Lucky Jim Grows Up
POSTER, CONSTANCE H.
Lucky Jim Grows Up MY ENEMY'S ENEMY By Kingsley Amis Harcourt, Brace and World. 224 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by CONSTANCE H. POSTER Contributor, "New Republic." "Furioso" Reading Kingsley Amis'...
...But in fact he's shoddy material...
...When he encounters the truth, instead of being broken by it, he reaches out for what is probably the first real intimacy of his life, replete as he knows it will be with misunderstanding, difficulty and immeasurable strangeness...
...Doll, like Julian Ormerod, is a "con man" who in a muddled society, through superior vigor and drive, allied with sheer cunning, picks up what he wants from the world...
...But Amis redeems himself in two ways: He has a great ear...
...He explains himself quite clearly in talking to Archer, the University man, about the major, a fellow-reactionary whom they both hate: "I can't think of anybody whom I despise as thoroughly as I despise the major . . . He's so sure he's better...
...All the things Patrick wants so desperately—an unlimited supply of women, leisure, booze, money— come easily to Julian...
...He does not get her...
...Amis is consistently funny and eminently readable...
...Certainty has given place to doubt...
...That's the one thing I can't forgive...
...He and his hero both have heeded the adjuration to "shake the lead out...
...He talks a terrible and slightly outmoded RAF slang...
...An absolutely correct attitude for his age and time: The Angry Young Men had ample cause...
...Patrick, mid-20th century hero, can only disparage it momentarily, since the end result is that he will be able to sleep with Jenny all the time now...
...In fact he fascinates Patrick (and Amis) far more than Jenny does, and rightly because he's multi-dimensional as against Jenny's 38-24-36 measurements...
...He'll break...
...Moral Fibre" deals with a confrontation which illustrates this superbly...
...Of a number of the enemies with whom he chooses to lock horns, one might remark, in the old street idiom, "Leave him alone, he'll fall down by himself...
...Good...
...Yet even here there are no easy solutions...
...an act which Julian not only condemns verbally, but would not commit...
...But where, the novel seems to ask, is there to go, and what would you do even if you could...
...representing one class, idea or set of postures...
...Sergeant Doll saves Archer from Major Raleigh's scheme to send him to the Far East where the fighting is still going on...
...For many years he has lived on what proves to have been a oneway Platonic love affair...
...On the other hand, he seems to be engaged in some vast and mysterious series of "cons...
...The very ambivalence of Amis' attitude toward Doll indicates that he feels the old definitions no longer work...
...If he falls in the compost heap, he comes up covered with roses...
...That didn't mean that you had to feel friendly disposed towards any such person, bar the odd nurse perhaps, and then only on what you might call extrinsic grounds...
...And movement, even when cirsumscribed and groping, is preferable by far to the stasis of the protagonists of many of Amis' contemporaries, whose time seems to be spent flat on their backs, playing with their sensibilities...
...Julian's values are also unacceptable, for however much his vision is clearer than Patrick's, he is by custom and habit rooted in the eternal-pleasure set, awake enough among the lotus-eaters to despise their sleep, but too torpid himself to leave their company...
...Puce Baudelaire...
...As a "loner" he is admirable...
...lighter here, darker there, and finally so shifting that between graspingfor and touching the colors have altered...
...Lucky Jim represents all the negative anger of an adolescent who has just learned that the world is evil, is quite sure of the identity and nature of the enemy, and in trying to destroy him will yield no quarter...
...It presents a stupid, completely amoral whore whose one fine action is resisting the efforts of a horrifying social worker, trained in the British equivalent of Rose Franzblau psychology, to save her from herself...
...You cannot like Betty, but of Mair, the social worker, Amis says, "It was true enough that you had to have prison warders, local government officials, policemen, military policemen, nurses, parsons, scientists, mental-hospital attendants, politicians and—for the time being anyway, God forgive us all— hangmen...
...The three stories about the signal corps unit in postwar Europe are predictably anti-officer class and contemptuous of the liberal-intellectual whose attempts to cross class lines to engage in a moral action would be totally ineffectual were it not for the backing of enlisted men...
...Good or bad...
...Bad...
...He, too, wants Jenny and offers several times to set her up in a maisonette...
...A lot might be said about what Kingsley Amis is not...
...Even the puns are good: "He had felt the wing of the angel of marriage brush his cheek and was afraid...
...He does so not out of liking for Archer, or on principle, but for the sheer pleasure of putting down the major: the ends and means paradox...
...Unfortunately for the makers of ethical graphs and charts, he is by way of being a proto-fascist rather than a Labor supporter...
...As the novels succeed one another, his character has evolved in a striking manner...
...he still smells of dung, but he thrives on it...
...Figures supplied— C.H.P...
...Furioso" Reading Kingsley Amis' novels chronologically—Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling, Take A Girl Like You—along with the present book of short stories, one is made aware of the fact that Amis has created a hero, and a very modern one...
...the dialogue always sounds right and it is a joy to read...
...Were he to become a member of a party or a gang, he would be victim rather than hero...
...Third rate...
...A few years later, in That Uncertain Feeling, the hero's anger has abated somewhat...
...Life is such an ungainly burden, bundled together every which-way, full of oddly shaped bits and pieces that cannot be stacked neatly, that at one time it throws him backward for a pratfall and at another precipitates him into an astounding piece of luck...
...No principle...
...In Take A Girl Like You, Amis' point of view has so altered that neither Jenny Bunn, the ostensible heroine, struggling to maintain her virginity, nor Patrick Standish (Lucky Jim-hero grown older), working so hard to seduce her, excite our interest as much as Julian Ormerod, who according to Amis' old canons should be villain first class...
...Julian starts out as a minor character, but it is in him that the moral force of the book lies...
...For Patrick, as Amis sees him, is man not beyond good and evil, or insensible of the necessity for choice, but born into a world colored grey...
...Good...
...All the Blood Within Me," the most recent story, is about the shattering of an old man's long-held illusion...
...Good...
...His adventures still have some of the hysterical quality of the schoolboy, but at times they seem forced...
...Occasionally the gaucherie of his people is irritating and his value judgments simplistic...
...Take Sergeant Doll, in "I Spy Strangers...
...In the stories in My Enemy's Enemy, all written from 1955 through 1962, the same development of the hero can be observed...
...He is a member of the Establishment...
...But Jenny's defloration is accomplished by Patrick when she is so drunk she scarcely knows what is happening...
...Well, that is not a heroic action on the scale of Lancelot's or Gawain's, but given the circumstances, it is pretty courageous, and dragons have shrunk like everything else these days...
...It is not that the quality of the writing has fallen off...
...But there is a nagging doubt at the back of the hero's mind which suggests that sticking out one's tongue at authority isn't the best way to cope with it—hence, in part, the title...
...He has become aware of nuances of feeling, of the need for tenderness and gentle usage of some of the characters he encounters, even if they are "on the other side...
...If he represents wasted potentiality, Patrick's share even of this quality is left in doubt...
...Moreover, his people are in motion all the time and it is hugely comic motion...
...Yet he is enormously perceptive, much more so than Patrick...
...I can see him standing as a Labour candidate in ten year's time if the wind's still blowing that way...
...Not to be depended on . . . He's soft...
...With Julian, moral judgments cease to be simple...
...Good...
...Bad...
...He is not a novelist of ideas, a discoverer of profound insights, or a stylistic innovator...
...He is generous, though, and willing to share them with Patrick...
...He is quite small and his world is limited...
...Nor is Amis' hero a static figure...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 11
