Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  I learned an enormous amount from watching my play performed by first-class professional actors. On the whole it went well, aroused a good deal of laughter from the audience, and was warmly applauded at the end. Eleanor Bron was excellent as Maude, and Greg Hicks stole the show with his reading of Simon’s ‘Instead of a Novel’, having obviously taken the trouble to learn it by heart. The scene that followed, however, which should have tightened the tension between the three main characters to breaking point, fell flat and clearly needed more work, as did other parts of the play. But Patrick was pleased with the way it had gone and hopeful of further developments. It was barely credible to me that I would become a National Theatre playwright with my first stage play, and I was astonished as well as delighted when, a few days later, I had a call from Leah to say that the National wanted to option it for one year. They offered an advance of £3,500 which seemed to me handsome.

  I couldn’t believe my luck, and in fact it proved illusory. No area of artistic endeavour is more susceptible to good and bad luck, to accidents of timing and the interaction of individuals, than theatre, unless it is perhaps film, and fortune turned against me at this point. Peter Hall had recently announced his intention to resign as Artistic Director of the National, and while the search for his successor proceeded, a new post of Executive Director was created and filled by David Aukin. One consequence of this reorganisation was that my original supporter, John Faulkner, was eased out of his position and eventually left the NT. When David Aukin read the play, he liked it and wanted to see it produced. But none of the resident directors at the National to whom he showed the script had bothered to come to the rehearsed reading, and David was unable to persuade any of them to take it on, so it was left on the back burner of the theatre’s programming while the weeks and months of the option ticked away.

  Meanwhile there were other projects I had to attend to. One was writing an introduction and other apparatus to an edition of Henry James’s novel The Spoils of Poynton for the Penguin Classics series, which was due for delivery in the autumn. I enjoyed doing assignments of this kind because it was a way of thoroughly possessing a book in all its complexity, but they took time. As well as reading it carefully, and studying the history of its composition and any textual variants in different editions, I liked to read a wide spectrum of academic discussions of the book. This novel of James was the first of his ‘late period’, when his work became extremely ambiguous and therefore apt to provoke disagreement and controversy among critics. As in the case of The Turn of the Screw, commentators on The Spoils of Poynton divided sharply between those who regarded the main female character, Fleda, as a genuine heroine and those who saw her as a deeply flawed and neurotic character who is responsible for the tragedy with which the story concludes. My own argument was that both these readings oversimplify the meaning of the text, in which every crucial passage is capable of a double interpretation. The novel is meant to be irresolvably ambiguous, because James at this stage of his life was concerned to demonstrate the impossibility of arriving at a single, simple understanding of ‘the truth’ of any human interaction.

  The Spoils of Poynton was also the first novel James wrote after the humiliating failure of his efforts to become a successful playwright, when his play Guy Domville was produced in London in January 1895 and he was booed by the gallery on taking his bow at the end of the first-night performance. This provoked a crisis in James’s self-confidence from which he eventually recovered, partly by integrating the lessons he had learned from the theatre into the structure of his later novels – what he called his ‘scenic method’. In the course of my research for the edition of Spoils, I read Leon Edel’s account of the first night of Guy Domville in his biography of Henry James, an episode which I said in my introduction was ‘as full of suspense, pathos, comedy and irony as any novel’. Those few pages made a deep impression on me, perhaps because of my own current involvement in theatre, and stayed in my memory. Some twenty years later I wrote a novel about Henry James, Author, Author, in which the events of that night made up the climactic chapter.

