The Elegant Variation: MORE ON LUCKY JIM

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June 21, 2007

MORE ON LUCKY JIM

Tuesday's post on Kingsley Amis and the subsequent comments thread has sent us back to our library, curiously poking through some Amis-related volumes, specifically his Memoirs and The Letters of Kingsley Amis to check out Amis's thoughts on Lucky Jim.

Amis's Memoirs, while entertaining and gossipy, don't offer much literary insight - it's more "The People I Have Known" variety - but he does note the following in his chapter on Larkin:

Jim Dixon's surname has something to do with ordinariness, but at the outset had much more to do with Dixon Drive, the street where Philip's digs were. Yes, for a short time I was to tell his story. The fact that, as it turned out, Dixon resembles Larkin in not the smallest particular, not even in place of origin, witnesses to the transmuting power of art. Philip came into Lucky Jim in quite another way. In 1950 or so I sent him my sprawling first draft and got back what amounted to a synopsis of the first third of the structure and other things besides. He decimated the characters that, in carried-away style, I had poured into the tale without care for the plot: local magnate Sir George Wettling, cricket-loving Philip Orchard, vivacious American visitor Teddy Wilson. He helped me to make a proper start. And I never even bought him a lunch! - not then, anyway.

He did, however, dedicate the completed novel to Larkin.

You can find considerably more of interest pertaining to the genesis and reception of Lucky Jim in The Letters of Kingsley Amis. His correspondence with Larkin traces the book through its earliest incarnations, when it was known Dixon & Christine and then The Man of Feeling. Here he is on March 3, 1953 writing, as ever, to Larkin:

I've called it Lucky Jim now, to empahsise the luck theme - epigraph Oh lucky Jim, How I envy him bis. ... I'm afraid you are very much the ideal reader of the thing and chaps like you don't grow on trees.

Amis's sense of the book's prospects were present in his first letter to literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, who asked to see the manuscript he was working on. On December 8, 1952 he wrote:

I shall be very glad to send you my novel when the time comes. It would never make an author's or publisher's fortune, but I think it is quite funny; that, at any rate, is its aim.

History would prove Amis wrong on this score although, writing on March 28, 1955 to Rubinstein on the occasion of winning the Somerset Maugham Award, Amis wondered:

I suppose this bit of news may do the sales of Jim a bit of good? Or is that too sanguine?

But by his September 2 letter to her of the same year, the good news was pouring in.

Many thanks for sending on the review and for the tidings about the sales. I am so immensely relieved that my neurotic forebodings about the book have proved to be unjustified. I really think the reviewers have been most generous, and the fact that about four of them have stigmatised the book in passing as "vulgar" has been almost as encouraging as any of their praise.

Looking back in his later years, his opinion of Lucky Jim lowered somewhat. Here he is complaining to Larkin about how the book has aged, in a letter dated October 14, 1985, discussing a reissue of Larkin's The Less Deceived:

Matters take a turn for the better when one comes to the text, stil bloody marvelous after 30 years, nothing faded at all, in fact better in parts, e.g. Age, Spring. Wish I could say the same for poor ole LJ, which started to get pretty silly in parts quite soon.

And, finally, in a letter to Harry Ritchie in 1986, Amis discounts the notion that class informs Lucky Jim:

On Jim and related matters. I had no social (class, etc.) intentions at all: what class are the Welches? As for politics, of course Bertrans is a Conservative (the buns conversation) because Dixon hates him. Of course Margaret signs in the Conservative choir. As for culture, of course he hates Mozart; I must have said already that him hating Catelnuovo-Tedesco wouldn't be any good. Because of course Welch loves Mozart. Same with the madrigals, etc. None of these things, Mozart, madrigals, Bertrand's kind of painting, were particularly fashionable or unfashionable, they were just things I happened to know about that D would hate. As regards the provincialness and so on, after thinking it over I would put it like this. The decision to set it in the North, and make the hero non-bourgeois and put in a lot about his job was taken in the same spirit as a detective story writer of that period deciding he would rather not set it in a pleasant Sussex village and not have the baronet murdered in his library at the Towers. A literary decision in that it had to do with the the structure, characterisation etc. of that book, but not literary in the sense that would make it a shot in a campaign or a unit in a literary offensive against mandarinism or anything else. Nothing programmatic or manifesto-ish about it.

The letters, endlessly diverting if shockingly juvenile at turns, are highly recommended and sure to keep people arguing about Amis for years to come - much as he'd have liked it, we think.

Posted at 12:04 AM in Worthy Titles | Permalink

Comments

What a pleasure to visit The Elegant Variation after a long absence, only to find all the right morsels on Lucky Jim. The novel comes flooding back, and contrary to Amis' woes, the book still resonates very well with me today, if only a little burnt/cut around the edges.

Posted by: Matthew Brett | June 21, 2007 at 08:24 PM

What a great post. Thanks for doing the research.

Posted by: Michael O'D | June 22, 2007 at 11:21 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 21, 2007

MORE ON LUCKY JIM

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 21, 2007

MORE ON LUCKY JIM

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism