Old Clothes in New Times

We’re stuck on Kingsley! Another forensic analysis of provincial England; though this province, being in the South, is rather louche. Take a Girl Like You. Pity the Northern lass who finds herself between Kingsley Amis’s fingertips.

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Jenny Bunn is Kingsley’s nymphet. It’s an in-joke, like calling one of his extras D.H. Lawrence. This great debunker of Culture with a capital C is tied with an umbilical cord to the literary tradition he cannot - indeed, doesn't want to - escape. This is a child who, although he complains all the time of that loud voice, the aggressive make-up, her claustrophobia, doesn't want to leave mummy’s side. Or have I got the simile wrong: it’s not mother that’s the problem but all those aunts and uncles who’d smother him with sentimentality?

Here he gets all Freudian, and turns his mum into a sexy woman unaware of her sexiness - Jenny Bunn is a virgin who intends to remain intact until her wedding night. She looks like a sex kitten, and all the men, and one woman, make passes at her. Jenny finds the attention uncomfortable, and experience - she likes boys and their kisses - has taught her what it means; she is thus no innocent, but sex is a minefield she won’t cross. This creates a problem in the permissive 1950s.

Jenny is a school teacher. Yet her interests and ideas are those of a teenage girl. It is not that she is not intelligent - a musing on music suggests she is more knowledgeable than she seems1 - but that she is no intellectual. Then Jenny has no interest in what she teaches to the kids. It’s just a job. Schools taken over by the philistines.

We do not enter this novel to be cultivated. The 1950s a decade when the sophisticates fell a little out of love with literature, preferring journalism and sociology (cheap thrills and a fumbling in the abstract dark, jargon the decade’s poetry). It is why this novel is about a different kind of education; the street a classroom, the facts of life today’s lesson.2 Jenny is a young northern woman who has moved South to escape from a failed love affair. Her attitudes belong to the Nonconformism of the North of England, where licentious behaviour is controlled by a strong moral sense. Sex is feared; not so much because it is a sin, but because of the consequences - to have a baby before marriage is to lose respectability. To remain above one’s milieu one has to suppress the body’s instincts. Sex the great tempter to degradation and loss of caste.3

Jenny discovers a looser, more talkative, a freer world in this provincial town on the outskirts of London. For the man she loves - Patrick Standish - Jenny is a typical northerner who must be educated to lose her local beliefs, along with her petticoat, bra and knickers. Jenny agrees about the geography: the North is a case of moral backwardness, decades behind the times. But her ideas remained rooted there.

Are these differences really due to lines of latitude? Jenny’s father is a hearse driver. It’s another little joke - Miss Bunn’s ideas are the conceptual corpses she carries over from the Edwardian period; to paraphrase sex-obsessed Patrick. But forget the joke for a moment and think about that occupation…. It suggests the lowest level of the lower middle class, who keep above the workers only by their superior ideas: morality their life-raft when the deference society sinks. You agree? The source of Jenny’s morality is her class, although it is accentuated by locality. 

Patrick is a master in a public school; a mild bohemian, who likes Jazz and classical music and whose flat is a small library of books, which during the course of this novel he stops reading; for unable to get inside Jenny’s knickers he becomes distracted; overcome by the feelings of sex-deprivation that may turn into love. It goes deeper, perhaps. Patrick lacks the detachment and purpose of an artist or intellectual; thus his feelings destroy the mind and his culture fades away.4 If only sex were a mechanical process…. 

Patrick, as we see by now, is solidly middle class. His status reflected in his views, vaguely progressive and libertine about sex. That’s right, before 1960 sex was no longer taboo for the bourgeoisie.5 Promiscuity part of the texture of their lives. Women, especially when young, are not be courted and married but shagged. This not just the view of a cad like Patrick; Wendy and Susan are of the same opinion: sex is like alcohol and parties; it’s about having a good time. 

Jenny is behind the times. Her moral ideas the ideas of the middle class of at least a generation back.6 Patrick, in contrast, is very up-to-date; his cultural tastes - that modern jazz - reflecting the mores of the younger bourgeois, which tend to be - on principle - agin those of the older generations. Yet, and this is crucial, he remains stolidly respectable in his public life: his greatest fear that Charlton will reveal his private misdemeanours to the headmaster, who will then end his employment.7

For Patrick there is a distinct separation between home and work, although increasingly the attitudes of the former intrude upon his job; thus his pranks on the school’s cricket pitch. Jenny retains a more integrated life; where the moral ideas of her background constrain her private conduct. If sociologists, we could define this as a struggle between the secular and the religious; Jenny’s religious morality belonging to a class-culture that is about to disappear, and forever.8

Jenny likes men. But they mustn’t go too far. A difficult balancing act in these changing times, where sex is believed easy and available; cigarettes from a cigarette-machine. She needs a burka to keep her safe. I speak in metaphor. Leaving home and the physical presence of her parents there are now no fixed set of moral rules to keep men at a distance. It is hard to resist their advances. Jenny will allow Patrick to kiss her passionately, even stroke her thigh, and occasionally touch her breasts; but the action stops immediately fingers slide under the lace of bra and panties. The kisses are so lovely. But they have to end. Yet there is no obvious borderline, and so love becomes complicated and confused…it is only a matter of time, surely, when Jenny will lose her way….

Because she is attractive and because he likes her Patrick agrees to Jenny’s rules; but he finds them increasingly oppressive; the tension breaking when he enjoys a bacchanalia in London. Afterwards he makes a decision: to ditch his virgin queen, unless she gives up her protected palace. After much angst Jenny agrees; but doesn't turn up for their sexual rendezvous. He shags a teenager instead.

