by David Lodge
Afterword
‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up’ was written in the winter of 1965–66, when I was in very low spirits. I was suffering partly from withdrawal symptoms after a euphoric year in America with my wife and two children, on a Harkness Fellowship, and partly from acute dissatisfaction with the badly built, meanly proportioned and inadequately heated two-bedroomed house we returned to in Birmingham, combined with despair of finding a better one that I could afford. One of the characteristic symptoms of depression, and the closely related state of anxiety, is that at the moment of awakening from sleep one is immediately reminded of the immediate cause or causes of it. One longs, hopelessly, to return to the oblivion of sleep; one puts off as long as possible the moment of rising; and yet even as one clings to the warmth and passiveness of the dozing state one is guiltily aware that sooner or later one will have to get up and face the new day and its responsibilities. (Or so it seemed to me when I wrote the story. In old age I find this predicament has acquired a new and ironic twist: I wake very early, and could easily turn over and go back to sleep because I am retired from regular employment and can do as I please, but I’m wide awake and at the mercy of every negative thought that my brain can muster. So to escape them, I get up.)
It will be obvious how this experience generated a fictional story about a man who didn’t get up, whose dissatisfaction with his life, and craving for the warm, womb-like comfort of bed, impelled him to defy all the sanctions which ensure that, in the end, we do get up. The story began as a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy of escape; but as I worked on it, the question of whether the fantasy should be sustained to the very end, or defeated by reality, had to be settled. The man becomes a kind of folk hero, a secular saint, and has delusions of grandeur: he seemed to see angels and saints peering down at him from a cloudy empyrean, beckoning him to join them . . . with a supreme effort, he wrenched the bedclothes aside and flung them to the floor. In the story as submitted by my agent to the Weekend Telegraph the text continued: He was aware of cold and darkness. He was in space. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ said his wife. ‘The alarm hasn’t gone yet.’ In other words the whole experience described in the preceding pages had been a dream, and he was back where he always was, at the beginning of another depressing day.
I was not entirely happy with this ending, because awakening from a dream is such a narrative cliché. The editor of the magazine wasn’t happy about it either, though he liked the story otherwise. Couldn’t the man die, he suggested, or simply get bored with lying in bed and get up? The latter suggestion was too banal to consider, but the first one prompted me to write the ending with which it was eventually published. I decided that death should come to the man in the form of the drab physical environment with which he had begun his withdrawal from life, represented by a detail in the original description of the room, the long jagged crack in the ceiling plaster that ran like a sneer from the electric light fixture to the door; and I inserted a passage about this crack having been repaired and concealed by redecoration earlier in the story, its reappearance creating an effect of the uncanny appropriate to the revised ending. This ending punishes the central character more severely than the original one, and turns the story into something of a macabre cautionary tale. But perhaps I was teaching myself a lesson by writing it.
The basic premise of the story is similar to that of the late Sue Townsend’s novel The Woman Who Went to Bed For a Year, published in 2012, and they have some narrative elements in common. Her heroine, like my central character, becomes a popular celebrity as result of her refusal to get up, and there is even a crack in the ceiling above her bed which she invests with symbolic significance. I do not suspect any influence. Such ideas would easily occur to any writer developing the same donnée, and it is very unlikely that the nineteen-year-old Sue Townsend was reading the Daily Telegraph in 1966, when my story was first published.
‘The Miser’ was originally written for radio, and broadcast by the BBC in the 1970s (I cannot remember exactly when). It was based on a personal experience in childhood, a year or two after the end of the War – my friends and I really did find an old man miraculously selling pre-war fireworks out of a hut on a golf course – but the denouement was invented. I chose to tell this story as if it were a fragment from the early life of Timothy Young, the hero of my novel Out of the Shelter (1970), though it was written after the novel. Like the first part of that novel, its style imitates the early chapters of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short stories of childhood in his collection Dubliners, where everything is focalised through the consciousness of an immature central character.
