Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  Because Malcolm wrote many TV screenplays later, people often assume that he must have adapted his own novel, but the BBC evidently didn’t consider him sufficiently experienced at this stage to entrust him with the task. It was given to Christopher Hampton, a distinguished playwright as well as screenplay writer, who produced an excellent script that was very faithful to the original. But it wasn’t a difficult task for him, because the novel itself is formally very like a film, consisting almost entirely of dialogue and objective impersonal description of people, places and things, with no access to what the characters are privately thinking and feeling such as novels usually provide. That is precisely what made Malcolm’s novel so effective, since it required readers to make up their own minds about the motivation of the characters, especially the central one, the dynamic Marxist sociology lecturer at the new University of Watermouth, Howard Kirk, who believes his task is to forward the leftward march of history, a mission which also feeds his appetite for intrigue, control and sexual conquest.

  The History Man was a TV hit, and attracted an enormous amount of media attention. The title became a proverbial phrase, and new applications and echoes of it (like Alan Bennett’s The History Boys) continued to appear for many years afterwards. There were several reasons for the programme’s great impact. Antony Sher, a little-known actor who had come to England from South Africa, was cast as Howard Kirk, initially to Malcolm’s disappointment; but he seized the part, made it unforgettably his own and the springboard for a brilliant career. The serial also broke new ground for British television in the explicit representation of sex, not porn-style, but in a witty adult way, as when Kirk and his colleague Flora Beniform sit up in bed after intercourse, both naked except for Flora’s horn-rimmed spectacles, open their diaries and try to find a slot in a busy term for their next assignation. Clive James, who was then reviewing television in the Observer, wondered whether it was right that men like himself should be permitted to feast their eyes on the opulent breasts of Isla Blair, who played Flora. The TV adaptation gave the novel a second lease of life and attracted many new readers, but the political climate had changed since it was written and first published in the early seventies. Then, it had satirised fashionable radical orthodoxies, but also exposed the weakness of liberal opposition to them; now it seemed to confirm all the prejudices of the Conservative Party triumphantly elected to government in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. The History Man was frequently invoked in the media as evidence of the dangerous radicalisation of universities, and actually blamed later for the decline of sociology as a discipline. This reaction dismayed Malcolm, who respected sociology, disliked Thatcherism as much as militant Labour, and supported the SDP when it was formed in March 1981. The TV serial was set in the period of the original novel, with the appropriate clothes and furnishings, but it was not interpreted historically by most of the audience. It must also be said that Antony Sher’s Howard Kirk was a totally amoral character, ‘compulsively loathsome’ in Ludovic Kennedy’s words, whereas in the text there is an undercurrent of respect for his energy and intellect. It would seem that the producers had some misgivings about the serial’s reception and tried to correct it by appending a footnote to the last episode, ‘Howard Kirk Voted Conservative in the General Election of 1979’, but that seemed highly implausible.

  Meanwhile another conflict between radicalism and conservatism was being played out in the English Faculty of Cambridge University, in what came to be known as the ‘MacCabe Affair’. I had met the chief protagonist, Colin MacCabe, at the Joyce Symposium in Zurich, as mentioned earlier, and subsequently reviewed his book James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word in an academic journal of small circulation called the James Joyce Broadsheet. It was a favourable review because I thought the book was a bold and original effort to bring the concepts of Continental poststructuralist criticism to bear on a key modern writer whose difficult work was usually taken as a challenge to traditional interpretative criticism. But such interpretation, MacCabe argued, tried to make the work conform to a notion of ‘meaning’ that it was precisely Joyce’s aim to undermine. He was concerned ‘not with representing experience through language, but with experiencing language through a destruction of representation’. That was an aphoristic overstatement, but an interesting take on the later episodes of Ulysses and the whole of Finnegans Wake. In this way Joyce could be seen not as an art-for-art’s-sake mandarin but a truly revolutionary writer. MacCabe had spent some time in Paris studying and listening to the stars of the French intelligentsia, and his intellectual interests were not exclusively literary, but embraced linguistics, politics, psychoanalysis and cinema, including contributions to the radical film journal Screen. He and some other young teachers in Cambridge, especially his friend Stephen Heath at Jesus College, who were similarly attracted by the new ideas about literature and culture emanating from Continental Europe, aimed to fertilise and invigorate from these sources the Cambridge English syllabus, which had not changed much since the days of I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis.