Jenny has won. Even Anna is vanquished; her sexual approaches so queer to Jenny that she doesn't notice them until it almost too late.  

But then Jenny makes a mistake. She goes to Julian’s party; where she gets drunk, and is carried upstairs and is put to bed. Patrick finds her, and fucks her while she is still half-asleep.

Jenny is outraged, and rejects Patrick completely. But his feelings have changed - he is in love - and he will not be so easily denied. After a little persuasion Jenny acknowledges she wants their relationship to continue; even though she knows he is not the faithful kind. The ideal of a perfect husband is revealed to be an illusion. And virginity ceases to be a big deal; its loss causing no psychic pain, Jenny reflects she may have encouraged it to happen: she is to blame! Moral rules are out! Life is about one’s feelings, it is to love; and for that you will do anything, including going out with a prankster and womanizer; a generally unreliable character - we guess they will never be married. 

Today Patrick could be arrested for rape; in 1960 his action is an immoral act that both reveals his character and liberates a young woman from the antiquated ideas of the past.9

Patrick Standish is Jim Dixon almost a decade on. Unlike Jim he likes his job; now it is only particular characters that annoy him - the authoritarian Charlton, and the miser Dick who bores him and his friends with a politics culled mostly from the newspapers. Patrick is happy in his world, providing he is left alone to do his own thing - make love to girls, listen to records, play practical jokes on those less liberal or clever than himself. From time to time he will cock a snook at authority; that safety valve of a safe rebellion. 

Patrick is an in-between character. Not quite an intellectual. Certainly no artist. He has shades of bohemia, but also a strong backbone of middle class respectability. He is a schoolmaster but also a schoolboy. He likes women and chases after them, but he reflects that his tastes do not match his sensibility; Patrick Standish not some simple Don Juan, with a single obsession, the skirt-chase. He doesn't actually sleep with that many girls. There is something of the university graduate about him - an adult who hasn't quite grown into maturity. Will he ever?

He knows what he doesn't like - the boring (Dick) and the fake (Anna). Anna, who talks about art in a grandiloquent way, is French, overweight, plain and doesn't care about her dress; a sure Amis sign of a lesbian, itself a symbol of the phoniness of those who worship Culture (always that capital C). We are to learn it’s all an act: she comes from Guernsey. This revelation leads to a surprise: authorial sympathy. Women are lovely creatures providing they are not intellectuals (we recall Margaret in Lucky Jim). That doesn't mean women can’t be intelligent - Joan is beautiful but her stupidity grates - but their cleverness must remain within the female sphere; a woman exists to be petted and penetrated; she is not supposed to warble on about significant form and the Hegelian dialectic. Women are for pleasure; all this talk about art and ideas obstacles to a man’s enjoyment. Then Anna’s dress sense is not alluring; while Margaret’s neurotic personality substitutes the excitements of hysteria for those of sexual activity. Patrick likes women. But they must remain amenable, sexually interesting and different from himself.10

Jenny’s reserve complicates Patrick’s simple tastes. Nevertheless, it is his desire that triumphs. Sex cannot be denied. It suggests the problem of the times. These young women are thrust into a public world with only the beliefs of their parents to protect them.11 They get the men so excited! And eventually, after many setbacks, these men succeed. The girls not strong enough to save their moralities.  

Jenny embodies the period. A time when old ideas about purity and innocence were giving way to new ones about revolt and freedom. Of course for most people, for Patrick, such ideas have a disarmingly domestic tinge - liberty not much more than the freedom to remove a desired girl’s clothes. It was a time when all women were still considered as sex objects, and yet now worked like middle-class males. The sexes mingling, the old social restraints no longer strong enough to contain one’s instincts; which must and do triumph.12 Sex has stopped being some moral Rubicon. It’s just another bodily function, which has to be exercised, or it will produce sorrow and pain. And this idea comes right from the top; it is no coincidence that the headmaster’s daughter is a nymphomaniac.

But the middle classes are a complicated crew. It is not enough to bed a woman you like. You have to make a crusade about it. Sex a cry of liberty. A badge of honour. A sign of integrity.

Review: Take a Girl Like You

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1.  There is a similar moment in Lucky Jim. Both feel slightly out of character. It’s as if the author cannot restrain himself, and puts his own thoughts into the narrower minds of his characters.

2.  We are back in fact to the novel’s 18th-century roots.

3.  Well described in Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving.

4. Compare with John Edwards in That Uncertain Feeling. Amis has identified a new type.

5.  Nicely caught in John Braine’s Room at the Top.

6. If not before: during the War sex spread like wild-fire through all classes.

7. The belief and the mistake of the 1960s was that this shift in moral values would spill over into economic and social life. Yet the signs were already there: they wouldn’t.

8. By the 1950s Christianity had been thoroughly secularised. In form it looked Christian but in practice it was secular and social.

9. It also suggests Amis’s need for a happy ending. Compare with That Uncertain Feeling.

10. Think of Herman in Die Zweite Heimat - he rejects his intellectual girlfriends for the ordinary Waltraud. Why? Because their nervous energy wears him out. The artist, it seems, needs to protect himself from other artists; the hairdresser articulating this point, when she says that the wife of a genius will always be unattractive. The artist wants domestic comfort; that space in which his art can quietly grow.

11.  Contrast with Pamela Hansford-Johnson’s An Impossible Marriage, set mostly in the 1930s. At this time young middle class women were entering the workplace, and could, though with difficulty, maintain their distance from the male sex instinct. By 1960, as increasing numbers of women entered work, that distance was bound to get smaller; until, eventually, it ceases to exist; especially in the young.

12. That this was strongly weighted to the male - though sold as female liberation - is suggested by Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.