Serio-Comic Amis and True Comic Edge: Lucky Jim and You Can’t Do Both

by Robert H. Bell

"As often in life, what had seemed nothing but a jest became a glimpse of a large and painful truth the second time round"
-----You Can’t Do Both

    Rarely does comic fiction provide probing moral inquiry or compelling psychological realism. Critics like F. R. Leavis, primarily concerned with these qualities, deny masterpieces like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy status in The Great Tradition, and gifted writers like Kingsley Amis are disparaged by John Updike as "winsomely trivial . . . in thrall to the weary concept of the 'comic novel,' " without "true comic edge." Though I would dearly like to repudiate Updike's position, I can only take issue with it. After thirty years of enjoying and admiring Amis, and a career of explicating and justifying comic writing, I must reluctantly concede the partial validity of Updike's criticism. What I can dispute and eagerly argue is that Jim Dixon is a comic hero with some unexpected (and, all right, strangely neglected) intricacy; for a remarkably long time we cannot know what will become of him, nor are we ever entirely sure how to assess him. The result is an engagingly problematic comic novel, with moments of uproarious farce, which precipitates a measure of thoughtful laughter and reflective scrutiny. But Lucky Jim, animated by comic impulses and faithful to comic imperatives, has limited depth, especially compared with Amis’s more rigorously "serio-comic" late novel You Can’t Do Both. Ultimately, one of the most telling and impressive of Amis's achievements is the discovery of humor's inadequacy, and the successful conversion of these limits into a subject, an issue, and a resource.

    Our initial responses to James Dixon are not particularly complicated: we share his point of view and generally sympathize with him. He's a beleaguered young man in danger of losing his job, compelled to please Professor Welch, who is insufferably boring, inhumanly obtuse, and prone to addressing Jim by the name of his predecessor in the History Department. Jim is likable because he is without pretense or self-delusion. He’d be the first to admit he’s unheroic and all-too-human. Jim modestly considers that he had been "drawn into the Margaret business by a combination of virtues he hadn’t known he’d possessed: politeness, friendly interest, ordinary concern, a good-natured willingness to be imposed upon, a desire for unequivocal friendship." Jim wins our sympathy not by impressive character or conduct but simply because he is better than the fools and phonies whose follies he mocks. Jim protects himself and amuses us with satiric wit and comic defiance. He correctly describes himself as "quick off the mark" (133). He’s a great mimic, an inventive actor, a master of voices, expressions, and impersonations, a well of outrageous vitality. Jim is the only live sensibility in a mausoleum of death—the incarnation of Bergson’s elan vital, the life force pitted against stultifying authorities, the mechanical inhumanity embodied by Professor Welch. At one point, enjoying his plot against Bertrand, he "threw back his head and gave a long trombone-laugh of anarchistic laughter" (103). Jim’s "anarchistic laughter," mocking conventional morality and decorum, is the stock-in-trade of comedy. Set the Marx Brothers loose in an opera house, or the brothers of Animal House amid a civic parade, and welcome Topsy-Turvy in which exuberant youth discombobulates venerable authority. "The pure sense of life," says Suzanne K. Langer, is "the underlying feeling of comedy." Such comic energy is amusing but often excessive, infantile (Updike’s phrase is "unabashedly sophomoric"), as when Jim writes, "Ned Welch is a Soppy Fool with a Face like a Pig’s Bum" on Welch’s steamy bathroom mirror, or imagines devoting the next ten years to "working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand’s work unfavorably" (50).

While laughter is crucial to Jim’s survival and sanity, it contains more "anarchic fury" than he realizes or controls. Here is psychological intensity with significant implications, creating a discrepancy between Jim’s self-awareness and our reaction to him. To Amis a fully-defined character is perceived "from all points on the compass, with respect, irony, impatience, and sadness." The narrative point-of-view in Lucky Jim is stable and reliable, or at least stably and reliably the hero’s. But the viewpoint provides more: it is just over Jim’s shoulder, and it dramatizes Jim thinking and feeling—thus enabling us to regard Jim with more ironic detachment and critical skepticism than Jim himself would or could muster. The aggression we see so often is a far more dangerous quality than, say, the high spirits or amorous inclinations of Jim’s comic ancestors, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Jim can barely suppress the impulse to attack Professor Welch or Bertrand.

His favorite means of purging rage, or containing loathing, is to enact that dazzling repertory of faces; my favorite, suggesting the Saturnalian spirit he represents, is Jim’s Sex Life in Ancient Rome face. Jim acknowledges that his imitations "frightened him." He is less aware how much self-hatred he has: his aggression, deflected from its exterior objects, boomerangs. Some of his capers, like stealing the cab from his senior colleague at the dance, are reckless Kamikaze gestures, represented by Amis (but not Jim) as self-destructive. So often is he enacting roles, performing mimicry, and making faces, that it must confuse Jim himself, or distract him from the burden of introspection and self-awareness. He’s certainly lax and unskilled at self-examination; he seems happiest pretending to be someone else, impersonating people on the telephone or forging letters. This hero, with conflicts and tensions beyond his own comprehension, sustains a high-wire act which keeps his audience, including readers, off-balance; his volatile energies are very funny and quite desperate.

