Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  9

  I have usually found that the most enjoyable period in the long process of producing a novel is in the interval, which can be as long as a year, between having it accepted by the publisher and bracing yourself for its imminent publication. Acceptance proves that your labour has not been wasted, but only the public reception of the book will show whether it is a success or failure or something in between, and is therefore awaited with growing tension as it approaches. The earlier part of this transitional period is dedicated to mostly agreeable and absorbing tasks like polishing and improving the text in collaboration with your editor, approving (and sometimes drafting) the blurb and catalogue copy, discussing the jacket design and so on. The more important the author becomes to the publisher, the more s/he is consulted about such matters. The jacket of Changing Places, my first book with Secker, was a disappointingly plain and cheap affair: pale yellow unlaminated paper that quickly became tattered and soiled in use, on which the author’s name and title were printed in large red and blue letters, with the designation ‘A Novel’ at the bottom, oddly printed in silver. I don’t recall being shown a rough of this cover before I saw it wrapped around the finished book, but in any case I would have hesitated to complain. Tom admitted to some embarrassment about it after the book’s success, and from then onwards I always had approval, and often personal input, in the matter of jacket design. The cover of How Far Can You Go? featuring a Snakes and Ladders board was my concept, elegantly executed by an anonymous artist. I took a keen interest in this aspect of publishing, and suggested the main image or basic idea for most of the Secker jackets of my novels, while for the novella Home Truths I produced a sketch which was faithfully followed. The art director at Secker when Small World was in production was Gill Sutherland, then married to a fellow academic and friend, John Sutherland, and she took on board my suggestion that the artwork on the jacket should combine imagery of modern global travel with motifs from ancient myth and romance. The result was an ingenious treatment of the title in which the capital ‘S’ of the first word was drawn on a large scale and elaborately illuminated as in a medieval manuscript. Two naked maidens on a seashore, who might be sirens or sacrificial offerings to a dragon, shared the top curve of the ‘S’ with an image of Concorde in flight, while the bottom curve was occupied by a warrior on a galloping horse leaping over a typewriter keyboard, and other synecdochic details were packed into the frame around the letter. I was delighted with it.

  The typescript of a novel in production has to be copy-edited, i.e. prepared for the printer by careful scrutiny, and correction where required, of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and referential accuracy. Nowadays this task is usually given to a freelance copy-editor, whose queries the author answers by email, but John Blackwell was an editor of a kind now almost obsolete, who undertook the entire process of overseeing and assisting a book’s progress from typescript to print, including the time-consuming task of copy-editing, and he encouraged face-to-face consultation. I was always glad to have a reason to visit 59 Poland Street, which seemed more like the home of a delightfully eccentric extended family than the premises of a commercial business. At the rear of the ground floor, in an office made out of a conservatory, was Barley Alison, a legendary figure who had her own list of distinguished authors, including Saul Bellow, published as ‘Alison Press Books’ under the Secker imprint, but I did not get to know her and her eventful history well until some years later. On the first floor was Tom’s office and I would glimpse him through the open door at his desk, in boldly striped shirt and red braces, booming down the line to New York or Sydney, with telephone in one hand while he signed letters brought by his secretary with the other. Further up the crooked staircase were other offices housing the various departments of the publishing process, with John’s cosy attic at the top, full of tottering piles of books and manuscripts, and his assistant Alison’s cubbyhole close by.

  In November, when I was correcting proofs, I received a letter from John Batchelor, a former Birmingham colleague and currently Fellow of New College, Oxford, asking me if I was going to apply for the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature which had just been advertised by Oxford University. This was a prestigious chair, linked to a fellowship at New College, and had been occupied most recently by Richard Ellmann, who had decided to retire, so it was a reasonable assumption that the School of English would be looking for a successor specialising in the modern period. I thought I would be eligible, and after talking it over with Mary, I decided to apply.

  That I took this step shows I was still wedded to the idea of a twin career, as novelist and academic. This was partly due to innate financial caution. I had never expected to earn enough money from writing fiction to support a comfortable lifestyle and provide for my family – in particular for Christopher, whose long-term needs were imponderable – and although I was doing well financially at the time, I did not feel confident of maintaining the same level of income from writing indefinitely. The £5,000 I had received from the Whitbread Prize was serious money in the early eighties, and it had emboldened me to negotiate the contract with Birmingham which gave me more time to write – and not only fiction. I still derived intellectual satisfaction from writing criticism, and I wanted to continue the rhythm I had settled into, of producing a novel and a critical book in alternation. The part-time arrangement I had at Birmingham was in many ways ideal for this purpose, but I had been in the same department for twenty-three years, and the repetitiousness of teaching in the same institution for so long was becoming wearisome. If I was ever going to move from Birmingham before I retired, wouldn’t an Oxford chair be an excellent opportunity and a real change? Professorial duties were light: a modest number of lectures per academic year, some of which could be converted into seminars, and the supervision of postgraduate theses, but none of the personal tutoring of undergraduates which was the main work of most dons in English. Terms were short, vacations correspondingly long, Oxford as a city had numerous attractions as a place to live, and we had friends there. Our two older children had finished with school education and Christopher had nearly come to the end of the excellent provision Birmingham had offered in this respect. These were the factors which persuaded me to apply, and Mary acquiesced. The school where she had been a teacher-counsellor for eight years had closed down and she was exploring new career possibilities herself. I knew the job would attract a strong field of applicants, but I thought I had nothing to lose by applying. If memories of the stress I had suffered over the possibility of moving to Cambridge in 1966 occurred to me, I must have discounted them. So I posted my letter of application and CV.

