One Fat Narcissist

Roger Micheldene is fat, drunk, lusty, British, and he is in the United States. But that would be to simplify Roger. He is a visiting publisher at Pennsylvania’s Budweiser University. He is somewhat well-dressed. He is also hypersensitive to criticism and rejection, introspectively self-absorbed, palpably insecure, unable to identify or own hurting someone’s feelings, and leads a black cloud of negative emotion and hostility, even describing himself as “distinguished in anger.” However, like all narcissists, whether grandiose or vulnerable, he is the only one that does not truly know it, and, most of all, the blame lies always with others.

Mollie Atkins, cringe-worthy anglophile, serial adulterer, and soon-to-be budget-mistress to Roger, asks Roger, during the first minute of their first picnic together, “Which (food) [he] would like to try first.” Roger: “I think I’ll start with some of that,” pointing at Mrs. Atkins. And, whilst the very next line in “He had some of that” reeks of humor stinking of Amis, the following describing Mollie’s fruits as “well matured but showing no untoward signs of age and with the customer’s satisfaction borne very much in mind,” though tickling and telling enough, smacks one of a strangely self-centered detachedness, his immediate post-copulation thoughts being those of her age and the customer’s satisfaction. The sinister abdominal workout continues, as one honks through Roger’s description of Mollie’s unattractively intimate utterings and his deadpan espying of a tortoise under a fern that had been watching the sin unfold in real-time. Yet, we are a trifle shaken by the dialogue directly thereafter, wherein he describes Mollie as disturbing “his own sensations.” And, whenever the British literary liaison is bested in vocabulary distinction by a cheating Pennsylvania bumpkin, a scene of some psychological concern commences. Roger uses the word tortoise whenever turtle is called for, and, whenever Mollie catches him on this, Roger “brooded for a moment…He was dissatisfied with the tortoise situation…it had put him down a couple of points conversationally and this must be redressed at once. ‘How’s my old friend Strode?’” In addition to the odd habit of seeing conversation as a points-game, Roger decides to mention the name of Mollie’s apparently dastardly husband for a number of hurtful reasons, chief of those being “Worsted over the tortoises.” Moreover, Roger uses the word “Egotist” to describe Strode, which is fitting, as narcissists are always quite adept at finding narcissistic traits in those other than themselves.

Without much delay are we given another rather indicative scenario. A campus debate develops spontaneously between Father Colgate, a handsome, young, gentle Catholic priest, and Roger. What started as a conversation becomes one of those odd campus showdowns between religious figure and disbeliever. Despite one’s thoughts on the cosmos and their order, Roger’s motivations during interaction are worthy of some attention, starting perhaps with the fact that he “wanted some sort of audience for what he was preparing to tell Father Colgate. One of their number, a blonde girl wearing a man’s shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy, was looking at him. These Yank college girls were at it all the time, one heard.” Why would an audience be necessary for what is presently a private conversation? Additionally, why should a blonde Yank girl in a man’s shirt who was potentially at it all the time be an important consideration of the proceedings? Furthermore, why should she be the chief focus of the proceedings? “He must concentrate on showing this blonde…how marvelous he was at dealing with chaps like Father Colgate.” After the churchman had delineated his way through forethought, responsibility, and reason, Roger “said fast and loud: ‘I honestly don’t know which staggers me more, Father, your affection for the obvious or your half-baked humanitarianism.’” And, whenever Roger is momentarily impeded by the young, talented visiting novelist on campus, Irving Macher, Roger feels that he must now “engineer the punishment of Macher for his interruption,” for taking him away from his loyal herd of college disciples, “including the girl in the shirt.” A significant instance of shallow, self-revolving behavior, not to mention a preoccupation with being admired and praised by others, the main representative of those being the blonde, someone much younger than he, someone highly impressionable, someone whom Roger can control and manipulate.

And this instance of attempting to exploit Youth is not singular. Indeed Roger finds great irritation in losing a game of Scrabble to the seven-year-old genius child of the aptly named Dr. Ernst Bang, the husband of Helene Bang, Roger’s supreme lust. Roger goes as far as knocking over the Scrabble board in a way that attempts to convey an accident, whereupon he accuses the child of cheating. It was this same child whom Roger attempts to blame for plotting Roger’s downfall. Whenever all is resolved, however, and the child is free from suspicion, Ernst and Helene laugh a gleeful mirth, the kind of gleeful mirth that expects warm participation on the part of the laughee. Instead, Roger can hardly keep his narcissistic rage contained: “‘The laugh’s certainly on me,’ Roger said, keeping his mouth expanded and producing an aspirated grunt every half second or so.”

