The Presentation Op Morality in the Novels of Kingsley

THE PRESENTATION OP MORALITY

IN THE NOVELS OF

KINGSLEY AMIS

Michael Laine

B.A., McGill University, 1956 B.A., University of Oxford, 1958

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

in the Department of English

We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

April, 1962 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my

Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.

Department of £

Date CL /C /ICQ. ABSTRACT

One thesis examines the novels of the young British writer,

Kingsley Amis, and attempts to assess his contribution to the modern novel in terms of the moral code which he presents and in terms of his success in presenting it.

Chapter One dissociates Amis from the myth of the

"Angry Young Men" and shows that he himself will not be placed in any movement. The chapter goes on to discuss his position as a satirist and illustrates his requirement that satire have a moral basis. At this point certain parallels with the work of Fielding are discussed. The chapter shows how much the moral position depends upon seeing Amis's heroes as decent, and tentatively defines decency as it appears to him.

Chapter Two shows how much the hero of each novel conforms to the definition of decency and examines his behaviour in order to establish the code that he actually follows. The development of the hero is discussed, as is the extent to which Amis allows him to exceed the limits of decency. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Amis cannot present any ultimate solution to the problem of how the decent man is to find a place in society and maintain loyalty to his code. Amis's increased understanding of the influence of love is discussed and the chapter iii suggests that any future development will be dependent upon the acknowledgement of this aspect of human relations.

Chapter Three deals with the effectiveness of Amis's technique and argues that, although the comic technique aids in the presentation of the hero as 1'homme moyen sensuel. flat language and the repetition of certain devices distracts the reader from the complexities of the moral problems faced by Amis's heroes.

Chapter Pour concludes the thesis by reassessing the moral position and the technique used in presenting it.

It suggests that Amis has a tenable moral position, but that he does not succeed in presenting it to the reader in such a way that it can be seen to be of value as it applies to the way that men like his heroes can operate within their society. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The writer wishes to express his appreciation to

Dr. William Hall and Dr. Ian Ross for their suggestions during the preparation of this thesis. TABLE OF CONTENTS

I Kingsley Amis: Decency

and Morality 1

II The Hero and the Moral

Code 19

III Amis's Technique: Its Effectiveness and Limitations 46

IV Conclusion 57

Footnotes 67

Bibliography 75 CHAPTER I

Kingsley Amis: Decency and Morality

For the last few years, the novels of Kingsley Amis have been accepted as representative of the work of certain young British writers, loosely described by an enthusiastic press as the "Angry Young Men." But the acceptance of the popular myth that Amis is a member of any literary movement or that the "Angry Young Men" can be considered as a homo• geneous literary movement will ultimately distract a reader from whatever individual contribution Amis has to make.

Since Amis, more than any other of these writers, has attempted both to produce a consistent moral position and to illustrate the reactions of some young Englishmen to the world they are forced to live in, it is profitable to isolate and to inspect this moral position as it is pre• sented in his novels. Nevertheless, some background of the myth of the "Angry Young Men" is useful in order to place it in perspective.

Kenneth Tynan, who seems to accept the myth as fact, describes the origin of the "Angry Young Men." Referring to the first performance of John Osborne's play, Look Back

In Anger, he says:

It all came to a head one May evening in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. There had of 2

course been plenty of preliminary rumbles. A group of young British writers had recently published a series of picaresque novels featuring a new sort of hero — a lower class intellectual with a ribald sense of humour, a robust taste for beer and sex and an attitude of villainous irreverence towards the established order.1

Tynan suggests that the purposes of these "young British

writers" are largely negative and that they represent a

generation which has nothing to fight for. He sees them

as subject to apathy, derisive detachment or a rage

impelled by the consciousness that their society has no

equipment to prevent the chaos that imperils it. In this

he feels that the "Angry Young Men" typify the spirit of

their age: Somebody, in short, had to say that many young Britons were fed up; that to be young, so far from being very heaven, was in some ways very hell.2

Writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Wain, whose

works fit roughly into the general description of the

literature of the "Angry Young Men," have been compared to

satirists and social critics like Evelyn Waugh and Aldous

Huxley, but one critic who makes the comparison feels that

the younger writers are decidedly inferior, in that they

"do not write well" and in that "They don't shape the myth

of their generation."^ Critics seem to have accepted an

easy grouping of these writers and have carelessly failed

to concern themselves primarily with the literature. Such misleading criticism has been reinforced by the publication

of Declaration, a collection of essays by those writers who 3 are regarded by the public as typical of the group. But the editor of Declaration makes no claim for unity, and points out that the writers represented in the collection do not belong to a homogeneous movement: "Declaration." he says, "is a collection of separate positions."^

Similarly, Kenneth Allsop, in his critical survey, protests that he can see no value in the term "Angry Young Man."

No one is more adamant than Kingsley Amis in dis• sociating himself from a movement and insisting upon his right to be regarded as an individual novelist with an individual point of view, and upon his right to be judged upon his literary performance. He refused to be included in Declaration, saying:

'I hate all this pharasaical twittering about the "state of our civilization" and I suspect anyone who wants to buttonhole me about my "role in society". This book is likely to prove a valuable addition to the cult of the Solemn Young Man; I predict a great success for it.''

And writing in Encounter, he says:

Even that business about the Angry Young Men, which is going to sound so wonderful if anyone remembers it in a few years time, had its appealing side. It is difficult to sound sincere in repudiating free publicity, so I was lucky in never having to. In my case the simplifications and distortions inevitable in gossipy, booksy journalism fell short of tempting me to break the writer's first rule and start explaining what I "really meant" by my books. . . . Sometimes I would meditate on how nice it would be if one's novels were read as novels instead of sociological tracts, but then one morning the whole shooting-match just softly and silently vanished away, and there we all were reduced to being judged on our merits again. Which ought to be all right if the merits hold up.° 4

Despite his irritation at being included in an alleged movement, Amis displays a great deal of interest in the contemporary scene and shows concern for the social, economic and political aspects of man's relation to the world in which he lives. Such interests do not make Amis engage*, however, and about this he is quite clear, stating his position and his duty as he sees it:

Any decent writer sees his first concern as the rendering of what he takes to be permanent in human nature, and this holds true no matter how "contemporary" his material. Now and again he may feel — we should perhaps think less of him if he did not ever feel — that there are some political causes too vast or urgent to be subordinated to mere literature, and will allow one or other such to determine the shape of what he writes. But by doing so he will be guilty of betrayal. He will have accelerated the arrival of the day on which it is generally agreed that a novel or a play is no more than a system of generalisations orchestrated in terms of plot and diction and situation and the rest; the day, in other words, on which the novel, the poem, and the play cease to exist. . . .9

Speaking specifically of "political causes" in his article "Slightly More of a Plague on One of Your Houses,

Amis shows his attitude to be anti-Tory but not pro-Labour.

The title speaks for his position, in which may be found not only a trace of indifference bred by the post-war complacency and financial security of his society, but a frustration caused by his feeling that political action is useless. Elsewhere he reiterates his position:

... I feel my security is not threatened — perhaps it really is, but no matter, it doesn't seem to be — or in other words I have no political interests to defend, .... If I were shaken up I should act, at least I hope I should, but not until then. And what use should I be if I did?11

Nevertheless, although by no means a revolutionary, he

is not resigned to the status quo and he suggests, in his

° analysis of Science Fiction, that social change is both

necessary and good, and that literature is a barometer

rather than a mover of this social change:

This active dislike of any polity which prohibits change is widespread to the point of being axio• matic in contemporary science fiction, and I regard this as a hopeful sign, more hopeful certainly than the example of Huxley's Savage, who, as I noted earlier, merely sits about thinking how nice freedom would be.1^

As a critic, Amis is more vocal in his concern with

social change and the contemporary scene than he is as a

novelist; indeed he wishes to divorce these functions:

In particular some of them [British Novelists] need to show less readiness to double as critics, a role in which they may find out more than they should care to know about the Zeitgeist, always a good nodding acquaintance but a bad companion.13

Yet Amis himself has shown a great deal of readiness

to double as a critic. A man of academic experience, he

taught English at University College in Swansea and has

now moved to Cambridge; he has also served as a critic

and reviewer for various journals in England. Thus he, too,

keeps the Zeitgeist before him, and does not avoid the issue

of contemporary relevance. There is evidence then, outside

the novels, that Amis is a critic of society, and what he

is concerned with is the insecure position of the new 6

14 rootless class in modern British society.

Although Amis feels that the archetype of the writer

of social protest wrote in the nineteen-thirties, and

chooses, as examples, men like W. H. Auden, Stephen

Spender and George Orwell, there is a considerable difference

between Amis in the fifties and the writers of protest in

the thirties; the greatest part of this difference is

Amis's belief that he cannot do very much to change the

social situation. Undoubtedly such a belief has led to his

strong insistence that his own novels be read only for

their literary qualities and to his aversion to being

regarded as part of a movement having strong social impli•

cations. Moreover, he dislikes the idea of the satirical

novel being used as political propaganda, and differenti•

ates between the social concerns of the satirist and those

of the propagandist, suggesting Fielding as an example of 15

the former and Swift of the latter. y

Since Amis is concerned with morality, he, like

Fielding, requires that satire make a moral contribution.

Therefore, it is necessary to determine tentatively Amis's

own moral position in order to examine the quality of the

satire. Once such a position can be arrived at and the

influences upon it and the reasons for it determined, we

shall be able to see how far in his work Amis keeps to his

apparent moral position and how successful he is in the presentation of morality through satire. To assist in establishing Amis's moral position, we can look at certain clear parallels in the morality dis• played in the novels of Amis and in those of Fielding.

It should not be surprising, since Amis professes great admiration for Fielding, that the satire of both should display a common theme, the theme of innocence versus experience, and the exemplification of this theme through the opposition of the values of country and town. Like

Fielding, Amis sees the moral value in the innocence of the uninitiated, and he contrasts the essential morality of his "country" heroes with the decadence and the experi- 16 ence of his sophisticated and citified antagonists.

Moreover, both authors are inclined to condone mere sensuality while reserving their real disapproval for hypocrisy. In addition, Amis accepts Fielding's doctrine that the individual has personal dignity and that humanity must be treated with compassion.

The following two excerpts from That Uncertain Feeling will show how these themes are handled in Amis's novels: The light was just starting to go and the party was warming up. . . . when the dentist's mistress, calling out: "This is the life" in a staggeringly deep voice, fell across her lover's knees and vomited, deftly and without fuss, on to the sand. The dentist remained quite immobile except for drinking once from his glass with a gourmet's deliberation. He said to me in an undertone: "I warned her, you see. She's got to learn. Well, it's not surprising in a way. Knocking the flipping stuff back as if it was gripewater. ' 8

In our sitting-room we found the whole of my family assembled. The baby, his upper lip hidden behind his lower one, was sitting on the pot, crying steadily; Eira was crouching naked with her face in Jean's lap, singing as best she could; Jean, herself apparently wearing only a dressing-gown was vigorously towelling Eira's hair. They'd clearly all been having a bath together, a favourite enter• tainment of theirs. Around them was a multitude of objects, such as might, in a memory-test, be shown to spectators for one minute and then withdrawn. Apart from clothes, adult and juvenile, male and female, ironed, newly washed and fit to be washed, there were a half-eaten, browning apple, several broken biscuits, a plastic doll, the torso of a rubber doll, some children's books with pictures of clothed animals on the covers, a cup, a card of blue safety-pins, an orange with one of my pencils stuck into it, a bottle of cod- liver oil, a pair of plastic knickers, a lot of string unwound from a ball, a tin of powder, a spoon, a wooden locomotive, some nappies in varying states, the defaced cover of my Astounding Science Fiction ., g and a lot of other things. "Well, hullo," Jean said.

