by David Lodge
The most important act of Kierkegaard’s life was, arguably, the breaking off of his engagement to Regine, by which he deprived himself of the chance to discover whether he was capable of “ordinary” human happiness in marriage, and was tormented forever afterwards by the awareness of an opportunity foregone. Many of his books, perhaps most of them, can be traced back to this decisive act of indecision, this perverse and self-punishing reversal of a choice (the choice of a spouse) by a philosopher who insisted on the necessity of commitment. What makes Kierkegaard appealing to many nonspecialist readers who have great difficulty in understanding his quarrel with Hegelianism, and find his version of Christianity forbiddingly austere and exclusive, is the man’s own vulnerability, inconsistency, even folly. As Tubby says, contemplating Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine: “What a fool. But what an endearing, entirely human fool.” Kierkegaard does not lecture us from some pulpit of assumed impartiality, objectivity, and omniscience. He speaks to us out of the flux and the fray of human existence. He grounded the perennial problems of philosophy in man’s self-consciousness, which reason alone can never satisfy.
In the course of writing Therapy I discovered many more parallels, or equivalences, between Kierkegaard and Tubby Passmore than I had anticipated when I first decided that my hero should become interested in the philosopher’s work. This is a common experience in creative writing, and is perhaps the most exciting and satisfying aspect of what is for the most part an anxious and labour-intensive vocation. What happens with novels that are structured on some kind of equivalence and contrast between two stories, one original and one received, is that the precursor story begins to influence the composition of one’s own story in unpredictable ways. It is as if the two stories, or texts, that have been brought together by the writer begin to talk to each other, generating ideas and narrative material which would not otherwise have come into existence. The writer happily accepts this unexpected bonus of meaning.
An example: in the latter part of Therapy, Tubby is by chance reminded of his first sweetheart, Maureen Kavanagh, a transparently innocent Catholic girl whom he knew as a teenager in South London in the early 1950s, whose love and devotion he enjoyed for about two years until he pressured her into breaking off the relationship. In the course of writing a memoir of Maureen, Tubby convinces himself that this long-suppressed act of bad faith is the source of his lack of peace of mind and lack of self-esteem. Obviously I intended to draw a parallel between Tubby’s treatment of Maureen and Kierkegaard’s of Regine—and Kierkegaard’s reworking of this experience in the Diary of a Seducer and Repetition. Tubby himself is aware of some of the parallels, and remarks on the resemblance between the two girls’ names: Maureen/Regine. But in the process of composition, a further parallel developed. In the biographies of Kierkegaard I was reading I came across references to Regine’s husband, Johan Frederik Schlegel, who had been attracted to her before Kierkegaard won her heart, who successfully urged his suit about a year after Kierkegaard broke off his engagement, and who (rather priggishly, it seemed to me) refused to allow Kierkegaard to meet Regine socially or correspond with her in later life. These glimpses of this minor figure in Kierkegaard’s life story suggested to me the character of Bede Harrington, the stiff, pompous rival of Tubby for Maureen’s affections in the Catholic youth club to which they all belonged in the 1950s, who eventually marries Maureen and is surprised and not a little suspicious when Tubby turns up forty years later in search of her.
I introduced Kierkegaard into my novel because I felt the need for some other, quite different frame of reference for the investigation of my theme than the character of Tubby Passmore. But merely having Tubby read Kierkegaard, and draw out the parallels between himself and the philosopher, did not seem to expand the horizons of the novel sufficiently. I felt the need for other points of view and other voices. I consequently decided to present Tubby’s manic behaviour after his wife leaves him through the eyes of several other characters, who narrate their stories in the form of dramatic monologues, addressing interlocutors whose responses are implied, not quoted. Tubby’s friend Amy describes to her psychoanalyst his belated attempt to turn their platonic relationship into a carnal one, with farcically catastrophic results. Then a female Hollywood film producer, Louise, tells a friend in a telephone conversation how Tubby, whom she met four years previously and tried unsuccessfully to seduce, suddenly reappeared in Los Angeles to invite her out to dinner. His behaviour puzzles Louise until, halfway through the meal,
I suddenly realised what this date was all about. I realised that it was in this very restaurant that I had tried to seduce him . . . Yeah! . . . This whole date was like a reprise of the one all those years ago. The Venice restaurant, the table outside, the Napa Valley Chardonnay . . . That was why he was so upset that I’d changed my car and the fish restaurant had turned into a Thai restaurant . . . He was trying to recreate the exact circumstances of that evening four years ago as far as possible in every detail. Every detail except one . . . Exactly! Now that his wife had walked out on him he wanted to take me up on my offer to fuck him. He’d flown all the way from England specifically for that purpose. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that my circumstances might have changed, not to mention my mood.
Tubby is seeking a kind of impossible, inauthentic Repetition, like Constantine Constantius in Kierkegaard’s novella of that name, who on his second visit to Berlin tries to repeat exactly the experiences of his first visit, and finds that “the only thing repeated was the impossibility of repetition.”4 When Louise explains that she has a partner and is pregnant, Tubby is devastated, and quotes Kierkegaard to her: “The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of essential importance.” This remark in the Journals is thought to refer to Kierkegaard’s feelings on discovering that Regine, with whom he still secretly hoped to be reconciled, was engaged to Schlegel.