  At about this time my friend and colleague, Park Honan, who had joined the Department in 1968 as Lecturer in English and American Literature, and was now Reader, had also been feeling restive. When Leeds University advertised a new chair of English and American Literature he applied for it and asked me to be one of his referees. To his great delight he was appointed, and after a period of commuting, found a spacious early Victorian house on top of a hill in Leeds into which he and Jeannette moved, their three children having by now left home. Mary and Jeannette were close friends and particularly sad to be separated, but we promised each other to exchange regular visits in the years ahead.

  Early in 1984 the publicity department began to take up more of my time. Secker’s chief publicist was then Beth Macdougall, an enthusiastic and energetic lady, who arranged several press and media interviews for me around the book’s publication at the beginning of April, including a featured interview in the Guardian, another with Hermione Lee for Channel 4 TV, and a talk on BBC Radio 3 in a series called The Living Novelist. The BBC’s TV programme Bookmark proposed to preface its discussion of Small World with a filmed sequence in which I would be shown checking in at Heathrow on my way to a conference in some exotic location, with extracts from the novel read in voice-over. Heathrow would not co-operate, so the sequence was filmed at Manchester airport. A comely check-in clerk
was asked to take the place of Cheryl Summerbee, but unfortunately she had no natural talent as an actress, and several takes of the simple scene were required, but I enjoyed the experience. To cap it all I was a guest on Desert Island Discs.1 Some people have spent whole lifetimes hopefully compiling and revising lists of the eight pieces of music they would most like to listen to if stranded on a desert island with a record player. My session was one of the last presented by its originator, Roy Plomley, before he retired and was replaced by other interviewers. He entertained me to lunch at the Garrick Club before the recording, as was his practice, and told me candidly that he had had time to read only one of my books. He had chosen The British Museum is Falling Down, I suspect because it was the shortest, but it gave me a good reason to make ‘A Foggy Day’ one of my discs. This was the first time in my life that I had received this kind of attention, and it was undeniably rather exciting. Nevertheless I awaited the general verdict of the reviewers on Small World with the usual degree of suspense.

  In the previous year Malcolm had published Rates of Exchange, and I observed its reception with interest, especially in relation to the Booker Prize. He had himself been involved in its operation as chairman of the judging panel in 1981, an experience which impressed him with the power and glamour of the prize and made him dream of winning it himself one day. In that year the judges awarded it to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, though Malcolm told me beforehand that he had personally favoured D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel. The competition between these two writers, Thomas and Rushdie, who were little known previously, both experimenting with types of magic realism alien to the English novel tradition, aroused almost as much media interest as that between the two veterans, Golding and Burgess, the previous year. The White Hotel was a fictitious case study of one of Freud’s patients, mediated through poetic and hallucinatory erotic sequences, including a harrowing account of the Babi Yar massacre of more than 30,000 Jews by German forces in the Ukraine in 1941. It was disliked by the first British reviewers on its publication in the spring of 1981, but everybody in the literary world was talking about it when I was in New York and Princeton so I obtained a copy, and it seemed to me a powerful and original work. Soon its success in America filtered back to Britain, critics began to talk up its merits, and it became a strong contender for the Booker, though later Thomas was accused of borrowing too freely from Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel Babi Yar. Salman Rushdie’s success was a happier story, though it would have a fateful sequel in the long term.

  In the following year the winner was Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, which provoked another controversy, also connected with the Holocaust, as to whether it was really a novel, since it told, in a historical rather than a novelistic style, the true story of how the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland by employing them in his factory. In fact it was first published in America as a work of non-fiction, but in Britain as a novel. I was then reviewing fiction regularly for the Sunday Times, and I concluded my piece on this book: ‘Thomas Keneally has done marvellous justice to a marvellous story, and Schindler’s Ark is well worth a literary prize. But perhaps it should be a prize for knowing when fiction could not improve on the facts.’

  There was no generic ambiguity about Malcolm’s Rates of Exchange. It was unmistakably a work of fiction, set in an imaginary East European Communist state called Slaka with resemblances to several Slavic and Balkan countries. I happened to be on a British Council tour of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1983 not long after it was published, and one day on a street in Zagreb my eye was caught by a music cassette entitled ‘Slaka’ in the window of a record shop. It had a picture on the box of a band of musicians in a rustic setting, wearing folk costumes and wielding large brass instruments. Slaka turned out to be the name of the band. I bought the cassette and listened to it on my Walkman that evening, highly amused by the ponderous oompha oompha music, which was just what one would expect Slakan music to sound like, and when I sent the cassette to Malcolm as a gift he was delighted with it. He had invented a detailed history for this country, and a language. The latter generates much of the novel’s humour (brandy is rot’vitti, the state department store is MUG) as does the slightly fractured English of the educated Slakans whom the central character, an English academic called Dr Petworth, meets on his British Council tour of the country, where his name is subjected to ludicrous mutations, ‘Petwert, Prevert, Pervert’, etc. Superficially the linguistic jokes are at the expense of the Slakans, but in the end they emerge with more credit and dignity from the story than their English visitor, who fails to understand the complexities of living as an intellectual in a totalitarian state.

