by David Lodge
Two years, and several conferences, later, I prepared to write a novel about this phenomenon, set in 1979. I decided at an early stage that the characters would include Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, and their wives, whose fortunes I had left conveniently indeterminate at the end of Changing Places, and several minor figures from that novel. There would be a young hero and heroine who would be novices in the glamorous world of academic travel, and a host of other characters of divers nationalities. But what could provide the structural principle of the novel, comparable to the exchange scheme in the earlier one?
Before I start writing a new work of fiction I dedicate a notebook to the project in which I jot down ideas, character sketches, draft synopses, possible situations, jokes, and memos to myself, and looking through my Small World notebook I find very early on this remark: “The main problem is to find some plot mechanism that will bring together a large number of varied academic types from different countries, and involve them in meeting each other frequently in different places and in different combinations, and have continuous narrative interest.” It was a problem which I was unable to solve for some time. Thirty pages later in the notebook there is a somewhat desperate cry: “What could provide the basis for a story?” And just below that, “Could some myth serve, as in Ulysses?” (I was thinking of the way Joyce used the story of Homer’s Odyssey as a template to give shape to the detailed rendering of a single day in the lives of several modern Dubliners.) And below that: “E.g., the Grail legend—involves a lot of different characters and long journeys.”
The Grail legend—the quest for the cup which Jesus used at the Last Supper—is at the heart of the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I thought of it at that moment because I had just seen Excalibur, John Boorman’s slightly over-the-top but highly enjoyable movie treatment of this material, and been reminded what a wonderfully gripping narrative it is. I saw an analogy, comic and ironic, between modern academics jetting round the world to meet and compete with each other for fame and love in various exotic settings, and the knights of chivalric romance doing the same thing in a more elevated style, assisted, or hindered, by poetic licence and magic. The Grail sought by the modern knights might be a Chair of Literary Criticism endowed by UNESCO, with an enormous salary and negligible duties. The volatile state of contemporary literary studies, with various methodologies (structuralist, deconstructionist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, etc.) challenging traditional scholarship and each other, would generate rivalry and conflict. I also thought of T. S. Eliot’s great poem, The Waste Land, and its use of the Grail legend as interpreted by the folklorist Jessie Weston, who saw it as a displaced and sublimated version of an older pagan myth of a Fisher King with a parched, infertile kingdom. I saw connections here with various kinds of sterility afflicting modern writers and literary intellectuals. There might be an elderly, immensely distinguished, unhappily impotent professor called Arthur Kingfisher somewhere in the story. . . .
Small World is packed with literary echoes and allusions: there is scarcely a character or event that does not have its analogue in medieval and Renaissance literature. But readers who haven’t studied that subject on the graduate level should not be deterred, for essential information about it is integrated into the text. Miss Sybil Maiden, for instance, is on hand to comment on the Grail legend. The Heathrow check-in girl, Cheryl Summerbee, is eager to explain the difference between the Mills & Boon genre of “romance,” from which she has weaned herself (Harlequin romances would be the equivalent in America), and the traditional kind: “Real romance is full of coincidence and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost and enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that. Of course, they’re often in love too.”
Explicitly invoking the model of traditional romance licenced me to contrive all kinds of improbable narrative twists and turns and coincidences which would be out of place in a realistic novel (see the second epigraph, from Nathaniel Hawthorne), but which were essential to contain my numerous characters and their movements around the globe in a unified narrative. The novel is, however, also rooted in modern reality. There really is, for instance, an underground Chapel of St. George, with a low curved roof like the upper cabin of a Boeing 747, at Heathrow Airport, and a noticeboard at the back with desperate prayers and pleas pinned to it—what a gift to my purposes that was! I had visited almost all the places described in the book, and in some cases had similar experiences there to those of my characters. Like my hero, Persse McGarrigle, I nearly sank with a boatload of middle-aged students of Irish literature when we were overtaken by a squall on our way to the Lake Isle of Innisfree. Like him I took shelter from the rain in a bar in Tokyo without ever having heard the word karaoke or knowing what it was (very few people in the West did, in 1982) and found myself, after much confused explanation and a few beers, singing “Hey Jude” to an appreciative audience of Japanese businessmen. Later, alone in my hotel bed, I laughed aloud at the memory and thought to myself: “this has to go into the novel.”
Like most novels in progress, in my experience, Small World was hard work at first—I recall that getting all the minor characters established in their different milieux and time zones in Part Two was a lengthy process—but became progressively easier. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope that enjoyment transfers itself to the reading experience. It still makes me laugh, anyway, when I have occasion to dip into it.
