The Old Devil

Posted 27 December, 2007 in Book Reviews |

Jake’s Thing, by Kingsley Amis. Vintage Books, $19.95 paper, 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-099-51217-2.

Jake’s thing is his penis. At fifty-nine years of age Jake’s thing — unlike the seventy-one-year-old Nathan Zuckerman’s thing in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost — still functions effectively. The problem is not one of mechanics, but one of desire. Once a ribald Lothario, Jake has recently lost all interest in sex. Or, as Dr. Rosenberg, the youthful sex therapist to whom Jake is sent for consultation, puts it in a typical Amis exchange:

“Now your trouble is that your libido [lib-eedo] has declined.”

“My what?” asked Jake, though he had understood all right.

“Your libido, your sexual drive.”

“I’m sorry. I’d be inclined to pronounce it lib-ighdo, on the basis that we’re talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it’ll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined.”

Jake is an Oxford don, “Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College,” and as such is one in a line of Amis academics stretching back to his first novel, Lucky Jim. Published in 1954, that novel established Amis’s reputation as a notable prose stylist and is still considered one of the finest examples of postwar British comic writing.

By the time Amis came to publish Jake’s Thing in 1978, much had changed in the world, notably the rise of feminism. The author, who along with his good friend Philip Larkin was a key figure in the group of British postwar writers known as the Movement, had begun to take on the mantle of misogynistic, racist misanthrope that would hound him in throughout his later career. The titular figure in Jake’s Thing, albeit a patently comic character, nevertheless espouses attitudes toward women that were outdated at the time, and that seem positively Neanderthal from the perspective of 2007:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

The passage’s final clause is perhaps meant to indicate ironic distance, to forestall what Philip Roth in Exit Ghost referred to as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.” Thirty years after the publication of Jake’s Thing, however, it is unlikely that any enlightened reader coming across the passage above would not be brought up short by its scabrous dismissal of the female gender as shallow, deceitful, and gormless.

A similar reaction is prompted by Jake’s diatribe during a faculty debate about the merits of admitting women to Comyns College:

No doubt they do think, the youngsters, it’d be more fun to be under the same roof, but who cares what they think? All very well for the women, no doubt, it’s the men who are going to be the losers — oh, it’ll happen all right, no holding it up now. When the first glow has faded and it’s quite normal to have girls in the same building and on the same staircase and across the landing, they’ll start realising that that’s exactly what they’ve got, girls everywhere and not a common-room, not a club, not a pub where they can get away from them. And the same thing’s going to happen to us which is much more important, Roger’s absolutely right, all this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about. So let’s pass a motion suggesting they bugger off back to Somerville, LMH, St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s where they began and stay there. It won’t make any bloody difference but at least we’ll have told ‘em what we think of ‘em.

That Jake is a misogynist should by now be abundantly clear; that his declining libido is inextricably tied to his hatred of women seems likewise inescapable. His genuine tenderness toward his wife, Brenda — whose low self-image locates Jake’s lack of desire in what she perceives to be his distaste for the fact that she is overweight — coupled with his willingness to undergo a series of increasingly embarrassing and degrading sexual “therapy” sessions in an attempt to overcome his problem, is the only counterpoint to his growing notion that the benefits derived from sex are not worth the effort of engaging with women in the first place.

It should be noted at this point that Jake’s Thing is a comic novel. But its comedy is of a distinctly nasty stripe: dark, vicious, calculated to offend. Jake is in many ways a relic of a bygone era — or, at least, of an era that was rapidly waning in the Britain of 1978. Jake is contemptuous of anyone or anything he decides is beneath him, and his derision knows no bounds. He is brutal toward his neighbours Alcestis, whom he refers to privately as “Smudger,” and her husband, Geoffrey, “Christendom’s premier fucking fool”; toward his long-suffering cleaning lady, Mrs. Sharp, who is “born of that mysterious power … of unconsciously sensing how and when and where to be most obstructive and acting on it”; and toward Dr. Rosenberg, “a student of the mind who didn’t know where Freud had come from.” He is likewise suspicious of the “therapeutic” techniques that Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues employ with him, including “sensate focusing” sessions, the viewing of pornography to overcome his guilt and shame in the realm of sex, and a bizarre workshop that involves his ritual humiliation by exposing his genitals to a room full of strangers. It is harder to take umbrage at these satirical jabs, since so many of them still ring true in today’s Dr. Phil besotted culture: “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.”

But by and large, Jake’s Thing is an historical document, a snapshot of a time and a place that no longer exist. This is perhaps one reason why Amis is not more widely read at the close of 2007. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, critic Michael Dirda opines, “a lot of people felt that [Amis’s] books were coldhearted, and certainly no one could deny that the male protagonists were often despicable, no matter how artfully portrayed. Not least, because Amis’s books eschewed formal innovation, they have never held much appeal to literary scholars or classroom teachers.”

Amis was notoriously antithetical to formal innovators such as Joyce or Nabokov, and his novels display none of the structural or linguistic pyrotechnics of those authors. He was, instead, a proponent of clear, crisp, efficient prose, and it is perhaps this very clarity and precision that makes the content of the novels seem that much more untenable to 21st-century readers.

As for being coldhearted and despicable, these adjectives could easily be applied to Jake and to the novel that he inhabits, but these seem less like legitimate literary criticisms and more statements of emotional affect on the part of discomfited readers. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing about despicable characters; it is a peculiar brand of literary philistinism that demands that characters in novels be sympathetic or cleave to a politically correct worldview. Particularly when the novel is placed in its proper historical context, the backward views of its lead character — a British-educated male of a certain age — tend to become more understandable.

None of which is to excuse Jake’s more reactionary or offensive attitudes. It would be a shame, however, if a short-sighted political correctness were ultimately to deny a careful literary artist his rightful place in the pantheon of late 20th-century literature.

1 comment to “The Old Devil”

Panic, December 28th, 2007 at 10:59 am:

• “There is nothing inherently wrong with writing about despicable characters; it is a peculiar brand of literary philistinism that demands that characters in novels be sympathetic or cleave to a politically correct worldview.”
  For me, this immediately brings to mind Irvine Welsh, specifically Filth.

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