In the first of these excerpts, Amis conveys a feeling of cold disapproval. His narrator, who looks upon the scene as though from some distance, relates his impressions in a cool and orderly manner. The humour is the humour of under• statement and unhurried analysis of a rather gross situation.

Just as the dentist drinks once "with a gourmet's deliber• ation," the pace is slow and the activity on the beach is viewed with great detachment. On the other hand, in the second incident the pace is rapid and the narrator is con• cerned with the situation. The dirt is real dirt, and confusion engulfs the observer, preventing him from arranging his impressions. The humour is warm and is a product of this immediate confusion; it is the narrator's house and his half-eaten apple. The contrast in the two incidents is clear: in the first, disapproval is expressed

through a carefully controlled irony; in the second, appro•

val is expressed through the narrator's identification with

the situation. In the first episode, order is imposed upon

a chaotic situation; in the second, a situation, which has

at its heart all that is warm and valued in the unity of

family life, is superficially disarranged and chaotic.

There is no doubt upon which side Amis finds himself, and

his perception is obviously sharpened by his allegiance and

by his experience.

There is a morality implied in Amis's handling of these

episodes. We can see that he places himself close to those values which he considers right and detaches himself from

those he considers wrong. The first episode, representing

the moral environment of Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams and her friends, stands in relation to the second in the same way that "town" counters "country" in the novels of

Fielding. The innocence of John Lewis parallels that of

Joseph Andrews, and the experience of the milieu of

Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams that of the citified and sexually avaricious atmosphere of Lady Booby's house. Like

Fielding, Amis puts his hero in the way of a woman of superior social status, who wishes to enter into a sexual 19 relationship with him. 7 Unlike Fielding's Joseph Andrews,

John Lewis succumbs; however, he is not persuaded to permanently abandon the values of innocence for those 10

of "experience."

Barbara Bowen, in I Like It Here, makes the distinction

between "town" and "country" in a letter to Bowen. She

says,

I do wish you didn't feel so tied to London the whole time, what a ghastly place it is, everyone leading unnatural lives and all of them perfectly miserable, you can feel it as soon as you arrive in the place, . . . .20

Barbara suggests that they take a cottage in the country

for week-ends and lists some pastoral pleasures to be

enjoyed there. In her relationship with her husband, she has what C. P. Snow calls the "moral initiative," and can be regarded as pressuring Bowen to do good. Hence, her view of London as an unnatural place and as the place of

experience, which corrupts the innocent and good B0wens, develops this theme.

Amis seems very close to Fielding in his examination of sexual morality as well as in his distinction between inno• cence and experience. In That Uncertain Feeling, John

Lewis is not severely punished for his adultery; indeed he resumes his family life which, at the end of the novel, seems on a more solid foundation than it was at the begin• ning. Ian Watt points out that Fielding does not severely punish the sexual transgressions of Tom Jones or of his other characters, and suggests that there is considerable

justification in Ford Madox Ford's view that

. . . fellows like Fielding, and to some extent Thackeray, who pretend that if you are a gay 11

drunkard, lecher, squanderer of your goods and fumbler in placket holes you will eventually find a benevolent uncle, concealed father or benefactor who will shower on you bags of ten thousands of guineas, estates, and the hands of adorable mistresses — these fellows are dangers to the body politic and horribly bad constructors of plots.21

One might possibly apply Ford's statement to Amis. In

That Uncertain Feeling, the role of "benevolent uncle" is played by the hero's father, who, although he does not pro• vide riches, offers the opportunity of peace and security in the return to the innocence of "country" values. The transgressions of Patrick Standish in Take a Girl Like You also go unpunished, and, at the conclusion of the novel, his place in the affections of Jenny Bunn is secure. Still, despite appearances, one would be mistaken in inferring from the behaviour of the heroes in the novels of Fielding and Amis that the authors approve of sexual immorality. It is more important to see that both novelists suggest very strongly that hatred, vindictiveness, malice and hypocrisy are sins considerably more serious than sexual incontinence.

Amis feels that the issues were made clearer in

Fielding's novels than they are in contemporary reality.

The hero of I Like It Here, Garnet Bowen, muses, on the occasion of a visit to Fielding's tomb:

And how enviable to live in the world of his novels, where duty was plain, evil arose out of malevolence and a starving wayfarer could be invited indoors without hesitation and without fear. Did that make it a simplified world? Perhaps, but that hardly mattered beside the existence of a moral seriousness 12

that could he made apparent without the aid of evangelical puffing and blowing.22

Clearly, Amis approves of a fictional world in which

duty is plain and virtue rewarded, and he treats his own

characters with the kind of simplicity he here admires;

Jim Dixon is rewarded by the "benevolent uncle," Gore-

Urquhart, and John Lewis finds some happiness in homely

values. In constructing his novels in this way, Amis,

like Fielding, has aligned himself with the values of

innocence as opposed to those of experience. When Amis

is regarded as a social critic as well as a novelist, it

is fair to say that his innocent heroes represent the virtues and the defects of the new rootless class in

British society, and the "experienced,11 to whom they are

opposed, those values of that segment of society which is

in control.

Amis, then, puts his social criticism into satire; he feels that we are in for a golden age of satire and that

this is a good thing. He says that we need "savage

laughter" and that

Satire offers a social and moral contribution. A culture without satire is a culture without self-criticism and thus, ultimately, without humanity•23

He defines satire in its modern form as "fiction that 24 attacks vice and folly as manifested in the individual,"

and in his admiration of Fielding he suggests that we are

in the grip of a Fielding revival. Once again, with this 13

admiration as a clue, we can find more parallels between

his work and that of Fielding.

Like Fielding's, Amis's morality insists upon regard

for the individual. Speaking of Peter de Vries, Amis

catalogues the areas which are the proper business of the

satirist and those qualities in satire which he admires:

Affectation and irresponsibility, self-dramatization and self-pity are his targets, and the gaiety of the whole performance evinces a rare skill and integrity. This is what the satirist works toward and seldom achieves.25

His statement exhibits a striking similarity of idea and

expression to Fielding's dictum that

The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation. But though it arises from one spring only, when we consider the infinite streams into which this one branches, we shall presently cease to admire at the copious field it affords to an observer. Now, affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy: . . . .26

Fielding goes on to state that

. . . from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in them• selves: . . . .27

Amis looks at the basis of satire in the same way as

Fielding does; he requires a moral position in order to define affectation and irresponsibility. Just as

Fielding's Tom Jones is a hero because he has been born with good impulses, so Amis's heroes depend upon their 29 good impulses for their moral stature. ? Amis insists 14

upon the dignity of the individual and upon what can be

called "common decency." A short story entitled "Moral

Fiber," which is not so much a rejected chapter as a

rejected theme for That Uncertain Feeling, points these

values clearly. In it the hero, John Lewis, demonstrates his sympathy for a young trollop. Characteristically, Amis

uses a domestic example to introduce this musing on per•

sonal morality:

... I thought first how funny it was that a fallen woman — really fallen now, right smack over full length — should talk to a child in just the same style as the perpendicularly upright went in for. But then presumably there were parts of the fallen that were bound to remain unfalien, quite important parts too.30

The story deals with the difficulty in deciding what is

good for other people and concludes that imposing one's own moral standards upon others is probably immoral. Amis feels that what we should do is give understanding and kindness rather than try to convert. Dismissing the futile attempts of the social worker to convert the young girl to middle class respectability, at the story's end the narrator muses:

What if anything should or couid be done about Betty, and who if anyone should or could do it and how — that was the real stuff. I was sorry to think how impossible it was for me to turn up at the gaol on the big day, holding a bunch of flowers and a new plastic umbrella.31

In his poem "Act of Kindness," Amis treats the same idea:

To really give the really valuable, Or offer the last cigarette, 15

When shops are shut, to the ungrateful, Or praise our betters — wishing, we forget

That anything we own is nearly cash, And to have less of it is dead loss, That unshared cigarettes are smoke and ash, That praise is gross.

Not giving should be not living; how to live, How to deal with any wish to give When the gift gets stuck to our fingers? We give nothing we have, So smiling at strangers

Best suits our book — they cannot tell Our own from another's words; generous With common property we seem aimiable; Not to draw a knife Looks like an act of kindness, And is, acted to the life.32

Jim Dixon, of Lucky Jim, is able to extend an act of kindness to Margaret Peel, but he finds himself in a relationship in which any gift, any sharing, is misunder• stood. Jim himself describes this, early in the novel:

She had been known to interpret some of his laziest or most hurtful actions or inactions in this light [as kindness], though not, of course, as often as she'd interpreted some gesture of support as lazy or hurtful.33

Margaret is the kind of woman who lives, as one of the characters in the novel suggests, upon emotional tension.

Jim has been drawn into the relationship by

... a combination of virtues he hadn't known he possessed: politeness, friendly interest, ordinary concern, a good-natured willingness to be imposed upon, a desire for unequivocal friendship.

He remains in the destroying relationship because of a combination of weakness and decency, and he voluntarily renounces Christine, the attractive girl who does interest 16 him, in Margaret's favour; yet ultimately, he is able, by a combination of luck and design, to break free of her.

It does not say a great deal for his personal morality that he jumps at the chance to justify abandoning Margaret in order to protect himself; luck has freed him from what he calls "pity's adhesive plaster."

Other Amis characters can be found who support even more strongly the values of common decency. Throughout the novel I Like It Here we are treated to a good deal of Garnet

Bowen* s objections to the class and economic system in

Portugal and by extension to that in England. Such a conception of Bowen's character parallels that of John

Lewis of That Uncertain Feeling who aligns himself firmly 55 with the natural decency of his working class friends.

Just as often, however, all three heroes fail to act deci• sively according to their professed allegiance. Amis appears to define decency in terms of the kind of behaviour and the values which he is against rather than showing unequivocally through his heroes' behaviour what he stands for.

Thus in I Like It Here it is Barbara Bowen who has the

"moral initiative" in her relationship with her husband and it is she who insists that he keep common decency before him as a guide to his relationships with others. But as we see, he is not always inclined to do this. At the end of the novel, however, he supports her view and, in supporting

Strether, does the right thing though perhaps for the wrong 17 reasons; the book concludes by affirming the values of

decency more or less satisfactorily.

Often then it is Amis's heroines who set the moral line.

They, like Barbara Bowen, and Jean Lewis in That Uncertain

Feeling, have a consistent moral view and the heroes, in

accepting that their women have the"moral initiative,"

eventually acquiesce. Even Christine, of Lucky Jim.

poorly characterized as she is, displays human understanding

and a perception of fairness, a fairness which is clearly put in terms which Jim can understand. She presses money

for a taxi fare upon him in such a way as to show that she

is clearly in control of the situation:

She pushed the money into his outside breast• pocket, frowning, pursing her lips and waggling her left hand to silence him in a gesture that reminded him of one of his aunts forcing sweets or an apple on him in his childhood. 'I've probably got more than you have,' she said. She propelled him to the window, which they reached just as Welch's voice, in its high-pitched, manic phase, became audible not so far away. 'Quick. See you on Tuesday. Good-night.'36

In Take A Girl Like You it is Jenny Bunn, another of

Amis's women who have the "moral initiative" in their

relationships with others, who sees life in terms of

decency and human understanding and, in her treatment of

others, places a high value upon kindness and consideration.

