by David Lodge
My agent Graham Watson, who was the next person to read the manuscript, in May 1979, didn’t like it much either, mainly because of my metafictional authorial asides. He wrote a chilly letter in which the only positive sentence was the first, ‘You have had a good go at the Pope’, and he continued: ‘I am sure you are wrong in your personal interpolations. I think there is a certain element even of arrogance in referring back directly to your earlier novels.’ Fortunately for my morale my publishers were enthusiastic. John Blackwell said it was ‘brilliant’ and Tom Rosenthal wrote me a long letter to warm any writer’s heart. ‘It is a dazzling performance … a tour de force …’ I valued his praise all the more because he wrote ‘as not only a non-Catholic, but as someone who has a fairly jaundiced view about all religions’. To make the recent history of the Catholic Church interesting to non-Catholics of all kinds (Tom himself was a secular Jew) had always been to me the primary challenge of this novel.
Later that summer Graham told me that he was going to retire soon and proposed to hand me over to another agent at Curtis Brown, Mike Shaw, whom I did not know. Mike took me to lunch and congratulated me on the new novel, which he had read with interest and appreciation sharpened by the fact that he was an active member of the Church of England, which had been experiencing moral and theological controversies analogous to those in the Catholic Church over the same period. Thus began a professional association which lasted till Mike’s retirement twenty-four years later, and a friendship with him and his wife Marian which continued after it. As his retirement party witnessed, he was greatly cherished by all his clients for his personal warmth and cheerfulness and his understanding of the neurotic anxieties of authors, as well as his professional skill in negotiations with publishers. Graham had always done his best for me according to his lights, and I was fortunate to be represented by the senior director of the agency, but he didn’t really understand my commitment to a twin career as academic and novelist, or appreciate that the security of the first occupation freed me to take artistic risks in the second. He probably felt justified in his opinion of How Far Can You Go? when it was rejected in turn by four American publishers to whom he submitted it, but when the UK paperback rights were sold to Penguin before publication for what was considered a good advance his attitude warmed and he wrote to say he was looking forward to reading the finished book ‘for pleasure’. He received the news about the Penguin sale when lunching with Tom Rosenthal, whose enthusiasm no doubt had something to do with this change of heart. The leisurely and bibulous publisher’s lunch is an institution that has fallen into disfavour since the financial crises of the twenty-first century, but it had its uses. Tom also entertained Bernard Levin, then the lead fiction reviewer of the Sunday Times, to lunch before How Far Can You Go? was published, and in due course the newspaper carried a glowing review by Levin of a novel which might not otherwise have attracted his attention. Tom had the reputation of being rather parsimonious with advances, but he was generous with his time and energy in promoting his authors.
Another piece of luck was that a former tutorial student of mine, John Archer, who was working in BBC television at this time, was given a new series called The Book Programme to produce, in the first of which he featured How Far Can You Go? shortly after it was published. John had been an undergraduate in the Birmingham English Department in the early 1970s, a tall, curly-haired lad from rural Warwickshire, with a laid-back manner and an engaging smile, who managed to convey his appreciation of my teaching without the least tincture of fawning. One evening he phoned me up at home and invited me to come round to his bedsit in Moseley to listen to an LP he had just acquired, The Who’s Quadrophenia. He was entranced by it and thought I should hear it. Even in the relaxed relations between staff and students that had developed since the sixties this was quite a surprising invitation, but I accepted and drove round to his bedsit. I had probably mentioned to him my interest in jazz and vocal music in the folk-blues tradition, and he wanted to introduce me to the latest thing in rock. I listened to the album with interest (though I enjoyed Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which he also played for me, rather more) and was grateful for the initiation. Now he was proposing to do me a much bigger favour.
Thirty-odd years later I had scant memories of this TV programme, except that the other participants were Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, Margaret Drabble and Malcolm Bradbury. But I was still occasionally in touch with John Archer, who had moved to Scotland to work in television and more recently in documentary filmmaking, and was now running a small production company called Hopscotch, so I asked him if he could refresh my memory of the occasion and its format. This he was glad to do. Each instalment of The Book Programme focused on a different literary genre, starting with the Novel, and the participants discussed it with reference to their own recent work. How Far Can You Go? and Heller’s novel Good as Gold, just out in paperback in the UK, were the two books under review in our programme. Margaret Drabble and Malcolm were there to give their views on each of these novels respectively, before all four of us engaged in a general discussion of the novel as a form and our own practice. The presenter was Robert Robinson, a familiar figure on television in this role. As well as giving me this information, John mentioned that he could probably obtain a DVD of the original recording from the BBC’s archive. I begged him to try, and it arrived not long afterwards.
