beowulf = heap of gangrened elephant's sputum

Peter Green reviews Zachary Leader's The Life of Kingsley Amis:

The idea for Lucky Jim was planted in Amis's mind as early as October 1948, while he was still at Oxford. Larkin, degree in hand, had moved to a sub-librarian's post at University College in Leicester, where Amis visited him. On Saturday morning they dropped in for coffee at the college common room. Amis looked around -- a cold-eyed anthropologist among the natives -- "and said to myself, Christ, somebody ought to do something with this.'" He pinpointed the scene as "strange and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got on to from outside." The new world of provincial university life had found its fictional chronicler, though it would take more than six years, and several false starts and rejections, before Jim Dixon finally made his famous debut, in the publisher Victor Gollancz's trademark pus-and-permanganate-colored dust jacket. The effort of this prolonged literary birth seems to have cleared a block in Amis's psyche: from then on he turned out books steadily and methodically, as though on a conveyor belt.

But back in 1948 Amis was in a far from comfortable position. He had scraped a First in his finals, but apart from this, his prospects looked less than encouraging. He had very little money. His girlfriend since 1946, Hilary ("Hilly") Bardwell, had gotten pregnant, and after first considering an abortion, they had a highly unromantic shotgun marriage, gloomed over by all four parents. Throughout his noisy undergraduate career Amis had made a point of targeting both the revered figures of English literature and the dons who taught them with childish, highly public, and often obscene anti-Establishment rant: Beowulf got zapped as an "anonymous, crass, purblind, infantile, featureless HEAP OF GANGRENED ELEPHANT'S SPUTUM"; the fellows of his college in procession had "much less dignity than a procession of syphilitic, cancerous, necrophilic shit-bespattered lavatory attendants." With lethal mimicry ("Shakespeare" emerged as something like "Theckthpyum") he mocked the verbal affectations of the Goldsmith's Professor of English, Lord David Cecil. Cecil was not amused, and subsequently ensured that Amis's B.Litt. thesis failed...

One of the best things in Leader's vast biography is his subtle teasing out of this process: his assessment of what, and how much, the manuscript that became Lucky Jim owed to Larkin, his untangling of the two friends' intricate and improbable collaboration. His careful verdict (with which I basically agree) would seem to be that while Amis benefited enormously from Larkin's astringent suggestions, the overall debt was not as great as Larkin -- discouraged by Lucky Jim's huge success from writing further fiction himself -- ultimately came to believe. Leader dismisses the rumors that Larkin had virtually written Lucky Jim, boosted by his catty comment to Monica ("I refuse to believe that [Kingsley] can write a book on his own -- or at least a good book"), and his claim to another girlfriend, Maeve Brennan, that Amis had "stolen" Lucky Jim from him, showing such comments to have been, at best, envious exaggerations. It is good to see that old canard finally laid to rest.