Secret Thoughts
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Lodge
Title Page
Author’s Note
Foreword
Act One
Act Two
Copyright
About the Book
Helen Reed, a novelist in her early forties, still grieving for her husband who died suddenly a year before, is a visiting teacher of creative writing at a university where Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist with a special interest in Artificial Intelligence and an incorrigible womaniser, is director of a prestigious research institute. He is an atheist and a materialist; she is a Catholic who has lost her faith but still yearns for the consolations of religion. Ralph is attracted to Helen and she, in spite of her principles, to him. They argue about the nature of human consciousness, and the different ways it is examined in science and literature, as she resists with weakening resolution Ralph’s efforts to seduce her. David Lodge has distilled the story of his acclaimed novel Thinks… to create a witty and absorbing drama about a moral, emotional and intellectual struggle between two exceptional people.
About the Author
David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Author, Author, Deaf Sentence and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.
Also by David Lodge
FICTION
The Picturegoers
Ginger, You’re Barmy
The British Museum is Falling Down
Out of the Shelter
Changing Places
How Far Can You Go?
Small World
Nice Work
Paradise News
Therapy
Home Truths
Thinks …
Author, Author
Deaf Sentence
A Man of Parts
CRITICISM
Language of Fiction
The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Modes of Modern Writing
Working with Structuralism
After Bakhtin
ESSAYS
Write On
The Art of Fiction
The Practice of Writing
Consciousness and the Novel
The Year of Henry James
DRAMA
The Writing Game
Home Truths
SECRET THOUGHTS
A play for two actors
Based on the novel Thinks …
David Lodge
Secret Thoughts was first performed at the Bolton Octagon Theatre on 13th May 2011. It was directed by David Thacker. His Assistant Director was Elizabeth Newman. The designer and lighting designer was Ciaran Bagnall. The cast was as follows:
HELEN REED Kate Coogan
RALPH MESSENGER Rob Edwards
*
I am indebted to Benoît Verhaert for the idea of adapting my novel, Thinks … as a play for two actors. How this happened is explained in the Foreword. Secret Thoughts was performed at the Octagon Theatre on a thrust stage, with minimal props, using music and lighting to mark shifts in time and space. It could, however, be presented on a proscenium stage, and with a more realistic set. To allow for a variety of production styles the stage directions in this text are also minimal. As it went to press before the end of rehearsals there may be some small differences from the play as performed.
D.L.
FOREWORD
I can recall exactly the occasion when I had the first glimmering of an idea for the novel eventually published in 2001 as Thinks … It was reading in the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, in June 1994, a review by John Cornwell of two books – Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis. The review was headed ‘From Soul to Software’ and it interested me very much. First, it was news to me that consciousness had become a hot topic of enquiry for scientists in many different fields. Second, I was struck by Cornwell’s exposition of the challenge that the arguments of Crick and Dennett presented to traditional religious and humanist ideas of the individual self or soul. Crick’s hypothesis, to which Dennett would subscribe, is that ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviours of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ I had a hunch that there might be a novel in this subject, of the kind in which a conflict between two opposed cultures or value systems is explored in a human story.
But first I had to familiarise myself with the research and arguments going on in the field of ‘consciousness studies’, which embraces neuroscience, artificial intelligence, zoology, psychology, philosophy and many other disciplines, and is infused with the neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology disseminated by popular science writers like Richard Dawkins. This was a considerable task for someone who had ‘dropped’ science subjects at school as soon as he could. It was educative but time-consuming, and some years passed before I began writing a novel about Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist specialising in artificial intelligence, and Helen Reed, a novelist in her early forties who is still grieving for her husband who died suddenly a year before. She comes as a visiting teacher of creative writing to a university where Ralph, an incorrigible womaniser, is director of a prestigious research institute, and attracts his attention. They argue about the nature of consciousness and related issues while she struggles to resist his sexual advances. He is an atheist and philosophically a materialist; she is a Catholic who has lost her faith but still yearns for the consolations of religion.
Early in their acquaintance Ralph explains that the problem for scientists studying consciousness is that it is ‘a first-person phenomenon’ experienced by a subjective ‘I’, but science is an objective, third-person discourse. How can the former be described by the latter? Helen says that novelists have been doing this successfully for nearly two hundred years, by the technique of ‘free indirect style’ which allows the novelist to combine the inner voice of a character and the voice of a narrator, and she reads Ralph a passage from Henry James to prove her point. Ralph retorts that in real life, unlike fiction, ‘We can never know for certain what another person is thinking.’ I decided to tell their story from three points of view, two subjective and one objective. Ralph is dictating his random thoughts into a tape recorder to provide data for his research; Helen is writing a diary on her laptop. These discourses describe their developing relationship and alternate with another, impersonal, objective, third-person account of the same events, which is restricted to reporting what they say and do, without describing their thoughts and feelings. Interpretation of these three parallel narratives is left to the reader without authorial guidance.
