Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  My remaining lectures were more successful, but the Italian university system, from the impressions I received during the tour, seemed very strange. There were, for instance, no written examinations, only oral ones. The student accumulated credits towards a degree by presenting herself (most of the students doing English Literature were female) whenever she felt ready for interrogation on some part of the syllabus by one or two members of the teaching staff, which might take place in an office shared by several others chattering away at the same time. Those who made it to the final stage were however required to write a short dissertation to qualify for a degree, and in time my own work became quite a popular subject for this purpose. Some years later I turned up at my office in Birmingham one morning to find an Italian youth squatting on the floor outside. He had been told to write a dissertation on my first novel, The Picturegoers, which by then was out of print, and had come to ask if he could borrow a copy. I lent him one to photocopy in the University’s library.

  I had an interesting long weekend in Rome, thanks largely to Maurice Dodderidge, who was Director of the British Council there, one of the organisation’s plum positions. There was a personal connection between us because Mary knew him and his family, who were Catholics and lived in Broxbourne just a mile or so from her home in Hoddesdon. Maurice was an exceptionally nice man but he put himself out especially for my sake, introducing me to two British writers who were living in or near Rome whose work I knew well and admired: Muriel Spark and Anthony Burgess. They too were Catholics, though of very different kinds. Muriel Spark, brought up in a Jewish family of lukewarm religious allegiance, was a convert in adulthood who found the Catholic metaphysical world picture intellectually satisfying and imaginatively stimulating but practised her adopted faith in an idiosyncratic fashion. (She was, for instance, irregular in mass attendance and always arrived too late to hear the sermon.) Anthony Burgess was a cradle Catholic who lost his faith as a sixth-former at Xavier College in Manchester, run by an order of teaching brothers and much like the De La Salle school I attended in London. He subsequently embraced a rackety freethinking bohemian lifestyle but his imagination remained saturated in Catholicism, like the apostate James Joyce whom he revered. In his best-known novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), the problem of evil posed by violent criminality is addressed in terms derived from the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius about the concept of original sin. These two novelists were both key figures in leading British fiction into the period of postmodernism. Muriel Spark rejected the dominant realism of English fiction in the 1950s from the very beginning of her career as a novelist with an exhilarating mixture of supernaturalism, metafiction and satirical wit in novels like The Comforters (1957) and Memento Mori (1959) and later in black comic variations on classic crime fiction, The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Not to Disturb (1971). Anthony Burgess’s early work was essentially realistic in technique, having an affinity with Kingsley Amis’s social comedies, but increasingly he too experimented boldly with the novel form, exploiting and pastiching different fictional subgenres – the crime thriller, the biographical novel, the dystopia – and inventing new kinds of narrative voice. A Clockwork Orange, set in the future after a Russian occupation of Britain, is written in an Anglo-Russian argot which the reader picks up (with the aid of a glossary at the back) in the process of reading.

  At a supper after my lecture Maurice seated me next to Muriel Spark, and she invited me to a party in her grand apartment the following evening, seeming to be a quite different person on each occasion. I have described these two intriguing but slightly baffling encounters elsewhere.1 At the first she was demure, self-effacing, deferential to my academic status; at the second she was the glamorous hostess, superbly gowned and coiffed, moving regally among her guests, and I did not exchange more than a few words with her. Later she wrote warmly to thank me for something I had written about her work and gave me an open invitation to visit her in the rustic home in Tuscany to which she had moved, but I never found an opportunity to do so, or perhaps I should say that I didn’t make an effort to find one. I had a feeling that Muriel Spark was someone I would prefer to know through her books. She had a reputation for being unpredictable in personal relations and she certainly caused my friend Martin Stannard, her authorised biographer, an immense amount of frustration and anxiety by first giving him carte blanche and then blocking the publication of the book until after her death because she disagreed with his treatment of her troubled relationship with her son.

