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correspondence between them, and a visit by Amis to Leicester University which he claimed gave him the idea for
Lucky Jim.
In Oxford he met an attractive young art student called Hilary Bardwell and reported to Larkin his successful campaign to get her to ‘yield’, and its sequel. In late 1947, after he had obtained a first-class degree and commenced a B.Litt. course, Hilary became pregnant. Amis arranged for her to have an abortion – a criminal, sordid, and expensive business in those days – but cancelled it at the last moment out of a creditable concern for Hilly’s health, and they married. Amis retold the story in a late novel,
You Can’t Do Both
(1994). Their son was born in August 1948, and named Philip, after Larkin. They were poor, but on the whole happy, Amis’s main complaint about marriage being the new relatives he acquired, especially his father-in-law whom he described to Larkin as ‘an extraordinary old man like a music-loving lavatory attendant’, and vowed to pillory in a book one day. Mr Bardwell was the model for Professor Welch in
Lucky Jim
, but he failed, or perhaps refused, to recognise himself in the character.
    Lucky Jim
, however, was still in the future. At this time Amis was working on a novel called ‘The Legacy’. Interestingly the main character was called ‘Kingsley Amis’ (a postmodernist trick which Amis never employed again, though his son Martin would use it in
Money
) and is described by Leader as Amis’s ‘first hero as shit’. Amis attributed his failure to find a publisher for the novel to its experimental character, and this may have motivated him to adopt a more reader-friendly style in his next fictional project. The B.Litt. course entailed writing a substantial dissertation, and the topic Amis proposed, later drastically reduced in scope, was significant: a study of the ‘Decline of the Audience for Poetry 1850 to the Present Day’, aiming to show that when poets neglected a large public readership their poetry suffered in quality. A view of writing as communication, rather than self-expression or the exploration of form, would become a fundamental principle of the Movement.
    In 1949, without having finished his thesis, but with a second child (Martin) on the way, Amis applied for teaching posts at several universities and finally obtained one at University College Swansea, part of the federal University of Wales. Its English Department was not academically distinguished: no member of staff had published anything in the previous year, and with one exception none of them would ever publish a book. In this company Amis, with some published poetry and literary journalism to his name, was almost a star, and he kept his job even after his B.Litt. thesis was rejected by the two examiners, one of whom was Lord David Cecil. Amis was popular with students, though not always with his senior academic colleagues. It was in Swansea that he became a dedicated philanderer, and Hilly herself had occasional flings and one serious affair. It is likely that her third child, Sally, born in 1954, was not Amis’s, though he never said or showed that this was the case. They became the centre of a raffish social scene, generous and permissive party hosts, especially after the sensational success of
Lucky Jim
in 1954.
    That novel went through several drafts over several years, guided by extensive comments from Philip Larkin, especially when Amis was rewriting the penultimate version, entitled ‘Dixon and Christine’, which was submitted to and rejected by the publisher Michael Joseph. Leader gives a detailed and fascinating account of this revision process, during which Amis constantly consulted Larkin, who assisted him to a remarkable extent, suggesting significant changes in emphasis and structure which Amis invariably adopted. ‘The help Larkin gave Amis with
Lucky Jim
was crucial to its success, as Amis fulsomely acknowledged, both in public and private,’ says Leader. Larkin