The English novelist Kingsley Amis is being both hailed and damned in England as the spokesman for the postwar generation, a position he seems to share with two other young novelists, John Wain and Iris Murdoch. He has published two lively comic novels, Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling, the latter of which has recently been brought out in this country by Harcourt, Brace. His general subject is the insurgent lower middle class in the new conditions that have been made for it by England’s quasi-socialist “middle way.” So far, however, he sticks mostly to what he knows at first hand, and his two novels deal with the adventures of the sons and daughters of coal miners, union officials, small merchants, and government functionaries as they make their way into the intellectual life of England by taking jobs in the provinces as librarians, professors, or publicists. As may be imagined, Mr. Amis finds supporters among those who share his own uncertain status and enemies among members of the old settled middle class, such as Somerset Maugham, who has denounced Amis and his “school” as vulgar, referring to the characters of their novels as “scum.”

Mr. Amis, now thirty-three, studied at Oxford and then became a Lecturer in English at the University College in Swansea. The fact that he is both novelist and teacher reminds ,us how common his type has become in our own country in the last fifteen years. A good many Americans who read Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling are sure to get the impression that they are reading about themselves. Nor is this only because of the Americanization of Mr. Amis’s imagination or because he makes his characters say “I’ve had it” and “Let’s take a powder.” He seems to know all about the feelings and thoughts not only of status-seeking English intellectuals but of Americans too, particularly the struggling graduate students, young professors, and technicians who live in the jerry-built slums that have sprung up around our universities since the war. Mr. Amis seems to speak for a sort of hidden international proletariat or demimonde of the intellectual (or more often anti-intellectual) life, and it is therefore of some interest to notice what his attitudes are. “Attitudes” is the word, for Mr. Amis is not one to live or die by ideas. In fact anyone who like myself was born approximately ten years before Mr. Amis and his contemporaries will probably be astonished at how little the old intellectual idols mean to them. At the same time it is odd how much one’s own familiarity with status-seeking, bill-paying, dish-washing, diaper-changing, and one’s own unstable yearning for the lower culture have prepared one to feel as they feel and to think as they think.

Despite his almost newsy modernity, Mr. Amis’s comic style has an affinity with the literature of the 1920’s, especially with the early novels of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. And as John Betjeman is quoted on the dust jacket of That Uncertain Feeling as saying, Mr. Amis’s liking for hilarious farce makes him a sort of “literary Harold Lloyd.” The Harold Lloyd analogy is useful because it suggests the phenomenon that is at the heart of Amis’s novels: the petty bourgeois man and the comic situations he gets into as he drives or, more often, drifts towards status and respectability. One would not be surprised if Mr. Amis winds up in some intellectual’s version of Harold Lloyd’s eminence as an international potentate of the Shriners, a success Lloyd achieved not on the screen but in real life.

Although Amis sometimes sounds like Huxley and Waugh, he was not, like them, born into the comfortable middle class, and his comedy is not confined, as theirs was, to a mordant satire of the intellectual life and the cultural and social predicaments of that class. In Amis’s novels comedy and social analysis become the weapons of a newly rising class which is gradually displacing an older privileged group and rejecting many of its values in the act of achieving its respectability and power. Which is only to say that, farcical and easygoing as Mr. Amis often is, he nevertheless gets more of the substance of history into his novels than one finds in those of Huxley and Waugh, and that he may come to seem more in the central tradition of the European novel than they. For if, as it seems to be agreed, the classic subject of the novel in Europe was the assault of the bourgeoisie on the aristocracy, there seems to be no reason why at least a very considerable subject should not be found in the assault of the petty bourgeoisie on the high bourgeoisie. And as for Mr. Amis’s particular theme—the socially disreputable but insurgent intellectual—there has already been a precedent, though in a different historical setting, in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.

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The moods and vicissitudes, the frustrations and the whimsies of the figure who interests Mr. Amis are most fully pictured in John Lewis, the twenty-six-year-old hero of That Uncertain Feeling. Lewis is a sublibrarian at Aberdarcy in Wales. He lives with his wife Jean and their two small children on the second floor of a dingy house, and there is much difficulty with the nosey and querulous landlady, who lives downstairs with her drunken son. Although Jean is a competent mother, she is inclined to be lax in her general conduct of the household, so that there are often dirty dishes in the sink as well as half-eaten cookies on the bookcase, and safety pins here and there. She is rather hard-bitten. Her sentences are liberally laced with the word “bloody,” and she tends to greet her sporadically amorous husband with such expressions as, “Christ, here’s lover-boy pitched up all of a sudden.” There is no doubt that she is the most solid citizen in the book. Looking at her, while thinking of another woman, her husband reflects that she has less dignity than anyone he knows, and less need of it.

