by David Lodge
Earlier that year I had been approached by the British Council to join a delegation to a conference on Modern British Literature to be held in Seoul in August, organised by the English Language and Literature Association of South Korea. It was the most ambitious event of its kind they had staged, and the Council was anxious to support it, so had persuaded a distinguished figure to lead the British contingent, Professor Randolph Quirk. His participation was an enticement for me, but I wondered whether it was really wise to give up more time in the precious long summer vacation for yet another foreign excursion. Mary had arranged to visit her sister Eileen in Canada in August, taking Chris with her, and I entertained visions of having the house to myself with hours of peace and quiet in which to get on with the novel. My young colleague Deirdre Burton, whose research field was linguistics and stylistics but who also had interests in women’s writing and critical theory, had been invited to join the team going to Korea and accepted eagerly. One day she phoned me up to discuss the itinerary, which was to begin with an overnight stay in Hong Kong, and I told her I was going to drop out. ‘You don’t really mean that, do you?’ she said, and after chatting with her for a while I changed my mind. Asia was missing from my knowledge of the global campus and this seemed a golden opportunity to fill the gap.
In the event Korea contributed very little to Small World. There is one Korean character, the young companion, secretary, masseuse and bedfellow of Arthur Kingfisher in the USA. Persse meets her in a plane on the way to Seoul to visit her family, and she gives him some tips on how to locate the conference Angelica is supposed to be attending there, but that’s about it. The problem was not that the country was uninteresting, but it was curiously opaque to my Western eyes, with a middle class restrained by an elaborate, old-fashioned code of manners and a proletariat, as we observed them in Seoul, apparently dazed and confused by their sudden emergence from an agrarian peasant economy into an industrial consumerist one. There was nothing I observed that rang any bells with the themes and motifs of my novel. But when I committed myself to this long journey I had decided to make the most of it, continuing on around the world instead of returning home by the same route. I arranged to spend a few days in Tokyo to meet my Japanese translator Susumu Takagi, then to go to Hawaii to visit Eileen, and finally to a stopover in Los Angeles where Ruth apRoberts, a professor at the Riverside campus of the University of California, had offered to meet me at the airport and drive me to my hotel. She was a friend of Park Honan,2 in whose house in Birmingham I had first met her, and we had corresponded since then. I had booked myself into the celebrated Beverly Hills in Hollywood, thinking it might be fun to send Persse there, as in due course I did.
Susumu Takagi, who taught English at a university in Tokyo, had introduced himself by airmail a few years before as the translator of Changing Places, appending a long list of questions about the meaning of English words and phrases in the text (like ‘Y-fronts’ and ‘a bit of spare’) that he found puzzling. I always answer translators’ queries, because I have an interest in their work being accurate, but my correspondence of this kind with Susumu – he has translated most of my novels into Japanese – has been particularly copious. He is a very scrupulous translator, and in the practice of his craft often notices mistakes in the English texts of my novels that proofreaders including myself have missed. It was great to meet him in the flesh. He was a charming companion and guide to Tokyo, and helped me to buy a duty-free Sony Walkman cassette player, a fairly new device which seemed just the thing for long-haul flights, and yukatas for myself and Mary. These are deliciously soft and soothing cotton robes, one of which I found folded on my hotel bed when I arrived, and quickly became addicted to it. Tokyo fascinated me – outwardly just like a modern Western city but inhabited by people whose manners were entirely different. I was told that it was perfectly safe to walk about the streets at night and it seemed to be true. One hot humid evening I went for a stroll through the streets off the Ginza, the entertainment quarter, and it began to rain, so I took shelter in a basement bar under the sign ‘Pub’, the only recognisable English word amid the neon dazzle of Japanese characters. Its clientele, however, were all Japanese. The bar staff didn’t speak English, but with the help of a customer who spoke a little, I gathered that in order to get a drink I had to stand up and sing a pop song, selected from a menu which was in English, to a taped backing track. I chose ‘Hey Jude’ and was warmly applauded. When I got back to my hotel I lay on the bed laughing out loud at the memory and resolved to work this bizarre experience into the novel. I discovered next day from the British Council Representative that I had been performing karaoke (literally meaning ‘empty orchestra’), a word and activity not yet known in Britain. I also learned from Susumu that the Japanese equivalent of the saying ‘It’s a small world’ is ‘It is narrow world’. At the end of the novel Persse McGarrigle, now searching for Cheryl, the check-in girl who has displaced Angelica as the object of his desire, stands in front of a Heathrow departure flutter-board and wonders ‘where in all the small, narrow world he should begin to look for her’. When I was in Los Angeles some years after the book was published, I glanced idly at the personal ads in the LA Times one day, and my eye was caught by this item:
DESPERATELY SEEKING Angelica. Last seen in New York, MLA Convention ’79. Have $12 left, after that it’s back to Limerick – Persse McGarrigle.