With regard to Helene, Roger’s main sexual fixation of the novel, his general sentiment can be summarized rather succinctly: 

“Whether or not his motives about women were obscure he did not think they were. A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal. But it seemed a good moment to keep quiet about that.”

This sentiment can be still better understood, whenever taking his private calculations as regards Helene to heart. He oft describes his pursuit of her in quantified terms, one example thereof’s being “…a masterful feat of conscious policy, all of it successfully directed at getting her to come away with him in a week’s time…chances at about sixty to forty in his favour.” 

Roger, in a scene during which a notoriously promiscuous wench asks him whether or not people should be kinder to others who have relationship problems with the opposite sex, even using the phrase “our position,” Roger’s ego is assailed by suggesting the problem to be in the plural. Roger then jettisons all consideration for the cookie and, after “[taking] a deep breath to insure rapidity of fire,” instead locks, loads, and delivers accordingly:

“I fail to see any similarity in our positions. I have, fortunately for you, been taking almost no notice of your nonsense. But considering your time of life I would advise you to conduct yourself with a little more dignity. Most men don’t enjoy drunken women after a certain age making certain passes at them. You have a perfectly good husband. I suggest that you pay a little more attention to him.”

Like all seasoned narcissists, Roger projects his insecurity upon this, albeit not entirely admirable, woman. It is nevertheless striking how much Roger truly desires to hurt people with what he says, and what he says being, with the names and situations changed, really just descriptions of himself.

The novel’s religious meditations are frequent and strong. In general, Roger has it the wrong way around: praying to sleep with another man’s wife, endeavoring to fist-fight priests, even attempting to gaslight God himself, who, being the inventor of the thing, likely hasn’t fallen for Roger’s charms. Although Roger arguably holds his own amongst some of the most despicable characters in literature, his story is redeemed by the call to change. Father Colgate tells Roger, and therefore the reader, how these symptoms are 

“…infallibly the signs of a soul at variance with God. You, my son, are very gravely disturbed. You are in acute spiritual pain…I detected this from your very violent and distraught words to me back at the fraternity house and I obtained the clearest possible confirmation from the way you behaved a moment ago. A man doesn’t act like a child unless his soul is hurting him.”

Roger: “I’m not your son, you dog-collared buffoon…now unless you want to be martyred in the next five seconds you get out of my way.”

At just over 161 pages, One Fat Englishman, written in 1963 by the always witty ambassador to bad behavior, Kingsley Amis, flickers by with the speed and conscientiousness of a character-study. Whilst at first a novel merely unsettling, irritating, and even in nihilistic in scope, clarity reigns upon its conclusion; the redeeming factor to this novel is the call of transcendence that Amis offers in his demonizing Roger’s evil ways, indeed serving very much as something of a spiritual autobiography that led to Amis’s own retreat away from a delusional hedonism and accompanying convoluted nihilism to a life of, though ever satirically snappish, conservatively mannered contemplation.

Amis’s first wife, Hilary Bardwell, paints with lipstick on a sleeping Amis’s back her thoughts on the matter shortly before their divorce.

Pissed from a Distance

Angry, bellowing men with pythons for arms and peanuts for brains are no laughing matter. Disenchanted, seething gentlemen, whose arms exist merely for decoration and whose wits are tucked away in the dark steeples of brooding misanthropy are often a gaggle of laughs. Why we prefer one over the other is uncertain, yet the conundrum remains: why is being pissed from a distance so funny? 

As if Holden Caufield found himself a trifle more well-adjusted English don, the hero from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon, sets the modern gold-standard for amusingly irritated young men. However, unlike Caufield, Dixon, despite his patent literary-level hatred for the Post-War English University, is regarded by most of today’s literati primarily as a childish perpetrator of mildly lascivious high jinks. This is not an untruth. How, then, amongst all the griping, does Dixon keep sneaking in the ole’ rib-tickler? By examining a few of Amis’s distancing narrative techniques, and their effects on our humorous interpretation of novel, one may gather how merely being miffed is enough to blister the knees.

It is no happenstance that Lucky Jim is written in the close-third-person narrative style. This narrative choice sets the perfect level of impersonality necessary for harmless irritation and subsequent schadenfreude. Where in more than a few cases the first-person narration style, with its highly intimate connection with authorial intention, might perhaps flounder, the close-third-person succeeds in creating just enough distance between the snappish views of the character and the author who wrote them. This faux distance is important for the reader, as it allows him to fully experience all the fun of the hatred whilst relieving him from any of the personal responsibility for enjoying it. The distant-third-person would ostensibly also be quite effective in the pursuit for amicable animosity, but in its stark dissociation from direct emotional experience, it often cannot quite achieve the level of intimacy needed for one to feel that humbling pang of guilt so closely linked with humor. Therefore, in depicting the Displeased, the close-third-person reigns as the supreme line-walker. How, then, does Amis apply this balanced mode, in conjunction with other techniques, to Jim Dixon’s understanding of the provincial university at which he works and the pedantic characters who inhabit it?