Such anarchic qualities, by definition unpredictable, are inherently amoral. Jim rarely stands for anything: he defines himself mainly by what he despises. He is a contemporary descendent of the Picaro, attractive but fundamentally mischievous and self-seeking, a rogue or what Amis would term a bit of a bastard. We indulge the rascal, perhaps, to the extent that we recognize our own infantile, libidinal, unsocialized impulses. Yet under scrutiny his character is bound to cause confusion and consternation. He is ludicrous and likable, so smart and such a smart-ass, objectionable yet admirable, heedless yet life-affirming. Marvelously protean, he is elusively ambiguous. Consider again Jim’s meditations on the "Margaret business." Jim’s catalog of qualities which got him into the relationship is accurate but incomplete. It omits rather less appealing qualities one might just as readily attribute to Jim, such as cowardice, passivity, timidity. He often behaves unscrupulously, in ways that may provoke both amusement and "impatience," to recall that key point on the Amis narrative compass.

Even Jim’s ironic self-appraisal, normally a winning trait, is highly disorienting, as when he considers the title of his article: "It was the perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems" (16). For living without illusion, Jim surely gets full marks, but he veers beyond candor and humor toward self-abuse. His assault upon sham and pretense includes self-loathing and Philistinism, what we might term the Filthy Mozart Factor, to commemorate the moment Jim hears somebody in the bath singing "some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart." Jim’s impertinence and antipathy to culture illustrate the way his satiric assaults rebound upon himself.

To say this is to stress that Jim is not merely the center of value and the voice of the satirist but the object of humorous and substantial evaluation. Here, for example, he fends off his ardent student Michie, the veteran intrigued by scholasticism, whatever that is: "Clearly, the more students, within reason, Dixon could get ‘interested’ in his subject, the better for him; equally clearly, too large a number of ‘interested’ students would mean that the number studying Welch’s own special subject would fall to a degree that Welch might be expected to resent. With an honours class of nineteen and a department of six, three students seemed a safe number to try for. So far Dixon’s efforts on behalf of his special subject, apart from thinking how much he hated it, had been confined to aiming to secure for it the three prettiest girls in the class, one of whom was Michie’s girl, while excluding from it Michie himself. Added to Dixon’s dislike of thinking about work at all, the necessity of keeping Michie at arms length went far to explain his present discomfort" (30).

Delineating Jim’s comic discomfort, as in many other moments of half-probing introspection, the narrator says nothing, strictly speaking, Jim doesn’t know and wouldn’t admit. Yet even while adhering rigorously to Jim’s perspective, the narrative viewpoint implicitly demands critical response. Through such revelations, Amis exposes the hero as expedient, cynical, manipulative, and lazy. Jim’s moral nature is not merely "winsomely trivial" but deeply equivocal. He is part victim but he isn’t necessarily more sinned against than sinning, for he is also and often maker of his own muddles. The pattern is established early, when Jim regrets the "bad impression" he’d first made at the University by "his having inflicted a superficial wound on the professor of English in the first week [who] had been standing on the front steps when Dixon, coming round the corner from the library, had kicked violently at a small round stone lying on the macadam . . .[which] had struck the other just below the left kneecap" (18). Characteristically, Jim expressed some violent, vague hostility which backfires; he partly invites or precipitates his troubles. The reason he was drafted to sing madrigals at the Welch’s party, and was mortified, is that he lied when he said he could "read music ‘after a fashion’ " (38). Jim is stuck in the wrong role without the courage to repudiate it or the dignity to transcend it. "He’d never be able to tell Welch what he wanted to tell him, any more than he’d ever be able to do the same with Margaret" (86).

There is psychological intensity, or "true comic edge," in the serious nature of Jim’s fears: because we know that his psyche is crippled and vulnerable, we cannot rely upon a happy ending. As his plight is problematic, his progress is genuinely suspenseful, replete with real perils, so that we hang upon events, hopeful but doubtful: Amis concocts comedy from traditional ingredients in a modern mix. In Joseph Andrews, Fielding plays with the possibility of disaster when, for example, he addresses the anxieties the reader "must have felt on the account of poor Fanny, whom we left in so deplorable a condition . . . wondering what happened to that beautiful and innocent virgin, after she fell into the wicked hands of the captain." Even describing the imminent peril of rape, Fielding’s tone reassures us that the danger is exaggerated, the virgin inviolate, protected (in a phrase he uses elsewhere) "by the deity who presides over chaste love." Fielding, of course, is that benevolent Deity, maintaining providential design and comic suspense. His blend of cheer and fright is beautifully counterpointed but always inclined toward humor, because the dangers are treated melodramatically and with cavalier insouciance. We do not read far in Fielding without realizing that he always guarantees virtue and never irreparably harms his favorites. We learn to anticipate a pattern of apparent catastrophes and hair’s-breadth 'scapes, to recognize hyperbolic fears or parodies of danger as comic analogs of fear. Above all, we can trust our omnipotent, ubiquitous narrator; the suspense is ultimately not if but how Fielding will bring his beloved hero and innocent heroine through the storms to the happy shore.

Lucky Jim contrives a similar but distinct synthesis, a modern version of Fielding’s melodramatic perils. Amis’s alternation of reassurance or equanimity and dread or suspense cuts deeper, and leaves us far less certain of deliverance than Fielding’s reader. Unlike Fielding, Amis does not flaunt his power, enter the stage directly, or show off. He is more like the tactfully withdrawn narrator of modernist fiction, in the Flaubertian phrase of Stephen Daedalus, "aloof, absent, paring his fingernails." Relatively abandoned or bereft of avuncular narrative protection, Jim Dixon appears to be the prey of fickle fortune, not the favorite of comic destiny. The third-person limited point-of-view gives us Jim’s plucky pessimism, and no warrant for believing he is lucky at all; given his confused travail, Jim would be surprised to learn the title of his adventures. Cued by the title, the reader suspects and probably hopes that Jim will survive and prosper. Yet as a result of the narrative reticence and authorial deftness, the providential tendency of Amis's comedy is barely discernible, only invisibly, subtly steering the hero toward more luck than he can imagine.