  In the academic year 1980–81 Colin MacCabe was a Fellow of King’s College and in the last year of a five-year appointment as assistant lecturer in the University. It was the practice of the English Faculty to offer permanent positions to the best and brightest of the assistants at this stage, and to let the others go. Colin MacCabe’s lectures were popular with students, and he had published a book and numerous articles. He was obviously a strong candidate for a permanent lectureship, but the committee delegated by the Faculty Board recommended that he should not be appointed to one of the few available. Such dubious decisions are not uncommon in academic life and there is no procedure to appeal against them, nor do they usually arouse interest outside the institution concerned. Colin could have continued teaching at Cambridge as a Fellow and waited until his case for a university appointment was irresistible. But in his view, and that of his supporters, his qualifications were demonstrably superior to those of the successful candidates, and he had been unjustly passed over by a Faculty Board numerically dominated by dyed-in-the-wool Leavisites and traditionalist scholars who were resistant to new ideas. Colin was of a combative disposition, and had several contacts in London journalism who knew how to generate public interest in the story he told them. Reports began to appear in the quality press about the dispute. A reading public which up till then had been bored or baffled by references to structuralism and poststructuralism and their impact on academia found the matter interesting when it was dramatised as a clash between personalities. Professor Christopher Ricks was cast as the leader of the anti-MacCabe faction, while Frank Kermode, who occupied the Edward VII Chair of English, was known to be sympathetic to MacCabe. This media exposure fanned the flames of controversy in Cambridge. Dons gave imprudent statements to the press, and libel writs were issued. Colin himself received one and counter-sued the complainant. The issue became national news, and then international news, as I myself witnessed.

  When my review of Colin’s book on Joyce was published in 1978 he had written to thank me warmly for it. Although I wasn’t aware of his employment situation at the time, for him it was a valuable endorsement of his work from a respected source outside Cambridge, and from then onwards I was his friend. In the correspondence between us that followed he agreed to give a talk in the spring term of 1981 to the weekly seminar on new developments in Critical Theory which I ran, with the support of two colleagues, for postgraduates in the Birmingham English Department and interested students in some other departments. The appointed date was at a time when public interest in Colin’s dispute with the Cambridge English Faculty reached a new peak. I was taking a tutorial while awaiting his arrival when the departmental secretary knocked on my door and, apologising for the interruption, said: ‘Newsweek is on the phone. They want to speak to Colin MacCabe.’ Newsweek! I could hardly believe it: the reverberations of the MacCabe Affair had reached the other side of the Atlantic. When the protagonist himself arrived he was fizzing with the e
xcitement and stress of his sudden fame. We put him up at home for the night, and Mary remembers him striding about with our phone pressed to his ear for much of the evening, chattering to his friends and media people about the latest developments. His talk at the seminar that afternoon – I think it was about the relevance of Plato to current thinking about language and representation, but I can’t honestly remember – was probably not as coherent as it might have been, but that didn’t matter. He was the man of the moment, and the room was packed with intent listeners. I preened myself a little on having brought him to Birmingham at that juncture.