  Another project was ripening which would occupy a good deal of my time in 1986 and into the following year. This was a television documentary about an international conference on ‘The Linguistics of Writing’ which was to take place in July at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow’s ‘New’ university created in 1964. It was the brainchild of two bright young lecturers, Nigel Fabb and Alan Durant, who ran a postgraduate programme in Literary Linguistics in the English Department headed by Colin MacCabe. Their collective aim was to put the Strathclyde English Department on the international academic map with this conference. Its theme was cleverly chosen: examining the contrasts, conflicts and possible reconciliation of different approaches to the phenomenon of language in its written form. Through most of the twentieth century these approaches had been broadly divided between functionalist explanations of how language works using methods associated with linguistics and stylistics, and the more intuitive, discursive approaches of literary criticism. But recently this distinction had been complicated and overwritten by the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism and the various schools of thought within those categories. So really the title of the conference could incorporate almost any academic approach to the phenomenon of language. The prospectus promised a discussion between two academic stars in this large field with very different styles and temperaments: Jacques Derrida, the French philosophe and high priest of Deconstruction, who was then at the peak of his fame in America, and Raymond Williams, the Cambridge professor from a working-class background who had absorbed the influence of both Marx and Leavis in a committed engagement with the relations between Culture and Society and the Keywords that define and mediate them (those capitalised words being the titles of two of his most influential books). Other high-profile speakers from all round the world agreed to participate, attracted by the opportunity to hear and debate with each other, and the promise of a few days’ rest and recreation prior to the conference at Strathclyde’s Country Club on the shore of Loch Lomond. It was not surprising that the announcement of this event attracted a good deal of attention and it was soon oversubscribed. Some three hundred academics signed up, most of whom would be able to speak only from the floor in the Q&A sessions.

  Colin had contacts and experience in film and television as well as academia, and made use of them to give the conference a longer and more public life than such events usually have. He persuaded Mike Kustow, in charge of Arts programming at Channel 4 Television, to commission a 90-minute documentary about the Strathclyde conference to be written and narrated by me as both a participant and an observer of the event. My brief was to produce an accessible study of an academic conference, an institution unfamiliar to the general public, about a subject of fundamental human importance (language), but treated with an element of the satirical humour that characterised Small World. It was eventually given the title Big Words … Small Worlds. This assignment entailed going up to Glasgow several days before the conference began, being filmed arriving at the railway station, and then interviewing some of the principal speakers who had arrived earlier and were relaxing at the Country Club. The film would begin with a montage of their replies to my questions, put to them in this setting, about what had drawn them to the conference and what they expected to get out of it. Their responses were politely expectant and modestly unassertive. But soon the mise en scène shifted to a large utilitarian lecture room, deprived of natural light for the purpose of filming, inside the grey concrete mass of Strathclyde University where the conference sessions took place over three days, and the mood of the participants gradually became less genial.

  An extra attraction of the conference for me was that Stanley Fish and his new wife Jane Tompkins were coming to it. I hadn’t seen Stanley for several years and had never met Jane, whom he married after his divorce from Adrienne. I had looked forward to doing so in the days preceding the conference, but they did not a
rrive until the morning of the opening day and my introduction to Jane was when she chaired my own contribution that evening, a paper on Bakhtin. She turned out to be blonde, WASP, extrovert and feisty – very different from Adrienne, which I suppose was what had attracted Stanley. She had started out as a reader-response critic like him, but was now identified as a feminist revisionist critic of classic American literature and beginning to move in the direction of what she called a holistic approach to literary studies that would eventually lead her away from them altogether. They were a formidable couple and had recently moved from Johns Hopkins to positions at Duke University in North Carolina. This immensely rich institution was striving to rival the elite Ivy League universities by recruiting star professors, rather as the billionaire owners of British football clubs boost their performance in the Premier League by paying extravagant transfer fees and salaries for top players. As chairman of the English Department Stanley followed this policy and rapidly assembled a team of cutting-edge literary theorists who attracted bright graduate students. As a student himself, Stanley had been torn between studying English or Law, and he stipulated that his appointment at Duke should be half in the Law Faculty so that he could return to the subject he had been obliged to abandon. He was soon teaching students in Law as well as Literature, and publishing in law journals as well as literary ones, a rare and possibly unique combination of disciplines at this level.

