Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
In That Uncertain Feeling (1955), one of Kingsley Amis's lesser novels, the narrator, John Lewis, is watching some young women play tennis, and decides to examine himself on an important question: 'Why did I like women's breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?' It's surprising, in a way, that Amis didn't capitalize those last words, as he was apt to do when he required any savage or emotional emphasis in his correspondence with Philip Larkin. (George Du Maurier's Trilby, for example, 'might be a lot worse,' he wrote. 'AND A LOT BETTER.') But he seldom permitted any such heaviness to pervade his novels, and it is this very delicacy that allows one to answer the sensitive and dangerous question not Why is Lucky Jim funny? (daunting enough as an essay topic) but Why is it so funny?
I happened to be in Sarajevo when Kingsley Amis died, in 1995. I was to have lunch the following day with a very clever but rather solemn Slovenian dissident. She knew that I had known Amis a little, and she expressed the proper condolences as soon as we met. Feeling this to be not quite sufficient, however, she added that the genre of 'academic comedy' had enjoyed quite a vogue among Balkan writers. 'In our region zere are many such satires. But none I sink so amusing as ze Lucky Jim.' This, delivered with perfect gravity in the lugubrious context of the Milosevic war, made me grin with inappropriate delight. How the old buzzard would have gagged, with mingled pride and disdain, at the thought of being so appreciated by a load of Continentals—nay, foreigners. And what the hell can his masterpiece be like when rendered into the Serbo-Croat tongue?
Lucky Jim Introduction Before we get to why Jim was so lucky, let's talk shop. Kingsley Amis was part of a 1950s literary movement that was known as the 'Angry Young Men,' a group of anti-establishment British writers who wrote biting satire about different aspects of British society.
Lucky Jim Introduction Before we get to why Jim was so lucky, let's talk shop. Kingsley Amis was part of a 1950s literary movement that was known as the 'Angry Young Men,' a group of anti-establishment British writers who wrote biting satire about different aspects of British society. ― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim. Jim was not so lucky in love either. The woman he was with, a fellow academic, plied whatever feminine wiles were available to one with a rather plain appearance. Christine, the more striking young lady Jim met an.more. Flag 23 likes. Kingsley Amis's witty campus novel, Lucky Jim is a comedy that skewers the hypocrisies and vanities of 1950s academic life.This Penguin Modern Classics edition contains an introduction by David Lodge. Lucky Jim is a 1957 British comedy film directed by John Boulting and starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas and Hugh Griffith. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.
in Clapham, Wandsworth, London, England, The United KingdomLucky Jim Analysis
Philip Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered the English novelist Martin Amis.
Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, Wandsworth, County of London (now South London), England, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer's clerk. He began his education at the City of London School, and went up to St. John's College, Oxford April 1941 to read English; it was there that he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, he was called up for Army service in July 1942. After serving as a l...more
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