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could not, however, conceal from other friends some jealousy of the literary fame
Lucky Jim
and its successors brought to Amis, and developed a grievance against him on this score. Leader observes: ‘In later years Larkin would sometimes grumble about not being properly credited for the amount of help he gave Amis with
Lucky Jim
. He once told Maeve Brennan . . . that Amis had “stolen”
Lucky Jim
from him. He cannot, though . . . have meant this seriously.’ The success of the novel did, however, significantly affect their friendship, as did Amis’s reports of his ever-accumulating sexual conquests, which Larkin received with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and envy that he put into a poem, ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’, which he wrote in 1959 and revised at intervals up till 1970. He was never completely happy with it, and by his own wish it was not published in his lifetime. It begins:
     
    After comparing lives with you for years
    I see how I’ve been losing: all the while
    I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.
    Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well.
     
    And it ends:
     
    It’s strange we never meet each other’s sort:
    There should be equal chances, I’d’ve thought.
    Must finish now. One day perhaps I’ll know
    What makes you be so lucky in your ratio.
     
    One of those ‘more things’, could it be?
Horatio
.
     
    The last line, which identifies the poem as a letter from Horatio to Hamlet, alluding to a famous speech in Shakespeare’s play (‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .’) seems an obvious afterthought designed to disguise its biographical and autobiographical sources. 2
    Amis’s philandering, and Hilly’s less promiscuous infidelities, seem to have reached a kind of peak during the latter part of a year spent in America at Princeton University in 1958–9, where he gave the Gauss Seminars at the invitation of R.P. Blackmur (choosing science fiction as his topic, on the shrewd assumption that his audience would not know much about it) and taught creative writing. Leader describes it as ‘the wildest year of their marriage’. Amis and Hilly had simultaneous affairs with their neighbours the McAndrews, and according to one observer, Betty Fussell, they ‘inspired a whole year of husband-and-wife-swapping’ at Princeton, though Kingsley was the main instigator, propositioning every attractive woman he met regardless of her marital status. ‘It was compulsive,’ commented another Princeton friend. Amis’s own explanation, or excuse, was that for him sex was a way of exorcising the fear of death, and this theme can be discerned in his fourth novel,
Take a Girl Like You
(1960), whose hero muses in characteristic Amis style:
     
All that type of stuff, dying and so on, was a long way off, not such a long way off as it had once been, admitted, and no doubt the time when it wouldn’t be such a long way off as all that wasn’t such a long way off as all that, but still. Still what?
     
    Take a Girl Like You
describes the long campaign of the cynical and selfish Patrick Standish to overcome the old-fashioned moral principles of the heroine, Jenny Bunn, and take her virginity. It was a carefully crafted novel of acute social observation, a kind of elegy for an era of sexual decorum and restraint that would soon be superseded by the permissive society, and that Amis had already left far behind in private life.
    Swansea must have seemed even more of an academic backwater on their return from Princeton, and Amis seriously considered settling in America, but the offer of a fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge kept him in England. He was, however, never really comfortable in this post. It was a college appointment in which the University’s English Faculty had no say, and Amis was cold-shouldered by some of the latter’s members. F.R. Leavis famously remarked that Peterhouse had hired ‘a pornographer’ (revealing complete ignorance of