Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  The prizes were awarded, not at a black-tie banquet in the Guildhall, but at a luncheon in the comfortably furnished cellars of the Whitbread brewery in the City of London, on Tuesday 11th November. Mary, who was now a teacher-counsellor at Blessed Humphrey Middlemore school, was not able to accompany me to the event because she had a high-priority engagement there on the appointed day. Happily I was able to invite Dad to be my guest in her stead. He was in need of such a break: looking after Mum was becoming more and more demanding, and at the same time his mother, my beloved Nana, relapsed into a worse mental state than before, and had to be hospitalised again. The Whitbread presentation was a great treat for Dad, and if he had been in the habit of dining out he could have done so later on the story of how the chairman of the company, Mr Samuel Whitbread, drew him a tankard of the brewery’s best draught bitter before lunch. At the meal Dad sat between me and Tom Rosenthal, who relished his reminiscences of the music business and always asked me about him afterwards. I already knew I had won the Book of the Year award, for a photographer had told me discreetly at the press conference which preceded the lunch, but I kept the information to myself and enjoyed the food. When it was my turn to say a few words on receiving the prize, I said it was the high point of my writing career to date, and I meant it.

  Afterwards I met Penelope Mortimer and thanked her for choosing my book as best novel and Book of the Year. I discovered to my surprise that she was appointed sole judge of the latter. What I knew of her and her work, which was not a great deal, made her enthusiasm for How Far Can You Go? also surprising. She was well known, via the media and her transparently autobiographical novel The Pumpkin Eater, for her stormy marriage with John Mortimer, which began when she was pregnant by her previous, recently divorced husband, and produced several other offspring before they divorced in 1971. I wondered that she was able to empathise with the burdened consciences of my earnest Catholic characters, but she said in the printed statement which each of the judges issued to explain their decisions: ‘The novel I hoped to find had to teach me something about contemporary life that I didn’t already know, and be thoroughly entertaining in the process … David Lodge’s novel achieved all this and a great deal more … With this ambitious, compassionate and supremely readable novel he moves into the big league.’

  I kept in touch with Penelope after the prize-giving, and she invited us to dinner that summer in her cottage in the Cotswolds near Moreton in Marsh. When we arrived on a bright sunny evening she was working in the fine garden, ablaze with flowers, which we discovered was her own creation and principal pastime. But the dinner was already prepared, and a bottle of Sancerre chilled. (It was my introduction to this esteemed dry white – at home in those days we drank a cheap medium-dry plonk made in Austria but bearing a French name, Hirondelle.) Penelope was then about sixty, and the stresses of her life had left their traces on her striking and much-photographed features. I had enjoyed John Mortimer’s dramatic work on stage and television since the 1950s, when Mary and I saw his very first play Dock Brief, and would have been inclined to prompt Penelope’s views on this aspect of his career if she had made any reference to their marriage, but she didn’t give me that opportunity. She did however mention being visited regularly by her grown-up children, including a daughter who had a young Down’s child, and I had little doubt, as she spoke about this grandchild, that it was a factor in her very positive response to How Far Can You Go?, which treated that subject in one of its plot-strands.

  In her prime Penelope had been a very successful novelist and short-story writer, and one of the few British authors regularly published in the high-paying New Yorker, but at the time when we met her she seemed to be rather anxious about her income from writing. She had a new novel in progress, but confided that she would probably accept a commission to write a book on a surprising subject, the Queen Mother, because she needed the money. The novel, her last, appeared in 1983. Entitled The Handyman, it was a deft fictional synthesis of her own present situation and past reputation, about a conventional sixty-year-old woman suddenly widowed, who retires to the country and encounters a number of seriocomic challenges involving the eponymous handyman and a neighbour who is a once-famous woman novelist with an outrageous past. I didn’t read the Queen Mother book but was not surprised to learn that it caused some consternation to her publishers when she delivered it, and controversy when it appeared, but it evidently made a refreshing change from the usual sycophantic royal biography, as one would have expected. Although we saw Penelope again, giving her a meal when she was in Birmingham, both parties let the connection go eventually, mutually aware perhaps that we didn’t have enough in common to sustain a real friendship, but I remained immensely grateful to her for giving an invaluable boost to my career as a novelist. She left the Cotswold cottage eventually and spent the last years of her life in London in a small house with a smaller garden, well looked after by her large family, according to her agent Giles Gordon, who wrote an evocative obituary in the Guardian when she died in 1999.

  At the end of the proceedings in the Whitbread cellars, Dad and I were driven in a limousine to London Bridge station to take the train to Brockley. It was a dull, chilly November afternoon and almost dark by the time we reached Millmark Grove, but our spirits were still warmed by my success and the hospitality we had received. We looked forward to telling Mum all about it. There were however no lights on in number 81 as we approached, nor when Dad opened the front door. We found Mum cowering in her usual upright armchair in the small living room at the back of the house, visible only by the light coming in through the French windows from the streetlamps above the back garden fence. When Dad switched on the ceiling light and she saw us she blinked and gave a feeble smile, but could not explain why she was sitting in the half-dark. Dad had arranged for somebody to come into the house and sit with her for a few hours, but they had evidently had to leave before we returned. I was shocked by how much her condition had worsened since I had last seen her. Her arms were pitifully thin and her hands trembled, but she also seemed mentally confused, unable to take in what we told her about the prize-giving. After a while she rallied somewhat, but in those first few moments I realised her condition was now very serious. It was a sad end to a day of celebration.

