Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  Some two years later, on 24th July 1982, I received a telegram from his wife Krystyna, with a three-word message: ‘ROMAN IS DEAD’. I had not been in touch with him since our meeting in Boston, and was unprepared for this news. I was touched that Mrs Jakobson, whom I had never met, had taken the trouble to inform me personally, and I felt all the more fortunate to have met him, thanks to Donald’s initiative.

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  One of the great perks and privileges of academic life, which compensated for the fact that one was paid less than comparably qualified people in other professions, was the sabbatical, traditionally one year in seven of paid leave from teaching and administration, allowing recipients to concentrate on their research and recharge their intellectual batteries. By this stage in my career it had been replaced at Birmingham by ‘study leave’ of one term’s duration every three years, and I qualified for this in the summer term of 1979. I took the opportunity to accept invitations to two conferences in June which were of interest to me and conveniently scheduled to run consecutively: the James Joyce Symposium in Zurich, and a conference on ‘Narrative Theory and the Poetics of Fiction’ split between the Universities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

  The Symposium is held every few years, usually in a city associated with Joyce, and timed to coincide with the anniversary of ‘Bloomsday’, 16th June 1904, the day during which the action of Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place. Zurich was an appropriate venue for one of the earliest of these events because Joyce wrote much of that novel when he took refuge there during the First World War, and he died and was buried there early in the Second. He boasted that he had put into this book ‘so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant’, and so far it seems that his confidence was justified (though just to make sure of retaining the professors’ interest he wrote another book, Finnegans Wake, which is even more densely encoded). Joyce has probably attracted more scholarly attention internationally than any other modern writer, in a period of rapid expansion in higher education when literary criticism became an academic industry in need of texts on which to demonstrate its various kinds of expertise. As D.H. Lawrence’s star sank in the literary firmament, Joyce’s rose, and his work was particularly amenable to criticism that belonged to the schools of structuralism and poststructuralism. Even so, I was impressed by the numbers of those who registered at the University of Zurich in the afternoon of Monday 11th June, and by the well-known names among them. We were all bussed to a civic reception at the other side of the city, and I found myself strap-hanging next to a tall tousled-looking man who introduced himself as Hugh Kenner, a Canadian who had made his career mainly in the USA, a brilliant critic of Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and several other major modernist writers. We chatted on the journey, and I learned later that he was born stone deaf and managed conversations by lip-reading, which impresses me even more in retrospect, having suffered significant hearing loss myself later in life. Whether he was able to lip-read the speeches of welcome by various Zurich dignitaries, I didn’t discover. The city takes a genuine pride in its association with Joyce, and one speaker, who was in charge of its excellent tram service, imaginatively acclaimed him as the ‘Bard of Trams’, on the strength of Leopold Bloom’s approving comment on this method of transport on his way to the funeral of Paddy Dignam in a horse-drawn carriage: ‘another thing I’ve often thought is to have municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage and all.’

  American or American-based Joyceans were the largest single group of the conferees: the second semester had just come to an end in the States and a grant-assisted trip to a conference in Zurich was a convenient way to start a European vacation. Among the names on the programme familiar to me were Ihab Hassan, J. Hillis Miller, A. Walton Litz, Robert Scholes and, intriguingly, Marilyn French, the author of a bestselling feminist novel, The Women’s Room, and also, I discovered, a college teacher who had written a book on Ulysses, and was down to speak on a panel entitled ‘The Joyce of Sex’. (Joyceans favour punning titles in homage to the master whose last book was written in a language consisting almost entirely of puns.) There were many European and British academics present whose work I knew, and several whom I had encountered before on my travels. Those in the British contingent whom I met for the first time included Colin MacCabe, soon to be at the centre of a famous academic controversy in Cambridge, and Maud Ellmann, daughter of Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s definitive biographer, following in her father’s footsteps as a lecturer in English at Southampton. The wine at the civic reception ran out quickly, so I went with some of my old and new acquaintances to the James Joyce Pub on Pelikanstrasse, a popular gathering place throughout the conference. It is a replica of an Irish bar, selling draught Guinness and other appropriate liquid refreshment, with furnishings and fittings taken from the bar in Jury’s Hotel in Dublin when it was demolished, and transported to Zurich by devotees of Ulysses.

  I kept a rough diary of my six days in Zurich from which it is clear that I thoroughly enjoyed the exchange of ideas with other Joyceans in both the formal sessions and private conversations. There was something exhilarating in the phenomenon of all these people from all over the world congregating like pilgrims in the city of Zurich to discuss and pay homage to the work of a single author. But whereas medieval pilgrims took months to reach their destinations on foot or horseback, we had travelled for only a day or two, shot through the air in tubes of steel from country to country and continent to continent; and we would soon disperse, but with every expectation of bumping into each other again before long at another conference. I wrote in my diary, ‘More and more I think that air travel has revolutionised the academic world, made it a global campus – a novel there, if Malcolm doesn’t write it first.’

  I was adapting Marshall McLuhan’s metaphor, ‘the global village’, for a world shrunk by the speed of modern communications, and I discovered in Zurich that I was now quite well known on the global campus, as both critic and novelist. It was pleasing, of course, to be frequently complimented by readers of The Modes of Modern Writing and/or Changing Places, but the city itself contributed a great deal to my euphoric mood. ‘I like it more and more,’ I wrote. ‘Birmingham is a junk heap in comparison.’ Beforehand I had associated Zurich exclusively with banks, and I vaguely expected it to look and feel like the City of London or Wall Street. It is of course utterly different from both, a charming low-profile city of harmonised period and modern architecture on a human scale, with a calm and civilised ambience which seemed to extend to every level of life, high and low. In the principal art gallery, superbly appointed and lit, I discovered a stupendous collection of Impressionist and Post-impressionist art which put Birmingham’s municipal Museum and Art Gallery into the deepest shade. My modest hotel, chosen at random, from which I walked to the gallery was on the edge of the red light district, where prostitutes were allowed to ply their trade, but in a very Swiss way, standing patiently on the street corners, just one per corner, and all looking clean and wholesome even if dressed in minuscule skirts and skimpy tops, though some of them wore smart cocktail dresses, or floaty kaftans, appealing to more refined customers.

  Marilyn French would no doubt have taken a less detached view of this spectacle if she had observed it, which was unlikely because, as I discovered, she was staying at the Waldorf in a posher part of town. Although I missed her participation in the conference programme, I did get to meet her on its penultimate evening. There was a party given by a publisher to which I went with many others, and I Ieft at the same time as Marilyn, Bob Scholes, a professor at Brown University and author of influential books on narrative literature (including The Fabulators, which had prompted the title essay of my book The Novelist at the Crossroads), and a young woman, a former graduate student of Bob’s, who was currently based in Paris, sitting at the feet of various intellectual celebrities there. I had met them toge
ther before, when Marcia (not her real name) gave me an amusing account of a lecture given by Jacques Lacan to some two hundred auditors. He came into the room, the chatter of the audience died into an expectant hush, and he shuffled his papers for ten long minutes before saying: ‘Why is there not a third sex?’ Then he relapsed into silence again, and began to transcribe some diagrams on to the blackboard, but having failed to do this to his satisfaction, abruptly announced that the seminar was ‘terminé’ and departed, leaving his question unanswered. Or perhaps that was the answer.

  Marilyn invited us to have a nightcap in her hotel room, where she had a bottle of whisky, and although it was getting late we accepted. But as soon we got inside the room Bob Scholes, a big, genial, bearded man, announced that he just had to sleep and Marilyn invited him to crash on her bed, which he promptly did. She was then fifty years old, blonde, elegantly coiffed and plump of figure, and at the height of her fame. The Women’s Room, published two years earlier, sold twenty million copies and was translated into twenty languages, but success hadn’t changed her pessimistic view of the damage patriarchy had done to women. We talked for well over an hour, mostly about feminism, a conversation dominated by Marilyn. As the only male awake I felt I had to tread delicately, and so evidently did Marcia, who had a more nuanced view of relations between men and women than our hostess, but refrained from challenging her directly. I recorded in my diary: ‘An odd conversation. Marcia obviously wanted to make friends with Marilyn (partly no doubt because she is famous) without being willing to pay the full price Marilyn was demanding, which would have been complete acceptance of her particular brand of feminism. Marilyn’s observations constantly sounded phoney and rehearsed without actually being so – I think she is quite honest and sincere.’ The conversation livened up somewhat when Marcia enterprisingly asked Marilyn how she chose her clothes, and volunteered the information that she herself took the advice of a former lover, and was actually wearing a rather mannish shirt he had given her. Soon afterwards Bob woke up and we departed, slinking guiltily past the night porter – the Waldorf had a rule against guests in bedrooms after midnight. I thought later that it would make an effective first scene in a play to have three people talking in a hotel bedroom and what appears to be a heap of quilts and clothes on the bed suddenly erupts to reveal an unsuspected fourth character who has been asleep underneath it (or perhaps awake and listening).

  I haven’t written that play, but several years later I discovered that our extended and rather dull conversation had had an unsuspected subtext. I never met Marcia again, but at another conference several years later I met Bob Scholes, and we recalled that evening in Zurich. To my astonishment he told me that Marcia had been strongly attracted to me during the conference and was hoping to further this interest over Marilyn’s whisky in the Waldorf bedroom, but she had been intensely frustrated by the way the evening developed, with Bob unavailable to distract Marilyn or prevent her from keeping the conversation dourly focused on the subjection of women, marginalising me. I had not been conscious of any amorous element in Marcia’s friendliness, though for my own part I did describe her as ‘attractive’ when first mentioning her in my diary, and on this second occasion wrote: ‘She is tall, very slim, long-limbed, nice smile, perfect teeth, petite pinched nose, soft waved hair. Good sense of fun – an amusing way of’ There the entry breaks off tantalisingly in mid-sentence like the last chapter of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey – but without the same implied sequel.