  Stanley’s paper was entitled ‘Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning and Persuasion in Freud’s “The Wolf Man”’. In this case history Freud speculatively traced the source of the Wolf Man’s neurosis to the trauma of observing in childhood his parents engaged in sexual intercourse, causing him to soil himself. As Stanley began to analyse all the rhetorical strategies and tropes that Freud used to make this theory plausible, it seemed that he was exposing Freud’s bad faith; but in the conclusion of his paper Stanley produced a stunning reversal which exonerated him. Whether the primal scene postulated by Freud actually happened was irrelevant. ‘Rather its credibility is a function of its explanatory power. It satisfies the need Freud has created in us to understand, and by understanding to become his partner in the story … The thesis of psychoanalysis is that one cannot get to the side of the unconscious. The thesis of this paper is that one cannot get to the side of rhetoric. These two theses are one and the same.’ The second thesis is one that underlies all Stanley’s work. He boldly admitted his ‘relentless campaign against some of the so-called virtues that have already received pious endorsement at this conference – openness, flexibility, indeterminacy, generosity of mind, and the acknowledgement of difference. For all of these I would substitute the notion of persuasion, which I would define as a desire for mastery and closure.’

  The opposition between ‘openness’ and ‘closure’ was central to several sessions of the conference, including my own. Bakhtin’s ‘dialogic’ concept of discourse, in which every statement invites a response, seems to favour openness, but his own prose, like that of most scholars, is carefully composed to make his assertions appear irresistible. There is a similar, more basic opposition between speech and writing as media of communication, which was illustrated again and again in the conference by interventions from the floor, or responses to them by speakers, which were full of hesitations, qualifications and incomplete grammatical constructions, unlike the carefully crafted lectures that their authors had read out. That disparity is more or less inevitable unless, like Stanley Fish, you can speak extempore in perfectly formed sentences. He had developed a kind of realpolitik of discourse which he defended with great rhetorical skill, and it was regrettable from a dialectical point of view that some famous figures in the field who had enrolled for the conference and might have challenged him had withdrawn. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said were all men of the Left and their absence unbalanced the event ideologically, contributing to the mutinous mood that developed in the audience later.

  Another reason for discontent was that the unremitting succession of lectures left no time for rest and recreation. Anyone who had signed up for the conference hoping it might include the hedonistic diversions described in Small World would have been disappointed. Fredric Jameson had been scheduled to speak after dinner on the second evening, but in case anyone was tempted to take advantage of his absence to go out on the town, the organisers persuaded Derrida to plug the gap with a public lecture. Most of the conferees trooped off dutifully to hear it, some of whom discovered they had heard it before, at another conference. Entitled ‘How to Avoid Speaking’, it was about Negative Theology and lasted for two hours.

  And so we came to the last day of our conference and the last session, which was to consist of Colin MacCabe’s summing up of the event before we all dispersed. Half an hour had been allocated for general comments from the floor before he spoke. It was not enough. One person after another got to their feet to complain that the programme had been elitist, privileging the main speakers and leaving little opportunity for the audience to challenge what they said, or did not say. Others said that it was Eurocentric and politically reactionary. One hinted darkly that the absence of Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton seemed mysteriously convenient for the silencing of dissent. Another objected to the filming of the event as intimidation and asked for the cameras to be switched off while he was speaking. (The request was granted.) Another was so disappointed that he felt like asking for his money back. Plainly disconcerted by this barrage of complaints, Colin admitted that he was hesitating about whether to plunge into his talk. Jane Tompkins passed a note up to the podium, which he read out, suggesting that the discussion should continue. Someone suggested from the floor that they should take a vote on whether Colin should give his talk or not. This was done by a show of hands and he won by a humiliatingly small margin, but soldiered on.