  I went back to Birmingham later that evening. The next day the Guardian and other newspapers carried the story of the prize, and soon messages of congratulation began to arrive, with a less enthusiastic one from my daughter Julia, now studying Biology at Southampton University, who liked to conceal her connection with me and my novels as much as possible. Fortunately I had just sent her a cheque. ‘It almost makes up for you getting your name in the paper and drawing attention to yourself again,’ she wrote. One of the longest and liveliest of these epistles was from Barbara Wall, the mother of Bernard Bergonzi’s wife Gabriel, and of Gabriel’s sister Bernadine, members of a very literary Catholic family mentioned in QAGTTBB. Bernard and Gabriel, living in Warwick where Bernard taught at the University, were good friends whom we saw regularly for Sunday lunch at one house or the other, and through them we met Barbara, who was a delightful person and, writing under her maiden name of Barbara Lucas, a skilful exponent of the English novel of middle-class manners with a Catholic slant. She happened to hear the news of the prize on the BBC radio arts programme Kaleidoscope, which carried an interview with me recorded after the lunch, and wrote next day:

  All your couples were a generation younger than me, but far more scrupulously worried about contraception than were Bernard (my Bernard, Bernard Wall) and me. We used French letters, as we called them in our old-fashioned way, after our first two had been born. Bernard didn’t think this was wrong (at least I don’t think he did – after all Coventry was being coventrated [sic] and bigger sins were being committed in Europe as a whole, not I admit, that this exculpates the individual) but I in a funny kind of way did, so went to confession for us both. But the thing about Bernard and me is that we used to talk about GOD the
whole time, whereas your chaps don’t seem to worry much about God and trying to be holy (pace Angela, I think she does …). I do congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. Each character is so vivid, and the whole Zeitgeist so brilliantly portrayed. The only chap who’s absent one feels, is God, except with Angela, Angela is holy.

  This strikes me now, reading it again some thirty-five years later, as a very interesting and shrewd comment on the novel. The different attitudes regarding birth control Barbara described, between Catholics of her class and generation and mine and Mary’s, was illuminating. But she had also discerned what I was only dimly becoming aware of: that I was not innately spiritual, that my faith was the product first of conditioning, and then of an intellectual and philosophical commitment, and when the foundations of the latter came to seem increasingly rickety, the faith began to drain away.

  I received many letters from Catholic readers of my own generation endorsing the representative accuracy of my fictional story. One lady, writing from Tunbridge Wells in 1981, listed twenty-three separate events or situations in the novel which corresponded to things which had happened to her or members of her immediate family. She concluded, ‘Your book will be of tremendous historical importance, to show what it was really like.’ The Jesuit Rector of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, whom I had met when judging a doctoral dissertation there, reviewed the novel in a Dutch newspaper, and wrote to me personally to say that the chapter which dealt in an almost essayistic way with the Humanae Vitae controversy was the best thing he had read on the subject. But some conservative Catholics were displeased.

  A few years after the novel’s publication I received a letter from Chris Walsh, a lecturer in the English Department of St Mary’s College, Twickenham, a Catholic college of education affiliated to London University which is now a university in its own right. He declared himself a fan of my work, and asked if I would give a talk to the students at St Mary’s and allow him to interview me for the college literary magazine, Strawberry Fair. He enclosed a specimen copy which impressed me with its quality and the distinction of some of the extramural contributors. I often heard references to St Mary’s in Catholic circles, and knew that it occupied the neo-Gothic castle which Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, had built for himself, but I had never visited it, and took this opportunity to do so. Chris Walsh was a congenial host and skilful interviewer, and when I read the published transcript I thought it was the best interview I had given up to that point in time. After the tape recorder was turned off, Chris told me that How Far Can You Go? was a set text in a course on contemporary British fiction at the college, and very popular with the students; but the father of one of them had got hold of the novel and been very shocked that his daughter was required to read such a heterodox and sexually explicit book at a Catholic institution. He made a formal complaint to the college, demanding that the book be withdrawn from the curriculum; and when this was politely refused he took his case to the Cardinal Archbishop of the Westminster diocese, Basil Hume, who to his great credit declined to anathematise my novel. The father subsequently withdrew his daughter from the college.