3. NICE WORK
Small World was set explicitly in 1979, when I conceived the “global campus” as a subject for fiction. In Britain, it was also the year when the Conservative Party won a general election and Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister. By 1984, when my novel was published, her government’s policies had made a decisive impact on British economic and social life, including higher education. Universities had their funding drastically cut, were obliged to freeze new appointments, and were exhorted to run themselves like businesses. Some of my colleagues, and a few reviewers with a foot in the academic world, thought it was an inopportune moment to publish a comic novel about academics swanning around the world on generous grants to attend conferences which seemed to involve as much partying as conferring: it didn’t give a positive image of university life for the times. I was unrepentant: my novel was, I believed, faithful in its carnivalesque way to academic culture at the time when it was set; it was international, not parochially British in scope; and in any case novelists are not in the business of PR. However, I understood the reaction, and it may have had some influence on my next book, which, without renouncing comedy, took a more serious look at the state of the nation and the place of universities in it.
One effect of Thatcherite free-market economics, it seemed to me, was to put the concept of Work in a new light. The shakeout of uncompetitive British businesses created widespread unemployment, not least in the West Midlands, where Birmingham is situated, and university students could no longer count on getting jobs when they graduated. Our brightest ones, I observed, were not staying on to do research, since the prospects of an academic career were bleak, and many of them were going into financial services, which were booming. Fewer people were at work than before, but they were required to work harder than ever before. University teachers, at least in the humanities, had never seen their work as having any connection with commerce, but as a vocation, essential to their own self-fulfilment. They were unhappy with the new enterprise ethos, but ill-equipped to resist it.
I began to think of a novel about a businessman, the managing director of some manufacturing company, who had lived only for his work, but suddenly lost his job when the firm collapsed or was taken over, and was unable to find another equivalent one. Suddenly bereft of power and status, his occupation gone, he would fall into depression, then, through getting involved with a woman on the Arts side of his local university he would begin to re-evaluate the concept of work and its place in his life. Before I could develop this
vague idea any further, I needed to know what kind of work he would have done before he was made redundant. Although I had lived in Birmingham for some twenty-five years, I knew very little of that side of its life, so I approached a friend, the husband of a student I had taught in the 1970s, who was managing director of an engineering firm, and asked if there was any way I could spend some time observing his working routine. “Of course,” he said. “You could shadow me.” Shadowing, i.e., following someone around as he worked, was, I gathered, a common practice in industry—used, for instance, to introduce potential recruits to the operations of a company. But what pretext could I use?
It so happened that the year which had just begun, 1986, had been designated “Industry Year” in the United Kingdom, with the aim of “bringing about a change of understanding and attitudes” to this sector of national life, and a number of documents were circulating at Birmingham University announcing various initiatives to strengthen its ties with local industry. I was by this point a half-time professor, and the spring term of 1986 was my term “off.” My friend and I concocted a story that I was on sabbatical leave, doing my bit for Industry Year by learning about career opportunities for arts graduates in this area. I spent a couple of weeks, and occasional days after that, shadowing my friend in his professional activities, attending meetings, inspecting the workshops, visiting potential customers and other factories. Only once did someone identify me as a writer, and he kept a discreet silence; otherwise nobody raised an eyebrow at my presence.
I found the experience absolutely fascinating and highly educative. Literary studies do not encourage a sympathetic interest in commerce and industry, and much classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature is explicitly hostile to the Industrial Revolution and its social consequences. In some ways my experience as a shadow confirmed these prejudices. I was appalled by the soul-destroying, repetitive nature of much factory work and the squalid and sometimes dangerous conditions in which it is carried out. But I also recognized that many managers and skilled operatives had a commitment to achieving excellence in their occupations that was admirable. Furthermore, the whole experience of mixing with people constantly exercised with questions of cost and profit brought home to me a truth that academics and literary intellectuals tend to ignore: that high culture depends ultimately on the wealth created by trade.
Very quickly I realised that the cover story devised for my research was a marvellous foundation for a fictional plot, and it displaced the somewhat sentimental idea I had started with. It resembled the exchange scheme in Changing Places—my imagination seems drawn to binary structures which bring contrasting milieux, cultures, and characters into contact and conflict. Instead of a single central character and a single point of view, I would have two: a polytechnic-educated, down-to-earth MD struggling to keep a foundry and engineering company in the black, and an academic from the local university who was reluctantly obliged to shadow him for one day a week as an Industry Year exercise. It would raise the stakes, and increase the fun, of their forced collaboration if the shadow were a woman, and an intellectual of a kind with whom Vic Wilcox (as I called my MD) would have least sympathy. Accordingly I created Robyn Penrose, a young left-wing, feminist literary theorist and specialist in the Victorian “industrial novel,” who has never been inside a factory in her life until she turns up in Vic Wilcox’s office one day to his consternation and dismay (he has been expecting a man called “Robin”). They are two people who have absolutely nothing in common except a dedication to their work—work of two totally different kinds—and an underlying anxiety that they might soon be deprived of it.