  In America the crucially influential New York Times Book Review has the humane practice of circulating its reviews to publishers in advance of publication so that authors can be warned of a disappointing one or cheered by a favourable one and spared some suspense. In Britain the important reviews come out bunched together over a short period around the official publication date, and there is no way of discovering what they are like beforehand. You would probably see the first one in your daily or Sunday newspaper, and breakfast might be a queasy meal in consequence. Malcolm had heard that Martin Amis was reviewing Rates of Exchange for the Observer and was apprehensive, with reason. Amis was a role model for many younger British novelists, and also a very skilful writer of critical prose, and it was impossible not to see his witty put-down of Malcolm’s novel as a challenge from a new literary generation against the preceding one. There was however an excellent review in the Sunday Times to compensate, and there were enough good ones subsequently to encourage Malcolm’s hopes of being shortlisted for the Booker. To his great joy and relief he was shortlisted in September, though the bookies made him an outsider with the longest odds. Just before Judgement Day in October I sent Malcolm a postcard of the young James Joyce gazing quizzically into the lens of a camera (wondering, he recalled later, if the photographer would lend him five shillings) to wish him luck. To be the outsider, I told him, was a good position, because if you win the glory will be all the greater, and if you don’t the disappointment will be milder.

  The chairperson of the judges that year was the novelist Fay Weldon. Martyn Goff, the chief administrator of the prize, who would perform this function for more than thirty years, revealed in an interview in 2003 that, at their final session to choose the winner on the day of the award, the other four judges were divided evenly between J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Salman Rushdie’s Shame. This gave Fay Weldon the casting vote. But she was quite unable to decide between them, and changed her mind several times, reading passages aloud from each to compare their merits, as the clock ticked on to 6 p.m. when the result had to be conveyed to the PR staff, until she eventually chose Coetzee. Goff dashed to the phone in the room and delivered the message, pretending not to hear Fay say, ‘Hold it a minute …’ Thus are literary fortunes determined in the media-dominated modern world. The South African Coetzee was not well known in Britain, but he went from strength to strength subsequently, winning the Booker a second time with Disgrace in 1999, and the Nobel Prize in 2003. The judges knew that he would not be attending the banquet that evening, a decision which seemed very much in the writer’s independent character, but made for a rather anticlimactic presentation ceremony. The prize was accepted by his British publisher – Tom Rosenthal, who was in the unusual position of having two novels in the shortlist of six. I was sure he would have preferred to see Malcolm going up to receive the prize for Rates of Exchange.

  In those days the BBC devoted a long programme to live television coverage of the event on BBC2, including shots of the guests arriving, and then eating and drinking at the banquet tables, a panel of critics speculating about the result, and the presentation and acceptance speeches. Mary and I watched the whole thing of course, and I called Malcolm the next evening to commiserate and chat about the result. He
sounded tired and in low spirits – not surprisingly. All the shortlisted candidates know, however much they discount their chances, that they will have to make a speech if they win, and most will take the precaution of preparing a few words for that eventuality. But to do that is to imagine oneself winning, which makes the experience of not winning all the more deflating, as I would discover myself in due course. But that wasn’t what Malcolm meant when he said at the end of our conversation, with a wistful sigh, ‘Well, now it’s your turn.’ He meant: now it’s your turn to have a taste of all that excitement and publicity and drama if you’re shortlisted. Though I made a self-deprecating response, the enthusiasm of everyone at Secker for Small World was encouraging. ‘This is going to be the big one,’ Tom Rosenthal assured me.

  On Friday 16th March Claire Tomalin, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, wrote a letter to me: ‘I am so sorry – we have a very unfavourable review of your new book (from Peter Kemp). I’m writing to warn you, because it may be slightly less horrible to know in advance.’ This was kind of her, but unfortunately I did not receive the letter until the following Monday morning, a day after the review appeared. It was indeed a stinker, and a very long one. Kemp declared his admiration for my previous novels at the outset, and as chief fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times he was consistently favourable to several of my later books, but he simply hated the self-conscious literariness of Small World, and didn’t have a single good word to say for it. It was the first review I read and therefore all the more demoralising. I read one more that Sunday, in the Observer, by Anthony Thwaite, which was wholly positive, but bad reviews always have more effect on the author than good ones, and the fact that Anthony was a friend made his count for less as an indicator of the book’s likely reception. I waited for most of the other reviews to be sent to me by John Blackwell or Beth Macdougall, and those I saw in that first week were not encouraging. Blake Morrison was cool in the TLS, and when I peeped inside a copy of the New Statesman in W.H. Smith’s on New Street station I found a contemptuous six-line dismissal of Small World which made me think that my hopes for this novel had been deluded.