‘My First Job’, first published in 1980, is another story based on the memory of an episode in my own early life – a vacation job I took when I was seventeen, between leaving school and going to university. I made my adult narrator a sociologist, rather than the novelist and literary critic I eventually became, to bring out the social and economic ironies of the narrative, and gave him a family background quite different from my own. The little gold chain that holds up Mr Hoskyns’s palsied lip was borrowed from the father of a childhood friend of mine. It was an object of some fascination to me then, and I have never seen such a device worn by anyone else.
‘Where the Climate’s Sultry’ was first published in 1987, but drafted some years before that, and looks back even further in time. As the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies took hold on British society, travel agents began to advertise package holidays on the Mediterranean for the 18–30 age group which promised potential customers unlimited opportunities for sexual promiscuity as well as sun, sand and sangria. Wryly (and perhaps enviously) comparing the visions these advertisements summoned up with memories of holidays abroad when I was a student, before the advent of the Permissive Society, I composed this comic quadrille of sexual frustration among four young Brits raised to fever pitch by their temporary exposure to a holiday under the Mediterranean sun in the 1950s.
‘Hotel des Boobs’ has a similar theme, but the story, and the writing of it, belong to the 1980s and middle age. In 1985 my wife and I took a short touring holiday in the south of France, staying at a number of pleasant hotels, each with its swimming pool. Most of the female guests sunbathing on the margins of these pools would, as a matter of course, remove or roll down the tops of their swimming costumes. (The practice is not so widespread nowadays.) A heterosexual Englishman of my generation could not be indifferent to this spectacle, though etiquette demanded that one pretended to be quite oblivious to it. Musing on the paradoxical, unspoken code of manners that governs the baring of female breasts in such settings was one source of my story. The other was a curious incident connected with Graham Greene.
I had met Greene on two occasions in England, and corresponded with him occasionally. His fiction had been a powerful influence on my own efforts in this field in youth and early adulthood, and he was kind enough to offer favourable ‘quotes’ for the jackets of two of my novels. He invited me to visit him at his home in Antibes on the Côte d’Azure when the opportunity arose, and I took up the invitation at the beginning of our holiday. After giving us gin and tonics in his modest flat overlooking the marina, he took us to lunch at a harbourside restaurant. He talked freely and entertainingly about his life and work.
It seemed to me that I ought to write down my recollections of this meeting, and I was doing so the following day, sitting beside a hotel swimming pool somewhere in rural Provence, surrounded by the usual display of bare bosoms, when suddenly without warning a small whirlwind blew through the grounds of the hotel, knocked over chairs, tables and umbrellas, snatched all my manuscript pages high into the air, and carried them away across the countryside. Dismayed at the prospect of losing them, and urged by my wife, I jumped into our rented car with her and pursued the fluttering pages for a kilometre or two, until we saw them settle among trees on a hill which seemed to be a private estate. We followed a winding track whic
h led us to a large ramshackle house where a lady was seated at a table on the veranda – writing. I began to feel that I was in a dream, or a film by Buñuel. It turned out that the house was a kind of retreat for Parisian academics, of whom the lady was one. She was very charming, and amused by our explanation of why we had appeared on the property. She led us to the hillside where we had seen the pages settle, and amazingly we recovered several of them, somewhat soiled but still legible. This curious adventure, combined with my meditations on the subject of topless sunbathing, prompted the story of ‘Hotel des Boobs’.
When I returned to England I wrote to thank Greene for his hospitality, but resisted the temptation to mention the incident of the petit mistral. I was sure it would have amused him, but I didn’t want to admit to writing down my recollections of our conversation, since I had not asked his permission to do so. Probably he wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t want to risk undermining a relationship I valued highly.
‘Pastoral’ was commissioned by BBC Radio in 1992, for a series of stories to be broadcast in the intervals of classical music concerts. A number of writers were shown a list of well-known symphonies and concertos, and invited to write an original short story which had some connection with one of them. Seeing on the list Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, I was reminded of a Nativity play I had written and produced in my youth for the Catholic parish in south-east London to which I belonged, in which the ‘Shepherd’s Song’ was used as incidental music, and wrote this story. A few years later I drew on the same experience (which is factually described in my memoir Quite a Good Time to Be Born) for an episode in my novel Therapy. Dedicated readers of my work may find some amusement in tracing the resemblances and differences between these two fictional versions of the same event.