The open-ended uncertainty of the romantic triangle illustrates the deft comic plotting. Until remarkably late in the novel, the limited omniscience of the narrative viewpoint and Jim’s exaggerated sense of his hopelessness give us little authoritative assurance that Jim will get rid of the wrong girl and get hold of the right one. Amis conveys the grand illusion that events are determined by character rather than designed as we like it. It is another mask—apparent contingency disguising ultimate design. Jim is initially and apparently endlessly involved in a bloodless liaison to which he musters only intermittent passive resistance: "suddenly he’d become the man who was ‘going round’ with Margaret, and somehow competing with" a rival named Catchpole. Margaret, recovering from a half-baked suicide attempt, is just plausible and pathetic enough to command Jim’s attentions. Yet his feelings toward her are thoroughly vague and utterly confused: compassion, irritation, evasiveness, little desire. Plain and priggish, she addresses Jim as "Poor James." His drunken advances, at first zealously reciprocated, are abruptly rebuffed, an indication that her feelings are as tepid or ambivalent as his. The next morning, feeling resentful, her response to Jim’s dilemma with the bedspread ruined by his cigarette, is sternly censorious, the voice of an aunt or librarian, not a sweetheart. Her reproaches resonate, and precipitate two familiar feelings in Jim, panic and guilt. Yet somehow Jim, under a kind of wicked spell, is drawn further into bondage to Margaret, manipulated into escorting her to the dance. Even when he makes his daring exit with Christine, he says grimly that Margaret "has a real claim on me, you know."

Though Jim’s escape sparks a frightful row with Margaret, he still cannot bail out. Arguing furiously, she reveals her true colors: "You don’t think Christine would have you, do you? A shabby little provincial bore like you!" (158). She falls into hysterics and Jim, realizing that Margaret can still exploit his decency and weakness, sinks into bleak depression. He perceives but can’t address a flaw in his character, passive acquiescence to manipulators like Margaret and Professor Welch (who are of course warm friends). It takes Jim an inordinately long time to realize that he is "well schooled in giving apologies at the very times he ought to be demanding them" (174); in this important regard, Jim resembles his literary cousin Robin Davies in You Can't Do Both. Jim remains something of a schlemiel, fearful, estranged, terrified that he won’t know what to do in the company of quality. Like the classic Picaro, he is the perpetual outsider or marginal figure, but without the traditional rogue’s poised mastery.

So not simply his situation but his limitations make Jim an unlikely hero, romantic or otherwise. His first meeting with Christine is unpromising: she appears as Bertrand’s companion at the Welch’s arty weekend, and arouses powerful, contrary responses in Jim: desire, alarm, and anger that he can’t have such attractive women. When he dances with Christine at the ball, he is nearly unmanned by apprehension: "he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn’t spontaneously intervene to prevent them" (117). Yet ever since they met, there have been dimly perceptible omens, such as Christine grinning in comic complicity with Jim when they both remake his bed with the ruined spread. Again what the narrator withholds is crucial, for without an omniscient Fielding to guide us, the signals remain wonderfully mixed. Since the characters don’t know what they want or should do, we can’t guess what will happen. In one breath Christine praises Jim’s impersonation of a reporter, in which he gulls Bertrand, as "brilliantly funny," then regrets seeming to be in a "conspiracy to get the better of Bertrand" (119). As in classical comedies like Tom Jones, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Pride and Prejudice, the characters unwittingly form discernible dance like or minuet patterns.

Hope and Dread remain finely balanced until quite late in the novel. Given Jim’s malaise and uncertainty, failure seems more likely than success. He drifts back to Margaret, "directed by something outside of himself . . . not out of any willing on his part" (186). He and Christine meet, each prepared to renounce the other. As late as chapter nineteen, four-fifths of the way through the novel, Jim’s dreams remain far-fetched if not inconceivable. His only solace is a gradual clarification of his own weaknesses: "I’m sticking to Margaret," he tells Christine, "because I haven’t the guts to turn her loose . . . So I do that instead of doing what I want to do, because I’m afraid to" (201).

As late as Jim’s tour de farce, the Merry England lecture, his prospects with Christine remain highly dubious. He helplessly watches Bertrand "with his hand on Christine’s arm, confident, proprietary, victorious" (219). The reader has no way of knowing what’s in Christine’s mind and can only pity "Poor James," whose "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" (220). Not until the very last scene, improbable but plausible, can we perceive that comic destiny has, all along, been disguised as fickle fortune. As Carol Goldsmith says, in another context, "it’s all connected, all connected." Even the Professor’s notoriously terrible driving, which early in the novel puts Jim at real risk, enables the comic and romantic denouement.

