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Within the triangle of Amis, Osborne and Braine, the rest of the Lucky Jim school is encamped. John Wain (Hurry On Down ) is an Amis in whom the quinine water has changed to straight quinine. Thomas Hinde (Happy As Larry) explores the Welfare State Bohemia with a hero who feels that cadging a livelihood is "more honest," and Peter Towry (It's Warm Inside) writes the comedy of carping domesticity. The upstart philistinism that molds and mars the entire group is succinctly stated by John Braine's hero when he says that everything is "simply a question of money."
End of an Era. Lucky Jim and his pals mark the end of an intellectual era—the era of Utopian belief in man's earthly salvation through socialism and sociology, related to the igth century evolutionary notion that history is a process of perpetual improvement. That era's brilliant, fashionable upper-class leftists—Auden, Ishenvood, Spender et al.—are dismissed by Amis and Co. as playboys on a slumming party. The "new men" have actually been poor, and understandably they smirk when they pick up the memoirs of a posh erstwhile pink like Philip Toynbee (son of A Study of History'> Arnold J.) and read:"It was there, at Castle Howard, that I fell in love with Laura Bonham-Carter; and what I best remember about the first breathless evening is a dinner in the Canaletto room . . ."
But the most significant quarrel that Amis and Co. have with their literary predecessors is not that they had money but that they had causes. As Novelist John Wain puts it: "It was the last age, consciously and feverishly the last, in which people had the feeling that if they only took the trouble to join something, get a party card, wear a special shirt, organise meetings and bellow slogans, they could influence the course of events. Since 1946 nobody above the Jehovah's Witness level has taken this attitude."
Behind the Amis vogue is a conscious retreat from Utopia. The "new men'' have withdrawn from politics—and politics has withdrawn from them. Amis himself spelled it out in a pamphlet entitled Socialism and the Intellectuals. Fumblingly written but painfully sincere, it may be the first authentic manifesto of an apolitical literary age. Amis confesses that he finds politics a bore, and that he votes the Labor ticket as a kind of conditioned reflex—two admissions which infuriated British Laborites and old-line liberals. Analyzing his own apathy, Amis makes the pertinent reflection that intellectuals are political romantics who can be stirred by extreme situations: "Romanticism in a political context I would define as an irrational capacity to become inflamed by interests and causes that are not one's own, that are outside oneself. When we shop around for an outlet we find there is nothing in stock: no Spain, no Fascism, no mass unemployment."