  Anthony Burgess was a much more genial and transparent character. At the time I was in Rome, he was living with his second wife Liana and their son Andrea in Bracciano, an ancient town in the hills about 20 kilometres outside Rome overlooking a picturesque volcanic lake. Maurice kindly drove me there one morning and we spent a pleasant hour or two chatting and drinking on a balcony with Anthony and enjoying the splendid view. He was a loquacious host, but I made no notes of the occasion, and all I distinctly remember of what he said was that his reason for moving out of Rome was a fear that his son might be kidnapped. I had reviewed several of his novels over the past ten years, and he had reviewed my second novel, Ginger, You’re Barmy, a circumstance which can cause some awkwardness when writers meet, but there was none in this case. His main criticism of Ginger – that it attributed too much importance to the tribulations of National Service in the army – was entirely understandable coming from a veteran of the Second World War, and he had softened his verdict by predicting a bright future for me as a novelist. My reviews of his novels had been mostly positive, and I could claim some credit for having called Inside Mr Enderby (1963), which he published under the name of Joseph Kell, ‘a little masterpiece’ in The Spectator, without knowing that he was the author. The prolific Burgess adopted this nom de plume when his publishers warned him he would not be taken seriously if he published more than one novel in the same year, and amused himself by writing a favourable review of Inside Mr Enderby for the Yorkshire Post, where he was a regular fiction reviewer at the time. Humourlessly they sacked him from this post when the secret of Joseph Kell’s identity was revealed, but he was never short of such employment.

  He was an extraordinary writer, a kind of genius, publishing more than thirty novels and as many non-fiction books about literature, linguistics and other subjects, in an unstoppable stream. He made a shortened version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake with commentary, in a noble effort to coax readers to attempt that formidable text. He wrote poetry, stage plays and screenplays (inventing a language for Stone Age men and women in the French feature film Quest for Fire) and the book and lyrics of a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac. He was also a composer of some two hundred and fifty works of music. Birmingham University, in whose Extra-Mural Department he had worked between 1946 and 1950, gave Anthony an Honorary D.Litt. in 1986, and I had the pleasure of looking after him during his visit. He always had something knowledgeable to say about the academic specialisation of any member of staff to whom I introduced him, in whatever department or faculty. On his last evening a section of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of his latest musical composition, a piece for brass ensemble, in the Central Library’s auditorium.

  I met him occasionally after that in London. The last time was in 1992 when we did a joint event promoting our latest books in the South Kensington branch of Waterstones – his was a book about the English language called A Mouthful of Air. He told me privately that he had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and the prognosis was not good. This was not surprising news as he was addicted to cheroots and was defiantly smoking one as he spoke, but it had understandably lowered his spirits. Like the trouper he was, however, he entertained the audience with his usual wit and fluency. He died at the end of the following year. Perhaps he wrote too much, too fast, and arguably he never produced a flawless masterpiece – even A Clockwork Orange is compromised by having different endings with opposite meanings in the British and American editions – but he
made up for his books’ imperfections with the fecundity of his invention, the breadth of his intelligence, and his stylistic virtuosity. It is good to know that there is an International Anthony Burgess Foundation in his home city of Manchester to assert and celebrate his greatness.

  In the autumn of 1975 I was asked by the Council to do a tour in the south of France visiting the Universities of Toulouse, Montpellier, Aix-en-Provence and Nice, lecturing on Jane Austen’s Emma. It sounded an attractive itinerary, and I accepted. I was asked to speak about Emma because it was a set text for the Agrégation that year, the competitive national examination for candidates of postgraduate status who hope to obtain one of the limited number of new appointments available as teachers at the top lycées or as junior lecturers in universities. I was well qualified for this task, since I had written an introduction to the standard text of Emma published by Oxford University Press in 1971, and three years previously I had edited a selection of criticism about this novel from the time of its publication to the present day in Macmillan’s Casebook series. I remember that my literary agent at that time, Graham Watson, tried to dissuade me from doing this book, believing that it would involve a lot of work for little financial reward. But Emma was my own favourite novel by Jane Austen, and I sometimes named it as my favourite novel by anyone, so I relished the task of tracing the history of its reception. Furthermore it was the novel by Austen most often prescribed as a set text in higher education, and both JA and HE were booming. The Casebook did very well, being reprinted in an extended form in 1972 to take into account the rise of feminist criticism, and Graham sportingly wrote to me confessing that he had been wrong. I still receive a trickle of royalties from that Casebook.