Another way Amis makes Jim’s ultimate good luck utterly unexpected yet realistically acceptable is by deploying Gore-Urquhart as the comic deus ex machina. Notice that even in the crucial phone call, when Gore-Urquhart offers Jim the coveted job, we do not lose sight of the hero’s unimposing stature: "It’s not that you’ve got the qualification for this or any work . . . You haven’t the disqualifications, though, and that’s much rarer" (234). As Gore-Urquhart humorously underscores, Jim only more or less deserves such good fortune—yet comic destiny has decreed that our hero, bad as he is, shall live happily ever after. Like Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews along the way to the promised land, Jim makes unremarkable, indeed quite slight progress. Like most comedy, Lucky Jim depends upon a series of recognitions rather than dramatic revelations. These recognitions fall into two categories: facts and self-discoveries.

The recognition of facts, or a more lucid apprehension of the way things are, comes gradually but regularly to Jim’s consciousness. Some of these facts are crucial to his understanding of other characters, such as his discovery of Bertrand and Carol Goldsmith in a compromising situation. This of course makes it ethically easier for us to applaud Jim’s efforts to steal Christine from Bertand, exposed as a two-timing hypocrite, as well as a pompous ass. Another important fact is Carol’s speculation, later corroborated, that Christine hasn’t yet been abed with Bertrand: like Fielding’s Fanny and Sophia, she is inviolate, certified innocent and pure for the hero.

Another fact in the cascade of comic recognitions, as crucial as the glad tidings of the Pedlar in Joseph Andrews or the Lawyer Dowling in Tom Jones, is Catchpole’s testimony regarding Margaret’s sham suicide. The revelation of her deep neuroses liberates Jim from the strictures of his conscience and the bondage of their relationship. "Don’t try to help her any more," says Catchpole, more helpfully than he could know, "it’s too dangerous for you. I know what I’m talking about. She doesn’t need any help either, you know, really. The best of luck to you" (242). Helpful, hopeful, virtually a benediction. Although there is an opposite possibility, almost equally strong, which illustrates the continuing complexity of evaluation. One might conclude that a staged suicide indicates profound problems that deserve sympathy, respect, and patience rather than impatience, irony, and self-protection.

The second category of recognitions in comedy, self-discovery, is considerably murkier than the discovery of plain truths. Compared to Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Jim is much more self-aware and complicated; he is too reflective, pained, and internal to be described as a flat comic character. Yet like Tom and Joseph, Jim’s character remains relatively fixed, incapable of radical transformation. He experiences a modicum of self-discovery, gradually enhanced comprehension of himself and his world. Marking his limited progress is his final gesture, a "howl of laughter" at the Welch family, for the things he has learned delight, but they don’t instruct all that much, and won’t take him much beyond gleeful victory, and never into what Yeats termed the "abyss of self." Jim remains for better and for worse a comic hero in a comic novel, with keener perceptions and vague development. He has understood the need to leave Margaret and abandon academics, neither of which will prove painful. Jim has learned that he needn’t be so timid, so afraid to approach a girl like Christine just because "she’s a bit out of my class."

A conversation with Carol Goldsmith at the dance illustrates the fundamentally comic qualities and limits of Jim’s growth. When he confesses his fear of approaching Christine, she tells him to grow up, stop apologizing, and seize the day. Wiser and more cynical, Carol gives Jim’s mission half-facetious, half-serious sanction, and repeats it for emphasis: "You’ve got a moral duty to perform." For once Jim is invited to do something he wants to do and to feel good about it, which is a comic if not often realistic opportunity, a pleasant development, not to be confused with "moral duty." Jim is stunned to hear that Carol had informed her husband about her affair with Bertrand, and reflects "that he knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about other people or their lives" (123). Thus our hero remains in need of rather basic lessons fundamental to fiction and life. He has become luckier and a bit less pathetic and callow without becoming much more mature or even much less naive.

By the end of the story, Jim has not developed far enough, strictly speaking, to merit his cornucopia of luck. The book knows this and contains more comic wisdom than the hero attains: Jim’s experience illustrates some his favorite, vitally comic, and only modestly penetrating, credos: "Nice things are nicer than nasty ones," and "Doing what you want to do is the only training for doing more of what you want to do." The comic closure of Lucky Jim fulfills wishes but does not measure merit. The discovery of some facts and simple truths brings fantasy and reality closer, in a sense, as when Jim thinks and says out loud the same insult, terming Bertrand a "bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation." As David Lodge observes, from this instant when "thought and speech, the inner and outer world coincide," things "start to go right for Jim." Language has amazing capacity: recognizing and designating the truth miraculously transforms self and world into something better.

In the world of Lucky Jim, overseen by an invisible but benevolent deity, whose requirements are lenient and standards generous, such divinations are perhaps sufficient. Jim remains relatively superficial in his ethical growth, even though his character is far from simple. And though Lucky Jim is hardly trivial in its "psychological intensity," the novel does not test its protagonist deeply but rewards him in accordance with more purely comic imperatives. The denouement is a pleasing gesture toward comic justice. But it rewards Jim for comic energy and resilience rather than for any more profoundly ethical attributes.