We can tentatively supply Amis's moral position which

depends upon the way in which Amis presents his characters.

If we assume that Amis sets the values of decency, that is,

kindness and consideration and the preservation of human 18 dignity, above those of opportunism, and it does not seem to be a difficult assumption to make, we can then see where his heroes conform to Amis's idea of common decency and where they fall short of it. If Amis seems to justify their falling short in certain situations, we can re-define his impression of decency and establish his moral position more exactly. CHAPTER II

The Hero and the Moral Code

If we know that Amis feels decency to he connected with the perception of the needs of others and one's own duty towards them, we can show how far he presents each of his heroes as a decent man and whether, despite occasional abandonment of common decency, each follows some consistent code. Beginning with Jim Dixon, whose basic decency can be seen in his treatment of Margaret

Peel, one can attempt to establish the moral code against which Amis's heroes should be judged.

Primarily, Jim Dixon is, an honest man who does try to follow a consistent moral code, at the base of which can be found Fielding's themes of innocence versus experience.

Amis is clear in dissociating decent behaviour from the code of the gentleman and, as we have seen, insists that common decency is a virtue to be found in the common man; •57

Jim Dixon is such a common man. ' Moreover, he is an example of the "scholarship boy" from a lower middle class background who finds himself in a position and in an occupation which, before World War II, was almost exclusively the preserve of the gentleman. In this situation Amis is anxious to establish Dixon's credentials 20

as an innocent, as a "country boy" and as an honest man.

Dixon is insistent upon his "flat northern voice" and

he feels close to members of the working class because here

his natural sympathy operates, rather than a consciousness

of class. He says of a barmaid:

He thought how much he liked her and had in common with her, and how much she'd like and have in common with him if she only knew him. 38

Even when stripped of the obvious sexual innuendo, this

passage demonstrates the same feeling of kinship that John

Lewis ultimately feels for Ken Davis in That Uncertain

Feeling. Moreover, Jim Dixon rejects high culture; he

speaks of a piece of music as "some skein of untiring

facetiousness by filthy Mozart," hence standing opposed to

Bertrand Welch, the artist. The contrast serves to

emphasize the moral difference between Bertrand and Jim.

Bertrand Welch is out to grab those things which he wants;

explaining his own moral position, he says: 'I'm having Christine because it's my right. Do you understand that? If I'm after something, I don't care what I do to make sure that I get it. That's the only law I abide by: it's the only way to get things in this world.'39 The fact that Jim Dixon disapproves of this moral position does not make him a paragon of morality, even

though his strongest point of disapproval is Bertrand's hypocrisy. He does demonstrate, however, his simple decency, by saying:

'And you're so dishonest that you can tell me how important Christine is to you without it entering 21

your head that you're carrying on with some other chap's wife all the time. It's not just that that I object to; it's the way you never seem to reflect how insincere. ...'4-0

Thus insincerity and willingness to harm others are what

Jim objects to most strongly in Bertrand's behaviour, and

Amis indicates that no one should take the position that the world is organized entirely for his own benefit, and arrange his own life accordingly. Consequently he allows his hero to react violently against this sort of behaviour 41 when he finds it, and Dixon fights with Bertrand, beating him thoroughly.

Despite his groping towards altruism, Jim remains a childish fool with special needs, who feels that he can exceed the bounds of conventional behaviour, in order to satisfy those needs. His childishness is demonstrated by the faces he makes in times of insecurity or stress, apparently relieving his frustration and annoyance in this 4-2 immature fashion. Trapped into an unwelcome social engagement by his professor, Jim, responding to a joke, . . . tried to flail his features into some sort of response to humour. Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he'd make it actually when next alone. He'd draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils. By these means he would, he was confident, cause a deep and dangerous flush to suffuse his face.43

Viewed along with Jim's consciousness that his motives will be misinterpreted, such faces reflect his insecurity 22

about his personality, about the face he presents to the

world. These faces are, in a sense, self-destructive in

the same way that a good deal of his boorish social

behaviour is self-destructive. Jim's lack of confidence

about his place in society leads him into a pattern of

behaviour which is outside the bounds of conventional

social behaviour; for instance, when drunk, he burns a hole in Welch's guest-room bedding and attempts to cover

up the damage by an elaborate and transparent ruse rather

than to make a conventional and straightforward apology.

This action leads him into a web of deception which works

to his social disadvantage. His shyness and social

ineptitude make him chronically unable to apologize; for

example, after inadvertently kicking a stone at a colleague, he realizes that

As always on such occasions, he'd wanted to apologize but had found, when it came to it, that he was too frightened to.44

Frustrated and incompetent, Jim finds life little better than "predicted boredom" and, in a rather childish way, wants to decline his social obligations. In this he appears little less cynical and self-centred than Bertrand as he wishes for a

. . . fierce purging draught of fury or contempt, a really efficient worming from the sense of responsibility. 45

Although Jim is basically different from Bertrand in that he feels himself hollow and wishes for a change whereas 23-

Bertrand presumably does not, such behaviour and such an

attitude have led critics like Somerset Maugham to see Jim

and the other heroes of his kind as men who

. . . have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of cele• bration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. . . . Charity, kindliness, generosity, are qualities which they hold in contempt. They are scum.4-6

The case for seeing Jim Dixon's egocentricity as more

intense than that of any of the men of whom he disapproves

is strong. When opposed in his desires, he can be bitterly

vindictive as is shown by such actions as his malicious

burning of Evan Johns's insurance policies. Perhaps one

can suggest in mitigation that his behaviour is motivated

by his awareness that society cannot punish Johns's kind of

malice and that Jim is taking justice into his own hands.

Indeed, Jim feels that he is alone against the world, that his motives are misinterpreted, that he is punished in 47 excess of his crimes; ' consequently he manages to generate a great deal of self-pity:

It was a bit rough to be reproached for hankering after what he'd voluntarily turned down. His spirits were so low that he wanted to lie down and pant like a dog: jobless, Christineless, and now grand-slammed in the Margaret game.^8

Yet Jim longs for material success and admires those

individuals who, unlike himself, can manipulate the social

system and manoeuver within it in order to achieve their

own ends. His admiration for Gore-Urquhart, the forceful 24

and successful business man, is clear, as is his admiration

for Atkinson, his cynical and detached fellow-boarder.

What Jim admires is just this cynicism and detachment, the

fact that Atkinson has been successfully wormed from

responsibility and can be uniquely himself:

There was a long pause while Atkinson looked censoriously round the room, a familiar exercise. Dixon liked and revered him for his air of detesting everything that presented itself to his senses, and of not meaning to let this detestation become staled by custom.4-9

Success and self-satisfaction dictate Jim's actions to a

greater degree than is consistent with the moral code which

Amis sets up for him, a moral code represented by his

behaviour towards Margaret and by his opposition to

Bertrand1s selfishness. Amis presents Jim as a sort of

homme moyen sensuel. but in permitting excesses of selfish• ness, he is in danger of failing to convince us of Jim's

basic decency.

He is more successful with the character of John Lewis

in That Uncertain Feeling. Lewis, like Jim, assumes such roles as speaking with the voice and accent of a Cardiff

radio announcer in order to disguise his insecurity in

society. During a few minutes' inconsequential flirting at the novel's end, he admits to this role-playing when he

says: "It was like old times, back with my roles again."

He indulges in antics over the telephone, and leads a highly developed fantasy life just as Jim Dixon does. 25

In addition, he reveals his insecurity in his extreme

dislike of being out alone at night. However, John Lewis

demonstrates a considerable step forward in character

development.

Although Amis's characters do not seem to develop very much within each novel, maintaining the same basic attitude

to morality and to society at each novel's end as at its

beginning, they do, however, develop from novel to novel.

At the end of That Uncertain Feeling, John Lewis, like Jim

Dixon, fails to show unaided any explicit awareness of his moral position, although he is much more capable than Jim of wrestling with moral issues and Amis makes those issues more explicit for him. Amis's treatment of John Lewis as a character is more clear, then, in its moral orientation than is his treatment of Jim Dixon. John Lewis is forced, and it is interesting to see that he is forced by pressure from his wife, Jean, into some awareness of the moral difficulties presented by his behaviour. His wife, having the "moral initiative," ultimately forces him into a posi• tion where he senses that his adultery is wrong and into a state of mind which enables him, at the novel's end, to reject firmly the advances of yet another woman. At the same time he returns to the innocent "country" values as he states his preference for beer over dry sherry, a beverage which he seems to consider effete and upper-class: 26'

"That woman. I had to get away from that woman. So I got away from her. Crude hut effective, you know. We'll have a couple at the Foresters on the way home. Not dry sherry, though. It isn't my drink at all."50

Earlier in the novel, John Lewis is shown to be basically a decent man who likes the working class and feels that its members can possess an intrinsic virtue which his "smart" friends lack:

I thought how much I liked him, [a working class acquaintance] as he stood there in his mucked-up finery, not inquiring why I had these or any cigarettes on me, not wondering how I'd happened to be out at this time, not thinking there was anything odd about anything, not above all, knowing or caring anything whatsoever about Elizabeth or Gruffydd-Williams or Whetstone or Theo James or Probert or Gloriana or Stan Johns or Margot Johns or the dentist or the dentist's mistress or Bill Evans.51

Amis takes predictable care to align Lewis with the values of "country" and innocence over those of "town" and experience, thus conforming to his acceptance of Fielding's basic theme. That John Lewis equates "country" values with virtue is seen as he comments upon the publican who serves drink "with courtesy and a strong Aberdarcy accent, twin 52 stars of virtue.ny Like Jim Dixon, he reacts strongly against the phoney, and, in Gareth Probert, Amis has created a foil whose resemblance to Bertrand Welch is clear. Probert is the dishonest artist who dispenses pseudo-local-culture and takes from the world what he can get. John Lewis, like Jim, is anti-cultural, preferring his Science Fiction and sex magazines to the meagre stock of books that he has retained from his student days or those available at the library where he works. Amis makes this point strongly; speaking of an illustrated weekly which features a sensuous picture of a girl, Lewis says:

If only this paper and its two competitors came out once an hour instead of once or twice a week, without impairing the rigour of their standards, solitary evenings, and many other things, would be quite endurable.

But John Lewis's alignment with decent values is not founded only on his awareness of his social and cultural position. He makes less attempt than Jim Dixon to avoid the moral problems which face him. His strongest moral stand is on the iniquity of "log-rolling." Elizabeth

Gruffydd-Williams, with whom he is having an affair, uses her influence and that of her husband to obtain a promotion for him. His acquiescence is very uneasy and, although he obtains the promotion, he later turns the job down.

Throughout, he expresses his disapproval of the methods used, in such expressions as ". . . but to get it by a 54- dirty piece of jobbery like that. . . ." John Lewis objects to "log-rolling" because he sees it as the unfair exercise of power which deprives the individual of the right to be judged on his individual merits.