One technique Amis employs to achieve a safe proximity with the Scathing is to affect the first comedic commandment of Euphemism. How does one scathe euphemistically? It is in this very field where Lucky Jim displays its unique brand of genius. The idea here is similar to the effect of outboxing an opponent, whilst simultaneously inquiring into whether he endeavors to continue, yet reminding him he cannot stop the round; it is a kind of controlled, gentle viciousness that is a bit difficult to have happen upon one’s own person, but highly entertaining to watch. Dixon is not bashful about whom he targets for what is more than solely pugnacious satire, rather a kind of ruthless portrayal of truths. For an example of this, seek no further than the first scene of the novel, during which Dixon’s interpretations of Professor of History and mentor, Professor Welch, are described. Welch tells an anecdote to Dixon regarding his playing recorder and piano with a few music aficionados around the school, and how he was observed by and reported on by a local gazette. Whereupon, beginning with Welch, the following takes place:

 “(B)ut what do you think they said then?”

 “I don’t know, Professor,’ he said in sober veracity. No other professor in Great Britain, he thought, set such store by being called Professor.” 

 “‘Flute and piano.”

 “Oh?”

 “Flute and piano; not recorder and piano.” Welch laughed briefly.

A veritable knee-slapper. And Dixon felt the very same way, going as far as to mention that “the older man… began speaking almost in a shout, with a tremolo imparted by unshared laughter”. And, though the laughs indeed remained in the singular form, Welch continued on absently and without consideration for the human constraints of boredom. Dixon, however, like a decent lad, attempts to honor this insufferable codger by “tr[ying] to flail his features into some sort of response to humor”. May we see now how Dixon is following the standards for decorum, responding in seemly ways, seemingly adhering to societal expectations, whilst also taking the piss? This is the very essence of being pissed from a distance. It is a kind of Bad Faith agreement wherein one conforms yet kicks dust. A subtle rebellion. 

Let us now tackle the subject of Bertrand, the unequivocal coxcomb of the novel. Dixon treats Bertrand with palpable discontent. Fitting to the temperament of an exasperated young man, Dixon behaves the opposite way to his contemporary, Bertrand, than he does through his begrudging subservience to Professor Welch. Bertrand is rendered as something of a laughingstock. We are meant to laugh at Bertrand, not with him. Bertrand is described as a kind of Post-War beatnik; he is a self-proclaimed painter and caricature-grade clown; and Dixon sees this to its core. Through his persistent commentary on Bertrand’s madcap insistence on perpetually wearing a blue beret, Dixon dances not around his distaste of Bertrand, stating his claims outright: “He was wearing a blue beret, which had much the same effect on Dixon as Welch senior’s fishing-hat. If such headgear was a protection, what was it a protection against? If it wasn’t a protection, what was it for? What was it for?” Can we not hear Dixon’s irritation? Inevitably, one of the final elements of the novel is a, due to an ignominious lack of physical conditioning on the part of both participants, graceless affray between Bertrand and Dixon, of which event Dixon narrowly claims victory. 

Lucky Jim is a young man’s novel. It preaches to the soul of the forthcoming thirty-years-of-age existential crisis, incisively arguing with, and often fittingly ignorant to, the antithetical notions of career versus freedom, love versus happiness, and suffering fools versus societal dissociation. Lucky Jim, truly a late-stage bildungsroman book, by Amis’s use of the close-third-person narrative style and tastefully detached prose style, a Looney Toons steam-whistle-escaping-from-the-shirt-collar hot-temperedness is rendered irascibility-light, a stiff scotch cut with water, heavy on the ice.  

Butt: It Ain’t Enough

Laughter is evoked through comedy, comedy through surprise, and surprise through the depiction of humorous juxtapositions. Kingsley Amis’s 1955 novel That Uncertain Feeling features John Lewis, a man whose adulterous escapade with Mrs. Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams teaches him profound existential lessons on lust, love, and life. Butt: Amis knew, in order to get his readers smiling, this was not enough. Merely to describe how a penurious twenty-six-year-old married librarian with moth-eaten clothing, no money for groceries, and an indefatigable toddler at home might betray some interest in a wealthy, beautiful woman’s sudden and boisterous advances would be obvious. Amis wrote comedy, and comedy relies on surprise. Therefore, in the pursuit of great comedy, Amis chose to impose a source of humor upon Lewis’s 1st-person narration by juxtaposing the loose, slang-ridden recalcitrance of a Breezy narration style against the euphemistically formal understated narrative style, as well as scenes of literary solemnity against irreverent slapstick. 

