152 Amis, Kingsley
The novel’s climax, Dixon’s drunken lecture
on “Merrie England,” encapsulates the contrast
between the characters and the satire on education.
Standing to deliver the lecture, Dixon begins with a
“preludial blaring sound” imitative of one of Welch’s
habitual mannerisms. Partly unconsciously, partly
in an attempt to placate Welch, he further imitates
Welch’s manner of speech: “He’d inserted an ‘of
course’ here, a ‘you see’ there, an ‘as you might call
it’ somewhere else; nothing so firmly recalled Welch
as that sort of thing.” In a pointed jab at academic
speech (as represented by Welch), Dixon also uses “a
number of favourite Welch tags: ‘integration of the
social consciousness,’ ‘identification of work with
craft,’ and so on.” Trying to break the imitation of
Welch, Dixon begins to sound like the university
principal, then affects an “exaggerated northern
accent,” followed in turn by someone sounding like
“an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of
a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts
from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate
Communist,” and finally speaking in an “unname-
able foreign accent... punctuating his discourse
with smothered snorts of derision... spitting out
the syllables like curses, leaving mispronunciations,
omissions, spoonerisms uncorrected.” Dixon’s speech
(in his description, “conjectural, nugatory, deluded,
tedious rubbish”) critiques the nostalgia-infused,
nonworldly nature of higher education and ensures
his dismissal. However, in the end Dixon finds
himself in better company outside the university,
concluding the novel’s negative assessment of the
world of higher education.
Eric Leuschner
sOcial class in Lucky Jim
Although Kingsley Amis, in a letter written in 1986,
denied the suggestion that Lucky Jim was intended
as a critique of the class conflict in postwar Britain
and was never comfortable with his identification
with the “angry young man” movement, it is dif-
ficult not to read the novel without seeing such
characters as Professor Welch and his son Bertrand
as being caricatures of a pretentious, class-conscious
type or Jim Dixon as the reactionary working-class
hero. As a comedy of manners, Lucky Jim’s humor
stems directly from its targeting of social foibles and
behaviors.
The novel opens with a conversation between
Dixon and Professor Welch that encapsulates
Welch’s characterization as someone obsessed with
trivialities, testifying to a snobbish, pseudo-cultured
person. Recalling a Post review of a recital, Welch
notes that the “reporter chap” mistakenly stated that
the concert was for “flute and piano,” not “recorder
and piano.” Opening with Welch’s long-winded
explanation of the difference between a flute and
recorder immediately establishes Welch as knowl-
edgeable, but it is evident that this type of knowl-
edge is not useful. Later, after Welch goes on about
the welfare state, “so-called freedom of education,”
and retributive punishment to Dixon while driv-
ing, Dixon looks at the window and sees his barber,
for whom he “felt a deep respect” because of “his
impressive exterior, his rumbling bass voice, and his
unsurpassable stock of information about the Royal
Family.” For Dixon, the low-brow gossip trumps the
niggling distinction between recorder and flute.
Not only is Professor Welch, with his passion
for amateur musicals, singled out for criticism, but
his sons are as well, especially Bertrand. Tagged as
elitist, Bertrand affects a cultured and cosmopolitan
attitude, which consistently irritates Dixon. While
the primary conflict between Dixon and Bertrand
is over Christine Callaghan, the tension between
the two results from the difference between appear-
ance and reality. In one of their final confrontations,
Dixon calls Bertrand on his behavior:You think that just because you’re tall and can
put paint on canvas you’re a sort of demigod.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you really were. But
you’re not: you’re a twister and a snob and a
bully and a fool. You think you’re sensitive,
but you’re not: your sensitivity only works
for things that people do to you. Touchy and
vain, yes, but not sensitive.”Primarily, the criticism in store for Welch and
his family lies in their pretentiousness, summed up
most succinctly in their affected clothing choices.
From the beginning, Professor Welch is seen wearing
a fishing hat, despite the fact that he is never seen