{"id":85388,"date":"2015-05-04T13:05:40","date_gmt":"2015-05-04T17:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85388"},"modified":"2015-05-04T13:05:40","modified_gmt":"2015-05-04T17:05:40","slug":"something-serious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/04\/something-serious\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Serious"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kingsley Amis\u2019s \u201cmost unpleasant\u201d hero.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"25117_take-a-girl-like-you-3\"<\/a>

A still from the 1970 film version of Take a Girl Like You<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s fair to say that in the late 1950s Kingsley Amis was riding high. In 1954,\u00a0Lucky Jim <\/em>had made him the leading novelist of his generation. He had held off an attempt by a new boss to have him fired for \u201cinefficiency\u201d from his post as a lecturer at University College of Swansea. His marriage had recovered from his wife Hilly\u2019s love affair with one of his friends. (Amis\u2019s mistress also abandoned him for a time, but she came back, too.) Though he mocked them in private and in public, he was identified with Britain\u2019s twin literary insurgencies, the Movement poets and the Angry Young Men. He was much in demand as a reviewer and journalist, and he could afford monthly visits to London, where he would drink from lunch until closing time. Despite his famous capacities, he wasn\u2019t always compos mentis by the end of such nights; after one strenuous lunch he was hit by a passing car. He spent a few hours in Charing Cross Hospital, and was taken home by his friends Geoff and Mavis Nicholson. The next morning, a young neighbor stopped by their house; he was pursuing a master\u2019s in literature, and told the Nicholsons his favorite author was Kingsley Amis. Just then a bandaged man in his underwear staggered into the room. This, Mavis told her guest, is Kingsley Amis. The Nicholsons are the dedicatees of Take a Girl Like You<\/em>. Geoff was his former student, and Mavis his mistress. Amis led a complicated life. <\/p>\n

Lucky Jim <\/em>had introduced a new type: Jim Dixon exemplified the young men rising from lower middle class through the universities in the postwar welfare state. The praise for Amis\u2019s talents as a comic novelist was near universal. The view on his characters was mixed. In 1955, Somerset Maugham wrote in the\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned.<\/p>\n

They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious \u2026 Charity, kindness, generosity, are ideas they hold in contempt. They are scum.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There was not a little class snobbery in Maugham\u2019s judgment\u2014his father was a lawyer for the British embassy in Paris; Amis\u2019s a middle manager for a mustard manufacturer\u2014and it didn\u2019t go unchallenged. The New Statesman and Nation <\/em>ran a contest for readers to reply to Maugham in the voice of Jim Dixon. A university instructor wrote to the\u00a0Times <\/em>to point out that the majority of students who\u2019d ever gone to university had done so with the hopes of getting a job, and that campus literature had long portrayed the mean and the malicious. Edmund Wilson had come to Amis\u2019s heroes\u2019 defense, pointing to the decency beneath their boorishness. But in 1955, when Amis started writing Take a Girl Like You <\/em>(its working title was Song of the Wanderer<\/em>), it was bad behavior that had come to interest him most. Fifteen years after its publication in 1960, he would call its hero, Patrick Standish, \u201cthe most unpleasant person I\u2019ve ever written about.\u201d Yet his nastiness is all his own, not a class trait. Whether he qualifies as scum is a matter for the reader to decide.<\/p>\n