John Lewis has a positive dislike of power; speaking of his colleague Jenkins, he says: Somewhere in him there was a man who admired and wanted power, the one aspect of him I had anything less than affection for.55 28

In Amis's view, one of the difficulties with power is that

it implies the using of people for one's own advantage,

and, as such, is outside the hounds of what he understands

to be common decency. John Lewis makes use of people when

he sends two Lascar seamen, looking for a "piano and a bit

of life," to the bar where Elizabeth is drinking and

instructs them to ask for "Lizzie;" This strikes one as a

crude and unnecessary method of avenging a humiliation.

The explanation of this behaviour is that John Lewis falls

between two stools morally; that he is aware of the

problem does not make it any the less acute:

Since I seemed to have piloted myself into the position of being immoral and moral at the same time, the thing was to keep trying not to be immoral, and then to keep trying might turn into a habit. . . . Not giving up was the important thing. 56

John Lewis is bored and finds that his life lacks

direction; he describes his depressions as combining

"rootless apprehension, indefinite restlessness and

inactivating boredom,'' and in this condition, he is vul•

nerable to the charms of Elizabeth, tending to place the moral considerations of infidelity in the background. But he does sleep with Elizabeth and he does love his wife.

His attitude up to this point indicates that he prefers to

remain in a position where he is not forced to make a moral

choice; however, physically the decision is forced upon him, chiefly by Elizabeth's husband, and he cuts his losses

and gets out. 29-

The framework of morality is presented in the same

way as in Lucky Jim; it is impossible for the hero to

remain in an attitude of indecision, because circumstance,

luck, and fortuitous events force a choice. But John

Lewis still loves his wife and her disgust with his

behaviour and her detailing of his responsibilities make

him uneasy about his moral position. Ultimately the pro•

blem can be reduced to his appreciation of human dignity

and to his limited awareness that he has violated the code

of decent behaviour. Here Jean has the "moral initiative,"

as she tells him

"I don't care what happens now, because it's all over as far.as I'm concerned, whatever you told me couldn't be as bad as what I felt when I realized what you were thinking about that Elizabeth and preferring her to me."

"What do you think it's all about, anyway? Why do you think we got married? I know your rich pals think different, but I didn't know you did. Not then, not when we got married. Or I shouldn't have married you, see? Yes, I know a bit of chasing round after other women now and then doesn't matter, according to you. As long as there isn't too much of it. Well, according to me a bit does matter, a bit's too much. Any at all's too much, so it's over, there's nothing left of the whole bloody issue." She began crying. "Anything at all of that sort matters. According to me."57

Jean, like Christine in Lucky Jim, is capable of trans•

lating the problem of decent behaviour into terms which an

Amis hero can understand, and, seizing the advantage, lies

to her husband, saying that she has had an affair with 30-

Probert. The lie, John Lewis later admits, "did him a

power of good." Thus, at the novel's end he can return to

the "country" values in the coal town and embrace virtue

while still leaving the reader unsure whether or not Lewis

has seen the problem clearly. Amis himself does not

describe clearly the good life. In the final chapter of

That Uncertain Feeling we can see that John Lewis is as

bored as ever and that his life, although morally satis•

factory, is not really an Arcadia.

In I Like It Here Amis takes some pains to define the moral issues more clearly; still, there is a good deal in

common between Garnet Bowen, the hero, and the heroes of the previous novels. The same themes of "town" versus

"country" and experience versus innocence occur, and luck

is allowed to play some part in influencing moral choice.

Bowen is saved from adultery by the sting of a wasp and his

comment upon the situation is typical:

And, since he could now remember that he had a wife, it was an enormous relief not to have done anything much to Emilia. But he had wanted to do a great deal and had been going to. It was sad to no longer have his cake, in a way, and yet not have eaten it. On the other hand, though, Barbara was never going to know anything about this, so there was no need whatever to worry.58

Garnet Bo\^en, like Jim Dixon and John Lewis, leads a kind of double life and, like John Lewis, he is aware of his double position. On the one hand he is the selfish opportunist and on the other he attempts to accept an 31 upright and slightly prissy morality which can be seen in his description of two of his own passport photographs taken ten years apart. They suggest the extremes of moral choice available to him:

The lad in the 194-6 one had looked back at Bowen with a petulant, head-on-one-side sensitivity. Wearing a nasty suit, he had seemed on the point of asking Bowen why he wasn't a pacifist or what he thought of Aaron's Rod. The 1956 Bowen was twice as wide and had something of the air of a television panelist. His question about Aaron's Rod would have concerned how much money whoever wrote it had made out of it. It was odd how the two of them could differ so much and yet both look exactly the kind of man he would most dislike to meet or be.59

Bowen is very dependent upon his wife; he, like Jim

Dixon and John Lewis, finds it difficult to cope in the modern world without support from some quarter. His xenophobia is extreme and he only manages to cope with the arrangements for his trip to Portugal through a haze of fear and incompetence. The moral choices that he makes are largely determined by Barbara's attitudes, for it is she who pushes him back towards the 1946 face with her way of "viewing regular salaried employment as somehow inimical 60 to integrity." Still, in the final analysis it is Bowen himself who is most likely to excuse people's behaviour, on the grounds that they are basically decent. The fol• lowing dialogue concerning the Bowen's Portuguese landlord illustrates this. Note that it is Barbara who sees money as the root of evil and Bowen who excuses the landlord, feeling that he is, on the whole, a decent man. Barbara 32

is the first speaker:

"Perhaps she's sent one to Oates's place." "Well if she has he'll forward it." She did her vigorous head-shake, inhaling and shutting her eyes. "I wouldn't he too sure of that." "Oh, nonsense, he wouldn't do anything he thought was nasty." "What about the extra cash he took off us?" "He didn't think that was nasty. He thought he was entitled to that." "But it was nasty, whatever he thought about it." "That doesn't make any difference; he didn't think it was nasty." "I think it makes all the difference," she said stoutly.61

Here, it seems, is the crux of the situation: Bowen, as l'homme moyen sensuel. is willing to take motives into consideration; Barbara, more rigid, is not. No doubt

Bowen wants his own motives to be understood when he him• self is judged and for this reason he is willing to allow this much consideration to those of others. Here again we have the echo of Fielding, whose Tom Jones was "a hero because he had good impulses.''

Barbara is very insistent that it is wrong to spy on

Strether; she applies a rigid moral code and Bowen is ultimately forced to agree with her:

"What a revolting idea, spying on the old chap like that. ... I should have thought you'd have had a bit more integrity. I know you always laugh at me when I go on about integrity. Yes you do. But this time I'm right, and you know it. Don't you?" "I suppose I do."62

Barbara insists that Bowen give up his espionage which was to determine whether or not an elderly man living in retirement in Portugal was, as he claimed, the famous 33

novelist, Wulfstan Strether. Typically, Bowen, like all

of Amis's heroes, finds himself with a difficult moral

choice and typically he is unable to resolve his dilemma.

He describes his problem in the following passage:

He hated opposition, not, he believed, because he liked his own way more than the next man, hut because it made him feel so terrible, too terrible to sort out what he really thought. To decide whether, and if so how far, self-interest conflicted with decency over this issue meant using his con• science' as a precision instrument. How could he do that with Barbara jogging his. arm about integrity? Perhaps he'd feel better after lunch—. . . .63

Bowen then is incapable of immediately coming to terms with the problem and leaves it in abeyance. Like most of

Amis's heroes, he wallows in indecision until the issue is decided for him. To some extent Amis begs the question and allows Bowen to make the decision which corresponds with his idea of decency without in any way deliberately compro• mising his self-interest; or his integrity. Bowen does in fact tell the publisher that the old man is Strether and seems to have enough real evidence to do so. However, in a display of honesty, he admits to himself that he did not make the decision on the basis of the evidence alone; instead he made it on the basis of his judgement of the character of a girl with whom he had had an inconclusive sexual encounter:

He realised he had^not been quite straight with Bennie Hyman [the publisher], or with himself, about why he had come to the conclusion that Lopes couldn't be blackmailing Strether. It was simply because he had decided that Emilia couldn't be a 34

"blackmailer's girl. And he had decided that because he had liked Emilia. But of course in spite of that she could be a blackmailer's girl. So perhaps it was true that he let people he liked get away with murder. But what did that matter?64-

This passage comes at the novel's end and is at least

a clue to the grounds upon which Bowen makes moral

decisions. Once again it is the question of personality

and decency, as he sees it, which influences him; we find

that he is willing to subordinate the real evidence in

order to make what he feels is the human and decent choice.

As we have seen, however, Amis does sidestep the real issue

to some extent by assuring us that, since it is for other reasons that Bowen does not get the expected job with the publishers* his decision does not conflict with his self- interest. Furthermore, Amis implies that the real evidence could, in fact, have supported Strether's claim, and thus

Bowen's decision, made on the basis of personality and decency, is no sacrifice of principle. Therefore, no real moral choice occurs; Amis allows his hero to act from decency and weights the issue in such a way that the action represents no denial of principle nor of self-interest.

Before examining the moral problem Amis raises in his latest novel, Take A Girl Like You, we can usefully define his position as it is discernible up to this point. Until now, we have had a series of heroes who try to tread a fine line between crass self-interest and virtue, and who seem to have evolved a moral code which assumes that the 35 '

world sees them as they see themselves. Completely con•

sistent with this attitude is their insistence upon

judging the actions of others as they would wish their

own actions to he judged, that is, by their motives.

Nevertheless, Amis cannot solve the problems which

his hero,'as a kind of Hoggartian scholarship boy, meets

in his society nor can he provide any adequate solution

to the problem of how a decent man is to find a place in

society and maintain his loyalty to his code. Amis's

failure to solve the problem is shown by the way in which

he tends to beg the moral questions. First, he allows

luck to play a part in the resolution, as in Lucky Jim,

where Jim says:

To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration. Christine was still nicer and prettier than Margaret, and all the deductions that could be drawn from that fact should be drawn: there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones. It had been luck, too, that had freed him from pity's adhesive plaster; if Catchpole had been a different sort of man, he, Dixon, would still be wrapped up as firmly as ever. ?

Second; Amis consistently allows the hero to square his moral code with his self-interest; Garnet Bowen does not harm himself by being decent, nor does Jim Dixon lose out because of his ridiculous, drunken and half-intended protests against hypocrisy. The final resolution of the

first three novels makes no attempt to meet the problem head-on, and Amis goes a long way to admitting this by the 36;

kind of resolution he gives. Jim Dixon receives his job

at the hands of that figure of authority, Gore-Urquhart,

hut it is a curiously negative kind of employment:

'Sort of private secretarial work. Not much correspondence, though; a young woman does most of that. It'll he mainly meeting people or telling people I can't meet them.

'I think you'll do the job all right, Dixon. It's not that you've got the qualifications, for this or any other.work, but there are plenty who have. You haven't got the disqualifications, though, and that's much rarer.'66

Similarly Garnet Bowen neither makes the progression in

society that he wishes nor does he break from it in the way

that Barbara desires him to, and John Lewis, who chooses value over material gain, knows that the same kind of bore• dom that he left behind in Aberdarcy awaits him in his new s life in the colliery town.

Thus it is that none of these heroes, although they wrestle mightily with moral choice, can be said to have developed in character during the course of a single novel.