  At the eye of the storm was the English Faculty Board in Cambridge. Frank Kermode, who served on it ex officio but with no more power to affect the outcome of its deliberations than his single vote, gave a brief but eloquent account of what it was like at this time in the last chapter of his memoir, Not Entitled (1995). After much hesitation he had moved to Cambridge in 1973 from University College London where he was very happy, seduced as he admitted by the idea of capping his brilliant career by occupying the most prestigious Chair of English in the country, only to find that he had no power, no office and no secretarial assistance. At UCL he had chaired an open seminar for people interested in the new critical theories and practices, to which some of the most distinguished Parisian critics, including Roland Barthes, accepted invitations. He had been encouraged to think by some progressive members of the Cambridge English Faculty that it would be glad of his guidance in reforming their rickety syllabus, and dutifully set about this formidable task, but the conservative faction on the board persistently blocked his working party’s proposals. When the MacCabe issue erupted, Frank inevitably became involved on Colin’s side. He wrote later:

  It seemed to me plain that this man was being dealt with unjustly; against my will I was involved in a fight with opponents more determined than I. Useless to recount all the complex manoeuvres, the dirty tricks, the calculated rhetorical performances … It was not … a lofty debate about rival literary theories, which is how some students took it, and how the Sunday papers mockingly reported it. It was certainly related to the whole question of how literature should be taught, especially in Cambridge; but intellectually the disputation was feeble and rather disreputable, and the argument ruthlessly ad hominem.

  The affair generated so much acrimony and scandalous gossip that eventually the University held an inquiry – known in its own jargon as a ‘Discussion’, and chaired by the Vice-Chancellor – into the state of the English Faculty, at which every member of staff was entitled to speak. Its proceedings were recorded verbatim in the University’s Gazette. I obtained a copy from a former Birmingham colleague who had moved to Cambridge, and it is a fascinating read, a credit to the University’s openness to public scrutiny, but not flattering to one of its key departments. Needless to say the whole saga reinforced a conviction I had long held, that my decision not to pursue an appointment at Cambridge for which I had been invited to apply in 1967, plunging me into obsessive regret for many months afterwards, had been absolutely right.

  The result of the Discussion was that a high-level committee was formed to review the decision not to appoint Colin MacCabe, which concluded that no miscarriage of justice had taken place. So his enemies had won, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The English Faculty was like a battlefield strewn with corpses, from which the wounded of both sides limped away. Kermode resigned from his chair and became a freelance critic and lecturer, Stephen Heath emigrated to America, and Christopher Ricks soon went to America too, though he cited domestic reasons for the move. As to the casus belli himself, Colin MacCabe very soon became Professor and Head of the Department of English at the new University of Strathclyde in Scotland, the youngest in the country to occupy such a position, so could claim to have won the battle in a sense. One of his first actions was to appoint a second professor in his department, and he asked me to be an external assessor for this position. So I met him again, and his partner Flavia, staying overnight with them in their cottage outside Glasgow, and thus began a friendship which has lasted till the present, in spite of the stresses of a collaboration which I shall describe in its place, and long intervals without contact. He has remained a man of strong opinions tempered by a lively sense of humour, and our occasional reunions, including Mary and Flavia, are always full of hilarity and argument.

  Looking back on the ‘MacCabe Affair’ it must be acknowledged that with the passing of time I, Frank Kermode, Colin MacCabe himself, and many others on his side at the time, became disillusioned with the poststructuralist approach to literature, especially of the Deconstructionist variety, when it became a kind of orthodoxy which ambitious young scholars felt obliged to embrace and apply to literature in a jargon-heavy discourse of tortuous obscurity. But intellectual and creative progress is furthered by the rise of new ideas and their eventual decline, only what is permanently valid in them surviving. In 1981 the majority on the Cambridge English Faculty Board was out of sync with this rhythm.

  At the Joyce Symposium in Zurich Walt Litz, Chairman of the English Department at Princeton, had asked me if I would accept something called the ‘Whitney J. Oates short-term Fellowship’ there in two years’ time. The visitor had to give two public lectures on subjects of his choice and conduct two seminars to discuss them further, meet faculty and postgraduates informally and be generally fêted. There was a substantial honorarium. I said yes. Two years later, but less than three weeks after my mother had died, I flew to New York early in April to fulfil this engagement, to which several others had been added. But first I spent two nights in New York, partly in order to meet a new American agent acting for Curtis Brown, who had split with their partner, Curtis Brown New York. His name confusingly was James Brown. I was also to have lunch with some editors from Doubleday, who were interested in my work in spite of the indifferent reception of Ginger, You’re Barmy when they published it back in 1965. They had passed on Changing Places, like every other American publisher to whom it was offered, but had perhaps revised their opinion since Penguin USA issued it successfully as a paperback original in 1978. They were hesitating about How Far Can You Go? and when they heard I would be passing through New York they asked to meet me.