The last two stories in this book were written quite recently. ‘A Wedding to Remember’ is set in the present century, in and around Birmingham, where I have lived since 1960 when I was appointed assistant lecturer at its oldest (and at that time only) university. It has changed a great deal since then, and like other English industrial cities has redeveloped its centre to accommodate service industries, leisure facilities and various hedonistic pursuits, including fine dining (a concept which would have seemed risibly incongruous when I first arrived there). Unlike the previous stories this one contains nothing that is derived from my own experience except the location. The basic idea came from an anecdote told to me by some friends, concerning a family only distantly known to them who lived in another part of England. A daughter of this family was engaged to be married, and a big, expensive wedding was arranged, but after invitations had been issued the engagement was broken off for reasons unknown. Instead of cancelling the wedding, however, the young woman married someone else at the arranged time and place. My friends, who were not present at the occasion, did not know any more details. I regarded it as a kind of challenge to a writer of fiction to imagine how such a marriage might possibly come about, and the result was ‘A Wedding to Remember’.
Obviously it was the young woman’s story, and obviously she had to be a strong-willed character, determined to bend the world to conform to her own wishes. I called her Emma, suggesting a faint resemblance to Jane Austen’s heroine, who is rewarded with her Mr Right only after a humbling lesson in self-knowledge. The sexual mores of her age group and class are different from those portrayed in the earlier stories. Cohabitation is now a lifestyle taken for granted by the younger generation, and accepted more or less reluctantly by their elders, but the longer it goes on in any particular case, the more of an issue the possibility of marriage becomes, especially for the woman, and infidelity is almost as serious a breach of trust in this kind of relationship as it would be if the couple were married. Since weddings nowadays are mostly of people who have been sexual partners for some time, they have lost much of their traditional meaning as a rite of passage – hence, perhaps, the increasing amounts of time and trouble and money that are lavished on them to create a theatrical sense of occasion. (An article in my daily newspaper informs me that ‘A best man will no longer suffice for some couples, who order an owl trained to fly down the aisle to deliver their wedding rings.’) Emma Dobson, self-appointed producer of her own wedding, is determined that the show in which she has invested so much must go on, even if it requires a last-minute recasting of the groom. She is lucky to get away with it.
‘My Last Missis’ is the latest of these pieces and was published in the Autumn 2015 issue of Areté, a literary magazine with a small, select readership, edited and produced on a shoestring by Craig Raine. It originated with the thought that Robert Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’ was, among other things, a perfect short story, and might provide a model for another one in a modern context that would contrast entertainingly with the original – not as parody, but as hommage. The line ‘That’s my last missis, hanging on the wall’ floated into my head, and I went on from there. The first line of Browning’s poem is actually, ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall’, indicating that the portrait of the Duchess was a wall-painting or fresco, but I imagined as my modern equivalent a large framed photograph hung on the wall.
‘My Last Duchess’, which was first published in 1842, is a dramatic monologue, a poetic form of which Browning was a supreme exponent and which he applied to many historical and contemporary subjects. It differs from a simple monologue (such as my story ‘Pastoral’) in that it gives one side of a conversation between two people, so that the reader must infer the responses and reactions of the interlocutor to the speaker’s words. This greatly increases the effort of interpretation required of the reader, and in this case intensifies dramatic tension as the true nature of the situation emerges. Although ‘My Last Missis’ is a complete story on its own, I hope it will be enhanced by the reader’s awareness of its intertextual dimension. ‘My Last Duchess’ is a well-known and much admired poem, frequently studied in schools, colleges and universities; but inevitably some of my readers will not be familiar with it, and even those who are may not recall it in every detail. For the benefit and convenience of both groups I therefore append the text of Robert Browning’s poem. The word ‘Ferrara’ underneath the title locates the story in his favourite territory, Renaissance Italy. The speaker is thought to be based on Duke Alfonso II d’Este of Ferrara (1533–98), who married the fourteen-year-old daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose lineage was less distinguished, for the sake of her dowry, and was suspected of poisoning her two years later.
My Last Duchess
Ferrara
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
‘Frà Pandolf’ by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, ‘Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,’ or ‘Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat.’ Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My
favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool