by David Lodge
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE CAMPUS TRILOGY
David Lodge is the author of fourteen novels and a novella, including Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work (the latter two of which were finalists for the Booker Prize); Paradise News; Therapy; Thinks…; Author, Author; Deaf Sentence; and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written many works of literary criticism. He lives in Birmingham, England.
DAVID LODGE
THE
CAMPUS TRILOGY
CHANGING PLACES
SMALL WORLD
NICE WORK
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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CHANGING PLACES
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited 1975
Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1978; Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1979
SMALL WORLD
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited 1984
First published in the United States of America by Macmillan Publishing Company 1985
Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1985; Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1995
NICE WORK
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited 1988
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989; Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1989; Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1990
This volume titled The Campus Trilogy published in Penguin Books (USA) 2011
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CHANGING PLACES: Copyright © David Lodge, 1975
SMALL WORLD: Copyright © David Lodge, 1984
NICE WORK: Copyright © David Lodge, 1988
All rights reserved
NICE WORK
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following lyrics:
“The Power of Love” (De Rouge, Mende, and Applegate). © 1985 SBK Songs Ltd.
“Come Give Me Your Hand” (De Rouge, Mende, and Rush). © 1983 SBK Songs Ltd.
“Surrender” (Rush and Klapperton). © 1985 SBK Songs Ltd.
By permission of SBK Songs Ltd., 3-5 Rathbone Place, London WIP IDA.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Lodge, David, 1935–
The campus trilogy / David Lodge
p. cm.
EISBN: 9781101577127
1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. College stories. I. Title.
PR6062.O36A6 2011
823’.914—dc23 2011025853
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Elke Sigal
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Contents
Introduction
CHANGING PLACES
1. Flying
2. Settling
3. Corresponding
4. Reading
5. Changing
6. Ending
SMALL WORLD
Prologue
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
NICE WORK
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Introduction
The campus novel is a mainly Anglo-American literary phenomenon. The first classic example was American, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), followed in England by Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim in 1954, some years before the British had adopted the word “campus” to describe the enclosed territory of a university or college which makes it such an inviting location for a story. (One reason why there are very few European campus novels is that the typical Continental European university is less clearly demarcated, architecturally and socially, from its environment.) There had been novels about student life before the 1950s, of course, but what was distinctive about the campus novel was its focus on the lives of academic staff. It continued to evolve as higher education expanded in the postwar period and more and more novelists, or aspiring novelists, took jobs in universities, as I did myself. I don’t think many of us set out to write a “campus novel” as one might set out to write a detective story or any other kind of fiction with formulaic components and conventions. We were trying to give literary form to ideas and experiences which had come to us in an academic milieu, and always seeking new variations on previous novels with similar settings. I certainly did not intend to write a “campus trilogy” linked by common characters and a fictional Midlands university—it just happened, as a consequence of three quite distinct sources of inspiration.
1. CHANGING PLACES
In January 1969 I took six months’ leave of absence from my lectureship at Birmingham University to be a visiting Associate Professor at the University of California in Berkeley, taking my wife, Mary, and three young children with me. We had spent an idyllic summer in San Francisco, just across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley, in 1965, when I was on a Harkness Fellowship, but since then the ideological climate on campuses across Europe and America had changed dramatically. The student revolution, inspired by les évenements of May 1968 in Paris, was in full spate. Birmingham University experienced a relatively mild manifestation in the autumn term of that year, though the occupation of administration buildings by militant students traumatised many of my senior colleagues. In Berkeley I found something much more like a real revolution in progress, driven by opposition to the Vietnam War and the hippy counterculture of Flower Power, of which San Francisco was the fountainhead.
