Ginger, You're Barmy

by David Lodge

  And besides, I have become strangely attached to this place, where the fogs come down in October, and scarcely disperse until Spring. In this remote community, besieged by nature for half the year, I feel I could build a life of modest usefulness. The lectures I gave at the prison have aroused my interest in remedial work. Since Mike began to study externally for his degree the idea has caught on, and several of the prisoners are preparing to sit for the G.C.E. Mike was fortunate to be tried by the civil authorities, and to be sent to a prison with so enlightened a governor.

  It will be difficult to explain to Pauline why I want to stay here; but if, as seems likely, they offer me the deputy headship of the school next year, we might be able to afford a house with a bathroom and indoor lavatory, two amenities that would bribe Pauline to do almost anything.

  Twelve o’clock striking. I must put a clean nappy on Michael, lay the table, and get out the cider. And the Guinness.

  AFTERWORD

  A QUESTION THAT novelists are frequently asked is: how does the idea for a novel arise—in what shape or form does it begin? As far as I am concerned, it begins with an intuition that some segment of my own experience has a kind of thematic unity, and a more than private significance, which might be explored through a fictional story. The novel, in other words, begins as a short answer to the question that will eventually be asked of it, as of every novel: what is it about?

  Ginger, You’re Barmy is a very straightforward case in point. It is ‘about’ peacetime National Service, as an institution and as an experience—one which most young men born between, say, 1928 and 1941, underwent. Considering how common an experience it was, it is perhaps surprising how few postwar novels dealt directly with National Service, especially if you discount those set in places where conscript soldiers were involved in actual combat, such as Malaya, Korea, Suez. Such novels belong to the literature of war. For the vast majority of National Servicemen, the likelihood of actually fighting for one’s country seemed infinitely remote, and the day-today routine of military life, empty for the most part of any useful occupation, did not inspire one with a sense of urgent readiness for patriotic duty. This was why most National Servicemen resented, with varying degrees of bitterness, the confiscation of their freedom for two of the best years of their lives. The Services, and successive governments, failed abysmally to give any kind of positive or constructive meaning to National Service. Those of us who did it felt, not that we were being trained to be useful in a national emergency (what training we received could have been accomplished in three months or less), but that we were being maintained as a cheap standing army, occupied with futile and demeaning tasks.

  Of course, not everybody took so jaundiced a view. For many, National Service was a chance to get away from home, see foreign countries, and indulge in dissipation, at a period when such things were harder to accomplish than they are today. For those qualified to become officers, and prepared to compete for the privilege, a National Service commission could be a useful addition to one’s curriculum vitae. But for the vast majority National Service was an irksome suspension of freedom, rather like being forcibly compelled, as an adult, to go back to school—a particularly bad type of boarding school, staffed by brutal, snobbish, cynical and incompetent masters.

  The majority of National Servicemen had, in fact, not long been out of school, and many came straight from it, so they adjusted without too much difficulty to being treated by officers and N.C.O.s with bullying condescension. Those, however, who had deferred National Service in order to do a university degree, and were called up at the age of twenty-plus, having achieved a certain amount of intellectual maturity and independence of mind, were more likely to feel outrage at the indignities of Basic Training and despair at the prospect of two years’ servitude stretching beyond it—especially if, for one reason or another, the prospect of securing some creature comforts by means of a commission was closed to them. Ginger, You’re Barmy presents National Service from precisely this perspective, for it was my own.

  Like my narrator, Jonathan Browne, I was drafted into the Royal Armoured Corps shortly after obtaining my B.A. in English Language and Literature at London University (in August, 1955 to be precise). I received my Basic Training, and Trade Training, at Catterick Camp, and was subsequently posted to the permanent staff of the R.A.C.’s Driving and Maintenance School at Bovington Camp, Dorset, where I worked as a clerk until my release in August 1957, by which time I had attained the rank of Acting Corporal. In the interests of authenticity (and whatever weaknesses the novel may have, I do not think it can be faulted on that score) Ginger, You’re Barmy cleaves very closely to the contours of my own military service. Although the story of the three main characters is fictional, there is scarcely a minor character or illustrative incident or detail of setting that is not drawn from the life.