\"amispic\"<\/a>

Amis doing an Evelyn Waugh impersonation.<\/p><\/div>\n

The novel was still unfinished when Amis was invited to spend the 1958\u201359 academic year in Princeton. He had put it aside to write I Like It Here<\/em>. The slightest of his first three books, I Like It Here <\/em>is a near-autobiographical account, supplemented with a mystery plot, of the months he spent with his family in Portugal, where he went reluctantly after Lucky Jim <\/em>was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, which stipulated travel abroad. On its release in 1958, I Like It Here <\/em>was greeted as a dud, and Amis didn\u2019t disagree: \u201cYes, those critics have certainly shown themselves less than fanatically keen about ILIH<\/em>,\u201d he wrote to his uncle John Davenport. \u201cWell, it had to come, is what I keep saying to myself. I don\u2019t feel depressed so much as faintly foolish\u2014\u2018like falling down outside a pub\u2019 as [the novelist] Elizabeth Taylor \u2026 put it to me.\u201d He had written the book in a rush, out of a sense that he needed to get another novel in print and to exploit his time in Portugal before it slipped from his memory. \u201cAnyway,\u201d he told his uncle, \u201cthe next one will knock them cold: I\u2019m all set to step into the second rank behind C. P. Snow and Priestley as a serious chronicler of our society.\u201d He was only half joking. \u201cI was saying, to put it very crudely,\u201d he told an interviewer of Take a Girl Like You <\/em>in 1975, \u201cI hope they\u2019ll go on laughing, but this time they won\u2019t be able to escape the notion that I\u2019m saying something serious. I don\u2019t mean profound or earnest, but something serious.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Portugal, Princeton, and Swansea, Amis made elaborate notes for the novel, drawing parallels between its characters and those of Hamlet<\/em>. In its initial conception it was meant to solve the problem of \u201chow to get a girl for Willie.\u201d Willie Smyth was a Latin instructor at Swansea, \u201cpedantic, pernickety, letting nothing inaccurate or of uncertain meaning go by\u2014not an aphrodisiac quality.\u201d He is the original Graham McClintoch in the finished novel, but early in its conception he was pushed to the margins in favor of his more charming and appetitive roommate, Patrick Standish. Through Patrick\u2019s obsessions with sex and death, Amis could get at something darker than he\u2019d managed to conjure so far. As Amis wrote to Philip Larkin before leaving for Princeton: \u201cSong of the Wanderer<\/em>, without necessarily being at all good, is pleasing me and interesting me greatly as I write. It looks like being about as long as War and Peace <\/em>at the moment. I hope you\u2019ll like it. I think I have devised a character who can say more of what I think than any previous. Time will show.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patrick is a teacher at a boys\u2019 school in a country town about an hour from London. What he thinks about mostly is women, and the one he thinks most about is Jenny Bunn. She has come down from her home in an industrial city in the north of England in flight from a breakup, about which we\u2019re never told much. She\u2019s twenty years old with a job as a schoolteacher, and, crucially, she\u2019s a virgin, with no plans to stop being so until she\u2019s somebody\u2019s wife. England in the 1950s: \u201cIn those days, there were good girls and there were bad girls,\u201d said the late Mandy Rice-Davies, the model and nightclub dancer at the center of the 1963 Profumo affair, Britain\u2019s first modern political sex scandal. \u201cGood girls didn\u2019t have any sex at all, and bad girls had a bit.\u201d Jenny is one of those good girls, an endangered species in this novel, and as for Patrick: \u201cTrying not to be a bad man took up far more energy that 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.\u201d Jenny is both object and obstacle in Patrick\u2019s quest. On their first date they reach \u201cthe stage of oh please <\/em>and no please <\/em>and then oh <\/em>and no<\/em>.\u201d Jenny enforces her noes with firm grabs of his wrists and a hard pull of the hair on the back of Patrick\u2019s head. \u201cThat was a bit unnecessary, wasn\u2019t it?\u201d he says. She replies, \u201cIt seemed pretty necessary to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

This dynamic is sustained until the novel\u2019s end: Will Jenny give in? Will Patrick be patient? Will he propose marriage? Will he bugger off? Or will he take what he wants by force, his nastiness finally getting the better of him? The novel\u2019s third-person narration partakes both of Jenny\u2019s and of Patrick\u2019s points of view. The majority of chapters belongs to Jenny. She\u2019s good-natured to a fault, and if the reader\u2019s heart sinks whenever she reaches back to a lesson she\u2019s learned from the advice columns of Women\u2019s Domain<\/em>, there\u2019s an acute intelligence at work in the way she observes men: how they look at her, their styles of kissing, what happens when they put a record on the gramophone. After she asks Patrick to put on Dave Brubeck, prompting one of his lectures, she thinks, \u201cThere was always something they liked telling you about.\u201d Jenny\u2019s disposition is affectionate and hopeful. Patrick has a hard time loosening himself from a state of agitation. He constantly puts the Jenny problem through various analytic frameworks. After their first date, \u201che was now in a position to codify as an axiom the fact that willingness to be impressed was inversely correlated with willingness to be assaulted.\u201d As that last word indicates, some of his thoughts about Jenny really are foul, such as \u201chis early assumption that the Great Sculptor and Colourist, particularly in his latter capacity, had fashioned her primarily as a bedroom amenity.\u201d He\u2019s plagued by anxieties about whether cancer will be cured before he contracts it, anxieties only relieved by thinking about which women he\u2019ll go to bed with before he goes to the grave. Today we\u2019d call him a sex addict. By the last page, after chapters thick with reversals and revelations, we\u2019d call him other things, too.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Patrick and Jenny become entangled in one way or another with the novel\u2019s large and precisely drawn supporting cast; these entanglements only send them back towards each other. Martha and Dick Thompson, the owners of the house where Jenny lives as a lodger, represent marital misery, cut off from Jenny and Patrick\u2019s youth and charm. Another resident of the house is the obsequiously French Anna le Page, who has some history with Patrick, and like the novel\u2019s men can\u2019t help herself from making a pass at Jenny. Julian Ormerod, a wealthy Jaguar-driving figure of some mystery, kisses Jenny, then proposes to set her up in a London pied-\u00e0-terre, and quickly gives up on the idea when he realizes she doesn\u2019t know what he means by it. Unlike Patrick, Julian knows to leave a girl alone when she doesn\u2019t suit his \u201cpurposes,\u201d and he teases Patrick about Jenny throughout. He also takes him to London, brings him to a strip show, and introduces him to a pair of willing divorc\u00e9es. It\u2019s either a mark against him that he goes to bed with one of them, or a mark in his favor that doing so doesn\u2019t break Jenny\u2019s spell on him.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Graham McClintoch. He takes Jenny out one night, kisses her, then immediately apologizes. He goes on to explain the difference between himself and Patrick: \u201cI\u2019m unattractive. Not just not attractive. Unattractive. A positive quality.\u201d This is the start of a lengthy monologue, as amusing as it is saddening:<\/p>\n