The other woman is Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams, a member of the “Anglicized Aberdarcy bourgeoisie,” the wealthy upper group about which John Lewis has such ambivalent feelings. She comes to the library one day to get a book on ancient Welsh costumes in connection with a nationalistic verse drama she is sponsoring. As soon as she and Lewis meet, it is mutually assumed that they will make love whenever a suitable occasion presents itself. Most of the action of the novel has to do with finding a suitable occasion. There are noisy and somewhat ill-natured parties (American-type, standing up with martinis). There are jaunts to country roadhouses. There is a variety of contretemps and difficulties about whether Jean should come along on these jaunts, providing a baby-sitter can be got, and whether Elizabeth should try to cajole Jean into complacency by inviting her to tea. There is a Harold Lloydish scene in which Lewis hides in a closet to escape detection by Elizabeth’s husband, poses as a plumber, gets out of the house through a window after dressing himself in a female costume meant for a character in the play Elizabeth is sponsoring, is chided on the bus by a lady Welsh nationalist because he can’t speak Welsh, and is pursued by a lecherous laboring man. There are outbursts of mutual hatred between Lewis and certain members of the upper group. Also to be reckoned with is the unstable character of the hero’s passion, for with him passion tends to take the form of “uneasiness and inert, generalized lust.” At last, however, he and Elizabeth “do it,” as she inelegantly says, after an evening swim at the beach. But then Lewis’s disorganized moral sense marshals its forces, and he hastily leaves town with his family and gets a job with a coal company. He has decided to turn down the promotion that was offered him at the library, because he has learned that it had been wangled for him by Elizabeth, whose husband is the chairman of the library board.

At the end of the book, Lewis and Jean are at another party, from which, however, they hastily depart when Lewis grabs her arm and they flee together from a professor’s wife who has been making a play for him. The scene, like some others in the book, appears to be hastily got up by the author and it is somewhat meretricious. But it serves at least to emphasize that although Lewis is less lucky than the Jim Dixon of Amis’s first novel, he still lives a charmed life. The hard-bitten wife is tender with him again, and in general he can still be the gay if uneasy fellow who always manages to escape tragic involvements. Luckily Elizabeth is incapable of conceiving a child. Jean confesses that her story of sleeping with the Welsh nationalist bard Gareth Probert, to get revenge on her husband, was false. Lewis is now, as a coal salesman, even poorer than before, but he is free of compromising entanglements.

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The slight but engrossing tale is told in the first person by Lewis in a vigorously breezy style and with much self-awareness. Always a bit of a buffoon, Lewis reports that as he approached Elizabeth in the library for the first time, “I injected into my demeanor a purposeful air that owed a little, I confess, to the striding, sneering hero of that week’s main feature at the Pavilion. You wanted to see me? Well, now’s your big chance, lady. Siddown, will you? All right, shoot.” Later he reflects that “if my character was, as it appeared to be, not so much bad or weak as unworkable, farcically unfitted for its task, like an asbestos firelighter, then that was more than merely bad luck on Jean.” The only solution, he decides, is “to start liking being the kind of man I evidently am.”

This sort of blithely amoral attitude towards things in general undoubtedly conceals a good deal of guilt under the easy appearance of self-complacency. And indeed Lewis has to admit that as he jovially prepares for “a spot of the old adultery” he can’t help simultaneously “letting the ancestral Welsh nonconformist puritanism make a crafty comeback in me after all these years of discredit”; nor can he ignore the vague feeling of depression that suffuses his amorous fantasies. However, because it is both more workable and more fun, blithe amorality seems preferable to two other kinds of attitude depicted in the book. The first is that of Ieuan Jenkins, in whose favor Lewis declines the promotion at the library, and who speaks for what may be called Victorian probity. In a passage which might do for a speech by Clement Atlee to Aneurin Bevan, Jenkins says wearily to Lewis, “Who can be relied on? Where is there any loyalty left, any—any trust? What’s happened to common decency? Finished. All finished.”