While I was there the struggle became focused on the effort to turn a piece of university property into a People’s Park. The authorities responded with repressive law enforcement. There were violent confrontations between demonstrators and police, tear gas was sprayed onto the campus from helicopters, and the National Guard was called out. People were hurt, and someti
mes jailed, but the analogies that were drawn with the contemporaneous occupation of Prague by Russian tanks were wide of the mark. Fundamental political liberties were not at stake, and there was a carnivalesque quality about much of the protest. It was a cultural and generational conflict, which I observed with keen but semidetached interest, like a war correspondent. At the same time, as I performed my teaching duties, I was intrigued and amused by the contrasts between American and British academic life—the competitiveness and professionalism of the former making the latter seem by comparison humane but amateurish. I promised myself that when I got home I would use all this experience to write a novel—a comic one, as campus novels tend to be, exploring the gap between the high ideals of academic institutions and the human flaws and follies of their members.
In recent years, however, several novels had been published by youngish British writers making use of their experience of visiting American universities, including Stepping Westward, by my friend and former Birmingham colleague, Malcolm Bradbury. I was conscious that my treatment of the subject would need some new, extra dimension. Pondering this problem, it occurred to me that as far as I knew, no novel had been written about an American academic spending time in a British university, though this was not uncommon in those days, and was usually brought about by some kind of exchange scheme between two institutions. Bingo! That was the moment when the cartoonist’s lightbulb of inspiration lit up inside my head. Suppose I had not one academic central character but two, one British and one American, exchanging posts for six months, against the background of two campuses in revolt, and my narrative cut back and forth between them, following their fortunes, which would become increasingly entwined as they got to know each other’s families. They might even come to exchange wives as well as jobs. . . .
This scenario required two protagonists who were typical of their respective national and professional environments. I had no difficulty in creating Philip Swallow, who, apart from his physical appearance and dearth of publications, has a good deal of myself in him. For Morris Zapp I drew on a great many Jewish academics I had encountered on my two visits to the United States, and one in particular, a friend who fortunately revels in the portrait and in fact rather exaggerates the resemblance to himself. The verbal energy and caustic wit of Morris and his wife Désirée also owe something to Jewish-American novelists and short-story writers I admired. One of the pleasures of writing Changing Places was the opportunity to extend my usual stylistic range in this way, savouring differences between two varieties of English by bringing them into conjunction, and sometimes collision. I am shamefully incompetent in foreign languages, but I believe I have a pretty good ear for American usage.
I needed to find names for my two geographical locations which would evoke the places that had inspired them, but were sufficiently playful to deter a literal-minded identification of the fictional institutions with real ones: “Esseph,” “Euphoric State,” “Rummidge,” etc. With these locations established, and the characters in place, the story developed almost of its own accord, each event or scene in one country generating its counterpart in the other. The characteristic features of life (not just academic life, but social, sexual, and cultural life) in each country were made amusing by being observed through eyes unused to them—a device known in the lit.crit. trade as “defamiliarisation.” When I was well into the novel I feared the symmetry of the plot might come to seem a little mechanical and predictable, so I loosened up the narrative method, writing the later chapters in different styles of discourse—letters, quotations from published documents, embedded retrospective narrative sequences, and finally a film script. Many of the documents were authentic press cuttings and fliers I collected while I was in Berkeley. I especially cherish the comment by a Californian eight-year-old: “The police are just ruining their lives by being police, they’re also keeping themselves from being a person.” As I approached the end of the novel I found that I didn’t want to resolve the “long-distance wife-swapping” plot in a way that would favour any of the possible life choices it entailed. The conventions of film narrative provided a convenient solution.
The differences between Britain and America which generate much of the comedy are no longer as striking today as they were in 1969, or have disappeared altogether. In many ways British higher education has become more like the American model as it expanded: we have adopted the modular course system, small-group tutorial teaching has virtually disappeared, staff must publish or perish, and universities are run like businesses. The contrasts between everyday life on each side of the Atlantic have also become less marked. In Britain we have long taken for granted many of the material amenities, like central heating and big refrigerators, which were once enviously associated with American affluence; and the speed and cheapness of modern communications (air travel, TV, the Internet, etc.) have created an almost homogeneous transatlantic culture. Changing Places, in short, is now something of a period piece, but I hope still an entertaining one.