John Lewis is a young, disgruntled proletarian with militant feelings towards the wealthy Bourgeoise; he is also a scholar of Welsh literature and something of a pedant; he could be construed as what some people refer to today as a broke-ass snob. Therefore, it only makes sense that Lewis’s language be so interestingly humorous, carrying with it both the Holden Caufield-esque eye-spitting of the Breezy narration style that bobbysoxers and undergraduates alike seem to champion and enjoy, and the wit-riddled irony of an understated, Dickensian-esque narration style favored by those with chronic dyspepsia. 

Strunk and White told us never to affect a “breezy manner,” as it is “often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.” A breezy manner is a kind of “alumni magazine” talk that chafes the more sensitive lexophiles amongst us. Consider three-hundred pages of the following: “Well, guys, here I am again dishing the dirt about your disorderly classmates, after pa$$ing a weekend in the Big Apple…” A difficult task, to be sure. 

Although Mr. Strunk and Mr. White have doubtlessly slugged this unbearable archetype of the lexical narcissist on the chin, the gentlemen did not malign the use of a breezy manner in judicious conjunction with a more formal, understated one. And it was this concoction Amis thought worthy of two hundred and fifty-four pages.

We begin with the breezy whenever Lewis abbreviates linoleum floor as “Lino,” whilst further describing the floors of the library by stating that “the place was starting to empty, thank God.” An onslaught of informality: the library becomes an ambiguous pejorative noun, the imperfect past tense is employed, and the idea is punctuated by thanking the main Judeo-Christian deity for Lewis’s triumph of Sloth. This narration, however, is juxtaposed but only a few sentences later with a creative euphemism as regards Lewis’s inspection of a young woman’s lower musculature: “Distraction was at hand: a female student from the local University College crossed my path some yards ahead and my glance dropped involuntarily to her legs” (10). Although better understatements have occurred in literature, this usage is attractively subtle in the way it follows Lewis’s cocksure breeziness with the formal admission that his eyes were not voluntarily under his control, that, in some way, he suffers tyranny. This continues throughout the novel: a man experiencing valid emotion and crying is “turn(ing) liquid eyes on [Lewis],” which is followed by lengthy, elaborate similes and metaphors anent the uncertain feeling of following another man’s wife’s offering her body up to his discretion: “We moved together towards the entrance-hall. I felt I was swinging in an absurdly unnatural way, like a schoolboy on stage for the first time in his life. Did I always swing my arms as if I were carrying a pair of empty buckets? Surely not. And what did I suppose I was going to say next?” Humorous language, Amis knew, is only half the battle; therefore, he also knew that, to write a humorous novel, one must also depict humorous scenes.

It is funny to watch other people suffer. The Germans, which recent history would suggest to be particularly fond of this notion, have a word for it called Schadenfreude, which most literally translates to disappointment-joy. A similar logic applies to Amis’s juxtaposition of a solemn, unironic narrative against humorous relief. This heightens the humor, as a narrative saturated in only the sugary treacle of the cutely ironic becomes cloying and indeed a real bellyache to read. This release from solemnity to comedy produces a kind of joy in the reader, suggesting that even the dark times are never without something to smile about. 

Consider the case of Lewis’s suspicions that his wife and a failed playwright named Probert are having an affair: “I looked around for Jean. Probert was talking hard to her, with Elizabeth listening rather attentively. She caught my glance and mouthed some phrase at me, pointing to Probert. No thanks, I thought; whatever it is, no thanks. I smiled and waved to her, then hurried out.” Now consider the sentence immediately thereafter: “it was wonderful in the lavatory.” His wife’s flirting with an unattractive literary imposter turns into supreme bathroom bliss.

Further consider Lewis’s leading of his mistress down a poorly lit alleyway, in which “[he] stumble(s) on something soft, a bundle of washing or corpse, and warned her about it,” whereupon Mrs. Davies, a nettlesome neighbor, calls into the darkness, inquiring into whether it might be her husband or son walking that same alley. Lewis continues the narrative: “ignoring this, I began climbing the stairs…” Examples of this quick shift from the solemn to the humorous may be gleaned from about every single page in the novel. 

Yet, this formula, and it is indeed a kind of formula, somehow never gets old, never flags, never tires. This is due to its contrivance of truly surprising juxtapositions; if it is truly surprising and truly a juxtaposition, by definition, it will work every single time. Recall the last time someone said to you that they just did not feel like laughing that day. That person was a fool. Laughter is not a choice. It is a visceral reaction, a reaction caused by surprise, and surprise is enough.