I have no idea who posted this poignant appeal.
When I got to Honolulu I found that Eileen was depressed again. Added to her financial worries was a sense that Waikiki had lost much of the charm which had originally persuaded her to settle there. As well as the relentless construction work of the developers (as Joni Mitchell sang, ‘They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot’) the resort was becoming increasingly criminalised, and she had given up babysitting as a source of income because she no longer felt safe walking home late at night. She even spoke of returning to England for the remainder of her life, but I could not imagine her being happy there. I did my best to cheer her up, but it was a taxing task, and feeling the need to be on my own for a while I took a tourist excursion to a beach popular for snorkelling, with equipment provided. I covered up on the hot beach, but foolishly assumed I could not get sunburned while swimming. In fact snorkelling, which was new to me, exposes the back to the sun’s rays, and I was badly burned, especially on the back of my legs. I was obliged to adopt a stiff-legged gait for the remainder of my travels, grateful to use the handle of a luggage trolley in the airports as a kind of wheeled Zimmer frame.
I made another academic visit to a foreign country in this period which did not leave any trace in Small World, but was one of the most memorable. In 1981 I went to Warsaw with a British Council-sponsored team to take part in an international symposium on ‘The Quest for Identity in 19th & 20th Century English Literature’. It had been arranged at the beginning of that year but took place almost at the end of it, in early November, when the fate of Poland was in the balance. The flourishing independent trade union Solidarity, founded and led by Lech Wałe˛sa, was challenging the Soviet-backed Communist government with strikes and demonstrations, and Russia had responded by imposing a hard-line army general, Wojciech Jaruzelski, as Prime Minister. The consequence of the strikes was a drastic fall in the value of the Polish zloty and shortages of food and other basic necessities, severe enough to be widely reported outside Poland. The British party who made the journey included two friends of mine, Bernard Bergonzi and Barbara Hardy, Professor at Birkbeck College London, and Ian McEwan whom I met for the first time on that occasion. We were warned in advance by the Council that commodities like coffee and soap were unobtainable in Poland, and informed that they would make very acceptable presents to our hosts. It was a hint which most of us took and we wondered as we gathered for the opening reception how to hand over these goodies gracefully. Our accommodation was in a small palace on the outskirts of Warsaw, a replica of the eighteenth-century original which had been destroyed in th
e war, like almost every other building of note in the capital, and due to a breakdown in the electric power supply there was no hot water. ‘I brought plenty of soap, but the British Council didn’t tell us to bring water,’ I remarked to a lady from Poznan´ at the reception. ‘Ah, Poland will always surprise you,’ she said with a smile. ‘By the way,’ I added, ‘would you like a bar of soap?’ The offer lacked finesse to my own ears, but it was received with charming good humour. ‘I promise you it will be the last bar of soap I shall use,’ she said.