Since the choices of the heroes have been guided by events and pressures extraneous to what can be seen as the real moral issue, and since the heroes.themselves are not able to learn from these choices, it follows that the novels do not fulfill, their apparent moral intention of illustrating a viable code of behaviour for the decent man in the twentieth century. Thus Amis's heroes are defined by what 37

they are ..against rather than what they are for; that is,

they are anti-cultural and do not present a clear moral

position of their own. It can he argued that such clouding

of moral issues is a part of living in the twentieth

century within the.sort of society in which Amis places his

characters, a society in which it is difficult to isolate

and inspect strictly moral considerations. Instead, these

three novels describe boredom and stagnation, a boredom,

like John Lewis'Sj which Amis seems to see as a condition

of modern>life and which, he describes, referring to the

grave, in his poem "The Silent Room":

... the corpse must keep Permanently awake, And wait for an earthquake.

Earthquakes are few, brief their effect. But wood soon rots: he can expect A far less rare relief From boredom, and less brief;

At last, maddened but merry, he Finds never-tiring company: •

Slug, with foul rhymes to tell; g7 Worm, with small talk from hell. '

Amis's first three novels all present the same problems and tend to solve them in the same inconclusive way, but with his latest novel, Take A Girl Like You, he extends his vision considerably. Although he does not present a com• plete solution to the problem of how the average decent man, Amis's version of l'homme moyen sensuel, is to act and to choose in his society, he does, however, go a good deal farther to broaden the base of that choice. 38

Take A Girl Like You represents a determined effort to come to terms with the moral rather than the practical problems of life, and deals in a more or less straight• forward way with the problem of maintaining some kind of standards in modern life. Amis introduces his heroine,

Jenny Bunn, as a beautiful, educated^working class girl; his main narrative line is occupied by Patrick Standish's repeated attempts upon her virtue, and the moral issue arises from her desire to safeguard that virtue. Jenny comes equipped with as rigid a code of morality as that of

Barbara Bowen, but unlike Barbara she is not impervious to pressure and, rather than simply insisting upon what is right, she feels she must make her morality work in her relations with the people around her. During this exercise in maturation, her values change. This, too, marks a pro• gression in Amis's technique, for Take A Girl Like You is the only novel in which the characters develop within the novel itself. Up to now, any development of Amis's moral vision and any evidence of his consolidating his moral knowledge is of necessity acquired by our comparing the hero of one novel to that of another.

Unfortunately the focus of the novel becomes disturbed and Amis does not maintain Jenny as the central figure; instead, about mid-way through, he concentrates his attention upon Patrick who is foolish, self-centred and much given to painful scrutiny" of his motives. m Characteristically, his actual behaviour changes very

little. Nevertheless the novel becomes occupied with

Patrick's problems and attitudes, most of which centre

about the sexual act. Patrick could be regarded as sex-

obsessed; a large part of his time and energy is concen•

trated upon sex in some way, and his mind tends to approach

the subject at every opportunity.

However, Patrick is not without his agony and his guilt.

Disappointed in Jenny's missing an assignation with him, he

sleeps with his headmaster's pregnant daughter instead, and

immediately thereafter arranges an appointment at an abor•

tionist's for her, advancing her the necessary money. This he does out of kindness, as the responsibility in the case

is not his. Later he muses:

The commercial aspect of Sheila's dealing with him was trifling; .... What got him down was what he

had actually :done to Sheila. It was his worst thing so far, he thought as he phoned for a taxi, but plenty of time, no doubt, for worse yet.68

Like a spoiled child he later reproaches Jenny for missing

the assignation and pleads that he has been extremely fair

r

in not trying to influence her by soft lights and sweet music. In retorting, Jenny gives him a piece of practical advice, suggesting that, if he did want to seduce her, the most expedient way to go about it would have been to be unfair. This he becomes. It is Julian Ormerod who objects to the way in which Patrick finally seduces Jenny.

Ormerod puts his objections into a plea for fairness: 40

"Not too drunk for you, anyway." "Had to get it done somehow." "And it didn't much matter how, eh?" "Life was becoming absolutely impossible as it was.". "Do you know what I'd sooner do?" "Oh, for Christ's sake."

"I thought you were supposed to be in favour of all this kind of thing." "Most of it, Patty, yes. But fairness." "I'm tired of fairness." "Clearly."69

Patrick has never really admitted fairness as one of his values and he has persistently refused to regard others

as having any rights or dignity. This, is demonstrated by his treatment of a complete stranger who had the misfortune to be using the public pavement while Patrick was driving by:

Turning off at the electricity showrooms, he was lucky enough to send the greater part of a puddle over a sod in ragged clothes who was doing his level best to blow his nose into the gutter. 70

Patrick seems to enjoy this kind of behaviour, and cer• tainly, at no time does he raise any moral objection to it.

The point is that Julian Ormerod, despite his behaviour, has some kind of code, a code which recognizes people as consenting individuals, and Patrick Standish, for all his scrutiny of motives, has none. Jenny is able to make a strong and accurate moral judgement of Patrick. Referring to her seduction, she says: 41

"It's not what you did that I object to; it would probably have happened anyway, sooner or later. But to do it like that." ". . . Yes, that was bad." ". . . I've got another name for you. . . . Mr. Eat-All-Sup-All-Pay-Nowt."71

Thus Jenny has classified Patrick Standish with the

Bertrand Welches of this world, the people who will take

whatever they can get and do not scruple about means,

taking as though it were their right. Patrick, at the

close of the novel, protests that he has had a moral

lesson; his protestation sounds hollow, but certainly

Jenny has made Patrick aware of the value of decency and

in his future behaviour he will no longer have the excuse that the issue is not clear. This is a considerable widening of Amis's understanding. The behaviour of Jim

Dixon in Lucky Jim is shown as a contrast to the behaviour of Bertrand Welch, although they emerge as having selfish• ness in common. In Take A Girl Like You. Patrick Standish is seen much more objectively by Amis.

But the novel suffers from its shift in focus. It is more consistent to regard Jenny as the heroine and Patrick as a kind of foil. Jenny is the character who is trying to preserve moral standards in a society which considers them old-fashioned, and her moral development parallels her acquisition of sophistication, in that, at the novel's end, she is willing to make allowances for various-kinds of behaviour and not to judge them against a fixed scale.

She is not, however, herself prepared to abandon a code of 42

behaviour by which one is obliged, to do the decent thing.

Her final interview with Miss Sinclair concerning an

accident to one of her charges makes this clear. On the

one hand, although Jenny is made to feel guilty because

she could not visit the child when he wanted her, it is

obvious that she could not be expected to sacrifice her

entire life to the gratification of the needs of others

when they are unreasonable or picayune. On the other

hand, in her condemnation of Patrick's behaviour over his

shooting of Dick Thompson, she clearly believes that one

cannot indulge oneself at the expense of others.

Jenny stands for Amis's own perception of morality

and Patrick is the student. Although he refuses to act, he is forced to concede, through Jenny's insistence, that decency is a moral obligation and that self-indulgence must be subjugated to it. It is a flaw in the technique

that the focus of interest cannot be maintained upon this relationship since Amis's concern with Patrick Standish and his skill in portraying him shifts the reader's attention to Patrick's problems and motives rather than allowing it to remain on Jenny. Moreover, Patrick's grappling is con• cerned largely with pseudo-problems in that he tries to

ignore, even after, the Sheila episode, the problem of decency altogether.

Thus it is possible to see Jim Dixon, John Lewis or even Garnet Bowen as men who struggle with this central 43

problem —the problem of how to be a decent man despite

the pressure.of modern society — but Standish, a sort of

Amis "non-hero," sidesteps the issue completely until, at

the novel's end, it is forced upon him by Jenny who has,

throughout, the "moral initiative." Standish, then, receives

from Amis a hero's place without being givena hero's pro•

blems.

Just after the publication of Take A Girl Like You. Amis

published a Science Fiction story in the New Statesman

called "Something Strange," aspects of which demonstrate

that his horizon has expanded. Although the ~story is no

real advance over Take A Girl Like You, it does indicate

Amis's desire to focus upon certain aspects of morality and '

to make them more real; in addition to this, he goes

farther towards finding a solution to.the moral dilemma.

The story concerns a group of people, the subjects of

a psychological experiment,.who are conditioned to believe

that they are in a space station and have been abandoned

forever by their base. 'Their routine is disrupted in various" horrifying ways In order to determine how they will react to the pressure. The experiment is described in the official file as "Fear Elimination," but the conditioning

is such that, when liberated by the new regime, one of the

subjects, an attractive girl, cannot be deconditioned and withdraws into a catatonic state. Her cure is begun by a declaration of love by another memver of the group who has 44 been previously removed from the experiment because he was beginning to understand its intent. The members of the liberating forces make it quite clear that they consider this experiment, and others that they have discovered, to be immoral. We are forced to agree. The objection to the experiments is not only that they destroy personality but that they make use of people, and this, as we have seen, is something of which Amis strongly disapproves.

Since the characters in the story are not finely drawn,

Amis is free from the confusion of portraying his homme moyen sensuel and is thus able to concentrate his attention on the solution of a moral problem. This solution involves love. It is true that Amis concerned himself with love in

That Uncertain Feeling and Take A Girl Like You, but nowhere in the novels was he absolutely clear about his heroes' direct concerns. The following passage from a novel being written by one of the characters in the Science

Fiction story clarifies Amis's perception of the value of love:

Irmy looked from one man to the other. There was so much difference between them that she could hardly begin to choose: the one more pleasant, the other better at thinking, the one slim, the other plump. She decided being pleasant was better. It was more important and more significant -n^hetter in every way that made a real difference.'

The values embraced by the fictional author of this passage need not be commented upon to be seen as false, but it is significant to see that the power which finally 45 brings her back to reality is the power of love, a love expressed by the only member of the group who never com• pletely loses touch with reality. Thus Amis is arguing that it is love which enables us to face reality and the horrors of the world in which we find ourselves. Perhaps

Amis is on the way by his emphasis on the element of love to solving the problem which has beset him in his novels.

If, in the future, he can deal with the question of love and the decent man's appreciation of it, he may be able to provide the needed solution to the problem of how a decent man is to find his place in society. CHAPTER III

Amis's Technique: Its Effectiveness and

Limitations

If, through his work, Amis is trying to show the way in which the decent man can find his place in society, his technique should he examined in order to see whether it goes any distance toward showing where that place is, or whether it is responsible for the difficulty that the reader often finds in seeing Amis's homme moyen sensue1 as decent at all. Now, since Amis is a satirist rather than just a comic novelist, he uses his comic technique to reinforce and to complement the presentation of morality in his novels; hence, farce is often intended to support directly the moral position. Note the fight scene in

Lucky Jim which stands for the triumph of decency over wickedness as Jim defeats the poseur Bertrand in a wildly comic scene of violence:

They faced each other on the floral rug, feet apart and elbows crooked in uncertain attitudes, as if about to begin some ritual of which neither had learnt the cues. 'I'll show,' Bertrand chimed, and jabbed at Dixon's face. Dixon stepped aside, but his feet slipped and before he could recover Bertrand's fist had landed with some force high up on his right cheekbone. A little shaken, but undismayed, Dixon stood still and, while Bertrand was still off his balance after delivering his "blow, 47;

hit him very hard indeed on the larger and more convoluted of his ears. Bertrand fell down, . . . .'^

Amis describes the fight as a ritual, and the tempo of the incident is careful and slow, with every move observed. It is meant to be a ritual, an acting out of the triumph of decency. Bertrand is the stereotype opponent, who, as the artist, poseur and hypocrite, stands opposed to Jim's picture of himself as the bluff and honest exponent of decency. Bertrand is citified, admiring the rich and seeking their patronage; he is, in Fielding's, terms, a representative of the corrupt "town," and his language even contrasts with Jim's "flat northern voice."