The other attitude, and one that Jenkins warns against, is the cynical selfishness of the wealthy bourgeoisie, as illustrated by the sexual acquisitiveness of Elizabeth, who callously humiliates the latest of her series of lovers while she pursues Lewis, and by the petty spite and chicanery of her husband. Theirs is the behavior of a privileged class which has been left nothing but the remnants of its material power by the rapid wartime transformation of England into a Welfare State. What Lewis calls “the new privileged classes of ‘our society’” seem to him preferable to the “Anglicized Aberdarcy bourgeoisie”—namely, the people now seen taking their leisure at the best pub in town, “an occasional grocer or butcher in his Yacht Club blazer and lavender trousers, a publican or two in subfusc accompanied by an ignorant doctor or two in sportive checks, an odd golfing jacketed cinema manager, cafe owner, or fish-shop proprietor.” At least, says Lewis, these people don’t mind if you take a brandy before dinner.

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The tastes of Mr. Amis’s hero might be described as those of a highbrow who with a mixture of anxiety and relief is relaxing into a middlebrow, though he is fond, also, of making sallies into lowbrowism. A year or two ago, he recalls, he had been fond of Henry James. But now he looks forward to the next issue of Astounding Science Fiction. He doesn’t want to think any more about T. S. Eliot, and he is irked by fake highbrow nationalist poets like Gareth Probert—poets who “pretend to be wild valley babblers . . . thinking in Welsh the whole time and obsessed by terrible beauty, etc.” He refers off-handedly to the exacting literary standards of people like I. A. Richards and William Empson—“what those Cambridge chaps used to call critical awareness.” Musing about his prospective appearance before the library board to be quizzed as to his fitness for promotion, he imagines a member of the board asking him, “Are you interested in films, drinking, women’s breasts, American novels, jazz, science fiction?” The answer to this unlikely question is supposed, of course, to be “No,” but it makes a fair list of the things Lewis is fond of. Under a seat cushion at home he keeps a picture magazine on whose cover is a photograph of “curvesome Marietta Du-Forgue.” As for picture magazines in general, he cannot help reflecting how pleasant it would be if only this one and its two competitors could come out “once an hour instead of once or twice a week, without impairing the rigor of their standards.” And at this moment, such is his life, he becomes conscious of a thin voice calling from the bedroom, “Dadd-ee.”

It is at times like this that Lewis is most aware of “that uncertain feeling.” In its social origins, what he feels is the uneasiness of a man without power or position in a society that is changing, and which in its transitional period offers the possibility but not the assurance of unprecedented opportunity for such as he. More generally, the uncertain feeling is what theoretical minds would identify by using words like anxiety or existentialist. But Lewis is content to call it “rootless apprehension, indefinite restlessness, and inactivating boredom.”

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The attitudes of John Lewis more or less resemble, one gathers, those of Kingsley Amis himself. They are fundamentally the attitudes called for in Mr. G. S. Fraser’s The Modern Writer and His World, which was published in this country last year by Criterion Books. Mr. Fraser’s historical study of modern British literature has unfortunately not received, on this side of the Atlantic, the attention it deserves. The notable thing about The Modern Writer and His World is that one finds in it an intelligent if perhaps finally rather unimaginative mind expressing a strong dissatisfaction with the literary gods of the first four decades of the century, such as Henry James, Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, and W. H. Auden. These writers seemed to Mr. Fraser to live in a high, tense world of strenuous and difficult metaphysics, moral doctrine, political ideology, and religious feeling which it was no longer possible to share. They seemed to him also to have striven for an impossibly high ideal of artistic craftsmanship and for an expressive form which was too dependent on abstractions, universals, myths, and symbols. Of course there has been no dearth of complaints such as these; yet among critics who share his views Mr. Fraser commands more respect than most.

Fraser’s prescriptions for the new literature of England reminded one strongly of Wordsworth specifying what would have to be done in order to bring the artificial poetry of the 18th century back into touch with experience. Speculating on the future of the novel, Fraser noted that under modern conditions it is increasingly difficult to penetrate deeply, as the novelist must, “into the mind and habit of a community” and “to make a clear shape of the merely personal life and to reach out to other persons of similar temperament.” These minimal requirements for the novel might still be met, he thought, by certain younger writers who had “it in them to write the novel that will catch, without false abstraction or tendentiousness, the strange rhythm of our time, with its continual overhanging tension, its storms, and its calm, fatalistic drift.”

