A Pilgrim’s Digression

Since sometime in August, I have been reading the novel Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. A friend of one of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, I had been aware of Amis for a long time, but had never got round to reading his most well-known novel. I knew it was a comic novel, and I knew from my reading of Larkin’s biography that Amis was quite a funny fellow in college, so I expected good things. I don’t feel disappointed.

I am only a little more than half-way through this short novel, though. I read a page here or there, on the train or in the coffee shop, or at my desk at lunch. It’s no way to read a book and really absorb it, but it is how I read these days. Bits and pieces, here and there. I find I have trouble keeping character names straight, or remembering what happened last week, when I last picked the novel up.

Anyway, this will not be a literary analysis of any kind. I don’t do that anymore. I want to share a few of what I feel are memorable quotes from the book. I’ll begin with just a brief synopsis, to provide some context.

Jim Dixon is a professor at a small, rural school, where he has hopes of becoming a permanent faculty member. His hopes rest on the publication of an academic paper, which he is not really intellectually invested in. The comedy of the novel comes from the way in which Amis pokes fun at academics. The whole profession is portrayed as something of a sham. Dixon is a specialist in Medieval studies in the history department, but he doesn’t really believe in what he is doing. At the very beginning of the novel, he asks how he came to be a professor of history–certainly not by his published work or excellent teaching–and as Amis writes, “as usual he shelved this question,” instead focusing on the immediate need to secure a permanent position.

He does not even believe in his own research. And here I will introduce the first of my qutoes. The chair of his department has just asked for a reminder of the title of his paper:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most for its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance.

What is the unfortunate title of this most unfortunate work of scholarship? The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.

When Dixon does get an offer of publication for the article, he immediately tells his department chair and a couple colleagues about the acceptance, all of whom throw cold water on his excitement. One colleague comments on the poor quality of the stationary the editor used for his letter to Dixon; another says that since the editor did not give a definite date of publication, it really doesn’t mean much. “A vague acceptance of that kind really isn’t much use to anyone…No, you pin him down to a date. Take my advice.”

What becomes apparent is that none of his colleagues want to acknowledge each others successes. There is an element of jealousy and competition in their interactions.

Dixon’s preoccupation with finding a permanent position is constantly in danger of being thwarted by his own carelessness. Some of the most humorous moments of the novel come when Dixon’s facade of academic earnestness nearly falls. He hates his most eager student, a fellow named Michie, because he believes Michie asks him tough questions merely to try to show him up for a poser. Michie also happens to be a handsome, athletic WWII veteran who is popular with the pretty girls Dixon tries to recruit for his classes, yet another reason to dislike him.

And at a long, boring social gathering staged by his department chair, Dixon arranges for a colleague to ring him up and tell him that his parents have popped down for a surprise visit, so he can leave early. This ruse is blown when a colleague betrays Dixon and tells the Department Chair of the plot. These incidents provide the humor for the novel, but they are also central to what I see as the building theme: obviously, like many other modern men, Dixon is working at a job that he actively dislikes for reasons he cannot define, other than by invoking the desire for financial security.

His love life is quite similar in this respect. He is dating the daughter of the chair of the history department, not really because he likes her (it becomes apparent he does not), but because she likes him intensely, and he feels it would be disastrous for him to turn her away. Because she is emotionally dependent on him, and because Dixon is not a total ass who would feel nothing about hurting a woman, he also feels a moral obligation to pretend to love her. He constantly asks, “What would she do to herself if he should reject her?” She had went into a depression once before, upon being rejected by a lover.

The crux of the novel is whether Dixon is always going to do what is expected of him and what he feels other people want him to do, or is he going to choose his own path? He eventually falls in love with another woman, which sets up the novel for its conflict. He is going to have to choose between women and, maybe, his career.

My final quotes come from the chapter in which an experienced woman friend tells Dixon he has a duty to pursue the woman he loves, not the one he feels indebted to.

“Yes, your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can’t, and you don’t know her very well. Ignorance of the other person topped off with deprivation…The old hopeless passion, isn’t it?”

Another quote, this one from the mind of Dixon himself:

What messes these women got themselves into over nothing. Men got themselves into messes too, and ones that weren’t so easily got out of, but their messes arose from attempts to satisfy real and simple needs.

What strikes me about this novel is its honesty about male/female relations and about the working life of men and women–not specifically of academics, but of anyone who works a job about which they are less than passionate. And that is the essence of comedy, ins’t it? We laugh at a comedian not because he says something outrageous, but because he tells the truth as we know it and we find it outrageous.

I remember watching the Dave Chappelle show and laughing uproariously, thinking to myself, “How can he say that?!” or “How can he do that?!” Most of us can’t get away with telling the truth. Dixon certainly feels that way. At the beginning of the novel, he accidentally burns a hole in a bed in his boss’s house and instead of admitting what he has done, there is a whole hilarious chapter on how he tries to cover up the “crime.” Of course, the truth finally comes out.

The question is, by the end of the novel, will Dixon come to some degree of honesty about the things that matter most? His job and his love life.

I feel like Dixon in a lot of respects, mostly in terms of my professional life. When I was a Graduate Student in English, and later a visiting professor, or whatever title such peons are given, I felt exactly as he does in the novel. I felt like a poser. I hated academic writing as it was practiced at the time. I felt like a fraud when trying to participate in the intellectual life of academia.

Lecturing and writing at a University was not the right job for me. I must have realized that at the time, though I characterized my leaving academia as a defeat, as yet another failure in a long string of failures. My therapist suggested to me the other day that maybe my decision not to pursue a doctorate and a career in academia or literature was in fact a brave acknowledgment that despite what teachers and friends believed about me, and despite what they had impressed upon me to believe about myself, the path ahead of me was not the academic/literary route.

I still have trouble seeing my choice in that light. No matter how much I love my current work, I will always feel like I failed in some essential way in my life because I did not stay true to the course I laid out at an early age.

I hope Dixon gets his girl. I hope he tells his college to fuck off. I want to see how this ends. But I have to finish the book before its due date of October 8. If I don’t finish a book before it is due back to the library, I don’t usually bother finishing it. I may never know the answer to how this story ends.