexually. One Fat Englishman was written on the cusp of Amis's ideological transformation, almost exactly halfway between the Fabian pamphlet of in which he declared his allegiance to the Labour party, and the essay, Why Lucky Jim Turned Right, which announced his conversion to conservatism. As time went on, he became more and more notorious for his politically incorrect opinions on education, war, women, and race, and domestically he enjoyed winding Martin up in this way.

Many of his prejudices were anticipated by Roger Micheldene, but in the novel they have an ambivalent import because of the implied moral of the tale. Social conflict became expressed as a battle between the sexes.

But in the less political s such insights were rare. On the one hand, there is the rejection of the hypocritical sexual codes preached by the Establishment. She is shabbily treated, first courted, then shunned by Jim as he pursues Christine. This could have made for a fairly complex picture of tangled emotions. Her previous boyfriend, Catchpole, appears at the end of the novel to prove to Jim that her suicide attempt at the beginning of the novel was a total fake.

Catchpole states:. We began to have rows about nothing, and I mean that literally. I was much too wary, of course, to start any kind of sexual relationship with her, but she soon started behaving as if I had.

I was perpetually being accused of hurting her, ignoring her, trying to humiliate her in front of other women, and all that sort of thing. His pursuit of Christine is therefore totally justified. What is objectionable is not so much the situation itself — sexual treachery has been the staple of the novel virtually from its inception — as the way in which Amis rigs the fiction to get the result.

Catchpole is a character solely designed to give the desired outcome without its in any sense arising from the objective structure of the novel itself. Margaret is manipulated authorially into becoming a monster, an enemy — part of the conspiracy to stand in the way of Jim and the realisation of his desires. The only thing to be said in mitigation is that the earlier depiction of Margaret in the novel is much less manipulative — even sensitive within limits.

Men may be predators, in the sense that they take every opportunity to pursue women, and that may be the source of tension and unhappiness for their long suffering wives or girlfriends, and indeed for the men themselves. But the message is that this is the nature of male desire, a frailty that in the end can be resisted but not conquered, forgiven but likely to be repeated. That, at any rate, is the message that comes across in Take a Girl Like You and its sequel, Difficulties with Girls The long suffering girlfriend is Jenny Bunn who marries handsome womaniser Patrick Standish, and the two novels feature his infidelities and adulteries and his attempts to atone.

But Jenny comes across as a woman hopelessly unable to cope with the sexual attention she receives and irrationally fond of a man she knows to be a shit. She is contrasted with Anna, the independent, strong woman — who turns out to be a pathological liar and manipulator: even her lesbianism is a fraudulent attempt to gain attention.

The crudeness of the portrayal of women goes with another kind of crudeness — that of social setting. This is sketchy, more a parade of social prejudice than anything else. Jenny Bunn herself is meant to be a northerner, from a working class background, down to earth but a bit unaware of the devious ways of the big city. But Amis hardly bothers to establish this except in the most perfunctory way.

The novel has a strong element of paranoia about it. Stanley seems to believe that there is a plot to get him and that women really are mad. Although there is never any attempt to see male homosexuality as other than deviant, there is nevertheless a peculiar kind of tolerance for it as of some different species.

In your case, straightforward, women; in my case not straightforward, not women — but, non-male, except anatomically. More like children. Crying when things go wrong. Making difficulties just so as to be a person. Stripped to its basics, this amounts to no more than reactionary conventional wisdom about the relationship between the sexes.

Ironically, masculinity has to include its destabilising opposite, the male homosexual. What one might call the exclusive male club view of the world is plagued by the suspicion that there may be traitors within. The deep vein of misogyny in his writing is not compensated for by fictional subtlety. On the contrary, as we noted earlier, the subjectivity masquerading as objective analysis produces artistic crudeness. The novels increasingly become a vehicle for reactionary prejudice.

One explanation is that he is a product of his period. The revolt against the Establishment never got much beyond a repudiation of high culture. Without any positive pole of attraction the revolt remained essentially negative.

If we compare him with George Orwell, there are, of course, differences of background. But there are certain similarities. There is also a tendency to philistinism: the sweeping rhetoric against cranky radicalism, for example, in The Road to Wigan Pier , which mars his personal commitment to change for ordinary people.

What essentially saves Orwell is both the keenness of his exposure to the misery created by the depths of the slump and, more importantly, the searing experience of revolution in Spain though by the end of the Second World War the confidence that things can be changed has given way to a pessimism that allowed his work to be co-opted by the enemies of socialism, despite his own continuing personal commitment to change.

No comparably radicalising events were available to Amis. He was too young for the s to have any real effect and the long boom of the s and s — the period of his maturity — were mostly bereft of any historically significant upheavals in the West, that is. That left only his experience of the army to have any impact on him — enough to make him look at the post-war world with a jaundiced eye and poke fun at its shibboleths, but little more.

Hence his revolt is largely individual and personal: a fight for the right to do what one wants. There was nothing to take that revolt in a left wing direction. Another consequence was that there was less to explore. His ear for voices, for mimicry of a certain type of speech, gave his early fiction — particularly Lucky Jim — real energy. But even here, with Amis at his best, there is not much sense of an objective social dimension to the novel. But there are limits to the number of ways in which the form can be fruitful if its prime virtue is the ability to impersonate a certain kind of consciousness, however brilliantly that is done.

The social world of his novels becomes increasingly stuck in a narrow realm of pubs and parties. The outside world is no more than a distant echo, an understanding of it no more than a parade of unthinking and reactionary reflexes. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the world is reduced to a sexual battleground, with little concrete sense of the social determinations of sexual conflict. Is the force of this argument that Amis was necessarily going to be limited because of the period in which he lived?

That would be grossly reductionist. The s may not have been a fantastically productive period as far as the novel was concerned.

But one should not conclude that only an Amis was possible. Other novelists in the period give the lie to such determinism. Sadly, all this is missing in Amis. His undeniable skill was harnessed to an increasingly reactionary and limited view of the world. The talent that had the power to satirise the pretensions and foibles of official culture became a talent to offend only the victims.