  I became a little bored with giving my Emma lecture in one university after another in the same week, but an unexpected feature of this tour provided some diversion. My first engagement was in Toulouse. At that time the University was distributed among buildings in the centre of the city as it had been for centuries (it has since moved to a campus on the outskirts). I gave my lecture in the afternoon, and in the early evening I walked from my hotel to the restaurant where a group of the senior staff were gathered for dinner. On my way I passed a cinema which, I was surprised to see, was showing Deep Throat. This film and its star Linda Lovelace had received enormous media attention since its release in America in 1972, being the first movie with hardcore pornographic content to be publicly shown in New York and other American cities, and its story was well known: the heroine has difficulty achieving orgasm until her doctor discovers that her clitoris is located in her throat, after which she finds sexual fulfilment by fellating a series of grateful men while the doctor disports himself in more orthodox fashion with his nurse. The film was banned in Britain, and I thought I would take this opportunity to see it. The dinner started and ended at a conveniently early hour, and I assured my hosts that I could find my own way back to the hotel. As I approached the cinema I saw a crowd of young people milling about outside in an excited and hilarious mood, waiting for admission, and I joined them. It seemed to be as novel and transgressive an experience for them as it was for me. Deep Throat turned out to be a light-hearted movie which used montage to juxtapose close-ups of carnal intercourse of various kinds with the clichés of mainstream cinema for sexual ecstasy, shots of fireworks exploding and waves breaking on the shore (another example of the binary opposition between metonymy and metaphor to add to my collection). The comic nature of the film’s fantastic premise was perhaps what allowed it to get into the public domain in some places, for pornography whether visual or written does not usually arouse laughter intentionally. Nevertheless, any frank depiction of sexual congress will have a powerful effect on a viewer unaccustomed to it. When the film began with a shot of a naked woman sitting on top of a kitchen appliance with her legs wide apart and a man knelt to perform cunnilingus on her, the youth slouched in his seat in the row in front of me suddenly straightened up like a released spring, as if his entire body had had an erection. I was aroused myself, if less demonstratively, in the course of the film.

  I discovered later that I had arrived in France at a time when either the censorship of films had been relaxed or cinema owners had decided to challenge the existing code, and hardcore porn films were being exhibited widely. I went to two more on my tour, one in Montpellier and another in Aix, seizing the opportunity to extend my knowledge of the sexual revolution, though not unaware of the irony of pursuing this research in the evenings while lecturing on one of the most chaste and reticent novelists in the English literary canon by day. I don’t recollect anything from the first of these cinematic experiences except a short film in which a pair of diminutive blonde-haired identical female twins jointly pleasured a Popeye-lookalike sailor with an enormous penis, to a hornpipe musical accompaniment. The last film I saw, entitled L’Essayeuse, was more serious, and had some artistic pretensions. A young blonde who sells lingerie to men to give to their wives while having wild sex with them, falls in love with one of her clients. His wife, not knowing of this relationship, pays the blonde to demonstrate how to act out the sluttish behaviour her husband seems to desire, which sets up a series of increasingly depraved episodes involving both women. The last scene of the film is an orgy which takes place in a steamy bathhouse. The camera pans to take in a convoluted chain of naked men and women, some on their feet, others on their hands and knees, each connected to an orifice or organ of the body in front of them, groping, moaning and writhing in polymorphous abandon. Finally the camera turns aside to show two naked grey-haired women, with sagging breasts and wrinkled skin, sitting on the floor at a distance, and one says to the other as she gazes at the spectacle, ‘J’ai peur.’ Only the French could make a porn film that ends with the line, ‘I am afraid.’

