Lucky Jim Book Covers

Lucky Jim is my favorite novel. Not only that, but whenever I see a used version in a bookstore, I generally buy it, especially if it's a cover I don't have yet. One day, maybe, I'll have a whole shelf devoted to versions of Kingsley Amis's first novel. It would be a large shelf, since there are many, many versions of this never-out-of-print book.

Here are the ones I own:

There are a few others I have, that I couldn't find images for online. The classic, of course, and probably my favorite, is the one drawn by Edward Gorey, which he did for the first United States version. The top one, with the illustration by Arthur Robins, freaks me out a little since the illustrator did the drawings for What's Happening to Me, the book on puberty my parents gave me when I was, well, hitting puberty.

Here are some I don't own:

Man, what I would give for the Four Square Books version, with the pulpy girls fighting over a very dapper Jim Dixon. I'm sure I could find some of these versions on ebay, but it's more fun to find them in bookstores.

Lionel Asbo: State of England

It's pretty obnoxious when readers such as myself make suggestions about what an artist should do next (e.g. Woody Allen should stop making movies about neurotic people), but I'm going to do it here. I wish Martin Amis would take his wit, his characterizations, his fizzy prose, and write a straight (i.e. not satirical) novel. It's not just that I think he might write something very good (just imagine a Martin Amis version of his father's great novel The Old Devils), but it would also mean that he wouldn't be writing another bad book. Lionel Asbo goes over a lot of territory that MA has already trod on: The distopian present, thugs with excessive appetites, character foils, and he's done it better before. That's the problem.

Poetry Monday

I just read Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth, which will certainly be one of my favorite books of the year. It's a twisty take on the spy novel, one that is actually far more about literature and love. There's a fair amount of poetry discussion in the novel, including a reference to one of my favorite Kingsley Amis poems, "A Bookstore Idyll". And there is reference to a poem I had never read by Edward Thomas called "Adlestrop."

Here are both poems, well worth reading.

A Bookshop Idyll

Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY

            Comes the brief POETRY shelf;

By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology

            Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,

            I scan the contents page,

Relieved to find the names are mostly new;

            No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:

            Landscape near Parma

Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,

            So does Rilke and Buddha.

“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read”

            These titles seem to say;

But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,

            Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter

            For several seconds;

From somewhere in this (as in any) matter

            A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart

            Or squash it flat?

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;

            Girls aren’t like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff

            Can get by without it.

Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;

            They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay them open

            Just doesn’t strike them.

Women are really much nicer than men:

            No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times

            We sat up half the night

Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,

            And couldn’t write.

                                   

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

A Good Man in Africa (1981)

William Boyd's first novel is truly excellent, enough to make an aspiring writer such as myself pretty sick. Also, it's abundantly clear that the young William Boyd's favorite book (or close to it) is my own favorite novel, Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. There are sections and phrases that are very familiar to someone who has read Lucky Jim as many times as I have. A Good Man in Africa is a comic novel, its protagonist a low-level member of England's diplomatic corps in Western Africa. His name is Morgan Leafy and he's a corrupt, womanizing boozer who stumbles in and out of farcical situation. The plot builds, however, with genuine suspense and the atmosphere is palpable. William Boyd: My new favorite writer.

Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is my all time favorite novel, and I'm fairly certain it will never relinquish that spot. Anyway, just read it again, as I often do in March, a month in which I always need some comfort, and enjoyed it as much as I always do.

But I'm not here to talk about that: I'm here to talk about the character of Margaret Peel in the novel. She is the neurotic lecturer that our hero Jim Dixon has become entangled with, despite his many misgivings. She is needy, manipulative, unsure of herself, self-conscious, but also somewhat kind and intelligent. She is a character in the novel that I become more and more interested in each time I read the book. Even though she is made out to be a ridiculous fool (and that was Kingsley Amis' intention -- I wouldn't suggest otherwise), I think she is also a tragic figure, someone who is just not comfortable enough with herself to make it in the world.

Margaret is based on Monica Jones (her full name is Margaret Monica Beale Jones), a lecturer who was a long-time friend and sometime lover of Amis' own best friend Philip Larkin. It's a cruel portrait, and I wonder how Larkin felt about it. But the bottom line is that Margaret (more so than her foil Christine Callaghan) is such a well-written character that she takes on a life of her own. I think she's one of the great characterizations in the novel.

Larkin and Monica Jones on one of their holidays

The Contenders (1958)

I picked this book up at a used bookstore because I'd heard John Wain's name before (he was an acquaintance of Kingsley Amis) and because I liked the Penguin paperback version that I found. Then I read it and it was a pretty good book, very well-written, essentially a satire about success. Two friends from school grow up to be successful in their own rights, one a businessman and one an artist. They try and one-up one another, and eventually a pretty girl gets in the mix. The pretty girl character is remarkably thin considering her importance in the structure of the love triangle. I know that Amis and Wain were competitors and not particularly fond of one another but Amis wrote better female characters than Wain, at least based on this one book, and that's not something you can say very often about Kingsley Amis.