*** *** *** ****

Tempted as he must have been to repeat the winning ways of Lucky Jim, Amis never exactly rebottled its champagne mirth, which he found inadequate for the kinds of investigastions he wished to pursue. Many of his best novels have sharper edges and deeper stakes, without "evangelical huffing and puffing," but with more sustained exploration of ethics, and a sense of comedy's limited ability to treat the problems. By the end of his career, when he wrote You Can’t Do Both, Amis had mastered serio-comic inquiry significantly different from his first novel, all the more so because the links with Lucky Jim are so evident. Robin Davies, the protagonist of You Can’t Do Both, resembles Jim Dixon yet becomes a more complicated character with a curious fate. As the story begins, the fourteen-year-old Robin lives in a modest South London suburb, excels at school, and copes gamely with his father’s policy of "round-the-clock chaperonage." Any mild transgression provokes paternal ire and a stern reprimand. Robin regularly accepts blame and apologizes grudgingly. Deflated, bullied into outward submission, he invents interior monologues where he triumphs or at least vents his anger. As with Lucky Jim, we are situated inside or just above the consciousness of a hero whose plucky wit and vital energies enable his encounters with objectionable authorities. Both novels compel sympathy for a restless, put-upon hero with exceptionally sensitive, accurate Boredom and BS Detectors, yet permit or invite more critical assessment of only partially "authorized" figures. If Jim Dixon is a lovable rascal who gets his just deserts with an extra helping, Robin Davies is an appealing, engaging youth who always wants to eat and to have his cake. Yet Robin is regarded by nearly everyone who knows him as a self-seeking egoist, and is treated rather less tenderly than Jim Dixon by Providential Design. Lucky Jim rewards comic values and scarcely considers the limits of comedy; You Can’t Do Both tests comic values and becomes a compelling serio-comedy. Initially Robin seems unexceptionable—like Jim, the source rather than the object of critical inquiry. He is highly intelligent, with normal adolescent yearnings and resentments: he’s a hard-up hero facing various obstacles, some reasonable, some arbitrary. This conventionally comic situation produces increasingly somber developments. The hero’s wants, needs, and conduct are examined much more rigorously than they were in Lucky Jim, and evaluation becomes more intriguingly problematic, most conspicuously in the sexual sphere.

For a long while, Robin appears blameless, exploring, experimenting, and blundering, guilty of nothing more than ordinary horniness and callowness. We enjoy the comedy of Eros, as when Robin contemplates a female Oxford student, "half-way up Category 2, that comprising girls it would be jolly nice/perfectly all right to find yourself in bed with but not worth serious trouble to get them there" (81). Indicating availability, she catapults to Category 1. Yet in Robin’s more interior, conflictive personality, sex causes disturbances and precipitates reflections that cut deeper than in Jim Dixon’s amusing yearnings. Pondering sex, Robin’s language becomes more sinewy, a convoluted sin-tax, doubling back upon itself, conveying ambivalence and confusion. Robin’s introspection causes us simultaneously to like and distrust him, and gradually to assess him more critically. Like Jim Dixon, Robin has appealing comic bravado and carefree self-regard, but what was disconcerting in Jim becomes more worrisome in Robin. When Robin meets Nancy Bennett, for example, he instantly categorizes her (I-B, beautiful complexion and a perfectly adequate though not quite distinguished bosom): "Robin hoped very much to get into a position soon where a decent chap would have to keep reminding himself that, hang it all, the girl was still not yet eighteen years old" (96).

You Can’t Do Both challenges Robin’s humorously self-indulgent point-of-view through several sterner commentators. His old mate Embleton lectures Robin: "A piece of you agrees with me that Nancy isn’t the right sort of girl for you to persuade to follow your confounded intentions or whatever they are. What I’ve been saying is designed to strengthen that piece and do some damage to the other piece, the one that says it’s all right to go after something you want if you really want it" (97-98). Embleton’s cautionary note sounds valid: maybe it’s not always all right to go after something you want simply because you really want it. We’re prodded into regarding the hero not merely as a comic rascal with a license to fool, for the hero of You Can’t Do Both lives, more than Jim Dixon, in range of ethical stricture, where there are substantial implications to conduct, some more nasty than nice.

Nancy is quite obviously a nice girl, the kind to marry. Her blushing sincerity fills Robin with "transient compunction" (wonderful phrase), and makes him "slightly uneasy" (127). With such a heroine, the male penile project, generally condoned if not sanctioned in comedy, gives pause. Unlike the girls in Lucky Jim, Nancy has a family history and concerned parents. Her Dad is another Welshman of the old school with decided views, self-dramatizing rhetoric, and the traditional, unenviable role of Blocking Force frustrating the hero’s amorous pleasures: "if I find you’ve trifled with her affections, to use a pompous but expressive phrase, I shall be greatly upset and also very cross with you indeed" (104).

Even more difficult to dismiss or mock is the anguished Mrs Bennett, who informs Robin that Nancy’s older sister Megan has an illegitimate child. But Robin, intent on his pursuit, only considers how this "would affect him" and entertains a fleeting fantasy of contacting Fallen Sister Meagan, "who sounded more and more like the very thing he was looking for" (107). Though Robin is not a heartless cad, he stirs himself to combat with rakish aphorisms: "for every second not spent in driving or dragging a given female towards bed, you were going to have to put in an extra minute later on" (100) and "liking them got in the way" (101).

It is easier in You Can't Do Both than in Lucky Jim to respect the voices of authority. Here is an exchange between Robin and Mr Davies: "Is it your intention to marry little Miss Nancy—is it Bennett?"

"Yes, meaning yes it is Bennett. As regards the rest of it, isn’t it a bit early in the game to start talking about my intentions?" "Robin, please, it is no game." "I only mean . . ." "If you treat it as a game it’s my duty to inform you that you’re in for a rude awakening, my lad." "Sorry, Dad, I expressed myself badly. I assure you I regard it as a very serious matter indeed" (117). We should not be distracted by the old duffer’s archaic idiom or his incessant insistence that this matter, whatever it is, "deserves to be treated rather more seriously than you show signs of doing" (122). Like Nancy’s Dad, Robin’s Dad is tiresome but not foolish, and should be heeded: "Nancy is a good . . .girl, and I suggest to you it’s in your own interest that you pay due heed to that fact, which in my view it is."