It was my fifth novel, and for me what publishers call the “breakthrough book,” yet it did not have an easy progress to publication. It was turned down by the publisher who had an option on it and by two others, before Tom Rosenthal took it for Secker & Warburg on condition that I cut it by fifteen thousand words. (I agreed on considerably fewer with my sympathetic editor, but it was good advice.) Published in England in January 1975, some considerable time after I wrote it, the novel received unanimously good reviews, was awarded two prizes, and has never been out of print for more than a few weeks. Surprisingly, the novel struggled to find a publisher in America and was never issued in hardcover, having been turned down by umpteen publishers, including Viking, but when it was published as a paperback by Penguin in 1978, it soon became a kind of campus cult book, packed in the luggage of every college professor off to spend time in England, and it has never been out of print since.
Since its structure is based on the cinematic “cut” from one place to another, Changing Places was an obvious candidate for adaptation to that medium. The film rights were quickly sold to a British producer, who had had one success which unfortunately he was unable to replicate. With a script written by Peter Nichols, he tried for many years to put together a dream cast—John Cleese as Philip Swallow, Walter Matthau as Morris Zapp, Shirley MacLaine as Désirée—but he never managed to get them all together in the same frame; and as the rights were sold in perpetuity (which happened in those days) no one else has been able to make a movie. It is one of those might-have-beens that occur in most writers’ lives, and recur occasionally in wistful retrospect. But overall I feel only gratitude for the good fortune of this novel.
2. SMALL WORLD
From 1970 onward, the educational needs of our children made it impracticable to live abroad for any length of time, but I continued to travel on academic business, at first within Europe, and then further afield. The occasion might be a lecture tour of universities in a foreign country organised by the British Council, or more often participation in an international conference on some aspect of literary studies in which I had an interest. It seemed a good way to see the world, with one’s expenses paid and hospitality provided in return for giving a few lectures or delivering a paper. In the last days of 1978 I was invited to speak at the mother of all conferences, the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America. The colossal scale and frantic pace of this event amazed and excited me: ten thousand academics crammed into two skyscraper hotels in mid-Manhattan for three days, listening to and participating in discussions of every conceivable subject from “Old English Riddles” to “Lesbian-Feminist Teaching and Learning” from 8:30 in the morning to 10:15 at night, with thirty sessions in progress simultaneously.
And that was only one level of conference activity. It was above all a place to meet people, old friends and old enemies, people whom you knew previously only from their publications, people you might hire or who might offer you a job. And it was clear that other,
more intimate kinds of meeting were being arranged. A British colleague was accosted after his talk by an attractive woman who invited him to spend the night with her. “People only come to this circus to get laid,” she assured him as he struggled politely to excuse himself. She was wrong, of course, but not entirely wrong. The combination of common professional interests and erotic opportunity makes the conference a likely place for academics off the domestic leash to form new, interesting relationships, and therefore a setting full of fictional possibilities. (My wife trusted me when I was away on these trips, but well-travelled colleagues sometimes complained that their wives regarded them suspiciously after reading Small World.)
The idea of writing a novel about international conferenzlopers (as the Dutch call them) didn’t occur to me until the following June, when I attended the Seventh International James Joyce Symposium, held that year in Zurich, a city where Joyce himself lived for some years and wrote part of his novel Ulysses. I remember walking, soon after checking into my hotel, toward the conference venue and gradually becoming aware that all the other people moving on the broad, immaculately clean Swiss pavements were fellow academics and, as we clustered more closely together and squinted at each other’s lapel badges, that I knew many of them by repute if not personally, and they knew me. Later, in the James Joyce Pub, an authentic Dublin bar dismantled and lovingly reconstructed on Pelikanstrasse, there were more greetings and introductions as draught Guinness was quaffed in the great writer’s honour. From Zurich I flew directly to Israel to take part in another conference on “Poetics of Fiction and the Theory of Narrative,” where the same experience was repeated—on a smaller scale, for it was a smaller, more select gathering of scholars—but in a setting that provided more piquant contrasts in the alternation of intense intellectual debate with episodes of hedonistic tourism. Several of the other participants had also been at the Zurich symposium. It dawned on me that jet travel had created a new academic community, a travelling caravan of professors with international contacts, lightweight luggage, and generous conference grants—a global campus to which, it seemed, I now belonged myself.