Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Lodge

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  David Lodge’s frank and illuminating memoir about the years where he found great success as a novelist and critic.

  Luck plays an important part in the careers of writers. In this book David Lodge explores how his work was inspired and affected by unpredictable events in his life.

  In 1976 Lodge was pursuing a ‘twin-track career’ as novelist and academic. As a literary critic, he made serious contributions to the subject, before carnivalising it in his comic-satiric novel Small World. The balancing act between his two professions was increasingly difficult to maintain, and he became a full-time writer just before he published his bestselling novel Nice Work. Both books were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in which he was later involved as Chairman of the judges.

  Readers of Lodge’s novels will be fascinated by the insights this book gives – not only into his professional career but also more personal experience. The main focus, however, is on writing as a vocation. Anyone who is interested in learning about the creative process, about the dual nature of the novel as both work of art and commodity, will find Writer’s Luck a candid and entertaining guide.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Lodge (CBE)’s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

  He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

  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

  The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up and Other Stories

  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

  Lives in Writing

  DRAMA

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  Secret Thoughts

  MEMOIR

  Quite a Good Time to Be Born

  For Jonny Geller

  FOREWORD

  The Foreword to my previous volume of autobiography, Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir 1935–1975, published in 2015, concluded:

  This memoir describes how I became a writer, principally of prose fiction and literary criticism, beginning with the early experiences and influences that fed into my work later, and it covers what is, at the time of writing, the first half of my life, up to the age of forty. I hope to write another book about the second half, in added extra time.

  The book you hold in your hands, however, covers not the next forty years of my life, but just fifteen of them. There were two reasons for this change of plan. One was the greater availability of data about the middle period of my life, and the second was what I hope is the inherent interest of this material. The narrative of my early life as a child and youth was necessarily based mainly on personal memories, supported by a precious but tantalisingly meagre collection of letters, photographs and other documents. It wasn’t until the 1970s that I began to fill a succession of bulky folders and boxfiles with letters both personal and professional. As time went on and my activities as a writer expanded I also kept occasional diaries and other documents relating to particular projects or journeys. This archive has enabled me to recall all kinds of details about my professional and private life which I could never have summoned up from unaided memory. But trawling through the middle period of my life with a net of finer mesh added weight to the catch and imposed a slower tempo on the narrative than the first memoir, and therefore a shorter time span. The focus is still the same, primarily on my work as a writer, with occasional digressions into personal and family life; but the professional life became increasingly full of incident as I combined an academic career with writing novels and, after retiring early from university teaching, began writing stage plays and screenplays as well.

  The seventies and eighties were exciting decades for both literary criticism and the literary novel in Britain. Traditional approaches to teaching and writing about literature in universities were challenged by new ways of reading texts and thinking about language. The Booker Prize and similar competitive awards sponsored by big business made the literary novel an object of interest to the mass media, and more lucrative for successful authors than before. I observed and participated in both these developments, and they are the subject matter of much of this book. For several reasons, of which the digitalisation of information and its transmission is probably the most important, the conditions under which literature is produced, circulated and financed have changed since then, generally for the worse as far as authors are concerned. I hope this detailed account of a writer’s life in those more buoyant times will have some documentary value, and that readers of my novels will be interested to trace the ways in which they were conceived and developed. When I told Tom Rosenthal, who published my novels at Secker & Warburg between 1975 and 1984 and was a good friend thereafter, that I was going to write an autobiography, he said immediately, ‘You’ll need three books.’ I am not sure whether I shall write a sequel to this one, but if I do it will perforce have a different, and more selective, structure.

  ‘Writer’s luck’ is a phrase usually applied to good fortune, and I certainly consider myself lucky to have published my most popular novels in a period when there was something like a boom in literary fiction in Britain. The phrase can also apply to the discovery of a promising subject – for instance, when Thomas Keneally walked into a leather goods shop in Los Angeles one day to buy a briefcase and got chatting to the proprietor, who proceeded to tell him about Oscar Schindler. Without that chance encounter there would have been no Schindler’s Ark. I haven’t had a gift as astonishing as that, but there are many moments recalled in these pages where chance played a crucial part in inspiring or facilitating some important element in a work of fiction. The words ‘lucky’ or ‘fortunately’ appear quite frequently in this book. So, to a lesser extent, do ‘unlucky’ and ‘unfortunate’, for the possibility of disappointment and frustration for reasons outside one’s control is inherent in all artistic activity. My experience of that is recorded here too.