One must continually distinguish Robin’s viewpoint from that of the narrator and regularly contemplate the adequacy of all perspectives, bumptious hero, blocking forces, and elusive narrator: "Again, Robin thought himself equal to paying heed to things unaided, but this time he said as if he meant it, ‘I promise you that’s something I’ll never be fool enough to let myself forget" (119). Much virtue in an If. Some, at least—but not enough, for Robin proves unequal to the task, and foolishly (his word) forgets his promise and violates his responsibility. Responsibility is man’s estate, as it was not in Lucky Jim, where we excuse Jim for concluding that nice things are nicer than nasty ones and "Doing what you want to do is the only training for doing more of what you want to do."

Though Jim Dixon’s comic credos don’t survive the more demanding climate of You Can’t Do Both, the results are oddly serio-comic, more disorienting than the relatively straightforward Lucky Jim. We would be mistaken, I think, to judge too quickly or harshly Robin’s unwillingness to pay more heed. In virtually every way, as a son, friend, and student, Robin is truly a good lad, with sensitivity and mostly decent motives; he’s far more likely than Jim Dixon to repudiate his own gestures and sentiments as "false, insincere" (120). He recognizes Nancy’s admirable unsuitability for a sexual fling. "It could not be, he was sure, that he regarded her physically with less than irreproachable carnality, most of the time at least. But at certain other times . . ." (109). The thrust and retreat of the language, the note of male dominance ("irreproachable carnality"), and the ultimate ellipsis indicate both the extent and the limits of Robin’s introspection.

It’s only in the romantic arena that his self-assertion requires correction. Robin’s inner jests are jarring, as when Nancy apologies for talking about her parents: "Robin would sooner have heard about Nancy’s detailed plans for a career in indecent films. . . these family chronicles . . . seemed to lead further away from the life of inventive fornication his fantasies designed for her" (129). Our laughter is uneasy or guilty because we are made more mindful that getting what you want isn’t an innocent enterprise. Soon enough, Robin makes the most of an unexpected break from parental presence, only to be confronted, unmanned, coerced into confession and of course apology by his father, who is heavy-handed but not altogether preposterous in underscoring "the question of [Robin’s] responsibility in this mess" (137). Robin’s vision is inadequate, blinkered.

In this comedy manqué, the Blocking Forces are not Straw Men, like Professor Welch or Fielding’s Squire Western, but substantial, with serious purpose, imploring Robin to take intimacy seriously. What’s fascinating is how You Can’t Do Both never simplifies but repeatedly complicates our perceptions. Robin’s older brother George is another reasonably reliable figure challenging Robin’s motives yet open to challenge himself. Many voices are enabled, none is sanctioned. "Whereas," George says, "your intention at this stage of your life is to engage in an indefinite series of fornications and you’ll think about the next stage in your life when you come to it" (147). " ‘It’s just, well, you can understand, George, I want to keep my options open as long as I—' Robin’s "attempt at self-justification was misguided," says the narrator, but it’s unclear whether that means wrong or merely unsuccessful. "George said with renewed annoyance, ‘Yeah, you’ve always been a great one for keeping those buggers open. I can remember when you were about twelve, not saying whether you were coming to the pictures or not till the last moment in case you got a more attractive offer from somewhere. Good old O. O. Davies Dad used to call you, standing for ‘Options Open’ " (220). People Robin encounters and trusts continually express irritation with his self-seeking, sometimes with more chagrin than seems warranted, except in the vexed area of sexual relations. Certainly we never saw young Robin behaving as frivolously as George remembers and can hardly imagine that boy crossing his Dad.

As in Lucky Jim but with richer complexity and more confusion there is tension between comic license and ethical compunctions. It is never easy to determine how severely to judge Robin, nor to calculate how bad he should feel. More so than in Lucky Jim evaluation is irresistible but tricky and troublesome. Robin exists around the muddy middle, neither one of Amis’s bastard-heroes nor a simply appealing young man. He fights a losing battle with desire, that least vicious of sins, but still one of the seven deadly: "he deeply wanted not to be the sort of man who, when just getting into his stride with a satisfactory love-affair, nevertheless seriously contemplates getting started on another," he meditates. "Unfortunately, at other times or even at the same time, that was just the sort of man he at least as deeply wanted to be. It had even occurred to him that sticking firmly to one girl could be unethically used to obtain exemption from the sometimes grueling task of promiscuity" (149). Here Robin, humorously playing a shell game with ethical concerns and humorous needs, caps a sentence with seeming sanction which boomerangs or ricochets out of Robin’s control and beyond his ken.

The first two sections of You Can’t Do Both sympathetically depict Robin at fourteen and at nineteen. The third section dramatizes Robin five years later, near the end of World War II. Robin has served in the armed forces, refuses to exaggerate his travail as a POW, indeed, continues to be perfectly agreeable: a good mate, kind to his super Mum, dutiful to his duty-minded Dad, and still intimately linked to Nancy. Now, though, his romantic activities are evaluated more often and stringently than ever. Jeremy Carpenter, the gay older friend who had seemed so glamorous, sounds older and wiser. He’s been incarcerated for refusing military service and again for some homosexual encounter. Now Jeremy views his youthful ideology of liberation, "all that sacredness of desire stuff," as shallow propaganda, "though it might have encouraged you to do what you felt like doing and to hell with other people, that’s if," he adds tellingly, "you needed encouragement" (159). Subdued by suffering, Jeremy now questions "wanting something that by definition it’s impossible to have" (284), sarcastically termed "Good advice for eleven-year-olds, do what you want" (289).