In the course of my twin career as a university teacher of literature and creative writer I became increasingly interested in the theory and practice of adaptation, especially in the question of what is gained and what is lost in the process. Narrative is a universal feature of all human culture, and in principle is translatable from one language to another and from one medium to another. The story of Cinderella can be told orally or in print, in English or French, as a pantomime or a ballet, a film or a strip cartoon, and still have essentially the same meaning in all these realisations. But more complex and sophisticated narratives are not so easily adaptable. Stage plays have to be ‘opened out’ when they are made into films or risk seeming artificial, but often lose some of their intensity in the process. Novels tend to contain too much plot and too many characters to be satisfactorily dramatised within the constraints of theatric
al time and resources: an entertaining show may result, but much of the quality of the original is lost. Film is a more compatible medium for the adaptation of a novel, because both forms move their stories through time and space in much the same way, and the TV serial is better still, because it gives room to unfold a long and complex story.
Both stage play and film or TV drama can bring a thrilling new dimension to a novel by the physical presence and performance of the actors, but – restricted to showing what can be seen and heard – all these media struggle to do justice to the representation of consciousness, which is silent and invisible. I enjoyed some success, and derived great satisfaction, from adapting my novel Nice Work and Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit as TV serials, greatly helped by the fact that in both novels the story unfolds in dramatic encounters and confrontations between the characters, rather than in their minds. The ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novel – Virginia Woolf’s, for example – is the kind of fiction most resistant to cinematic treatment. Using ‘voice-over’ in film to articulate the silent thoughts of characters must be used sparingly, if at all, because it goes against the grain of the medium – at least that is the orthodox view, or prejudice, in the Anglo-American film industry. Continental European film-makers are more comfortable with this device, and have had considerable success with it. I spent some time in the late 1990s developing a film script of my novel Therapy, much of it in collaboration with the director David Thacker, who had suspended his distinguished career in the theatre to work in TV and film; and later we pitched Thinks … to the BBC as a possible TV serial. Neither project came to fruition, but if they had, ‘voice-over’ would have been essential, especially with Thinks …
Late in 2006 I received a letter from a Belgian director/actor/writer, Benoît Verhaert, previously unknown to me, asking for permission to adapt Thinks … as a play for two actors, based on the French translation, Pensées Secrètes, for production at Théâtre le Public, a small but prestigious subsidised theatre in Brussels. He enclosed a rough, incomplete draft of his proposed play. It had never previously occurred to me that this novel could be adapted for the stage. The relationship of Ralph Messenger and Helen Reed is embedded in a particular social context – a ‘greenfield’ university of 1960s vintage, with its students and faculty, several of whom are important characters in the way the story develops. Ralph’s relationship with his wife Carrie and the backstory of Helen’s deceased husband are significant elements in the complex plot, which extends over several months. It would be impossible to incorporate all these characters and events in a stage play for both practical and dramaturgical reasons. But Benoit’s proposal suddenly made me realise that one could tell the essential story of the relationship between Ralph Messenger and Helen Reed, and explore the moral, philosophical and intellectual issues it involves, without all the dense contextual material of the novel. That could be stripped away without affecting the coherence of the central narrative, which could unfold through monologues based on Ralph’s tape recordings and Helen’s diary entries, alternating with scenes of dialogue between them, of which there are many in the ‘third-person’ sections of the novel. There would be no need to have any other characters. The conventions of stage drama, which require the audience to accept a degree of overt artifice in the presentation of experience, would make this stylised version of the novel viable. And it might provide parts with which two actors could create something memorable.
So I reasoned as I considered Benoît’s proposal, and immediately I was seized with a desire to attempt such an adaptation myself. Accordingly, I gave him permission to proceed with his French-language version, but reserved the right to do any adaptation in English myself. I looked forward to seeing how his play worked on the stage before I started writing my own, and in the meantime I read and commented on his draft script. Benoît explained to me that his practice in adapting novels for the stage (of which he had considerable experience) was to restrict himself to using the actual words of the author, but not necessarily in the same order. I was surprised, however, to find that he began his play with the talk about consciousness that Helen gives to a cognitive science conference, at Ralph’s invitation, near the end of my novel. In Benoît’s version Ralph introduces her to the audience, who stand in for the imaginary conferees. The narrative implication is that she has been teaching on the campus for some weeks, but they have only just met, and their relationship develops from that point. This was a neat way to establish the identity of the two characters and the context of consciousness studies at the beginning of the play, but I saw difficulties in using Helen’s talk, as written, in that position in the story. I would have to wait and see how it, and other quite radical rearrangements of the components of my novel, worked on the stage.