The early Victorian “industrial novels,” like Disraeli’s Sybil, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Dickens’s Hard Times, were sometimes called “Condition of England” novels in their own day, since they were responses to a period of great social and political tension, not unlike Britain in the 1980s. As Robyn Penrose explains in her lecture in Chapter 3 of my novel, in the 1840s there was widespread unemployment and poverty, especially in the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North, provoking strikes, lockouts, and violent demonstrations. Although Robyn is dismissive of the Victorian novelists’ attempts to reconcile the conflicting class interests of their time, she does, as a result of the Shadow Scheme, to some extent re-enact the experience of their heroines, especially Mrs. Gaskell’s Margaret Hale, and acquires a more informed and nuanced view of the relations between high culture and commerce—as does Vic, coming from the opposite direction ideologically. The typical Victorian narrative resolution of the initial antagonism between them—love and marriage—was for several reasons out of the question, but there is a romantic-sexual strand to the story which allowed me to reverse the basic plot device at a late stage and send Vic to shadow Robyn at the university. His participation in a tutorial on Tennyson’s poetry is a scene which I particularly enjoyed writing.
“Rummidge” offered itself as the obvious setting for this novel, but not without attendant problems. As portrayed in Changing Places and Small World, it is a comic caricature of Birmingham, drawing, as the authorial note to the latter book admits, on popular prejudices about that city, but not corresponding exactly to it. Nice Work is a more realistic novel, which required a more truthful and fine-grained evocation of its setting. My colleagues at Birmingham, confident of the high reputation of the university and its English department, had mostly reacted to the two comic novels with good-humoured tolerance, but they would look more closely and critically at a realistic portrait of Rummidge University. Altogether I was beginning to feel that the distinction I had always tried to maintain between my novel-writing self and my professional academic persona was becoming increasingly difficult to preserve, and it was with considerable relief that I was able to take early retirement from my professorial post and become a full-time writer before Nice Work was published in 1988.
In the event the novel was well received by readers on both sides of the social and cultural divide it described, and I received no negative comments from my former colleagues. But when I adapted the novel as a TV drama serial for the BBC, and the producer arranged to film the relevant scenes on the Birmingham University campus, some voices were raised doubting the wisdom of inviting confusion of fiction with fact. The university administration, however, believed the TV drama would be good publicity for the institution (an opinion borne out by subsequent market research), and the filming went ahead. Thus I had the experience of seeing many scenes which I had created returned to the “real” locations which had inspired them. One Sunday morning in March 1989, for instance, I drove from my house to the main entrance of the university and there, like a dream or hallucination, was a traffic jam I had invented three years earlier, caused by placard-waving pickets of the Association of University Teachers protesting against higher education cuts.
As for my readers in commerce and industry, both locally and nationally, their reaction was wholly positive. They were, I think, delighted to read a literary novel that, for once, was about them and the kind of work they did, and they seemed to think I had portrayed their world accurately—so much so that for some years after publication I was frequently asked to give talks or take part in seminars on business management. I had to explain that everything I knew about business management was in my novel—indeed, rather more, since I had already forgotten some of what I once knew and was preoccupied with researching a quite different subject. Writing Nice Work had shown me what rewards there might be in deliberately exploring experience outside one’s usual sphere, and henceforward my novels would become increasingly dependent on preliminary research.
Birmingham November 2010
THE
CAMPUS TRILOGY
CHANGING PLACES
A TALE OF TWO CAMPUSES
For Lenny and Priscilla, Stanley and Adrienne and many other friends on the West Coast
Although some of the locations and public events portrayed in this novel bear a certain resemblan
ce to actual locations and events, the characters, considered either as individuals or as members of institutions, are entirely imaginary. Rummidge and Euphoria are places on the map of a comic world which resembles the one we are standing on without corresponding exactly to it, and which is peopled by figments of the imagination.
1. Flying
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. They were protected from the thin, cold air by the pressurized cabins of two Boeing 707s, and from the risk of collision by the prudent arrangement of the international air corridors. Although they had never met, the two men were known to each other by name. They were, in fact, in process of exchanging posts for the next six months, and in an age of more leisurely transportation the intersection of their respective routes might have been marked by some interesting human gesture: had they waved, for example, from the decks of two ocean liners crossing in mid-Atlantic, each man simultaneously focusing a telescope, by chance, on the other, with his free hand; or, more plausibly, a little mime of mutual appraisal might have been played out through the windows of two railway compartments halted side by side at the same station somewhere in Hampshire or the Mid-West, the more self-conscious party relieved to feel himself, at last, moving off, only to discover that it is the other man’s train that is moving first … However, it was not to be. Since the two men were in airplanes, and one was bored and the other frightened of looking out of the window—since, in any case, the planes were too distant from each other to be mutually visible with the naked eye, the crossing of their paths at the still point of the turning world passed unremarked by anyone other than the narrator of this duplex chronicle.