At the welcoming dinner, the ingredients for which must have been obtained with immense difficulty, the Rector of the University praised us for our ‘courage’ in coming to Poland in its present state, a compliment most us felt we scarcely deserved. The Poles of course were more aware of what was at stake, and outside the formal sessions of the symposium they talked about little else except the political crisis. In the city its impact on everyday life was very evident: long queues of cars outside garages and long lines of people outside shops with bare counters and empty shelves, waiting for supplies of petrol and food to be delivered. Underlying these frustrations and deprivations was a fear that the Russians would suppress Solidarity by sending in troops and tanks, as they had done in Hungary in 1956.
I had earned some royalties on the Polish edition of my first novel, The Picturegoers, in zlotys, which was a blocked currency, and I intended to claim them from the publisher and spend them while I was in the country. But the currency had lost much of its original value since Kinomani was published in 1966. My zlotys turned out to be worth only about £280 at the official rate of exchange and a fraction of that in reality, and I used them to buy a not very elegant necklace of bits of amber for Mary. The Picturegoers was the first, and for some years the only one, of my novels to be translated into a foreign language. The publisher, called Pax, was a Catholic organisation, which accounted for their interest in the book, but I discovered after it appeared that Pax was disapproved of by the Vatican, and regarded as compromised by many Poles, because it operated with the approval of the Communist state. The senior editor at the time of my visit, Marta, was charming, fluent in English and smart. She told me that she and her colleagues had ‘reviewed’ How Far Can You Go? but would not be publishing it, because my view of the Catholic Church was ‘very different’ from the Polish perspective. That was no surprise. I had seen the TV news pictures of the striking workers at the Gdansk shipyards hearing mass and going to Confession and communion in the open air in their thousands, and I was aware that the Church had become the spiritual focus of the Polish people’s opposition to the domination of their country by Soviet communism, all the more fervently since the surprise election of their Cardinal Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in 1978, an event with which I concluded How Far Can You Go? almost as it happened:
The first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty years: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, a man of the people, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular – but theologically conservative … A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now?
Well, we know what happened in the world at large: increasing tension and conflict between progressive sections of the Church and the Vatican, but Polish Catholics remained staunchly traditional, and Pax obviously identified with that stance. Photographs of John Paul were plentiful on the walls of the Pax offices. While we were discussing recent English fiction Marta showed interest in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers because the central character was a pope, but when I explained that he was portrayed as an active homosexual, she said wryly, ‘No more questions.’
At the end of the Symposium the British participants either returned home or went their separate ways to other destinations in Poland. I took up a long-standing invitation to visit the University of Łódz´, a word which looks as if it might be Polish for ‘Lodge’, but is in fact pronounced ‘Woodge’. It is a manufacturing city and I was prepared for something rather grim but the centre is not unattractive, laid out in a grid of streets and boulevards lined with fine houses. Unlike Warsaw, Łódz´ sustained little damage during the war, but it had a dark history in those years. Before the war 30 per cent of the population was Jewish but very few of them survived it; and many from the surrounding areas were herded into the Łódz´ ghetto before being sent to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
I was provided with an escort, a young teaching assistant at the University. She had spent two years in adolescence on a scholarship at Atlantic College in Wales, spoke perfect English, and yearned hopelessly to escape from Poland and the cramped life she could expect there. One day she took me to meet Dr M., a single lady and lecturer in the English Department at the University, in her tiny apartment. She prepared a three-course lunch for us which I ate guiltily, knowing what an effort it must have required to obtain the food. I wrote in my diary later:
Dr M. is a fervent Catholic and patriot – to her the two things go together, and she seemed slightly disconcerted to learn that I am a Catholic too, almost as if she thought Catholicism was the special property of the Poles. The pontificate of Pope John Paul II has rather encouraged this attitude. Our talk is polite but serious, with none of the jokes, evasions and qualifications that would characterise such a meeting between strangers in England. We discuss the crisis, the films of Wajda, Polish history, Catholicism, the Pope. Dr M. remarks that the liberal theologian Hans Küng’s description of the Polish Church as ‘authoritarian’ was insulting. I introduce the subject of nuclear disarmament. ‘Of course,’ she says flatly, ‘unilateral disarmament means death.’ She concedes the difficulty of reconciling the use of nuclear weapons with Christian principles, but this is obviously a vaguer, more problematic issue to her … To a British observer Poland is a looking-glass world in which many of the ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ positions in our own ideological discourse – on disarmament, on the economy, on religion, on Viet Nam, even on the Boy Scouts – are queerly inverted.
