by Michael Bloor
(first published in Literally Stories, Oct 27th 2024)
I’m a big fan of re-reading, a sovereign cure for Life’s Disappointments. Whenever you injure your foot at the start of a walking holiday, or your team gets relegated, or the school bully turns up again as your new line manager, there’s one guaranteed restorative: re-reading a favourite story. And not just any favourite story: for my money, it’s got to be either a galloping adventure story, or a comic novel. (Notice I don’t say ‘favourite author:’ Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island,’ or ‘Kidnapped,’ definitely fall into the ‘sovereign cure’ category, but don’t ever pick up his ‘St Ives’).
When it comes to comic novels, it’s best to have a few candidates to draw on, because even the best jokes can become a little stale with very frequent repetition. My current list (there have been a few deletions over the years) consists of the following: Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm;’ Stanislaw Lem’s ‘The Star Diaries;’ David Lodge’s ‘Changing Places;’ J. K. Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat;’ Alexander Kinglake’s ‘Eothen;’ and, last but not least, Kingsley Amis’ ‘Lucky Jim.’
Kingsley Amis (1922-95) published ‘Lucky Jim’ in 1954. It was his first novel. He published a lot of other stuff after that, characterised by an increasing misanthropy. When ‘Lucky Jim’ came out, Amis was lumped with a group of UK authors with the title, The Angry Young Men. In Amis’ case, I’m afraid the angry young man transitioned into grumpy old git. But that shouldn’t detract from our enjoyment of his debut novel.
Lucky Jim is Jim Dixon, a temporary junior lecturer in history at the (thinly disguised) Swansea University, where Amis also taught. Dixon is much put upon. His head of department, Professor Welch, is a vague, absent-minded, near-killer driver and devotee of late medieval music, whom Jim must try and impress in order to secure an extension to his contract of employment. His salary is insufficient for his simple needs – his only savings are the anticipated deposits on his small collection of empty beer bottles. The woman he yearns for is the girlfriend of a pretentious modernist painter, Bertrand, the son of Professor Welch.
Jim lurches from one disaster to another. An invited guest to a medieval music weekend at Chez Prof Welch, en route, as a passenger in Welch’s car, Jim seeks to avert death or serious injury, by whipping off his glasses and rolling himself into a ball. On arrival, he discovers the musical weekend entertainment involves participation in a choir; he feels unable to confess that he can’t read music. As the evening proceeds, he slips away through the french windows to the local pub, where he celebrates in style his blessed release.
The most famous part of the book is the first paragraph of Chapter 6, where Jim wakes up the next morning in a guest bedroom at Chez Welch. No less an authority than The New Yorker described it as the best description of a hangover in world literture:
“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not so much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-ciuntry run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”*
His state of mind further deteriorated when he discovered that his previous failure to extinguish a late-night cigarette had resulted in a largish burnhole in a bedsheet, a blanket, and an expensive-looking rug, plus some superficial damage to the bedside table. He knows that he will be quite unable to confess this to the tiger-ish Mrs Welch. He ponders the mess then uses a razorblade to remove the discolouration around the burnholes, believing that the result might – for a second or two – be misinterpreted as the work of ravaging moths.
Further disasters follow fast. All things conspire against him, including the local public transport system. But needless to say, Jim wins through in the end, he gets the woman of his dreams and a splendid job in London, the city of his dreams. It can’t truly be a comic novel without a happy ending.
I imagine that you can tell that I’ve re-read ‘Lucky Jim’ recently. Well, during that re-reading, I realised that there is another great fugitive benefit to re-reading that is worth mentioning, namely that of pleasurable anticipation. From time to time, you find yourself turning a page quite eagerly. Because you know that there’s a really good bit coming up…
*Kingsley Amis, ‘Lucky Jim,’ Penguin Books, 1976, p.61