In another monologue, the producer of Tubby’s sitcom, Ollie Silvers, describes to a drinking companion how the distraught and deranged Tubby proposed in all seriousness to write a television mini-series based on the life of Kierkegaard. Samantha, an ambitious young script editor, relates how Tubby invited her to accompany him to Copenhagen, ostensibly to do research for his Kierkegaard film project, but really, she assumed, to have a sexual fling with her. This was indeed Tubby’s intention, but he is so affected by the poignancy of the relics in the Kierkegaard Room at the Bymuseum, and by the pathos of Kierkegaard’s modest grave in the Assistens cemetery, that he is unable to exploit Samantha’s eagerness to be seduced. As Tubby himself puts it later, in his journal:
Something held me back, and it wasn’t the fear of impotence, or of aggravating my knee injury. Call it conscience. Call it Kierkegaard. They have become one and the same thing. I think Kierkegaard is the thin man inside me who has been struggling to get out, and in Copenhagen he finally did.
Shortly after I began writing Part Two of the novel, in which the monologues are presented under the names of their respective speakers—“Amy,” “Louise,” “Ollie,” and so on—I decided that they would in fact be written by Tubby himself, though this fact would be concealed from the reader until Tubby reveals in Part Three that he wrote them as a kind of therapeutic exercise prescribed by his psychotherapist. What happens therefore is that the reader of the novel assumes the monologues are objective, independent reports of Tubby’s deranged behaviour, but then has to re-evaluate them as evidence that he is able to recognize his own weakness and folly, and is therefore on the way to recovery.
I was surprised that some British reviewers objected strongly to this twist in the novel’s narrative method, as being either incredible in itself, or as retrospectively depriving the monologues of their significance. This seemed to me an illogical response. If I, as author, could create convincing monologues for these fictitious characters, it is surely possible that Tubby, a professional scriptwriter, could do the same for people he knows personall
y, and plausible that he should develop the exercise suggested by his psychotherapist in this way. I concluded that my reviewers were annoyed at having been “tricked” into thinking the monologues were testimonies independent of Tubby, as if I had broken some fundamental contract between writer and reader. Kierkegaard, of course, irritated and exasperated many of his contemporary readers by the multiplicity and complexity of pseudonymous narrators and embedded narratives in his writings. It occurred to me that I had perhaps written a more Kierkegaardian novel (in a purely generic sense) than I had myself been aware of. Intertextuality is often as much an unconscious as a conscious element of the creative process.
One of the epigraphs to Therapy is taken from Graham Greene’s autobiographical volume, Ways of Escape: “Writing is a form of therapy.” In the original text, the passage continues: “sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”5 Writing was certainly therapy for Kierkegaard. “Only when I write do I feel well. Then I forget all of life’s vexations, all its sufferings, then I am wrapped in thought and am happy,” he wrote in his journal in 1847—a passage quoted by Tubby in his own journal. Tubby’s journal originates in his psychotherapy—he begins it after his therapist asks him to write a description of himself—but it turns into more than an exercise or private confession. As a professional scriptwriter, he has relied upon actors and pictures to flesh out his lines of dialogue. Writing his journal, writing the dramatic monologues, above all writing his memoir of Maureen, Tubby becomes a more self-conscious and literary writer—what he calls, in his homely idiom, a “book-writer.” In the process he turns negative, subjective experience into something positive and shareable. That is what literature does, and it is the great consolation and reward of being a book-writer. Kierkegaard knew it was so; Tubby Passmore discovers it is so; I have certainly found it so.
chapter eleven
A CONVERSATION ABOUT THINKS . . .
The tri-quarterly magazine Areté published an interview with me in its spring-summer issue of 2001, divided into two parts. The first part, conducted by a Polish journalist, ranged over a variety of topics. The second part was a conversation with Craig Raine, the editor of Areté, about my novel Thinks. . . I have used it as the concluding piece of this book because it touches on several topics discussed in the first essay and elsewhere, though in a more informal way. I have lightly edited the transcript in the interests of clarity and readability, but have not altered the sense of any statement, although there are some that I would probably not have made, or would have qualified, in a written discourse. Readers who have not read Thinks . . . and intend to do so are warned that this discussion reveals much of the plot.
C.R. IN THINKS . . . there are some sharp parodies of Rushdie, Amis, Gertrude Stein, Henry James. And a take-off of Irvine Welsh which completely cracked me up. The premise of parody is that there’s something distinctive there to parody. Do you think it’s essential that a writer should have a distinctive style, or not? And how would you describe your own style?