Devil May Care (2008)

This book was published as a celebration of sorts for Ian Fleming's 100th birthday. It was clear why Sebastian Faulks was picked to write this book. He's an acclaimed thriller writer, but more importantly, the guy is a master parodist. This is a spot-on copy of Fleming's style, right down to the casual racism and the fixation on every meal. Not only that but this book picks up in the late sixties, supposedly taking place immediately after the final Bond novel, The Man With the Golden Gun. And it's not a bad book exactly, but it's not really good either. One of the problems is that it is trying so hard to be a Bond book, and to cover every trope and cliche, that it never seems to breathe at all. Even Fleming was frequently willing to throw monkey wrenches into his own formula. Devil May Care is just one familiar Bond scene after another. The master criminal has a physical deformity, plus a seemingly unbeatable sidekick. Bond first beats the antagonist at a game (in this case, tennis). Bond is captured and not immediately killed. Etcetera. It's also a repulsively violent novel which is in keeping with Fleming's style, but really, some of the stuff that Chagrin gets up to (Chagrin is the "oriental" sidekick) is truly disgusting.

So I didn't really like it but I will say this. Why don't the producers of the Bond films look to some of these books for the movie plots? This wasn't a great book but it was a lot better than any of the original plots that were written for the Brosnan films, or for Quantum of Solace. It even has a decent title. The other book they should consider making is Kingsley Amis' stab at the Bond thriller, called Colonel Sun. Again, not a great book, but a whole lot better than any of the original ideas in the film series.

Essential Amis

In honor of Martin Amis releasing his new book, The Pregnant Widow, yesterday, I thought I'd put together a top ten list of my favorite Amis books, both by father Kingsley and son Martin.


Lucky Jim by KA

It’s hard to imagine that this story of an unhappy first-year professor in Postwar England was considered shocking in its day, but it was. Authority-snubbing and youthful dissatisfaction has come a long way since 1955, but it has never been rendered as cleverly as in Kingsley Amis’ first novel. This is the only book that I can honestly say is “laugh out loud” funny. Not the deepest of Amis’ novels but the most pleasurable by a long shot, and the book I've read more times than any other.

Money by MA
Martin Amis pulled out all the stops for this, his fifth novel, a blistering, crackling satire of film financing in early eighties New York City. The main character, John Self, is both Amis’ most grotesque and funniest creation, and Amis’ writing is never better. It’s a long book that bulges with style. There is hardly a dull sentence in the whole thing.


The Old Devils by KA
A late masterpiece by the elder Amis. A group of aging friends in Wales drink and talk, then drink and talk some more, and without drawing attention to it, Amis touches on all the big themes of existence. Love, friendship, fear, mortality. His most touching novel.

Experience by MA

A brilliant memoir by Martin that focuses primarily on his relationship with his father, while wandering into other equally fascinating subjects, including an abducted cousin, and Martin’s teeth.

Everyday Drinking by KA

A collection of KA’s newspaper columns on the subject of drink. As KA said, he didn’t agree to the column in order to have an excuse to drink more, he arranged for the column in order to recoup some cash for all the hours he spent studying the subject.

The Green Man by KA

A ghost story in which the adulterous, alcoholic proprietor of an inn begins to believe that the rumored ghost he uses to lure in customers might actually be for real. What makes this so entertaining is the unreliability of the narrator. Is it a haunting or is it the whiskey?

London Fields by MA

Another sprawling black comedy of urban sins. This one has MA’s second greatest creation after Money’s John Self, a low-level criminal named Keith Talent.

The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader

A beautifully written, warts-and-all biography of KA. He was a man of enormous appetites and enormous contradictions. A misanthrope that couldn’t stand to be alone. A drunkard with incredible work ethic. A misogynist in the constant company of women.

The Rachel Papers by MA

This was Martin Amis’s first novel, a slim funny coming-of-age tale about a precocious teen. Not as ambitious as his later works, and that might be a good thing.

Collected Poetry by Philip Larkin

Not an Amis, of course, but Philip Larkin, a close friend of KA’s since Oxford, is the dedicatee of Lucky Jim and the Godfather of Philip. He also wrote a lovely poem for Sally Amis, the tragically short-lived sister of Martin, called “Born Yesterday.” Like nearly every other poem he wrote, it’s a keeper.

Three for St. Patrick's Day

Three of my favorite things with green in the title:

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis. This a terrific ghost story. The twist is that the narrator is a black-out drunk and it's unclear whether he is actually seeing a ghost or just hallucinating.


Green for Danger. A great English detective story about a murder that takes place on the operating table.


A Flash of Green by John D. MacDonald. Maybe the best book written by one of the great writers of the last hundred years. This was also made into a movie with Ed Harris and Blair Brown but I haven't seen it in years.