Within the limits of his comic art and his subject matter, Kingsley Amis looks like the answer to Mr. Fraser’s prayer. If there is anything Mr. Amis’s John Lewis dislikes more than the grubbiness and poverty of his life or than the upper middle class, it is the literature of myth and symbol which this class modishly supports. Sitting beside Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams at the performance of Probert’s play The Martyr, which is an imitation of Dylan Thomas and Yeats, Lewis occupies himself, while wondering if he should place his leg against Elizabeth’s, by noticing that in the play “words like ‘death’ and ‘life’ and ‘love’ and ‘man’ cropped up every few lines, but they were never attached to anything concrete or specific. ‘Death,’ for example, wasn’t my death or your death or his death or her death or our death or my Aunt Fanny’s death, but just death. . . . Dear, dear, the thing was symbolical all right.” John Lewis is of course not moved so much by an inverted moral fervor as was Hemingway, who in a famous passage in A Farewell to Arms found abstractions such as these “obscene.” He finds them merely fatiguing and unnecessary.

But it is not his overt attacks on “abstraction,” nor is it the realistic décor of Corn Flakes boxes, animal crackers, pans of warm milk, and the many other details of his settings, which make Mr. Amis seem a genuine original in the contemporary history of the novel. His real achievement is that, although he is hardly as yet a major novelist, he has met Mr. Fraser’s minimal requirements of the present-day novel.

The reason why readers are finding Mr. Amis relevant as well as amusing seems to lie especially in his ability to give what Fraser calls “a clear shape of the merely personal life.” He gives the impression of a drastically scaled-down ambition. He does not make personal fulfillment depend on concerted action or ideology, as on the whole writers were doing in the 1930’s. As with most of us, even those of us whose ideas were formed in the age of the Great Depression, Mr. Amis suffers from astigmatism when he looks at the 1930’s. He sees the 1920’s much more clearly and responds more spontaneously to its currents of emotion, and he takes from that gay and doomed decade some of its licentiousness and iconoclastic wit, as well as its ideal of the personal life. Yet a profound change has occurred in what is expected of the personal life. It is no longer a matter of self-fulfillment through uninhibited behavior or through romantic gestures or heroic quests or sublime tragi-comic collapses and assertions. Despite their free and often ill-bred behavior, Mr. Amis’s characters are always seen in the sheerest, meanest actuality of their lives, and if they are in quest of anything beyond social status and relief from boredom, their goal may be described as the sharpening and reorganization of the “inert, generalized lust” they feel, into an active sense of being, a sense of the reality and significance of the personal life. The difference between the 1920’s and the 1950’s is neatly summed up by John Lewis: “It wasn’t so much doing what you wanted to do that was important, I ruminated, as wanting to do what you did. What about writing that down?”

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If, As I suggested above, Mr. Amis’s assumptions are middlebrow and if, furthermore, they sometimes seem to speak with the voice of the future, one may want to ask whether his particular brand of middlebrowism is importable to America. Mr. Amis, be it noticed, is not really a lowbrow, despite his liking for jazz, science fiction, and picture magazines. Like most articulate middlebrows on both sides of the Atlantic, he is an intellectual anti-intellectual (by contrast, the lowbrow, as Eric Bentley suggests, is typically a non-intellectual anti-intellectual). Yet why is it that his attitudes seem somehow superior to those of his American counterparts? Why is it that when Mr. V. S. Pritchett publishes some disparaging remarks about James Joyce’s Ulysses, claiming that it is more of a puzzle than a work of art, one does not feel like writing a letter of protest, whereas one does when Pritchett’s remarks are repeated and approved in the New York Times Book Review by J. Donald Adams? Is it simply because British middlebrowism is farther away than our own? Is it because our culture in the Age of Eisenhower is to such a large extent smothered by middlebrow standards, whereas English middlebrowism continues to show signs of life?

The real answer would seem to be that the English continue to perform the unlikely historical feat of making a great middlebrow literature. For reasons I tried to outline in Commentary (July 1955) in an article called “Is There a Middle Way in Culture?” American conditions have so far been such as to make a great highbrow culture possible, and also a great lowbrow culture—but not a great culture of the middle.1 By contrast the English have for centuries been successfully performing the characteristic middlebrow task of bringing the higher formalities and abstractions of art into a new relation with ordinary experience, with the personal, the temperamental, and the domestic. With the English this process of adaptation often turns out to be active and creative, whereas the middlebrow effort in America has been passive and parasitic—defining itself not according to any inner necessity of its own but only by what it rejects. It rejects the difficult ideas and principles of art which are propounded by the highbrow and merely pretends to an intimacy with the earthy and personal experience which it accuses the highbrow of being too refined to embrace. Hence the inner malaise of American middlebrowism, which is never quite concealed by its appearance of genteel complacency.