D. L. That’s a very good question. It has occurred to me to wonder whether you could parody me and how you’d set about it. In a way, it may be impossible for writers themselves to identify what is parodiable in their own work. It may be dangerous even to contemplate it. I’ve just been reading Edith Wharton’s memoirs. She says that Henry James really hated to even hear that anybody had parodied him. Yet you’d have thought that he must have been aware that, as a mannered stylist, he could be parodied.fn1
One would suppose that any writer who’s any good has a distinctive voice—distinctive features of syntax or vocabulary or something—which could be seized on by the parodist. But what they are in my case, I don’t actually know. I think I’m rather a ventriloqual kind of novelist. I imitate a lot of different voices rather than having an obvious distinctive one of my own.
C.R. In your last novel, Therapy, you were frankly engaged with polyphony. It seems to me in Thinks . . . you’re still in pursuit of polyphony—a prose carnival. Not only the parodies we’ve mentioned but also the truncated prose of e-mail and Messenger dictating into his recording machine. What specially interests you about polyphony? What engages you when you “do the police in different voices”?
D.L. In some ways, it’s been a feature of my work from the very beginning. My first novel, The Picturegoers, has a huge number of characters. I tried to evoke the way they think—the language they would use to think in. Looking back, I think Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood had a terrific influence on me. I heard it on the radio in early adolescence. What fascinated me about it was the polyphony. A number of my novels have got quite a lot of characters. Some, like Out of the Shelter and Ginger, You’re Barmy, are limited to one character’s voice, but more and more in later works I’ve wanted to introduce a lot of different voices into the texture. Long before I’d ever heard of Bakhtin. I think I got it partly from Dylan Thomas and then later from Joyce. Ulysses had an enormous influence on me. I read for the first time as an undergraduate and I taught it later. I do think a novel should do more than one thing—it should have more than one level and tell more than one story, and should have more than one style, in fact many styles. So the parodies in Thinks . . . came in—it wasn’t planned—partly as a result of thinking that the alternation of Ralph’s monologue with Helen’s diary was going to become a little predictable. I needed extra variety. I needed more than information about cognitive science flooding one way from Ralph to Helen. There had to be some reversal of that flow: a literary imagination playing with the ideas of the scientist in an unpredictable way and throwing them back at him. And that’s how the parodies came about really. In narrative terms they’re hardly necessary—cut them out, you wouldn’t notice.
C. R. No, it’s true—they don’t advance the story.
D.L. No, not at all.
C.R. But the parodies do a great deal for the dynamic of the book—lend it orchestral colour, as it were. Which brings me to my third question. It’s relatively easy to parody the distinctive—the Irvine Welsh, the Henry James—but I think it’s difficult to pastiche the undistinguished, the stylistically inert. Isn’t a great coup of Thinks . . . the prose used by Helen in her journal? Without any coarse signposting, you let us know that she’s nice, intelligent—but a writer poised somewhere between the mediocre and the passable.
D. L. Is there such a space between those two?
C. R. As a person she’s obviously fine. She has her limitations. She’s not as interesting as Ralph Messenger. But I was thinking in terms of her prose. Everything depends on the reader picking up the quality of her prose. Which is ratcheted down a couple of categories: “a distant rattle of tumbrils over the intellectual cobblestones of Paris”; “razor-sharp minds”—that’s not exactly razor-sharp; “the psychological point of no return”; “I slipped into the building like a thief”; “an African gentleman” for a black man.
D.L. Mhm—slightly prim.
C. R. You feel here is a novelist who is intelligent and so on. But actually what you’re parodying is her kind of stylistic neutrality.
D. L. I didn’t want her to be flashy. It would have been quite wrong if her journal appeared to have been written to impress posterity. It’s a relief to her own feelings, and a way of keeping the muscles of writing exercised. It’s therapeutic really, this diary she’s keeping. I think it’s more finished and polished than Ralph’s obviously. She is a writer who can’t write an ill-formed sentence. She can’t even write e-mail in a slapdash way.
C. R. But she has a slightly overwrought style—she talks about “repasts,” not about meals. When you read “it was dark outside . . .”; “sought to mitigate,” you think, “here is a woman who is still under the influence of Henry James.” You’re actually creating a prose style for her that isn’t neutral, it’s tinged with the second-rate. That seems to me an extraordinary thing to do—because you have
absolutely to rely on the reader to pick this up. Though there are two verdicts passed on her work in the book. One of them is Ralph’s. He says he’s speed-read The Eye of the Storm, “it’s a rather tedious story.” And we kind of believe him. Then Sandra Pickering—who’s had the affair with her husband—suggests Helen’s literary limitations too. She says that “men wearing odd socks” is a bit of a cliché. And Helen is rather wounded by this. We get a sense that we’re not meant to admire her as a writer.
D.L. The Spectator says that she’s one of the most brilliant contemporary novleists.fn2
C. R. Yeah, but we don’t believe this. Because what you’re offering is somebody who isn’t brilliant. All the brilliant bits in Thinks . . . come from you in the third-person omniscient narration—where you talk about the windsurfers with “shards of sails.” That’s something completely beyond her.
D.L. Yeah, interesting.
C. R. Do we need these two verdicts by Ralph and Sandra Pickering?—slightly pushing us in one direction. Or do you feel that polyphony means neither comment should be read as authoritative and the reader has to decide?