The use of violence as a comic device provides a clue to the way in which Amis uses comedy and farce to assist him in presenting the morality. It is useful to go back to the parallels with Fielding and to see that guiding

Amis's satire there is a rule very like the dictum of

Fielding that only an "ill-framed mind" can see ugliness, infirmity or poverty as ridiculous in themselves and that 74 affectation can be the only true object of ridicule.'

Such an attitude displays a basic decency and a willing• ness to acknowledge the sanctity of the individual. Ian

Watt examines the way in which this decency is displayed in the comic technique of Fielding; he states that The spectacle of a village mob assaulting a pregnant girl after church service is in itself anything but amusing, and only Fielding's burlesque manner, his 'Homerican style', enables.him to maintain the 48

comie note. It is certain that this and some other episodes would be quite unacceptable if Fielding directed our attention wholly to the actions and feelings of the participants; ... .75

Although Amis frequently uses this method to produce comedy, it cannot be suggested that he follows Fielding in a search for epic parallels; he does, however, follow

Fielding in diverting the reader's attention from the feelings of the participants in the situation in order to produce comedy, recalling, perhaps, Fielding's statement that misfortune in itself is not humorous. To a very large extent the scenes of violence in Amis's novels utilize this method. For instance, in the following scene from Take A Girl Like You, the host, Julian Ormerod, describes one of the high points of his party:

"Well, during the firefighting some anonymous jester wandered into my gun-room, which I blame myself for having omitted to lock, and picked up a fowling- piece, which he proceeded to discharge in the general direction of the Thompson arse. Nearly missed him, but not quite. Must have got him out

of one of the gun-room windows; they run justr;6 along there. Jolly mordant bit of wit, what?"'

Thompson, the victim, is a mild man, though not at all the sort of man of whom we can approve, but nevertheless not deserving of quite so much violence. He is pathetic rather than unpleasant, and Jenny, the heroine, to whom the above description is addressed, can at times feel sorry for him.^ The language in the excerpt is indicative of the absence of feeling. Julian's ironic "Jolly mordant bit of wit, what?;" seems to depersonalize the whole episode; it 49;

reinforces the detached objective point of view produced

by relating the incident in past time instead of describing

it as it happened. We forget that Thompson had feeling

and was hurt. Through this scene Amis allows his heroine,

Jenny Bunn, to reveal her awareness of Patrick Standish*s

character. She knows that it is Patrick who has fired the no shot,' and the knowledge aids her in passing a moral

judgement on him.

Amis is able to maintain this impersonal attitude in his handling of Julian Ormerod. Ormerod*s conversation, like that of Dicken's Mrs. Gamp, is limited to the repetition of a sort of leit motif expressed in cuttingly apt parody of fashionable Mayfair slang, what Patrick

Standish refers to as his "Raf-and-Jaguar dialect." The following sentiments are expressed in what Amis suggests is "a deep and confident voice with a BBC accent":

He paused and stared hard across the room to where a woman with heavy make-up and fierce blonde hair was drinking an elaborately decorated drink, her nose buried in a little clump of mint. "Well, there's something admirably suited for a spot of hoo-ha, I should have thought. Now what about the old faggeroo? Eh? Let's try the old fag-o'-my-firkin." With this he brought out cigarettes and offered them round.79

Ormerod is one of those figures of authority of whom Amis seems to approve, and the reader is never quite sure what fin kind of judgement Amis makes concerning his behaviour.

He is, however, the character who points out Patrick's lack of moral standards and in so doing serves a useful 5Q function in the presentation of morality.

This use of leit motif parallels in its utility

Fielding's "Homerican style." Unfortunately, however,

Amis has relied too much upon it, with the result that even before the publication of Take A Girl Like You the hero himself has become stereotyped. Thus we read that

Garnet Bowen's "large and well-made frame blended with an air of inefficiency," or that Bowen1s wife was "a pretty little dark woman with strong hands and big wondering eyes, [who] was putting a protesting child into its coat to the accompaniment of a song being sung very loudly and 81 badly by Frank Sinatra."

Similarly the reactions of the heroes to the women they meet are remarkably dead and sterile. When he first meets Christine, a girl who seems to impress him and with whom he later falls in love, Jim Dixon, in a few seconds, notices . . . all he needed to notice about this girl: the combination of fair hair, straight and cut short, with brown eyes and no lipstick, the strict set of the mouth and the square shoulders, the large breasts and the narrow waist, the premeditated simplicity of the wine-colored corduroy skirt and the unornamented white linen blouse.82 Perhaps the flatness of Jim's response can be excused on the grounds that this incident is only meant to be the briefest and coldest description of Christine and that it is intended to indicate both Jim's determination not to become involved and his feeling that she is inaccessible 51 to him, hut the reader has no way of being sure.

Although in his last novel, Take A Girl Like You. Amis is more interested in love and in the relationships between men and women, when Jenny first sees Patrick Standish, he is described in the same rather flat language which tends to persist throughout the novel:

He was handsome in a rather sissy way, and was pre• tending to have forgotten he still had his hand on the open door. She could tell that if he had been smoking a cigarette he would have taken it out of his mouth and thrown it away without taking his eyes off her.83

All this eventually results in a lack of relief, a flatness of detail which is intensified by the unfortunate lapses in style and the lack of clarity as is shown in

Patrick's comment about girls:

And, far more important, he knew that if he did manage to find a specimen of the real stuff — a gigantic proviso *~ he would in all probability be nervous of it. Irritating, that. What was it that had long ago set" Ms taste at variance with his temperament, with the result that the ones he liked were never the real stuff and, in cases where their transmutation into something nearer the real stuff became possible, he was apt to find himself con• fronted with something other than what he had originally liked? A bit more than irritating, that. There was also the point that to keep on transmuting non-real into quasi-real stuff was a procedure of dubious moral tendency. But screw all that from here to eternity. Trying not to be a bad man took up far more energy than he could, or was prepared to, spare from trying not to be a nasty man, a far more pressing task, especially this last year or two. Not only that: all this moral business was poor equipment for one barely into his stride on the huge trek to satiety.8q"

The passage above is intended to make an explicit 52

moral comment centering on some perception of the idea

of decency, an idea which has its foundation in Patrick's

distinction between "bad" and "nasty" and which takes

into account Amis's notion that „sexual immorality is not

the gravest of sins. Nevertheless, the style is so. obscure

that it is never very clear how this distinction is to be

made, whatever distinction can be made seems to hinge

upon Amis's perception of decency as the preservation of

human dignity, but, because of the difficulty of cutting

through obscure.prose and of finding a consistent attitude

to take to Patrick, this is never clear. The shift of

focus in Take A Girl Like You, (the above quotation is taken from that portion which focusses onPatrick), does nothing to make this task easier.

Yet Amis can sometimes use flat and inexpressive language, concentrating upon an elementary but over• emphasized logic which has a comic intent but which goes farther than comedy to lead directly to questions of truth and values, as in Garnet Bowen1s comments on advertising:

He thought to himself now that if ever he went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top "Bowen's Beer", and then underneath that in the middle a picture.of Mrs. Knowles drinking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words "Makes You Drunk".8 5

Here Amis tries to reach directly what his homme moyen sensuel thinks, and in this he is by and large successful, as he is in the following passage in which he tries to 53

strip John Lewis's thought of its peripheral and abstract tags:

Why did I like women1s breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?.86

In the above example, the technique does not reinforce the hero's allegiance to decency; it is only the accurate, though realistic, picture of a somewhat crude thought.

Amis often uses crudity for comic effect, but in addition he tries to make the crudity reinforce whatever point is at issue. Jim's difference from and hatred of the Welch family come out strongly when he exhorts their cat to "Scratch 'em, . . . pee on the carpets."8^ The incident is funny because it suggests a ludicrous con• spiracy between Jim and the cat. The conspiracy, like

Jim's faces which reflect his insecurity and childishness, illustrates his impotence in the face of society, as does the deliberately misspelled and crude phrase "Ned Welch is a Soppy Fool with a Fase like a Pigs Bum" which he scrawls on Welch's shaving mirror. Similarly, both Jim and John Lewis indulge in various antics on the telephone.

The telephone is one of those instruments of modern society which seems to defeat these men; they either comically misuse it or demonstrate a singular incompetence with it because they are outside that group to whom the telephone belongs by right and they are not at ease using it. Amis allows his comic talent full reign in these 54

scenes and they are effective in demonstrating the posi• tion of his heroes in relation to the society in which they find themselves forced to operate. At the con• clusion of one of these comic scenes, during which John

Lewis forgets to push the "A" button and wastes his telephoned insults, he delivers himself of the following sentiments:

The way to get through, or rather round, their defences was to come cartwheeling into the upstairs lounge in front of them all and do a can-can wearing the Welsh woman's outfit, modified in advance by having SOD THE WHOLE LOT OF YOU worked in gamboge across the shoulder-blades. That would be more the sort of thing.88

Here the dichotomy between "we" and "they" is used. John

Lewis is the man who is outside the social system in which he is trying to operate and implicit in the dichotomy is the thought that "we" are decent and "they" are not. The sentiment here is uncouth, but as always in the novels there is the intention to make mere crudity serve some purpose. The problem lies in determining whether or not

Amis is successful in presenting morality through this method.

Ultimately, Amis's technique tends to be confusing.

At it.si best it allows him to be impersonal and detached; his descriptions of behaviour especially, produce such detachment. However, constantly repeated devices and uniformity of the responses they produce tend finally to blur the presentation of morality, resulting in an 55, oversimplification of the moral problems involved in any- given situation. When behaviour is too often ritual, when description of characters is too often sparse, flat and sterile, and when dialogue is too often reduced to the repetition of catch phrases, then the fine balance of detail required to present complex human problems is not available. Take for example the description of character.

Jenny Bunn divides people into two classes: stooges, and others.

He had put his papers down and was evidently repairing a cigarette, one of the small sort, with a piece of stamp-paper. This put it absolutely beyond all pos• sible doubt that he was a stooge...... Stooges were easiest to pick out as children, ... but Jenny had got so good at recognising the grown-up ones that just catching sight of them at a distance was sometimes all she needed. They had to be walking then, because apart from things like their always having the latest bus-timetable and writing in their personal memoranda on the page for it in diaries and looking at times a little like a lady, the most reliable way of telling one was if he had one of the two kinds of stooge walk: .... so far she had never run into a stooge with ideas about her who had started anything. They just looked, in a sad, fixed way, like someone watching after a street accident.°9

But the world is not like this and this is not an adequate criterion to use in complex relations with others; nevertheless, Jenny is guided by such classifications.

Although Graham McClintoch, whose discourse on unattractive• ness is one of the few truly moving portions of the novel, is, to her, not quite a stooge, "being too slow in his movements and not looking anxious enough," he is "certainly 56

90 a dud." As much as Jenny seems to learn about people and differing standards, Amis persists in using these tags. At the novel's end, Mr. Vhittaker is described in such a way as to make him seem to be a stooge. He shakes 91 hands with "a quick up-ahd^down movement," and leaves,

"glancing at her in an apologetic wondering way."^

All this is confusing, as is the novel's resolution.