In his breezy way Mr. Amis may be said to carry on the creative task of the English middlebrow. And yet there is a nervous, “American” quality about him. We do not have in Mr. Amis a brutal and monolithic philistine like, say, H. G. Wells. “That uncertain feeling” is not only an existential uneasiness or the characteristic emotion produced by an undefined social status; it is also the guilt and anxiety of a writer who defines himself intellectually by a merely negative act—the act, namely, of rejecting most of the great ideas that for fifty years have been thought necessary to an understanding of the modern world. To this guilt and anxiety may perhaps be attributed the occasional outbursts of self-hatred in Mr. Amis’s characters.

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There is no social group in this country precisely like the one Kingsley Amis depicts in his novels. Yet, as I suggested above, the impoverished graduate students, teachers, laboratory technicians, and librarians who live in their cramped apartments, crowded shacks, and trailers in the vicinity of our large universities must surely see something of themselves in Mr. Amis’s characters. One could perceive, at any rate, a new culture in Shank’s Village, the agglomeration of temporary huts in Rockland County, N. Y., which functioned for ten years after the war as the intellectual backyard of Columbia University. And one can perceive a similar culture in the temporary villages that have sprung up around institutions like Indiana University.

The status-seeking inhabitants of these sprawling communities are brought much more immediately into contact with the facts of life than those who formed their ideas in the 20’s and 30’s are likely to have been. Books by the great thinkers who meant so much to them—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud—these may be found in the orange-crate bookcases in the flimsy shacks and Quonset huts, along with volumes by the difficult modern poets and novelists. Picasso and Klee may be seen on the dingy walls, and there are records by Bach and Mozart, along with some jazz and folk songs. But much more real and pressing than the life of ideas and of art is the spectacle of life as it is being actually led—with its hard work, its insecurity, its abnegation, its nervous fatigue, with its domestic duties and the ever-present children, who must be perpetually considered, even when engaging in the rather grubby sexual infidelities that make one of the few sources of diversion. Such a life leaves little enough energy to run after the intellectual gods of an earlier generation, and these were gods, it must be admitted, who required of their votaries a strenuous worship.

What this way of life, as well as the general spirit of the times, produces can be roughly described as a provincial, anti-intellectual, protestant moralism which finds its comic self-awareness in writers like Kingsley Amis, its literary-critical champion in F. R. Leavis, and its prophetic voice in D. H. Lawrence. Which is to say that, as always, American middlebrowism feels more strongly drawn to English than to American, French, or Russian writers.

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Will the new middlebrowism in this country turn out to be merely a new version of the old? One may at least speculate that if the rising writers, scholars, and government workers retain in the future years of their success some of the attitudes and emotions of their experience as a second-class citizenry in the university slums, they will not retain the complacent gentility of the older middlebrowism. At best they will keep the dynamic of their insurgent years. One hardly knows whether these underprivileged groups will change their attitudes and lose their cultural identity as they become full-fledged members of society or whether, having been made to suffer almost uniquely and living under conditions most factory workers would not tolerate, they will retain their own attitudes and, if they do, whether they will succeed in making them influential. Yet, as everyone knows, our civilization, especially in its present phase of unprecedented wealth, has grown enormously competent at enforcing conformity and relaxing intransigence. The chances are that the new middlebrows will be more or less facelessly absorbed into the vast rich, going concern of our society, thus demonstrating once again that the middle way in American cultural life is mortally weakened not only by its lack of ideas but by its historic inability to emulate the kind of energetic and creative naturalísm that distinguishes the English middlebrow.

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1 Only by way of analogy can one use the terms highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow to refer to cultural attitudes and art products of more than a few decades ago. To be sure, the kinds of taste and attitude which one associates with, for example, middlebrow writers of our own time are to be seen in literary works of various times and places throughout history. Thus it makes some sense to say that Chaucer was a middlebrow, whereas the French romancers and allegorists who gave him many of his ideas were highbrow, just as one might say that Pascal was a highbrow and Montaigne a middlebrow. But because these terms are not so much aesthetic and intellectual as socio-historical categories, they refer with full accuracy only to the modern times that have given rise to them. They are inevitably associated with the absorption of art and literature by commercialism and bureaucracy and the consequent emergence of a middle ground of culture, which in America in the time of Howells began to occupy the gap between the high culture and low culture that had existed since the 18th century.

The “brow” terms first began to be consistently used about forty years ago by critics who wanted to counter this absorption of culture with the concerted effort of a militant intelligentsia or advance-guard whose purpose it was to defend radical values. For a time the highbrow—for example, Waldo Frank—made common cause with the lowbrow—like Sherwood Anderson—against the gathering flood of middlebrowism. But at present there is in this country so much uniformity and so little effective protest that the distinction among “brows” is less real than it once was.

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