  In the course of a long career I published occasional accounts of my experiences in news
papers, magazines, collections of essays and introductions to reissued novels. I have drawn on these sources where it seemed appropriate and I have not hesitated to use their words, either in quotation or integrated into the narrative, when I could not think of better ones. What is written when the memory of an event is still fresh is likely to give a more accurate and expressive account of it than something composed long afterwards.

  D.L., September 2017

  1

  Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir 1935–19751 ended with a brief glance forward to a book I published some years after the memoir’s terminal date, a novel about

  the great changes that had taken place during that period in Catholic belief and practice, including my own. In the process of researching and writing How Far Can You Go? my faith had been demythologised, and I had to recognise that I no longer believed literally in the affirmations of the Creed which I recited at mass every Sunday, though they did not lose all meaning and value for me. But that is a subject, among others, for another book.

  This conclusion was described by one reviewer as ‘a bombshell’ –presumably because there were few hints in the preceding pages of my harbouring fundamental theological doubts. I presented myself there as someone who had had a rather narrow and shallow Catholic education which nevertheless informed and stimulated my early attempts at creative writing. These were also influenced by the work of Catholic authors like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh whose vision was essentially anti-humanist, privileging the supernatural drama of sin and salvation over the secular pursuit of material progress. My passage into adult life and its challenges, coinciding with a revolution in the Church triggered by the election of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council which he convened, transformed me into a liberal Catholic, supporting the modernisation of the Church in its organisation, liturgy and teaching, especially on the issue of birth control; but I did not consciously question the fundamental articles of the Creed or ask myself in what sense I actually believed in them until I started thinking about writing a novel that would reflect the extraordinary transformation of Catholicism that had occurred since the early 1960s.

  I wrote once: ‘A novel is a long answer to the question, What is it about?’ The fundamental challenge for a novelist is to find the appropriate form for that answer, something which entails not just the invention of a story and its characters but all sorts of decisions about such matters as the point or points of view from which the story is told, the treatment of time, and verbal style. From its inception I decided this novel must have a large number of characters of more or less equal importance, with no central character or characters as in most novels, so that the full spectrum of attitudes and responses to the changing Catholic scene could be displayed. I also decided that the time span of the narrative should run from the early 1950s to the time of writing it in the late 1970s. Both these choices suggested that the dominant voice of the novel should be an intrusive authorial narrator, who would summarise and comment on the action and move it rapidly forward in time and history.

  A fundamental distinction in the theory and practice of narrative literature is between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ what happens in a story. Modern literary fiction generally favours the latter, either by using the technique of free indirect style, which fuses the authorial narrator’s voice with the inner voice of a character’s consciousness, or by having a character narrate the story in the first person. Both methods simultaneously ‘tell’ what happened and ‘show’ how it was subjectively perceived. The omniscient authorial narrator who describes, comments on and interprets the characters and their actions is a convention especially associated with the classic realist fiction of the nineteenth century, and was shunned as old-fashioned by most literary novelists in the first half of the twentieth. But in the 1960s a number of novelists began to get new effects from this narrative method by deliberately drawing attention to its artificiality. It was a feature of writing identified as ‘postmodernist’ – breaking away from the smoothly integrated showing and telling favoured by novelists in the forties and fifties but without reverting to the innovative methods of the great modernist writers earlier in the century like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: stream-of-consciousness monologues, mythical allusions, overt symbolism and fractured syntax. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five were three novels of the sixties I admired and wrote about as a critic, excited by the different ways their authors occasionally or repeatedly broke the illusion of reality they had created by drawing attention to how it was done. It was a technique that I thought would be appropriate to the novel I was preparing to write. In the first chapter ten students attending a weekday morning mass are rapidly introduced, and then recapitulated by an authorial narrator:

  Ten characters is a lot to take in all at once, and soon there will be more, because we are going to follow their fortunes, in a manner of speaking, up to the present, and obviously they are not going to pair off with each other, that would be too neat, too implausible, so there will be other characters not yet invented, husbands and wives and lovers, not to mention parents and children, so it is important to get these ten straight now. Each character, for instance, has already been associated with some selected detail of dress or appearance which should help you distinguish one from another. Such details also carry connotations which symbolise certain qualities or attributes of the character. Thus Angela’s very name connotes Angel, as in Heaven and cake (she looks good enough to eat in her pink angora sweater) and her blonde hair archetypecasts her as the fair virtuous woman, spouse-sister-mother-figure, whereas Polly is a Dark Lady, sexy seductress, though not really sinister because of her healthy cheeks and jolly curls …

  Academic critics began to call this kind of novel ‘metafiction’, fiction which is partly about its own processes as well as about imaginary characters and events. Although as an effect it was not entirely new (it goes back as far as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in English fiction), to make it the dominant element in a novel is always a risky procedure, apt to irritate and alienate some readers. But I felt that as well as enabling me to handle a great chunk of human experience in a small textual space, it reflected the risks my characters were taking in their personal lives as a result of questioning aspects of the faith in which they had been brought up. The question that gives the novel its title is first quoted as one with which boys at a Catholic school teased the old priest who ‘took’ them for religious instruction, ‘Please Father, how far can you go with a girl, Father?’ Sexual behaviour is certainly a key moral issue for the characters, but the phrase acquires a wider relevance as the story proceeds.

  Father Austin Brierley, the diffident and repressed curate who celebrates the mass they attend as students in the first chapter, is radicalised first by being exposed to demythologising biblical scholarship, and later by publicly opposing the papal Encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church’s teaching against contraception. Suspended by his bishop on this account, he is supported by a movement of progressive laity called Catholics for a Changing Church (based on the actual Catholic Renewal Movement I described in QAGTTBB) to which several of the characters belong. He attends their ‘agapes’, meals hosted by different couples in turn, imitating the chaste love feasts of the early Christians, at which wholemeal bread is broken and passed round with cheap wine in a single cup or bowl in commemoration of the Last Supper, accompanied by New Testament readings and discussion. With Fr Brierly present:

  a certain theological ambiguity hung over these occasions. Was it a real Eucharist, or wasn’t it? … To some this was a crucial difference, to others it was a relic of the old ‘magical’ view of the sacraments which they had renounced … Austin himself declared that the idea of a special caste exclusively empowered to administer the sacraments was rapidly becoming obsolete … So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing
away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stimulating and slightly unnerving.

  This last image echoes a bleaker passage in Matthew Arnold’s great poem ‘Dover Beach’.

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  In 1984, several years after I wrote my novel, a television programme and associated book entitled Sea of Faith, by Don Cupitt, the Anglican Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, prompted the formation of a movement or network of sceptical Christians and interested agnostics and atheists which adopted the Arnoldian phrase as its name. Its principles may be summarised as follows: religion is a creation of human consciousness and human culture. God did not create man – it was the other way round. The concept of a transcendent deity denoted by the word ‘God’ in religious discourse is without foundations and no longer commands the assent of thoughtful people in the modern world, where truth is established by scientific method. Nevertheless religion, especially Christianity for those who have been brought up in it, is or can be a cultural and spiritual force for good. Its rituals and ethos deserve to be kept up. There is something Cupitt called ‘the religious requirement’ (and Matthew Arnold more eloquently ‘the eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness’) which should be obeyed for the sake of civilisation.

  Predictably this position attracted criticism and ridicule from orthodox Christians and dogmatic materialists alike, but in me it struck a sympathetic chord, and in later years, when asked about my religious beliefs, I would sometimes describe myself as a ‘Sea of Faith Catholic’, although I never had any personal contact with the movement. The practice of religion, especially Catholic Christianity if that happens to be the tradition in which you were brought up, can be a useful stimulus to thinking seriously about fundamental questions which don’t go away if you simply ignore them, questions formulated by the philosopher Kant which the radical Catholic theologian Hans Küng cited at the beginning of his book On Being a Christian, some of which I used as the epigraph to How Far Can You Go?