Viewing it was an extraordinary experience. I have often been surprised to read in interviews with well-known actors that they never watch their early work in films or TV drama, but now I understand. It is disconcerting suddenly to see yourself as you were at a distant time in the past – in my own case thirty-five years previously – not in a still photograph, but breathing, gesturing, speaking. I never possessed a film camera or camcorder, and if I had I would have been behind it, not in front of it, so there is no home-movie footage of myself. The televised programme was an authentic fragment of the life that I have been painstakingly trying to describe in words in this book and its predecessor, and viewing it brought back in detail an event of which I had only a hazy memory. It began with a wide shot of the five of us sitting in an arc with me in the middle, followed by Robert Robinson speaking to camera about the device of deliberately pointing out the fictionality of events in How Far Can You Go? – for example, the accidental death of a young child of one of the married couples in the story – which I had described in a manner to make them seem real and appropriately moving. Why would a novelist deliberately break the illusion he had created, Robinson asked. Instead of seeking my answer at once, he observed that Joseph Heller did the same sort of thing in Good as Gold and invited Malcolm to comment on that book, to which Heller replied. So far I had not said a word, and was reduced to looking thoughtful in the occasional shots that appeared on the screen, but these were hypnotically interesting to me.
I was then aged forty-five, but looked considerably younger, partly due to the luck of the genetic draw from both sides of my family, and partly no doubt to the BBC’s make-up department. I was wearing a fawn corduroy suit from Austin Reed, and a Beatles hairstyle, a helmet of fine hair combed forward over brow and ears, and my features seemed eerily smooth and well-fleshed, free of the flaws and blemishes that I now see every morning in the shaving mirror: the scars of a tricky operation to remove a basal cell skin cancer from one of my nostrils, age-spots and defunct pimples, the thinning of my lips and the way they turn down at each side of the mouth to become furrows in the cheeks reaching almost to the jawline. Except for reading I did not need glasses in 1980, which allowed my eyes to add expression to my words when I eventually spoke; and I spoke rather well, it seemed to me, with very few of the ‘erm’s’ and ‘I think’s’ which punctuate the interviews that I give these days. Also, it appeared that I was not yet suffering from significant hearing loss, with none of the anxiety that tends to show on the faces of people thus afflicted, as they strain to hear something of importance in a conversation.
Margare
t Drabble, only four years younger than me, also looked amazingly youthful on the programme, sitting erect on her swivel chair, radiating health and vigour and confidence in a simple but elegant blue dress. I had not met her before, but I had written a distinctly tart review of her generally well received debut novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, published in 1963 when she was in her early twenties. In due course she became a friend whom I called ‘Maggie’, but neither of us ever referred to this review and I often wondered whether she had forgiven me or had forgotten it or not even noticed it. Anyway she had every reason to disregard it, having published seven more novels by 1980, including The Millstone which was one of the seminal feminist novels of the period. She briskly summarised How Far Can You Go?, said that it contained a lot about sex in the lives of the characters and not much about their work, but was clever and cool and often very funny. Joseph Heller, by far the oldest of the writers, with a mop of grey curls, responded to the first point by saying that for the protagonists of his last two novels sex was work.
Some interesting differences in attitude and practice emerged between us four novelists. I spoke about the way the form one chose to embody a novel’s basic idea would determine the content to a considerable extent. Margaret portrayed herself as an instinctive writer, who avoided self-consciousness about technique, and made up alternative fictional versions of the life she was leading herself, so that the action of the novels tended to have the same time span as they took to write. Heller said he had only had three ideas for a novel in his life, and had written one about each of them. Malcolm said it took him as much as ten years to write a novel, citing The History Man as an example, and that his own depression at that period of his life had given the novel its disillusioned tone – at which point he turned to me and said, ‘like the treatment of sex in your novel – you make sex seem as depressing as the Black Death’. The others chuckled, but the camera caught me reacting with a jerk of the shoulders, as if stung – which was how I felt. It was true that I described the disappointments, frustrations and absurdities in the sexual lives of my characters, caused for most of them by their Catholicism, but it seemed an unduly gloomy reading of my book. Shortly afterwards, however, Malcolm wrote me a letter which mended matters between us:
I was feeling particularly low and miserable that day, as I largely have since getting back from China, which I found a rather amputating experience. I’m sorry about the remark about the Black Death. I wanted on the one hand to say something amusing, feeling the programme was getting a bit over-solemn; I was also trying to get through to a discussion about the treatment of sexuality in your book and in modern writing which somehow couldn’t get through the chat. I thought your performance was excellent and very strong, like the book itself.
Malcolm had been on a British Council tour in a China which was still recovering from the repressive regime of Chairman Mao. It entailed long journeys by train on which he was accompanied by an interpreter-guide, and it particularly troubled him that this person had to sleep and eat in appalling conditions while he himself enjoyed luxurious but lonely accommodation in first class. ‘An amputating experience’ is a characteristically vivid phrase which I never forgot.