Robin’s main problem remains effectively his only problem: he wants sexual adventure and emotional security but as he has long been told and as adults are supposed to know, you can’t have both. In pure comedy, such fun and games take place far from the law courts and church bells; in You Can’t Do Both such antics are not licensed freedom. More like Pip in Great Expectations than like Tom Jones, Robin is highly sensitive to criticism, especially from family, and excessively guilt-ridden, increasingly living not in The House of Mirth but The House of Sorrow, where mortals sicken and suffer, stumble and fall.

Robin continues to be a much more sensitive, solicitous son than lover. Brother George again berates him for failing to marry Nancy to which he reacts with fluent self-justification. When Nancy becomes pregnant, Robin reassures Nancy that he won’t let her down "ever." The narrative commentary is crucial: "Robin meant everything he had said in his promise to Nancy. He was greatly encouraged by the readiness with which she had believed him, thinking it went to show that when he was being honest his honesty shone through." But then the Robin Davies’ two-step, simultaneously winning regard for Robin’s candor and exposing his continuing callowness: "It was only later that he saw the force of the rider to that proposition, namely that when he was being dishonest his dishonesty must shine through as pellucidly." And a not quite saving grace: "Not that he could at the moment foresee any need for successful dishonesty, he just knew enough about life or about himself by this time to be reasonably sure one would be along soon" (199).

A bit of fun comes along soon enough, inevitably, on Robin’s radar screen, at Dad’s cremation, in the cheering presence of Cousin Dilys, married, in London, and still eager for some dilly-dally. Robin’s "spark of irresponsibility" (210), charming but disquieting in a youth, is more ominous and egregious in an adult. Like a resilient, supple, and irresponsible comic hero, Robin absorbs shocks, which in more serious characters might catalyze change and growth. Instead, he carries on, with no signs of pleasure or indications of sadness. He hears but shakes off George’s reproaches, just as he is sensitive enough to be staggered by a vision of "something sharp cutting through Nancy’s flesh" (231), "but only for a short time."

In the long night before Nancy’s operation, Robin, considering his two possibilities to marry or abandon her, thinks, "the second was not unthinkable in the least, it was as thinkable as anything he had ever thought, but that was as far as it went" (245). Robin’s persistent irresponsibility seems triumphant, greased by self-sophistry: as "everybody else would fervently have agreed, he was almost an ideal non-husband for Nancy, being selfish, self-indulgent, lazy, arrogant, and above all inextinguishably promiscuous by nature" (245). But some self-reproach is also self-evasion. Robin’s key concern is that marriage and children "would be no fun for anybody," certainly not Options Open Davies.

Nancy’s anguish just before the surgical abortion provokes a jumble of feelings, "some he knew now he had been trying with fair success not to acknowledge, others of whose existence he had been altogether unaware." He decides to rescue her. Robin is neither romantic hero nor dastardly bastard. Despite the hair’s breadth ‘scape, You Can’t Do Both doesn’t conclude with romantic/comic redemption. The champagne they drink to celebrate their engagement is cheap station stuff, while Robin’s "cheerio" toast is even flatter. "There," Robin comments. "What more can I say," to which Nancy replies forlornly, "Nothing I suppose" (254).

Neither Robin’s brother nor mother can be simply celebratory. Mum confesses that she is "a wee bit disappointed" (261) that Robin didn’t manage affairs better. The Bennetts are disappointed that their daughter is marrying a boy who turns out to be "nothing but a common seducer" (262), "the kind of man who thinks only of his own pleasure" (265). Robin is not as he protests a "libertine like in Restoration comedy" (265)--but he’s not particularly admirable. Smart enough to know that he’s "missed something indefinably important through lack of curiosity, lack of attention" (263), he’s not wise enough to identify what he lacks nor quite sure what it means to have it.

We get a sharper image of what Robin is missing when George’s wife berates him for failing to tell Nancy he loves her: "You stupid bugger" (269). Robin’s response is classic Amis humor which helps us see more clearly how You Can’t Do Both differs from Lucky Jim: "It occurred to Robin . . . that all talk of a male militia, of men spontaneously uniting in defence of their interests against the encroaching female, misrepresented the situation. Men operated something like a confused, poorly armed guerrilla-type rabble; women, in comparison, ran a highly trained, superbly equipped SS panzer corps complete with parachute brigade and grenadier back-up." The zest, the rich detail, the energy, so reminiscent of Lucky Jim are nearly irresistible, so hilariously cocksure that we might almost overlook the aptness of the sister-in-law’s reproach.

