written for the majority. Though social reportage has produced valuable results,
from Zola to some of the work of V. S. Naipaul, social representation is only one of
the functions of literature.
Even when the purpose of a novel can fairly be described as the portrayal of a new
or neglected portion of the life of society, representation does not have to be literal.
Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jimillustrates this point. Amis’s Jim Dixon is a genuine comic
invention, a lower middle-class provincial lecturer incurably hostile to all forms of
pretension, especially the painfully high culture of his madrigal-singing Professor.
Lucky Jimis excellent farce. Amis’s later novels developed Dixon’s talent for taking
off pseuds and bores. He was a verbal caricaturist of wicked accuracy, a craftsman of
the grotesque, but increasingly a curmudgeon, though Lucky Jimremains the most
vigorous of university novels.
The revolution of the 1960s was often misinterpreted, especially outside Britain.
It was more social, personal and sexual than public and political, a matter of clothes
as well as of class, and probably affected women more than men, insofar as the two
can be separated. As Philip Larkin (b. 1922) noted in his ‘Annus Mirabilis’:
Sexual intercourse began in 1963,
Which was just too late for me,
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LPThis gloomily pedantic joke offers dates for some changes: the introduction of the
female contraceptive pill, liberating sexual behaviour; leave to print four-letter
words; the triumph of pop music. The notion that sexual inhibition is bad and
sexual explicitness is good has had lasting consequences, though of a kind which
would have dismaye d the author ofLady Chatter ley’s Lover. The widespread adop-
tion of the female contraceptive pill coincided with a new claim for equal opportu-
nity for women in employment, and in sex without marriage, and an explicit claim
fo r parity of esteem for literature devoted to women’s experience. The radical South
African writer Doris Lessing (1919– ) was angrier about race, and about men, than
the young men were about class. A challenge to heterosexuality as the norm, and a
plea for same-sex relationships to be accepted, was heard in the plays of Joe Orton
(1933–1967),and has increasingly been heard since, especially in the theatre. Some
feminists aspired to women-only social arrangements.
nPoetry
Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, friends at St John’s College, Oxford, were suspi-
cious of high culture. They preferred, or could better afford, jazz, beer and mockery
to madrigals, wine and Romanticism.Lucky Jim ends with Jim Dixon’s attack on the
myth of Merrie England. Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’ probes uneasily the reasons
why churches are visited. Larkin also questioned the authenticity of a poetic ‘myth
kitty’, the religion and myth drawn on by Eliot, Yeats and earlier poets. For him those
myths were dead. These Oxford English graduates, critical of what seemed to them
pretentious in high culture, were soon placed high among the trophies of the more
middlebrow culture of the next generation: Amis a Lecturer at Peterhouse College,
Cambridge; Larkin the Librarian of the University of Hull. Their suspicion of
pretension turned into a general defensive irony.
POETRY 393