  The need for a fictional story was self-evident, since my own military experience was almost totally devoid of narrative interest. My response to the Army shifted from an indignant moral resistance to its values (I initiated, for instance, a renunciation of Potential Officer status by several graduate conscripts in my intake during Basic Training) to a pragmatic determination to make myself as comfortable as possible and to use my time as profitably as possible (at Bovington I wangled myself the right to occupy a small security ‘bunk’ in an isolated office block, which gave me the privacy, peace and quiet in which to read and write: I wrote much of my first novel, The Picturegoers, there). For the purpose of Ginger, I split these reactions into two characters, and set them interacting. To heighten the contrast between them I gave the rebel an Irish Catholic republican background (and flaming red hair) and made the conforming pragmatist an agnostic. And to give additional interest to the see-saw of their fortunes, I put a girl between them.

  The narrator, Jonathan Browne, is the agnostic, but in most other respects he is more like myself than the reckless, impulsive and wayward Mike ‘Ginger’ Brady, and I did not hesitate to choose the former rather than the latter as the lens through which to describe National Service. Ginger, You’re Barmy is the only one of my novels, to date, in which I have used a ‘first-person’ narrator. It seemed, at the time, the obvious and natural way to register the impact of military life upon a sensibility unprepared for, and ill-adapted to it. To avoid the temptations of self-pity and self-justification that attend the use of quasi-autobiographical narrators, I made Jonathan betray some unamiable traits—envy, selfishness, conceit—which are meant to imply some detachment of author from character, but risk merely alienating the reader’s sympathy. To mitigate this effect I bracketed the main narrative with a prologue and epilogue in which Jonathan shows some inclination to moral self-appraisal and self-renewal, but I am not sure, now, whether this was not a failure of nerve. And in the twenty years since the novel was written Jonathan has acquired some new vices that neither he nor his creator had heard of—sexism, for instance. It strikes me that several of his observations would now earn their place in the Guardian’s ‘Naked Ape’ column. This is hardly surprising: conscription, being sexually discriminatory, encouraged sexist attitudes.

  Another problem was the treatment of time. Both in reality and in my germinating plot, most of the drama of National Service was concentrated in the first few months, yet the banal tedium of the rest of it was also an essential element of what the novel was ‘about’. A linear, chronological structure would risk falling into the anticlimax and boredom which it sought to imitate. The best solution to this problem seemed to be a systematic flashback technique, whereby Jonathan’s recall of his, and his friend’s, induction into the Army is framed by his record of his last few days of service, and an evocation of the reasonably comfortable niche he has carved out for himself in the meantime.

  Much later, after the novel had been published, I realized that this structure had been borrowed, subliminally, from The Quiet American by Graham Greene, a writer who influenced me deeply in the formative years of adolescence and early adul
thood, and whose work I had studied closely in the course of postgraduate research between leaving the army and writing Ginger. I had been influenced, I think, not merely by the elaborate use of flashback in The Quiet American, but also by the relationship between Fowler, its cynical, sceptical narrator, and Pyle, the naive, dangerous enthusiast, who unsettles Fowler’s complacency and leaves him, though ultimately successful in their sexual rivalry, troubled with guilt and self-reproach. Perhaps, too, Maurice Bendrix, the agnostic narrator of Greene’s powerful religious novel The End of the Affair, whose obsessive probing of his own jealousy is also in some sense a spiritual quest, contributed something. There is a sentence in the first paragraph of Ginger which strikes me now as quintessentially Greenian in its relishing of the paradoxes of the moral life, its cadenced syntax and resonant abstractions: ‘I could never again write so unflattering an account of myself as the following, because it would open up so many awful possibilities of amendment.’

  If Graham Greene’s influence on Ginger was not immediately apparent, even to its author, at the time of writing (the name of the narrator, Browne with an ‘e’, was perhaps an unconscious acknowledgement of the debt) this may have been because it has more obvious affinities with a kind of novel being written in the nineteen-fifties by novelists a generation younger than Mr Greene, writers tagged, rather unsatisfactorily, as ‘Angry Young Men’. The original of this new culture hero was of course Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, first produced in 1956. I went to see it at the Royal Court during a weekend leave, and remember well the delight and exhilaration its anti-establishment rhetoric afforded me, and the exactness with which it matched my own mood at that juncture in my life.

  The attraction of the phrase, ‘Angry Young Man’ to literary journalists was that it could be applied equally well to fictional characters and to their authors. Novels that were often discussed in this context included John Wain’s Hurry on Down, John Braine’s Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving, and in the comic mode, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar. Though they are far from uniform, there is a kind of family resemblance between these novels made up of the following features: gritty realism, exact observation of class and regional differences in British society, a lower-middle or working-class perspective, anti-establishment attitudes, hostility to all forms of cant and pretentiousness, a fondness for first-person, confessional narrative technique. When Ginger, You’re Barmy was published in America, one of the epithets the blurb writer applied to it was ‘angry’.