  I was booked to stay at the Royalton hotel in mid-town Manhattan. A friend had recommended it because it was inexpensive but conveniently located near Times Square and opposite the classy Algonquin, famous for its literary habitués since the 1920s. I didn’t know how long ago my friend had last stayed at the Royalton, but I felt it must have declined steeply in the meantime when I checked in. The foyer was small and dingy, there was just one receptionist, who demanded advance payment in cash, and no one was available to carry my case and show me my room. The room itself at the back of the hotel lowered my spirits still further. It was clean, but shabby. The furniture, the carpets and the bed linen had a worn, exhausted look and the walls badly needed redecorating. The bath enamel was chipped and there were rust marks under the taps. But what most worried me was the array of various locks and bolts crudely attached to the inside of the door, as if accumulated in response to repeated attempts by thieves and thugs to break into the room. I spent an uneasy night there, waking up in the early hours from jet lag.

  I was already depressed when I arrived in New York because I hadn’t had time or peace of mind to grieve for my mother. A seedy hotel in New York was certainly not the place to start, nor was the busy schedule that lay ahead. When she died I could not suppress a feeling of relief that I would not have to cancel the whole trip at the last moment, as had seemed very possible, but I felt guilty at having this unuttered thought. So I was not in the right mood to make the most of my lunch with the Doubleday people. The venue was the fabled Four Seasons, probably the most expensive restaurant in the city at that time. I was seated at a round table in a circle of smart, friendly, sophisticated people in whose company I felt dull-witted and provincial. Invited to order first, I chose a conventional starter and main course from
the menu and was disconcerted when everybody else ate from an enormous split-level platter of seafood, and nothing else. Some said flattering things about How Far Can You Go? and others regretted that it would be a hard sell in the US. I perceived that they wanted to find out what kind of novel I was planning to write next, and if it took their fancy they might take a punt on it. I hadn’t told anyone about the subject of Small World, which was still at the notebook stage, and it didn’t even have a title yet. I am always rather secretive about a new novel-in-progress, in case it shouldn’t work out and have to be abandoned, or the idea be stolen by someone else. I told them it would be about academics, and hopefully funny, like Changing Places, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy their curiosity or whet their appetite. We parted amicably but inconclusively.

  I called at James Brown’s office. He was friendly and courteous, but he seemed to me almost elderly, not quite my idea of a dynamic New York agent, and he hadn’t yet read How Far Can You Go? so there was not much to talk about. I walked back to the Royalton, but couldn’t face my bleak room, crossed the road and went into the Algonquin where I ordered a cup of tea in the lounge. It seemed such an attractive, civilised place that when I had finished my tea I booked myself into a very expensive room for the night and went back across the road to fetch my luggage and check out of the Royalton. The man on the desk seemed only mildly surprised, and did not of course refund me for the second night. I understand it has since been totally refurbished and turned into a chic boutique hotel with self-catering rooms.

  The town of Princeton has its own railway branch line and is connected with the New York–Washington main line by a shuttle service. Arriving in this fashion is an appropriate introduction to a place which combines a sense of privilege with the ambience of a bygone age, made concrete in the elaborate Victorian neo-Gothic architecture of the campus and the perfectly preserved 1930s Nassau Inn where Mary and I were very comfortably accommodated. At first I was alone, because Mary’s term had not quite finished when I had to leave England, but Walt Litz was an assiduous host who ensured that I was never left on my own for very long before and after my first lecture and seminar, introducing me to colleagues in the English Department and to some of the distinguished academics at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, once the academic home of Albert Einstein.