In You Can’t Do Both, witty formulations don't compensate for shallow emotions. Robin hasn’t troubled himself with Nancy’s parents who "had never been much fun" (272) which is true but irrelevant. He could happily do without them forever, "But then of course there were Nancy’s feelings to be considered. Rather dully, but not unwillingly, he tried to imagine a future state of consciousness in which someone else’s feelings, in this case his wife’s, would seem to him as important and immediate as his own" (273). He tries, sometimes, half-heartedly but dully, to imagine a feeling which comes more naturally to some husbands. Indeed, Mum’s most effective point, trying to persuade the Bennetts to attend their daughter’s wedding, is to lay all blame squarely on her boy. "Look after number one, that’s all you can trust him to do" (275). Later Robin remarks that he knows she didn’t mean all those terrible things. "I didn’t say I didn’t mean it, dear, I said I was sorry I had to say it. You must know yourself it was true" (276). It’s as though Mum sadly agrees with George that Robin hasn’t bloody well grown up and damn well should. Though he marries Nancy and even remembers to tell her he loves her, "he soon stopped focusing on the two of them and went back to the one of him" (277). Pondering the many reasons for sticking to Nancy and putting her first always, he also remembers "the million or so bad reasons for not doing so all the time" (278), the girls with whom he might have lots more fun.

You Can’t Do Both becomes progressively grittier and grimmer. Life is evidently no laughing matter. Robin’s Mum drops dead, and though the doctor assures Robin that he has no need to reproach himself, he feels otherwise: he "would never be free of that shadow of guilt" (281). Why might Robin feel guilty? Only, I think, if he is displacing the guilt he should feel about Nancy toward Mum. He’s disappointed his parents not by being an unkind or unruly son but by not reliable person and faithful husband.

Comedies often end before or at the wedding because it is difficult to sustain humorous carefreeness or carelessness after marriage and children. A coda to Robin's saga, set nine years later, illuminates the quality of Robin's marriage, but the nature of the resolution is far from the comforting comic closure of Lucky Jim. Robin is now 35, a successful Classics don, with hopes of an Oxford fellowship, married to Nancy, and the father of two daughters. Eyeing his students’ "tits," as he says, he sounds unrepentantly adolescent. Home life is interrupted by a mysterious lady phone caller, whom Robin parries with phone antics worthy of Jim Dixon. More than casually, Robin resembles Jim, especially enacting "a vigorous silent routine of obscene gestures involving most of the top half of his body and accompanied by the pulling of hideous faces. This sequence he performed every morning in term-time or nearly" (290). Like Jim, Robin overflows with anxieties and animosities; but unlike Jim, Robin is a middle-aged man, with a successful career and a family, and without constant humiliation to fuel and justify his aggression.

We learn without too much surprise that Robin leads a busy secret life. That mysterious caller is a sexual liaison gone sour, now "an unacceptable security risk. Over the years," Robin "had got quite good at applying the closure" (295). Nancy doesn’t know that Robin regularly pursues "his former naughty life" (297), "screwing around whenever an opportunity came along provided it had good tits, goodish anyway, and a face to match. Meaning no known case of anything that could have been called self-restraint on his part" (297). Amis’s precision is devastating: "provided it had" and "no known case" telling us all we need to know about Robin’s sexual egotism.

Robin sees himself through a glass darkly, without introspecting deeply or progressing substantially. He will not agonize for long "over what was no more than a few harmless bits of fun," but proceeds with a "grim determination not to let a bagatelle like a hurried marriage interfere with what he had always done or at least wanted to do" (298). Thus Robin visits London for a nice spot of adultery with dear old Cousin Dilys, good fun for a bit, but then hard cheese on Robin. Nancy finally catches Robin virtually in flagrante. Robin’s tears are, for what it’s worth, sincere. "I’m sorry," he says yet again," no excuses, just me being a shit" (303). The problem remains that we can’t know what his tears are worth, and apparently neither does he. Yet Robin finds a convincing or at least efficacious way to say he is sorry and seems to mean it: "For a moment he was afraid that he really would die, and then he wondered whether that might not be best after all" (305). Nancy consents to try again under different rules, one we know from the title page. He can have his family, or he can pursue other women. "Not both" (305). He accepts her terms, and instead of kissing him, Nancy punches him, leaving Robin with a black eye, a whiskey and soda, and altered plans, if not a changed heart.

It’s a distinctly discomfiting conclusion, suggesting a continuing competition between apologia and confession, and indicating the tendencies, reach, and restrictions of Amis's art. We never see the effects of Robin’s philandering: the awkward lies, the lonely wife, the needy children, the messy, transient, and loveless liaisons. Robin has behaved callously and heedlessly without apparent consequence or cost until—finally--he is exposed and revealed for what he really is. Yet Nancy forgives him, with scant reason to believe any reformation is likely, and plenty of reason to suspect that he will always be as he has always been. We're troubled not by the mere absence of blustering, or huffing and puffing, but by the narrowness of what Amis makes real, substantial, and significant. In muffling the impact of Robin's faithlessness and crediting the sincerity of his regrets, the novel not only avoids judgment of his misconduct, but averts serious consideration of its meaning.

We've seen that You Can’t Do Both does not treat Robin's "harmless bits of fun" as merely humorous hey-nonny-nonny, so the denouement is bound to be ambiguous and disturbing. Whether we feel that Nancy treats Robin appropriately or too leniently, we’re forced to regard the problem as more serious than comic, more so than anything in Lucky Jim yet insufficiently resolved. I'm not satisfied that the ending of You Can't Do Both does justice--imaginative or ethical--to the conflicts the novel raises and Amis has long contemplated. For all his subtley, sophistication, and craft, Amis never convincingly portrays crucial realms of human experience; that these passions, longings, and sufferings are inhospitable to the comic muse makes his effort to regard them all the more admirable and poignant.