Jenny continues with what seems to be a most unpromising and unsatisfactory love affair, despite her experience, and

Amis persists in using tags which, in terms of that experi• ence, should be obsolete. Thus he tends to nullify the effect of Jenny1s moral development and distracts the reader from seeing that she has become more sophisticated.

Amis's technique is limiting and prevents a consistent development in the presentation of morality. The limit• ations of his technique are paralleled by the flaw in his vision through which he too often allows his central figures to exceed the bounds of common decency. Although the best of the comic episodes permit great detachment, and contribute to the characterization of the hero as l'homme moyen sensuel, the repetition of the same devices and the excessive use of flat or sterile language prevent.. Amis from revealing the complexities of situation and emotion which inevitably arise when such a character faces the world. CHAPTER IV

Conclusion

In order to evaluate finally Amis's success in his presentation of morality, we should determine whether or not Amis offers an acceptable moral code and whether or not that code is consistently presented throughout the novels. We should further determine whether or not any defects in the morality, as it appears, are a result of errors in Amis's technique or whether they represent a flaw in his vision. Ultimately the question can he put in terms of Amis's success with the characterization of his hero. Does he present his hero as a decent man who is put upon by society and who has no real choice of action, a man who is trapped, or does the characterization, and with it the moral position, fail?

Amis, as we have seen, is at great pains to establish his heroes as decent men. He observes carefully the distinction between innocence and experience and between sensuality and hypocrisy. His heroes, as we have seen, are the innocents in a world in which society is corrupt, and each attempts to act decently and survive, in the face of the hypocrisy and malice which he finds in the world 58 around him. The morality of his heroes centers upon their behaving with sincerity and integrity, and acknowledges, as an underlying admission, the moral fact that the harming of others is a far worse sin than that of simply gratifying one's senses. Thus it is that Amis can adopt a permissive attitude to drunkenness and lasciviousness, provided that ho real harm to others is done.

It is in the resolution of the moral conflicts that the difficulties in the appreciation of morality occur.

We have seen that the typical Amis hero is a man who receives punishment for sins of which he is not guilty and does not appear to be punished for those of which he is guilty. Amis is most interested in the way in which some people appear to be punished far in excess of the crimes they commit, while others are allowed to go relatively unpunished for crimes of a far more serious nature.

Consequently, in his novels Amis wants to correct this moral imbalance, and in order to do so he Introduces the element of luck. Certainly if we accept Amis's view of his hero as the average decent man, his homme moyen sensuel. we are gratified when luck plays its part and allows him to emerge from his tribulations relatively unscathed. But, as we have seen, the kind of resolution of the moral conflict which Amis seems to favour is really an evasion of the real moral issue and, although our sympathy is with the hero, we cannot ignore the fact that he has made no real §9 moral choice hut simply has heen absolved by being given 94 an "easy out;"^ Such a compromise cannot reinforce the moral position presented in any of the novels, however attractive that position, as it abdicates the struggle with the moral issue. Thus the resolution of the conflict in the first three novels, at least, is unsatisfactory so far as the presentation of morality is concerned.

Ill of Amis's novels are satiric in intent and thus must have a moral position. In taking the view that the proper business of satire is to deal with affectation, he is ruthless indeed with those characters whom he considers dangerously affected. The danger of affectation lies in the harm it can do to others. Concomitant with this theme is the idea that no one is in a position to dictate what is good for other people and that one must treat others with the awareness that they are fully consenting individuals. Amis is extremely conscious of these ideas and his work seldom fails to take cognizance of them. Just as he objects to the "do-good" attitude of the social- worker in the story "Moral Fiber \" throughout his analysis of Science Fiction in Hew Maps of Hell there is implicit a great deal of concern with the immorality of legislating what is good for others.

Thus Amis implies a code of behaviour for the average decent man which permits him to gratify his self-interest and his sensuality only if he can do so without harming 60

others; he is also hound to recognize the sacred right

of others to go to hell in their own way. However in

developing characters who subscribe to such a moral code,

Amis does permit them to do harm to others by taking

justice into their own hands, with the.result that some

of his heroes appear to exceed the bounds of that common

decency which for Amis lies at the basis of morality. The

possible argument that these heroes are trapped by their

society and forced to engage in immoral behaviour in order

to get some kind of justice, is largely self-defeating,

for what Amis must show is how the average decent man is

to behave in his society without sacrificing his own

standards of decency.

Amis fails to solve the problem in that the resolutions

of the novels fail to make the issue clear. The fact that,

until Take A Girl Like You, he can show no one of his

heroes as having progressed in his social or moral behaviour

indicates that he cannot see a way to make his morality work

in society. As a result, the position of the individual hero remains ambiguous. For example, in the case of Jim

Dixon we can see no end to the process of selfishness and

self-delusion which causes him to act outside the bounds

of decency. His ultimate employment is curiously negative,

if not actually destructive, and by achieving a modicum of material success he is permitted to resign from the moral

issue altogether. This is no solution to the problem of 61

morality in everyday life.

In order to make any kind of critical judgement upon

Amis as a novelist, we must determine why it is that Amis

is led to resolve the moral conflict in his novels in this

unsatisfactory way. It would appear that the perception

of morality as we find it in the novels is perfectly

capable of being extended as a code of behaviour for the

average decent man, but it is in the presentation of this morality that Amis makes his errors.

Underlying the errors there is, on the part of Amis,

a rather dull perception of values, so that, as John

Lehman suggests, balance has gone awry. ^ In the most

serious case, this apparent loss of balance can be blamed upon a fault in technique. In Take A Girl Like You.

Patrick Standish appears to displace Jenny Bunn as the hero and central figure in the novel, and consequently it has appeared to some readers, among them Lehman, that

Patrick Standish occupies the same position in Take A Girl

Like You as does Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim. Now this is not so. No amount of sophistry can make Patrick Standish into the average decent man; he is not decent. If Amis had permitted the focus of the novel to remain upon Jenny and upon her struggle to preserve her standards in a social situation which is opposed to their maintenance, he would have been well able to maintain the moral balance of his novel. 62

The shorteomings of Julian Ormerod or Larry Bannion are not judged to he as serious as either the posing and affectation of the Welch family or the vulgarity of John

Lewis's "smart" friends because neither Ormerod nor

Bannion is malicious. Yet it is too much to ask of a reader to discount their behaviour for this reason, or to perceive the moral behind the characterizations when almost no notice of intention is given by the author, particularly so since Amis elsewhere has indicated an admiration of the sort of man who has discovered that "the more rules there are the easier and safer itr is to break them."y Here, of course, he is illustrating the hero against society, an approach of which he seems quite fond, but which he often handles in such a way as to confuse the moral issue. It is careless indeed to allow such situations to creep into the novels without a fuller explanation of the moral distinctions to be observed.

Generally speaking, however, the technique of the novels admirably supports the moral intent. The dialogue and language underline the decent and matey good-fellowship of the heroes and remind us continually of an allegiance between decent men. It should be observed that the use of common speech is in no way satirical and, as Martin Green points out, Amis, unlike Waugh, is committed to rather 97 than critical of its users.J( Similarly, the actual satire is always directed at its target which is €3- affectation, and few if any excesses occur.

Therefore, the issue is not so much whether or not

Amis is on his target hut whether or not the target is the correct one, and, if it can be shown that Amis's attacks are worthwhile, it goes a long way to justifying his performance. Not all critics, however, would agree that Amis is firing at the correct target. D. J. Enright summarizes the argument against him:

... it appears to be felt in some quarters that these novels have a more direct, more significant connection with the realities of contemporary life than is the case, that Mr. Amis is telling some important universal truths rather than exposing some comparatively minor lies — and making oddly heavy and ambiguous weather over that.98

Such a view is sensible; however, it is limited in that it depends upon seeing Amis's performance as a satirist and as a moralist as being solely destructive. The

"universal truth" to be found in his work is a function of his presentation of the difficulty of his heroes, average decent men, in acting decently or in maintaining their standards of decency in the social system in which they operate.

Amis is to some extent presenting the case of the outsider. It may seem odd to describe the average decent man as being an outsider, but Amis clearly regards him as such. He is an outsider because he is trying to apply a code, a set of standards, to a society which does not recognize them as valid or viable. Jenny Bunn, for 64

example, is such an outsider; she tries to cling to a

set of standards which the social system in which she

operates refuses to recognize. Needless to say, this is

a difficult and confusing position to he in and Jenny,

like the other Amis protagonists, finds herself confused

and torn, hut she, the most successful of Amis's central

characters in this, does maintain her standards in the

face of opposition. This is the problem which Amis is

trying to examine and it seems carping of Enright to

suggest that Amis is solely concerned with exposing minor

lies in the face of his determined, if not altogether

successful, attempts to deal with the larger issue.

There is a serious struggle implied in Amis's novels

and the characters are drawn up in two opposing forces, with the hero, and those people who are decent, on the

one side, and the affected, the malicious and the poseurs on the other. Those who are on the side of decency are permitted by Amis to engage in conduct which cannot be regarded as altogether decent, provided that they never deviate from sincerity and honesty. Since honesty and a concern for others is the sign of decency in these novels, there must be, on the part of the hero, a violent reaction against the poseur and the phoney, as is seen in Jim

Dixon's conflict with Bertrand Welch.

On the other hand, the lives of the heroes, Jenny Bunn excepted, are distinguished by a pervading boredom. This 65 too seems to be a condition of being an outsider. One

can hardly be expected to be happy and interested in a

social activity if one stands outside the society which is engaging in it. The boredom of the hero, in the first three novels, was a very great obstacle to Amis in pre• senting the case for the average decent man, since such a pervading boredom does not make the hero a sympathetic character, nor does it engender an interest in his problems.

In Take A Girl Like You. Amis has gone a long way to meeting these objections. Although as an individual she stands outside her society, Jenny is not bored and indeed there seems to be an equal amount of give and take in her dealings with that society. Jenny, as the only protagonist of an Amis novel who conspicuously matures during the course of the novel, represents a real advance in characterization.

With Take A Girl Like You Amis goes farther towards resolving the moral questions raised in his preceding novels, for although Jenny loses her physical virginity, she retains her morality and consequently comes closer to solving the problem of maintaining standards of decency and morality in an antipathetic society than does any other of

Amis's central figures.

Amis also seems on the way to introducing some serious discussion of love. Until his most recent short story he has largely ignored any serious discussion of the value of love. John Lewis loves his wife and Garnet Bowen says 66 repeatedly that he loves his, hut that is just about as close as any reader can get to a serious examination of the problem. "Something Strange" indicates that Amis is aware of the relation between love and the kind of morality in which he is interested, but we have not as yet seen any attempt to deal adequately with that relationship in a novel.