\n

A great British prime minister once remarked that the people were divided into two nations, the rich and the poor, and in effect that these had no knowledge of each other. One might say the same, perhaps, of those who live in parts of the world where segregation by races is practised. But these barriers, or the reasons for them, belong to a part of our history which is fortunately passing away. There is one barrier, however, which no amount of progress or tolerance or legislation can ever diminish. I\u2019m talking about the barrier between the attractive and the unattractive, and if you think I sound as if I\u2019ve got this learned off, so I have, pretty well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Amis\u2019s way of framing a bad date in world-historic terms is typical of his comedy, from the start of his career till its end. The ideas themselves anticipate Michel Houellebecq\u2019s view of a liberalized sexual marketplace, brutally sorting winners from losers. On a smaller scale, the conflict between attraction and morality, or simply attraction and expectation, is the central dilemma of Take a Girl Like You<\/em>. Patrick, making his case for the umpteenth time, puts it this way: \u201cHe isn\u2019t ever going to turn up, Jenny, that bloke with \u2026 the honour and the bunches of flowers and <\/em>the attraction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"productimage-picture-take-a-girl-like-you-445\"<\/a>Does this fulfill the criteria of nonprofound seriousness Amis set for the novel? If being serious means looking at bad, even criminal, behavior straight on, I believe it does. This wasn\u2019t something Amis could do in his earlier novels, because the sins of a character like Jim Dixon are minor and often spring from circumstances he slips into because at heart he\u2019s a nice guy. Not so, Patrick. But Amis\u2019s moral project exacts a cost on the novel, its characters, and its comedy. Jenny is trapped in a prewar morality that\u2019s expiring so quickly she hardly knows herself why she\u2019s sticking to it, and Patrick is beholden to the oncoming sixties in ways he can\u2019t understand. Dragged across the novel\u2019s ever proliferating subplots, their affair and its schematic dynamics can be fatiguing. But to his credit Amis puts their oh-please-no-please routine to bed with a finale that\u2019s genuinely shocking.<\/p>\n

Amis\u2019s biographer, Zachary Leader, sees Take a Girl Like You <\/em>as a vehicle for Amis to project the troubles in his marriage. Virginity stands in for infidelity; Amis\u2019s tendencies to bad behavior are amplified in Patrick; and Jenny is a version of Hilly returned to her innocence. (\u201cShe said so many things that sounded like Hilly,\u201d Larkin wrote of Jenny in a letter to Robert Conquest.) When Hilly first \u201cyielded\u201d to Amis (as he put it in a letter to Larkin) and later married him on becoming pregnant, she hadn\u2019t bargained for a life of serial and constant affairs. Even as Amis persisted in his infidelities and encouraged her, to a point, in her own\u2014their year in Princeton involved a strenuous regimen of wife-swapping with the other young couples around campus\u2014he wasn\u2019t without guilt. It\u2019s an appealing formula, and when Leader spoke to Hilly she didn\u2019t contradict it. Amis said Take a Girl Like You <\/em>was his favorite of his novels. \u201cK. has finished a long novel, and sent it in,\u201d Hilly wrote to friends in 1959, \u201cno one\u2019s said they\u2019ve liked it so far, which is nasty\u2014 I think it\u2019s very good.\u201d As for its hero, she told her husband, \u201cI think Patrick\u2019s an absolute shit.\u201d Decades later she told Leader, \u201cI often felt like saying \u2018And you\u2019re an absolute shit yourself.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Christian Lorentzen is an editor at the <\/em>London Review of Books.<\/p>\n

This essay appears as the introduction to NYRB Classics\u2019 new reissue of <\/em>Take a Girl Like You<\/a>. Reprint<\/em>ed with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kingsley Amis\u2019s \u201cmost unpleasant\u201d hero. It\u2019s fair to say that in the late 1950s Kingsley Amis was riding high. In 1954,\u00a0Lucky Jim had made him the leading novelist of his generation. He had held off an attempt by a new boss to have him fired for \u201cinefficiency\u201d from his post as a lecturer at University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":827,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[17999,88,18000,17998,120,6425,1268,17706,17997,17996,15163,14328,17563],"class_list":["post-85388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-angry-young-men","tag-england","tag-english-fiction","tag-jenny-bunn","tag-kingsley-amis","tag-lucky-jim","tag-martin-amis","tag-midcentury-literature","tag-patrick-standish","tag-take-a-girl-like-you","tag-united-kingdom","tag-w-somerset-maugham","tag-zachary-leader"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn \u201cTake a Girl Like You,\u201d Kingsley Amis Got Serious<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Christian Lorentzen on Amis\u2019s 1960 classic and its repellent hero, Patrick Standish.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/04\/something-serious\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Something Serious by Christian Lorentzen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 4, 2015 \u2013 Kingsley Amis\u2019s \u201cmost unpleasant\u201d hero. 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