  7

  For Dad, the excitement of the Whitbread Prize presentation must have seemed as fleeting as the apparition of a shooting star on a black night. At the turn of the year the two most important women in his life were both seriously ill. Nana had been moved to Bethlem Royal Hospital, a mental hospital that was historically descended from the notorious Bedlam lunatic asylum, but now affiliated to the Maudsley and King’s College hospitals and situated in West Wickham on the southern rim of London. I visited her there twice, accompanied by Mary on the first occasion. She was in bed, propped up with pillows, looking frail but calm and pleased to see us, though she responded only to me, and Mary was doubtful whether Nana had recognised her. I made the second visit in January on my own and it was a poignant and distressing experience. I thought she recognised me, but the smile that used to light up her face when she greeted me did not appear, and conversation was difficult. Reports about how our children were doing, which had always aroused her interest in the past, made no impression. She rambled and groaned and sighed and shook her head at any suggestion that she would get better. The hospital staff told me she was suffering from an intestinal problem as well as severe depression, but they did not propose any surgical intervention for the former. It seemed to me that Nana had clearly had enough of life and wanted only to die, as she did not long afterwards – peacefully, we were glad to hear from the hospital – on the 20th of January, at the age of ninety-two.

  She was a lady of innate human goodness, whom I loved as a child and in adulthood, and it saddened me that, having lived a long and challenging life with admirable resilience, she should have suffered mental illness at the end of it. This feeling was not relieved by her funeral, which was a dismal affair, on a damp, cold January day. There were few mourners – the faithful Hilda and Stan of course, and a handful of other relatives of Nana’s – and I remember very little about the occasion except that the Honor Oak Crematorium did its best to add to the gloom. It was never lovely to look upon, and at that time a strike of municipal workers was affecting maintenance, so the precinct of the chapel was littered with rotting wreaths and bunches of decaying flowers from previous funerals because there was no one available to clear them away.

  Not long afterwards Mum took a turn for the worse, and was admitted to the Maudsley again, where they diagnosed that she now had pneumonia. In fact she nearly died, but she survived the crisis and remained in a stable but fragile condition. She was in good hands, and it was a relief for Dad that he no longer had the responsibility of looking after her. I arranged for her to be visited by the Catholic chaplain to the hospital and to receive the sacrament that used to be called Extreme Unction but now, in the post-Vatican II era, the Sacrament of the Sick. I wrote to a friend at the beginning of March that it was not clear whether she would ever be able to return home, and later in the month I reported to Eileen that she seemed very weak and confused, and called me ‘John’, her dead brother’s name. Some time ago I had arranged a complicated trip to America in mid-April, built around a short fellowship residency at Princeton University and entailing other lectures, meetings and visits in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC. Mary was invited to accompany me, and as the dates were mainly in the Easter holiday period she agreed to join me in Princeton. I had to tell all the people involved that my mother was gravely ill, and I might have to cancel the trip at short notice, which added an extra degree of anxiety to the situation.

  On the 24th of March, not long after I had sent this message to the appropriate persons in America, Dad phoned to tell me, his voice husky with emotion, that Mum had died quite suddenly. I went immediately to London to consult with him about the funeral, and then to the Maudsley, where I had my last sight of my mother, laid out in a chill, dimly lit room in the basement. I was alone, and in the presence of a dead person for the first time in my life. She looked like a carved effigy of herself on the top of a tomb: the phrase ‘the breath of life’ acquired a new meaningfulness from its total absence. Her features, once so comely, were hollow and shrunken, the skin stretched tight over the bone. I stooped to kiss her forehead and its touch on my lips was as cold and unyielding as marble. What other thoughts went through my head I cannot recall. I did not weep. I never do.

  So there was another funeral, which I helped Dad to organise, recruiting a priest from the parish church of St Mary Magdalene to officiate at the cremation. Honor Oak Crematorium had improved its appearance since Nana’s funeral – the rotting wreaths and bouquets had been cleared up – but Julia, who accompanied us, was dismayed by the dreariness of the place and the minimal service. There were more mourners than on the previous occasion, but not a great many, because we had so few close relatives. Afterwards we had a reception in a private room at a local public house, and when the guests had departed, Mary and Julia and I went back to 81 Millm
ark Grove and stayed as long as we could with Dad before returning to Birmingham.

  The ending of these two lives, so close together, saddened but did not depress me at the time, because I had so much else to occupy and distract me over the same period – not merely teaching duties, but commitments and developments in the wider world. John Archer had been sufficiently pleased with my contribution to The Book Programme to invite me to appear in January in the first of a new series he was producing, a regular review of recent television programmes called Did You See? Three guests with some expertise in the subject matter of one of the chosen programmes each led a discussion of it, after an illustrative clip had been shown, under the chairmanship of Ludovic Kennedy. He was a writer best known for books exposing miscarriages of justice, but also a skilful broadcaster with a personality perfectly suited to a talk show of this kind: relaxed and unassertive, setting his contributors at ease, but always intelligent and incisive in his comments and prompts. For my debut on this programme I had a stimulating combination of topics and fellow speakers. The other guests were Marina Vaizey, whom I knew from the ‘State of the Language’ symposium, reviewing a programme about Hieronymus Bosch, the fifteenth-century artist whose surrealist paintings of Heaven and Hell had fascinated me ever since I discovered them in youth; and Dr Anthony Clare, who would soon become famous for his BBC radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, reviewing a documentary called Facing Death. I was asked to kick off the discussion of BBC2’s four-part serial version of The History Man, about which I had plenty to say.