  This film provoked widespread protest from family organisations and religious groups in France, and in 1976 it was judicially condemned and the original negative was burned. Subsequently a stricter censorship of films was applied and hardcore movies were banned from public cinemas in France (though the development of videotape would soon make this method of distribution redundant). Not long afterwards I read a brief report in the Guardian that Isabelle Bourjac, who played the wife in L’Essayeuse, had committed suicide. It is difficult not to connect this act with the notoriety of the film. Deep Throat, in spite of its playful high spirits, also turned out to have a dark side, when its star Linda Lovelace revealed in an autobiography that she had been coerced into performing in it by her controlling husband. She became a born-again Christian and campaigner against pornography.

  Pornography is not without social usefulness. It may give solace to those who for one reason or another are unable to experience sexual intercourse, it is of assistance to sperm donors, and it may have a positively liberating effect in some circumstances. A priest of my acquaintance told me that one of his parishioners claimed that persuading his wife to watch a ‘blue movie’ with him had saved their marriage. But its availability needs to be controlled by scarcity and shame, because it easily becomes addictive, as I discovered on my journey through the south of France in 1975. Since those days pornography, often in extreme forms, has become omnipresent and instantly accessible from the internet on computers, tablets and smartphones, with calamitous effects, especially on the young.

  This was brought home to me recently when I watched a Channel 4 TV documentary about sex education in secondary schools. A Dutch expert in the field was invited to a British mixed comprehensive school in Yorkshire to see if she could improve the attitude and understanding of 15–16-year-old pupils with regard to sex. A liberated and enlightened lady whose style of teaching was to be totally frank and unshockable, she was perceptibly shaken when the boys spoke casually in the mixed class about ‘jissing’ (i.e. ejaculating) on to girls’ faces. There may have been an element of unfounded bravado in this, but their assumption that this practice was quite normal was disturbing. They could only have learned about it from internet porn
. (I first encountered this item in the erotic repertoire myself in a funny, shocking but entirely unpornographic short story by Martin Amis first published in 1981, called ‘Let Me Count the Times’.) By the end of the televised sex education experiment the teacher had succeeded, it appeared, in making the boys more respectful and the girls more assertive towards the opposite sex, but whether these effects will survive continued exposure to internet porn must be doubtful.

  The British Council Specialist tour was not the only way for a suitably qualified academic to see the world from the 1970s onwards. Increasingly the international conference provided further opportunities, facilitated by the rapid expansion of commercial air travel. If you were invited to deliver a paper in your subject area at such a conference you could usually get a grant from your university to cover your expenses; and sometimes a foreign association of university teachers of English would invite you to be a guest speaker at their annual conference, and then they would pay the expenses. Sometimes the British Council sent a group of specialists to such a conference if it was considered important. In the spring of 1980 I went to Turkey with such a group to a conference in Ankara, and we moved on afterwards to give lectures in Istanbul. Both parts of this trip would provide locations and prompt ideas for a future novel.

  At the end of 1978 I was invited to the Big Daddy of all such gatherings, the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America, which was a memorable experience for more reasons than one. The ‘MLA’, as the event is known familiarly to American academics, was held in those days between Christmas and the New Year in a big city on either the East or the West Coast. In 1978 it ran from 27th–30th December, in New York. I was invited to contribute a short paper to a panel on the concept of ‘period’ in literary history, for which the MLA was willing to pay for my airfare and accommodation. By happy chance (or perhaps it wasn’t chance, perhaps in the US as well as the UK we were by now tagged as a kind of double act) Malcolm Bradbury was also invited to give a paper at the convention, and it was a pleasing prospect to have each other’s company for this trip. To complete its attractions, my friend Donald Fanger, Professor of Russian at Harvard, invited both of us to join him and his family on New Year’s Eve in the Boston suburb where they lived, and to stay on for a few days. Since the Fangers’ houseroom was limited, it was arranged that I would stay with them and Malcolm with other mutual friends, Martin and Carol Green.