In September 2007 I went to Brussels with my wife Mary to attend the first night of Pensées Secrètes. Théâtre le Public is a comfortable and well-equipped building which looks on the outside as if it was once an old warehouse, with three acting spaces, of which the largest has only 300-odd seats – just right for a play of this kind. The artistic director, Michel Kacenelenbogen, is an actor, and had chosen to play the part of Ralph himself, with his wife, Patricia Ide, as Helen. He told me when we met in his office in the afternoon before the performance that it was, surprisingly, the first time they had ever acted together. I said I was honoured. He certainly looked the part – a big, genial, extrovert man – and Patricia Ide, when we met, seemed perfect casting for Helen.
So it proved in performance, but as I had anticipated, her talk, which opposes the literary humanist’s view of consciousness to the scientific approach, did not fit easily into its new position in the story. Patricia impersonated very well an arts-educated writer’s nervousness at addressing an audience of scientists; but the talk is in fact a very articulate synthesis of what, in the novel, she (and vicariously the reader) have learned about the subject of consciousness in the course of many arguments with Ralph. It was quite a challenging long speech to throw at the audience at the very beginning of the play, and for the first twenty minutes or so they kept what seemed to me a somewhat baffled silence. But gradually they began to grasp what the play was about, to laugh at the jokes, and respond to the twists in the story. The piece was beautifully designed and lit, and imaginatively directed. At the end (it was played without an interval) the audience applauded warmly. It was a successful evening, and the play had good audiences for its allotted run of eight weeks and, with one exception, favourable reviews. But it was not the play I had in my head – which was in fact a relief to me. I told Benoît that I intended to have a go at doing my own adaptation and that, if anything came of it, I would ensure that he received a percentage of the royalties, because the original idea of doing the play as a two-hander was his, and I would never have thought of it myself. However, I intended to follow the sequence of events and the emotional arc of the novel more faithfully than he did, and in consequence my play turned out to be very different from his, apart from the words taken from their common source, the original novel.
It also acquired quite a lot of new words, especially after David Thacker, who had returned to work in theatre as artistic director of the Bolton Octagon in 2009, offered to put it on there. At my first meeting to discuss the play with him and his assistant director, Elizabeth Newman, they pointed out that the script, based on a novel written more than ten years ago, needed bringing up to date if it was supposed to be set in the present day, particularly with reference to communications. It would hardly be credible, for instance, that Helen would come to teach at the university today without email installed on her laptop, as she does in the novel. My microbiologist daughter and computer-savvy son-in-law read the play and helped me modify the practical assistance Ralph gives to Helen in this respect, and also to update his expositions of evolutionary biology. The name of the fictitious University of Gloucester had to be changed because the University of Gloucestershire has been created since I wrote the novel. (I moved it to Harrogate.)
And more importantly, in two day-long sessions, with David and Elizabeth reading the two parts, we tested every line of the play for coherence, plausibility and dramatic relevance, and I made notes for cuts and rewrites, until we eventually had a script we were all happy with.
It was an absorbing and satisfying experience, but there is no way of knowing whether a play ‘works’ until, after much collaborative effort by director, actors, designers and auxiliary staff, it is performed in the presence of an audience. The process that will bring that about for Secret Thoughts has barely begun as I write this. Putting on a play is itself a collective drama, generating for the participants at different times hope, frustration, euphoria, disappointment and many other emotions. It has no equivalent in the solitary experience, intensely anxious as it often is, of writing a novel and seeing it through to publication. And if you are wondering why I want to bother converting a successful novel into another form and encountering a whole set of new problems in the process, the answer is this: it is not easy to invent a good story, and when you think you have one it is hard to resist the impulse to explore its possible meanings further, and to attract new audiences to it, by translating it into another medium.
D.L., January 2011
ACT ONE
Two areas of the stage have essential items of furniture. To one side: the living room of a small modern flat, with a table that serves as a desk, a small printer on or beside it, one upright chair for the desk, a small armchair with a coffee table beside it. There are ways out, one leading to a bedroom and another leading to the kitchen/bathroom/entrance hall, which are unseen. On the other side of the stage, an office in a hi-tech university institute, a desk with a PC and flat screen on it, a printer, a tilting swivel chair, an upright chair and a place to hang coats. Telephones on both desks.