Finally, it is safe to say that in his novels Amis presents a tenable moral position, that of behaving in a way which takes into account the rights of others and in a way which involves one's own sincerity. But he has not as yet, due to flaws in technique and a rather more serious lack of focus on moral values, succeeded in convincing his readers completely of the value of that moral position and of the possibility of its application to the individual in his society. FOOTNOTES

1 Kenneth Tynan, "The Men of Anger," Holiday. XXII (April 1958), 92. John Holloway, ("Tank in the Stalls: Notes on the •School of Anger'," Hudson Review. X [Autumn 1957], 424-) suggests that the term"Angry Young Man"is taken from Leslie Paul's Angry Young Man (1951) which is concerned with youth in politics during the nineteen-thirties. But the fiat which gave the expression currency is undoubtedly Osborne's production.

2 Tynan, op. cit., p. 93.

3 William Esty, "The Old in Heart," Nation. April 26, 1958, p. 373.

4- Leslie Fiedler in a more careful article ("Class War in British Literature," Esquire. XLIX [April 1958], 79-81) falls into the error and attempts to explain the movement in terms of society and class without considering carefully enough.the performance of individual artists and individual novels. Like Tynan, he suggests that "what we are beholding is the creation of a myth of a generation."

5 Tom Maschler, ed., Introduction to Declaration (London, 1957), p. 8.

6 The Angry Decade (London, 1958), P» 7*

7 Cited in Declaration, ed. Maschler, p. 8.

8 Kingsley Amis, "Lone Voices: Views of the Fifties," Encounter. XV (July I960), 10.

9 Ibid., p. 11.

10 Spectator, Oct. 2, 1959, p. 431.

11 Kingsley Amis, "Socialism and the Intellectuals," The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, eds. G. Feldman and M. Gartenberg (New York, 1959), p. 34-3.

12 Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (New York, I960), p. 77. 68

13 Kingsley Amis, "Yanks and Limeys," Spectator, Feb. 8, 1957, p. 179.

14- Since World War II there have been in England a number of working class men who have received a university education, have done well, and yet are unable to qualify socially for the class in which they could successfully apply such an education. The complete background of the new rootless class in British society is given in Richard Boggart's The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957). Hoggart describes the pressures which are placed upon the working class in modern Britain and the social flux which these pressures have caused. Of particular interest is his section on the Scholarship Boy in which he points out some of the difficulties which the working class man who obtains a university education will face in the process of adapting himself to his new level. At the same time as this tendency of the new rootless class to move up in society is occurring, the middle classes are having difficulty in maintaining their social distinctiveness. These difficulties are examined by Lewis and Maude in their book, The English Middle Classes (London, 1953), and in the Manchester Guardian pamphlet on middle class budgets, The Middle Class Way of Life (1954).

15 Kingsley Amis, "Laughter's to be Taken Seriously," Hew York Times Book Review. July 7, 1957, p. 1.

16 Maynard Mack, ed., "Introduction" to Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Toronto, 1954), p. xii.

17 Kingsley Amis, That Uncertain Feeling (London, I960), p. 171.

18 Ibid., p. 56.

19 Geoffrey Gorer writes of this in his article "The Perils of Hypergamy," (New Statesman. May 4, 1957, pp. 566-568.) Gorer defines hypergamy as the marrying upwards to a higher social class, and he points out that in English society it is more usual for the partner with higher status to become declasse, but since the status of the partnership is usually acquired from the male, female hypergamy is not unusual. However, he sees male hypergamy as illustrated by novels like Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling, or John Braine's Room at The Top where . . . the hero, of working-class origin, is married to, or involved in a public liaison % with, a middle to upper-middle-class woman" 69

and doesn't really enjoy it at all, in the long run.. He thinks he is 'destroyed' by her, or would be 'destroyed' by her if he didn't return to his proper working-class environment, or both are reduced to mutual misery and recrimination. These cross-class unions, with male hypergamy, don't work out, we are told with humour and anger ..and passion and senti• mentality; and yet it is implied, if not stated, that it is only among women of this higher social class that these bright young men can expect to find wives or mistresses. Gorer, citing Hoggart, follows with a professional analysis of the reasons why male hypergamy is now possible in British Society. He suggests that, although he is analysing fiction, the parallel exists in contemporary English life.

20 Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here (London, 1958), P. 177.

21 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Hovel (London, 1957), p. 281.

22 Amis, I Like It Here, p. 185.

23 Amis, "Laughter's to be Taken Seriously," p. 1.

24- Loc. cit.

25 Amis, "Laughter's to be Taken Seriously," p. 13.

26 Henry Fielding, Preface to Joseph Andrews, (Toronto, 1954), p. xxi.

27 Ibid., p. xxii.

28 William Empson, "Tom Jones," Kenyon Review, XX (Spring 1958), 227.

29 See Chapter II below.

30 Kingsley Amis, "Moral Fiber," Esquire, LI (March 1959), 121.

31 Ibid.. p. 127. See also Chapter II below.

32 Kingsley Amis, A Case of Samples (Hew York, 1957), p. 46.

33 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London, 1959), p. 19. 70

34 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 8.

35 Martin Green (A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons [New York, I960], p. 122) suggests that Amis sets the decency of his hero against the restrictive values of what might be called Establishment conformity. Green sees Amis as an "anti-Gentleman" who has ... an amazing gift for the detail that distinguishes the gentleman from the decent man, not sociologically, but vitally, magni• fying, that is, the decent man into the figure of life and dehumanizing the other into simple nastiness; details of opinion, taste, manners, language, morals, knowledge, everything.

36 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 135«

37 Green, op. cit., pp. 95-124-.

38 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 21.

39 Ibid.. p. 184-.

40 Loc. cit.

. 41 Walter Allen, in his review of Lucky Jim (New Statesman, Jan. 30, 1954, p. 136), attributes the violence of his reaction to his dislike of hypocrisy. Discussing the new concept of the hero, Allen asks: Is he the intellectual tough, or the tough intellectual? He is consciously, even con• scientiously, graceless. His face, when not dead pan, is set in a snarl of exasperation. He has one skin too few, but his is not the sensitiveness of the young man in earlier twentieth-century fiction: it is the phoney to which his nerve-ends are tremblingly exposed, and at the least suspicion of the phoney he goes tough. He is at odds with his conven• tional university education, though he comes generally from a famous university: He has seen through the academic racket as he sees through all the others. A racket is phoneyness organised, and in contact with phoneyness he turns red just as litmus paper does in contact with an acid. In life he has been among us for some little time. One may speculate whence he derives. The Services, certainly, helped to make him; but George Orwell, Dr. Leavis and the Logical Positivists — or, rather, the attitudes these represent — all contributed to his 71

genesis. In fiction I think he first arrived last year, as the central character of Mr. John Wain's novel Hurry Qn Down. He turns up again in Mr. Amis's Lucky Jim.

42 The application of face-making in more sophis• ticated role-playing is discussed by Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [New York, 19593, Introduction and passim). He suggests that it is a conscious or semi-conscious attempt to convince an observer of one's role. Note also Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter," (Great Tales, and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe [New York, 1951), p. 210) where Dupin uses face-making in order to project himself into the personality of another so that he may divine that person's thoughts. Neither of these explanations is applicable to Jim Dixon and this writer maintains that Dixon's face-making is caused by his childish attempt to escape from the pressures of his insecurity. In his last novel, (Take A Girl Like You [London, I960], p. 302), Amis casts further light on this when one of his characters is made to comment on her role-playing: "Playing a part's the only thing left these days, it shows you won't deal with .society in the way it wants you to."

4-3 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 6.

44 Ibid..., p. 13.

45 Ibid., p. 21.

46 Letter to the Editor, Sunday Times, Dec. 25, 1955. On Jan. 8, 1956, C. P. Snow replied to this letter and attempted to account for the feelings and behaviour of these "scum." Both letters are cited in William Van O'Connor, "Two Types of 'Heroes' in Post-war British Fiction," PMLA. LXXVII,(March 1962), 171-172.

47 In his short story "Moral Fiber" (p. 122), Amis turns to the notion of the character who receives extreme punishment for small sins. Describing the psychic degeneration that a prostitute can expect, his hero observes: That was a nasty prospect all right, and resembled a kindred nastiness thought up by the Godhead in seeming a disproportionate penalty for rather obscure offenses. Still, that little cavil about the grand design had been answered long ago, . . . • 72

48 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 194.

49 Ibid., p. 29.

50 Amis, That Uncertain Feeling, p. 222.

51 Ibid., p. 208.

52 Ibid.. p. 28. See also Chapter I above.

53 Ibid., p. 87.

54 Ibid., p. 198.

55 Ibid., P- 122.

56 Ibid., p. 209.

57 Ibid., p. 199.

58 Amis, I Like It Here, p. 170.

59 Ibid., p. 35.

60 Ibid., p. 13.

61 Ibid., p. 153.

62 Ibid., p. 90.

63 Ibid., p. 91.

64 Ibid., p. 208.

65 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 215.

66 Ibid.. p. 207.

67 Amis, A Case of Samples, p. 29.

68 Kingsley Amis, Take A Girl Like You (London, I960), p. 282.

69 Ibid., p. 306.

70 Ibid., p. 148.

71 Ibid., p. 313.

72 Kingsley Amis, "Something Strange," Spectator, Nov. 25, I960, p. 822. ' 73

73 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 185.

74 See Chapter I above.

75 Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 253.

76 Amis, Take A Girl Like You, p. 310.

77 Ibid.. p. 260.

78 Ibid.. p. 313.

79 Ibid., p. 4-5.

80 John Lehman ("King of Shaft," Spectator. Sept. 23, 1960, p. 44-5) suggests that Amis is sometimes "unnervingly quirky in his endorsement of character" and cites Ormerod, and Bannion of I Like It Here as examples: ". . .it came like a slap in the face when Bowen claimed 'only an unusually nasty man could have resented Bannion's approaches.'"

81 Amis, I Like It Here, p. 5»

82 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 33»

83 Amis, Take A Girl Like You, p. 13. R. B. Parker ("Farce and Society: The Range of Kingsley Amis," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. II [Fall 1961], 27-38) cites this quotation as an example of what he calls acting a cliche.

84 Amis, Take A Girl Like You, p. 134.

85 Amis, I Like It Here, pi. 80.

86 Amis, That Uncertain Feeling, p. 53•

87 Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 160. In a letter to the Spectator ("English Pubs," Sept. 22, 1961, p. 384) Amis demonstrates that the technique of using crudity to reinforce argument is applicable to his non-fiction, when he writes The licensee, then, deserves, and will I hope increasingly be given, most of the blame. But it is worth repeating that the drinker is not guiltless. If he drinks tepid urine without complaint, tepid urine is what he will go on • getting.

88 Amis, That Uncertain Feeling, p. 143. 74

89 Amis, Take A Girl Like You, p. 102.

90 Ibid., p. 120.

91 Ibid., p. 315.

92 Ibid., p. 317.

93 See Chapter II above.

94 Leslie Fiedler (op. cit.. p. 80) suggests that: The newer British fiction is plagued by knowing much better where to begin than where to end; its heroes flirt with self-destruction, suicide or utter declassing, but in the last chapters they tend to be bundled shamelessly into some sentimental compromise. He cites the resolution of That Uncertain Feeling as an example.

95 See Chapter III above. See also footnote 80.

96 Kingsley Amis, "How to Get Away with It," Nation, June 16, 1956, p. 515.

97 Martin Green, "Amis and Salinger: The Latitude of Private Conscience," Chicago Review, XI (Winter 1958), 20.

98 D. J. Enright, "New Pastoral Comical," Spectator. Feb. 3, 1961, p. 155. - BIBLIOGRAPHY

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