  What were the Angry Young Men angry about? Nothing that could be formulated in political or ideological terms, as their subsequent development has made very clear. Fundamentally, I believe, they were angry at the slow rate of change in British society. Structurally, things had altered irrevocably as a result of the ‘People’s War’ and the institution of the Welfare State by the 1945 Labour Government. The old rigid class society, in which inherited privilege was unquestioned by the vast majority of the population, had been, or should have been, swept away by egalitarian social, economic and educational policies. Evelyn Waugh, for example, thought this was inevitable following the Labour victory of 1945, and made a characteristically double-edged proposal that the county of Gloucestershire, in which he himself then lived, should be made into a kind of game reserve in which the aristocracy and gentry would be preserved in their natural state for the edification and entertainment of future generations of proles. Yet the British Establishment proved doggedly tenacious of power and privilege. The rising meritocrats produced by free grammar schools and free university education were apt to find that the old-boy network, the lines of power and influence that connected London, Oxbridge and the public schools, the possession of the right accent, manners and style, still protected the interests of the hereditary upper-middle class. Nowhere was this more evident than in the peacetime Army, where the rigid demarcation between Officers, Sergeants and Other Ranks was based on, and preserved, the class-distinctions of pre-war British society; and nowhere within the Army was it more evident than in the Royal Armoured Corps, which incorporated all the traditionally ‘elite’ regiments of cavalry. The anger behind Ginger, You’re Barmy is, then, the anger of a bright, no doubt bumptious young man, who, having sensed exciting possibilities of personal self-fulfilment via education, found his progress rudely interrupted for two years by compulsory enlistment in an institution which he could neither identify with nor defeat. But if the novel is, to that extent, a personal settling of scores, I hope its anger is controlled, for I deliberately delayed writing it for some years after completing my National Service.

  I began Ginger, You’re Barmy in 1960, and completed it in the summer of 1961. It was published late the following year by MacGibbon & Kee, the publishers (now defunct) of my previous and first novel, The Picturegoers. 1961 was, of course, the year of the Lady Chatterley trial, the result of which was to have a profound effect upon the conventions of literary discourse in this country. After the acquittal of Penguin Books, there was no successful prosecution for obscenity of a novel with serious literary pretensions.

  Within a few years of the trial, writers and their publishers felt free to describe sexual acts as explicitly as they wished, and to print the so-called four-letter words in full. This development was, however, too late to affect the form of Ginger, You’re Barmy. Not that I was much concerned with the description of sexual acts in this novel, but the accurate representation of the monotonous obscenity of most spoken discourse in the army, especially in the ranks, was very much part of my purpose. Working within the conventions of the day, I adopted Norman Mailer’s expedient, in The Naked and the Dead, of representing the most common of the four-letter words as ‘fugg’; and I inscribed the vulgar term for the female pudenda with a dash between its first and last letters. (This dash was curiously elongated by MacGibbon & Kee’s copy-editor or printer, perhaps to prevent the innocent reader from guessing the actual word, which was made to look more like an eight-letter than a four-letter one.) Even so, I felt it necessary to preface the book with a cautionary note in the following terms:

  The coarseness of soldiers’ speech and behaviour is a well-known fact, the representation of which I found necessary to my purpose in this novel. Readers likely to find such representation disturbing or distasteful are warned.

  Some years later, in 1970, when Panther issued a second paperback edition of the novel, this note looked exceedingly quaint. I deleted it, and took the opportunity of a new printing to revise the text so that the obscene language was represented in full. It was a strange experience to sit down with a copy of my own novel and, like some conscientious vandal of the public libraries, write obscene expletives in the margin of nearly every page.

  The present re-issue of Ginger, You’re Barmy reproduces the mildly bowdlerized text of the first edition, which is perhaps appropriate to a novel that now seems very much a period piece—of the fifties rather than the sixties. The last National Servicemen were called up in 1960. The nation’s youth entered upon a decade of unprecedented affluence, liberty and licence, unthreatened by what Jonathan Browne described as ‘the bleak prospect of windswept barracks, cold water in the early morning, the harsh cries of stupid authority, the dreary monotony of the slow-moving days.’ The dominant youth culture of the sixties—the music, the clothes, the hair, the experiments with sex and drugs and life-styles—would hardly have been possible without the ending of conscription. I hope my novel still has some interest as a reminder—or revelation—of the years before that deluge.

  DAVID LODGE

  December 1981

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  Copyright © David Lodge, 1962, 1982

  David Lodge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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  First published in Great Britain by MacGibbon & Kee in 1962 This edition first published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1982

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