In the summer of the previous year we had both been involved in another British Council enterprise: a seminar which every summer brought together a select group of about fifty foreign academics, writers, journalists and publishers in a Cambridge college for one week in July, listening to and questioning an impressive procession of British novelists, poets and playwrights, who gave readings from their work and answered questions about it. Malcolm chaired the event that year and continued to do so for many years afterwards, during which time I participated in most of them. On that first occasion I read from the opening pages of How Far Can You Go?, which I had just finished writing. It was the first time I read from my work to a sizeable audience, and it was a challenging one. A number of the auditors, probably from more conservative cultures, were uncomfortable with the text’s explicit references to subjects like masturbation, and to its ironic treatment of religion, though others were impressed and amused. In future I was more careful in choosing what to read and often edited the text for the purpose. Poetry readings had been around for a long time, but it was only in the 1980s that public readings by novelists became common in bookshops and at literary festivals. It was part of a revolution in the promotion, circulation and reception of literary fiction that had many other constituents, the most important of which was probably the Booker Prize.
The invention of the Booker Prize, awarded to the best novel of the year by a British, Irish or Commonwealth writer, is usually credited to the publisher Tom Maschler, senior editor at Cape, who proposed that Britain should have something like the prestigious French Prix Goncourt, which had been going since the beginning of the century, to stimulate public interest in new literary fiction. The two prizes are however quite different in organisation. The Goncourt is awarded by a standing committee of academicians, and is widely suspected of favouring a few Parisian publishers who publish the work of several of them, whereas the Booker has a new panel of judges each year, which gives protection against corruption but makes for erratic and controversial verdicts. The Goncourt is worth a paltry nominal sum but the winner is sure of enormous sales. The Booker’s sponsor was a large company with many financial and commercial interests and a conveniently appropriate name, which began by providing a cash prize of £5,000 for the winner and steadily increased this sum to keep pace with inflation and the growing prestige of the prize. (It now stands, with a different sponsor, at £50,000.) The Booker judges issued a shortlist of six candidates several weeks before the winner was announced, when each of the unsuccessful writers received a small monetary prize as well as benefiting from the associated publicity. The Booker Prize had an uncertain start but in the course of the 1970s it gradually attracted more attention, mainly on account of controversies associated with it (as when John Berger donated half of his prize to the Black Panthers), and established itself as a feature of the British literary scene. But it didn’t make its winners rich and famous until the 1980s.
Up till then the judges had secretly decided on the winner at the same time as they issued the shortlist, and there was always a risk that the result would leak out; but in 1980 they met again to choose the winner on the day scheduled for the announcement, which was made at a black-tie banquet in the Guildhall. The change of procedure made bookmakers willing to take bets on the outcome, and this generated great media interest even though a comparatively small amount of money was actually wagered. When you have ‘favourites’ and ‘outsiders’ a literary prize becomes a horse race and a drama. In 1980 the shortlist included two titans of contemporary British fiction, William Golding and Anthony Burgess, and the competition between them attracted a lot of media attention and public interest. Golding, who attended the banquet, was awarded the prize for Rites of Passage; Burgess, who was waiting at the Savoy Hotel in evening dress to accept it for Earthly Powers, if summoned, was disappointed.
How Far Can You Go? was published in late April of that year and was widely reviewed, mostly favourably, sometimes very favourably, and often at considerable length. Inevitably it crossed my mind that it might be a contender for the Booker shortlist (in those days there was no longlist) but I wasn’t surprised or more than fleetingly disappointed when it was passed over. What was a surprise, and a very gratifying one, was a telephone call from Tom Rosenthal, shortly after the Booker reached its climax in October, to tell me that I had won the Whitbread Best Novel Prize, to which I had given no thought at all. Sponsored by the eponymous family-owned brewing company, the Whitbread was founded a few years after the Booker and on a more modest scale. At this time it offered three awards, for best novel, best biography and best children’s book of the year, each worth £2,500. The judges in 1980 were Nicholas Bagnall, literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, John Rae, author of children’s books and one-time Head of Westminster School, and Penelope Mortim
er, novelist, journalist and ex-wife of the celebrated writer and barrister John Mortimer.
It so happened that in 1980 the organisers, no doubt imitating the competitive element of the Booker, decided to add a higher level to the prize: one of the three category winners would be nominated ‘Whitbread Book of the Year’, to which an additional prize of £2,500 was attached. When I discovered what the other books in contention were, I felt, without having read them, that I had a decent chance of winning it. One was David Newsome’s biography of the Edwardian don and man of letters A.C. Benson, based on his copious diaries, which though highly praised by reviewers seemed a subject of limited appeal. The other was John Diamond, a novel for young readers by Leon Garfield. He had already won many prizes with books of this kind but it seemed to me that the genre placed a writer at a disadvantage in competing for a general literary prize. All three of us were asked to keep the information of our involvement confidential until the prizes were announced. John Blackwell wrote a characteristic letter of congratulation: ‘I’m inexpressibly pleased by the news whereof we may not yet speak … This is exactly the wrong time, of course, to remind you of the fine spoonerism attributed to Rachael Heyhoe-Flint – “Titbread’s Wankard”.’