I returned to Warsaw and checked in for my last night to the Europejski, a pre-war grand hotel of slightly shabby splendour, where hard-currency whores plied their trade discreetly amid the potted palms. It was 11th November, Polish Independence Day.
This evening Solidarity has organized a huge procession from the Cathedral of St John in the Old Town to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which faces the Europejski across a vast, barren square. Just after 7.00, X, a young lecturer at Warsaw University, calls at the hotel with a package for me to mail in England, and we go out into the streets to observe the demonstration. Large crowds have turned out to line the pavement and applaud the marchers – unions, Boy Scouts, and many other groups, some of them illegal, like the movement for an independent Poland … X and I go back to my hotel room which overlooks the square and the floodlit tomb of the Unknown Warrior. X telephones his wife and, standing at the open window through which amplified speeches carry to us, describes the scene to her like a war correspondent. ‘She says there is nothing about it on the radio,’ he says to me. His eyes are bright with excitement. ‘If you had told me a year ago that such a demonstration could take place in Warsaw, I would not have believed you.’
A month later, on 13th December, General Jaruzelski declared martial law, the leaders of Solidarity were arrested and imprisoned, and Poland entered a period of political repression which lasted until 1989.
After my visit to Poland I decided to introduce a Polish character into Small World. She was called Wanda Kedrzejkiewicelska (the Polish name with the most consonants that I was able to discover), a young lecturer at the University of Łódz´ specialising in British theatre of the absurd, which she finds not at all absurd, but a sombrely realistic analogue of life in Poland. I wrote a scene or two in which she is shown queuing for sausage for her husband’s dinner, while reading The Birthday Party and, dreaming longingly of a promised invitation to a British Council summer school in Oxford; then I decided that the invitation would n
ot materialise, and Wanda would spend the entire novel travelling about Łódz´ by tram in search of likely-looking food queues, poignantly excluded from the plot and all the fun the other characters are having. But her character refused to come alive, and I realised that the plight of the young Polish academics I had met, and of the Polish nation at large, was too grim for incorporation into my light-hearted satire on the global campus. So I cut her out of the story altogether, a decision which also had the advantage of avoiding trespass on Malcolm’s fictional territory.
That trip did however make a useful contribution to my novel before I set foot in Poland. I flew to Warsaw from Heathrow on a Sunday, and arrived at the airport very early in order to explore its interdenominational chapel, which was mentioned in Brian Moynahan’s book. I had a hunch that it would make a useful setting for a scene or two, and when I discovered that it was called St George’s Chapel, with all the mythical and chivalric associations of that name, I knew I was in luck. It took me some time to find it, because no employee of the airport seemed certain where it was, but eventually I discovered it below ground level near Terminal 3: a fan-shaped space with a vaulted ceiling curved like the interior of a giant jet. Although it was officially interdenominational, the Catholics seemed to have taken it over: there was a statue of Our Lady against one wall, and a red sanctuary lamp glowed beside the altar. As I sat there, a priest wearing vestments came in. I asked if he was going to say a Catholic mass. He said ‘Yes – do you want Communion?’ I asked how long it would take. He said, ‘As quick as I can make it.’ He evidently had a plane to catch too. His rapid recitation of the liturgy was punctuated by burps of indigestion. I did not use this unromantic episode in the novel, but I did make use of the chapel’s ambience and architecture, at once archaic and modern, and exploited the petition board at the back of the pews, where travellers pinned their handwritten prayers. One quoted by Moynahan, obviously from a distraught Irish girl in trouble, suggested a plot strand, and the board would also play a part in Persse’s pursuit of Angelica.