  The subject of the conference had become the conference itself. It was a disappointing conclusion for the organisers, but I saw at once that this episode would provide a dramatic climax for our film. It was useful to have that ending in mind as I set about the formidable task of turning the transcripts of some fifty hours of filmed discourse, formal and informal, into a coherent script. The sheer bulk of material was not the only challenge. There had been two cameras covering the whole event, but one of them turned out to have a focusing fault that the cameraman had inexplicably failed to notice. In consequence all the footage from this source was unusable, including Derrida’s contribution to the conversation between himself and Raymond Williams, which was to have been the high point of the film. To be accidentally erased from it was an ironic fate for the great Deconstructionist, since one of his signature tropes was to visibly cross out words in his own text which were indispensable but in his opinion conceptually flawed, a device he called ‘sous rature’, usually translated as ‘under erasure’. All we had of this encounter was a series of remarks by Williams which had to be turned into a monologue. In spite of this setback and other difficulties I managed to produce a rough draft script which pleased Mike Kustow at Channel 4. ‘I can’t wait to see it on the screen,’ he wrote to me in October.

  Like all scripts it went through several rewrites, and it wasn’t until the spring of 1987 that I began to record my commentary which linked the various scenes and episodes. This was done partly as voice-over, and partly to camera in a studio set furnished like a large study, where I read the script from an autocue. Though I say it myself, I think I did a good job of explaining to a lay audience the concepts and issues the conference was concerned with. But Colin and his young collaborators, obviously unsettled by the Rebellion of the Proles (as I privately tagged the last session), thought my commentary was too cut-and-dried, too confident of its interpretations, too anxious to exert its authority – in short, too prone to closure rather than openness. Their proposal to avoid giving this impression was to disrupt my discourse in various ways. They staged a scene in which Colin, as producer, burst into the studio, interrupted my commentary and
argued with me that it was too monologic, and that we needed to interpolate other points of view. This scene was incorporated in the finished film and proved only that neither of us was a very good actor. Also included was a cutaway from me making a joke on the podium to me laughing at it from the front row of the audience, a surrealist jape which, since it was not repeated, looked like a mistake. I did not have an opportunity to veto it. Later the first edited version of the film was shown to a number of intellectual and artistic celebrities who had not been at the conference, including the academics who had withdrawn after enrolling for it, and short comments by them were inserted in the final cut. Those who had withdrawn did not seem to regret their decision.

  In spite of these problems, setbacks and disagreements, I had no regrets about my involvement in the film, for it had been an interesting experience. But a couple of months later I attended another ambitious symposium which was more successful and certainly less acrimonious. The subject was ‘Images and Understanding’, and the chief organisers were the distinguished neuroscientist Colin Blakemore and the polymath Jonathan Miller, co-creator of Beyond the Fringe, director of drama and opera, and a medical doctor with a mission to disseminate scientific knowledge of mind–body interaction through TV documentaries. The subject of the Symposium was how human beings process the images which present themselves to consciousness in a great variety of forms and media. It was hosted by the Royal Society, and the speakers were predominantly scientists, but Jonathan Miller’s involvement ensured that the arts were represented. He himself spoke about film as a medium, the great art historian Ernst Gombrich talked about the history of textbook illustration, Margaret Drabble chaired a session entitled ‘Images and Meaning’, and the cartoonist Mel Calman chaired the session on ‘Narrative’ to which I contributed, sketching us as we spoke. I really didn’t know enough science to benefit from most of the scientific presentations, and I was more interested in their form than their content. It was the first occasion I had seen and heard academic scientists doing their stuff, and I was impressed by the highly sophisticated visual aids they used to illustrate their talks, and the way this seemed to encourage a more informal verbal exposition than the typical humanities lecture. I felt underequipped in this company with no videos or slides to project, only a cyclostyled handout of passages from a few novels. Later all the speakers would submit written and revised versions of their contributions for publication in a substantial book.1 In retrospect it is clear to me that this symposium heralded an international surge of research and publications on the phenomenon of consciousness across a wide range of academic disciplines which would peak in the next decade, and some of the leading contributors to that body of work, like Daniel Dennett, were present at the event. But it was not until ten years later that I became seriously interested in the subject myself and began to do some research in preparation for my novel called Thinks …