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As for identifying with the working classes, it is a "mug's game." Nor do Amis and Co. propose to rally round their presumed benefactors, the Socialists, for whose triumph their predecessors fought so hard: "The Welfare State, indeed, is notoriously unpopular with intellectuals. It was all very well to press for higher working-class wages in the old days, but now—why, some of them are actually better off than we are ourselves . . ."
The Caitiff Angels. The least resentful of all Lucky Jims, Kingsley Amis follows Voltaire's advice and cultivates his own garden behind the sprawling ten-room house in Swansea, Wales, where he lives with his blonde wife Hilary and two sons and a daughter, all three under ten. He is a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea, dislikes London literary society, likes jazz, Guinness stout, science fiction, cricket and Rugby matches, and making faces like Lucky Jim at parties.
If Amis and the rest of his school part company, it will be because he is its only conscientious craftsman and its only notable wit. Even so, his humor travels no better than the average joke in Punch, and U.S. editions of Lucky Jim and a second novel. That Uncertain Feeling, have barely topped the 5,000 mark in sales. His fellow writers would probably fare even worse, for they write with a sloppy, cliche-ridden arrogance that has been absent from serious U.S. fiction since the heyday of James T. Farrell and the cult of social protest.
Ironically, the writers of the Lucky Jim school have something to say. They have become authentic chroniclers of Britain's shrinking pains. They are sociocultural D.P.s. uprooted from the class of their birth and ill at ease in the accents of their betters. Enviously they yearn for the privileges of the aristocracy, without its responsibilities. They have a fierce as well as a flabby honesty. It can be said of each of them, as one critic said of Lucky Jim: "He has one skin too few. but his is not the sensitiveness of the young man in earlier twentieth century fiction: it is the phony to which his nerve ends are tremblingly exposed, and at the least suspicion of the phony he goes tough."
In a way. their egotism is preferable to the deadly altruism of the '30s, whose intellectuals minded everybody's business and loved mankind with a dreadful abstract love often indistinguishable from hatred. But Lucky Jim and pals also possess the defect of their egotistical virtue. Determined not to pledge a false allegiance, they reject all allegiances as false.
In the third canto of the Inferno, Dante, with Virgil as his guide, enters the outer confines of Hell and there sees a vast throng of confused spirits set upon by wasps and hornets. He asks
Virgil: "Who are these that seem so overcome with pain?" And Virgil answers: "This miserable mode the dreary souls of those sustain, who lived without blame, and without praise. They are mixed with that caitiff choir of the angels, who were not rebellious, nor were faithful to God; but were for themselves."