Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim and Me

In my mid 20’s I read a good few Campus novels, satirical stories about academic life.  This was the late 1980’s when that campus world they described was disappearing, and they felt like nostalgia even then.

My Girlfriend’s dad was a Northern Grammar School educated academic who raged against the British class system that he believed had held him back. He longed to be free to make a career in the more meritocratic United States. Reading these books made me feel connected with the world he was talking about.  As my BTec in Building at Vauxhall College moved seamlessly into a Surveying Degree as Southbank Poly, the kind of academic world they portrayed  in these books was so much more fun than the pragmatic reality.  

The book often considered the original campus novel is Lucky Jim. But though I read Malcolm Bradbury, Tom Sharpe, Howard Jacobson and David Lodge, I never got round to Kingsley Amis’ most famous work.  A large part of the reason for this is to do with its Author.

 My views on Kingsley Amis were framed early and not very favourably. I paid a pound for a well-worn copy of Penthouse from one of my Classmates in the CSE electronics class. It was from the era when porn mags aspired to be gentlemen’s publications.  Basically they were like a British Airways inflight magazines some dirty pictures thrown in. For the 14 year old me the features on sports cars and films were the skin on the banana, there to be discarded.  My eyes fell on a cartoon of a smug looking middle-aged man in glasses holding a pen, perched at the top of his column. This column was (possibly) titled ‘Kingsley on Drink’. I read the opening couple of sentences and from then on Kingsley Amis was the bloke that wrote the unsexy bits for jazz mags.

This prejudice was reinforced by Wendy Cope’s ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’. The opening poem was ‘Engineers Corner’, the sentiment of which, as a would be surveyor, I resented bitterly. A resentment that was  in retrospect  quite complex and multi layered, but owed nothing to Kingsley Amis himself.

But more than this, whenever I encountered Kingsley Amis he seemed to be the literary equivalent of a right wing shock jock. Making offensive comments about Jews and reaping the predictable ‘controversy’ did nothing provoke an interest in his books.

When Sebastian Faulks did his excellent series on fiction I was surprised to see ‘Jim Dixon’ amongst the ‘heroes’. By now I did appreciate that Kingsley Amis had significance beyond being a Penthouse columnist so was both curious and sceptical. So I was glad that the Waterstones Croydon Book Group chose Lucky Jim. It has forced me to get on with it and judge the book on its merits not what I might have thought about its author.

Looking back my view of Amis was so generational. The mid 20’s me saw a right wing racist old roué. He seemed much like the bitter old surveyors I was working for. The ones that bemoaned how badly they were being treated, groped the secretaries and came back pissed and abusive from lunch.  I did not see the younger man, the new exciting voice, the writer that my girlfriend’s dad had admired.

Whether or not I actually like Lucky Jim will be for another day.