  If Marcia’s reference to ‘a former lover’ was a subtle hint to me of her availability should I be interested, I missed it, not being on the lookout for such opportunities. There were plenty on the conference circuit, as I became increasingly aware, and it was not surprising. Where else are men and women, far from home and spouses, more likely to meet attractive members of the opposite sex with the same passionate intellectual interests as themselves? Such affairs would figure largely in the conference novel that was germinating in my head, and transgressive sexual behaviour is a major topic in most of the novels that followed. Indeed I am sometimes accused of being excessively preoccupied with it. But as I often say, my perspective on the sexual revolution which happened in my lifetime has always been that of a war correspondent, not a participant. Occasionally journalists try to test the authenticity of this stance. The late Lynda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail interviewed me over lunch at the time of the publication of Therapy in 1995, and asked me boldly if I had ever had any affairs. If I had answered that it was none of her business, I might have given the impression that I had something to hide, so I said, no, I hadn’t. I said I had met women with whom I could imagine having a fulfilling relationship, but ‘one makes a choice’ and I had made it in favour of fidelity.

  There were several reasons for this, including certainty that Mary was equally committed to the principle and would never tolerate anything else, and the responsibility that we shared for our children, especially Christopher. The conditioning of my Catholic upbringing also no doubt played a part, though I no longer believed that I would put my immortal soul in jeopardy if I committed adultery. But I claim no special virtuousness for my behaviour. The fact is that I am constitutionally monogamous, like my father. I value the emotional security of a marriage made on the traditional contract, and have not found that desire is extinguished by it. I am never comfortable when telling a lie even for trivial social reasons, and would be quite incapable of the systematic deception that an adulterous affair entails, but it is not difficult to imagine what both the excitement and the stress of such experience would be like. In fact it seems to me that it would be difficult to describe it effectively in a novel if it were based on personal experience without one’s spouse suspecting something, certainly a spouse as perceptive as Mary; and perhaps the forced nature of much erotic writing in contemporary fiction is partly the consequence of the writers having to suppress more authentic sources of inspiration for this reason.

  The critic Mark Lawson, who has generally been a friend to my work, noticed Lynda Lee-Potter’s interview and teasingly accused me in another newspaper of ‘inverted hypocrisy’, giving the impression of familiarity with sexual adventure while secretly being an uxorious husband. I plead guilty to a measure of uxoriousness, but not to pretending to be more immoral than I really am. A novel is a novel and the ‘implied author’ of the text is not identical to the person who wrote it but has another self in the real world. That is not to say that my novels have no autobiographical sources – of course they do, like most novels that purport to represent the real world. But in works of fiction facts are modified, transformed, heightened, and sometimes inverted for artistic reasons. When readers identify things in my novels that they presume must be autobiographical but which in fact I invented, or vice versa, I am always pleased.

  The conference in Israel to which I went straight from Switzerland was as memorable as the Zurich symposium, though quite different in character and in various ways more strenuous. The political situation there was different from what it is today. The Israeli government’s treatment of its Palestinian citizens was not the festering issue that it is now, the Intifada was some way off in the future, and Israel and Egypt had signed a peace treaty, brokered by the USA, in the previous year. But other neighbouring Arab countries were still hostile, embittered by losing two wars in the last two decades, and Israel was on permanent alert. Several other conferees had taken the same flight as mine, including two who had been at the Joyce Symposium, and security procedures at Tel Aviv airport were exhaustive and exhausting, our identities carefully checked and luggage thoroughly searched before we were allowed through the exit doors and met by our hosts. The Sabbath had ended and the shopping streets through which we were driven were thronged with people in short-sleeved, chain-store casual clothes, like Birmingham’s Bull Ring on an exceptionally hot day. Our hotel was not luxurious, but it was adequate and had a decent swimming pool, which we couldn’t wait to plunge into.

  Among the la
test arrivals I was glad to see Allon White, one of the two cleverest students I had taught at Birmingham. (The other was Patricia Waugh, who was in the same third-year tutorial group as Allon, and is currently a professor at Durham University.) There were just under fifty participants in the conference, divided between foreign guests and Israelis, roughly in a two-to-one ratio. Hosted jointly by the Universities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it was due to relocate to the latter halfway through the programme, to appease rivalry between the institutions and to give the foreign guests an opportunity to see the historic city; but it was essentially the brainchild of Professor Benjamin Hrushovski, Head of the Department of Comparative Literature and Poetics which he founded at Tel Aviv. A Lithuanian born in 1928, he managed to survive the war and was among the first illegal immigrants to enter Israel after it. Having read The Modes of Modern Writing he had written to me asking if he could add my name to the masthead of the journal Poetics Today which he published from Tel Aviv, and as it was a purely honorary position, I agreed. But when he asked me later to give a public lecture as well as a paper at the conference, I couldn’t very well refuse. He had also asked me about Allon White, whom he was interested in recruiting for his department, and I told him truthfully that he was one of the most promising young critics in Britain. But Allon made his career at the University of Sussex, writing with rare elegance and clarity on a broad spectrum of topics in the field that was beginning to be known as Theory. Exceptionally clever, he was also a remarkably nice person. Alas, his life was cruelly cut short by leukaemia, and he died in 1988 at the age of only thirty-seven, greatly mourned by his friends and colleagues.