Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  To ensure that Malcolm and I would have adjoining seats on the flights I offered to obtain our tickets, and did so at a branch of American Express which had opened on the Birmingham campus (a sign that academic travel was a growing market). We met by arrangement at Heathrow – it was Terminal 3 in those days for all intercontinental flights – and joined the line to check in for the 13.30 Pan Am flight to Kennedy airport, which because of the time zone difference would get us there comfortably in the afternoon. I handed over my passport to the check-in clerk, who flipped through it several times. ‘You don’t have a valid visa,’ he said.

  WHAT? I was astonished, incredulous, stunned, shocked and dismayed in quick succession as I struggled to grasp the truth. I had not noticed that the ten-year employment visa I had obtained at the time of my stint at Berkeley had expired. It was a humiliating and stupid oversight. I could not travel to New York, and the whole eagerly anticipated trip seemed about to dissolve like a dream. The Pan Am clerk was sympathetic, and said he could put me on the same flight next day if I got myself a new visa in time. ‘Will the American Embassy be open today?’ I asked. He assured me that it would be, but pointed out that there was no other Pan Am flight to New York that day. ‘Can I transfer this ticket to another airline?’ Not normally, was the discouraging answer. I decided that I would try to get a visa anyway, and pay if necessary for the first available flight to New York. I said farewell to a disappointed Malcolm and took the Tube back to central London, carrying my suitcase, and sweating in the overcoat I was wearing for New York temperatures. Oxford Street was crowded with shoppers looking for sale bargains in the big stores. I stopped in one to get new passport photos from an automatic machine, as I was sure I would need them, before hurrying to the embassy in Grosvenor Square. It was open and fortunately not very busy. I made my request, filled in the forms, and sat and waited for about four hours until my name was called and I was handed my passport with the new visa.

  I dashed into the one-way street beside the embassy and hailed a taxi. An Indian family tried to get in through the opposite door but I shooed them away, and ordered the driver to take me to Heathrow as quickly as possible. It was early evening when we got there and Terminal 3 was relatively quiet. The departures board showed one last flight to New York, by British Airways, at 2200 hours. The Pan Am desk was deserted apart from a single female official, who was desultorily tidying the desks. I threw myself on her mercy and explained my plight. Could she authorise the transfer of my ticket to BA? She could. She would. She did. Blessing her, I hurried to the BA desk. The flight was full on paper, but there was a little group of standby passengers hoping for no-shows. I joined them, and after a tense couple of hours we were all issued with boarding passes and checked our luggage. With one bound (well actually it had been several bounds) I was free of the knots I had tied myself in.

  Our flight benefited from a tail wind, according to the captain, and got to New York in record time. The immigration area in the Kennedy terminal, laid out like a cattle pen, was almost empty and I was whisked through. The driver of the yellow cab I took drove as if he was trying to break a record, with no need for encouragement from me. The result was that I entered the foyer of the Hilton Hotel in mid-town Manhattan at about 8 p.m. New York time. I felt it had been the longest day of my life, and it wasn’t over yet. Most astonishing of all – there was Malcolm, in the foyer, chatting to a group of people with his overcoat on and his suitcase at his feet. He laughed in astonishment when I greeted him. ‘How on earth did you get here?’ he demanded. When I explained he said, ‘You did well,’ and patted me on the shoulder in an almost fatherly way. ‘But you look as if you only just got here yourself,’ I said, which turned out to be almost the truth. The Pan Am flight had been delayed by an hour and a half. The immigration queues at Kennedy had been long. He had got talking to a group of other British conferees and joined them in taking a bus into Manhattan instead of a cab; and not realising that his VIP status entitled him to check in at a special desk, he was waiting for the long line which stretched from the main Reception desk into the street to diminish.

  Recovering from the disastrous start to my trip had put me into a euphoric mood to enjoy the extraordinary event that was the MLA. Some ten thousand academics had converged on two gigantic hotels in Manhattan (not all of them actually staying in one, of course, as Malcolm and I were) to attend lectures and panel discussions on every conceivable literary and linguistic subject from ‘Old English Riddles’ to ‘Faulkner Concordances’, from ‘Lesbian-Feminist Teaching and Learning’ to ‘Problems of Cultural Distortion in Translating Expletives in the Work of Cortázar, Sender, Baudelaire and Flaubert’. The programme was laid out in a book as thick as the telephone directory of a small town, listing 600 different events running concurrently, thirty at a time, from 8.30 in the morning to 10.15 at night. Those that involved the stars of the profession took place in huge ballrooms with audiences of over a thousand, but people at less prominent events were fickle and might leave halfway through to try the one next door if there was audible applause or laughter from it. But that was only one level of conference activity. There were also caucus meetings and cocktail parties and cash bars and business meetings for various specialist groups. Above all, the MLA was a place to meet people: old friends and old enemies, people whose books you had reviewed, or who had reviewed yours, people you might hire, or who might offer you a job. Some senior professors spent most of their time at the MLA interviewing young hopefuls in their bedrooms. And it was likely that other, more intimate bedroom meetings were being arranged. After Malcolm had delivered his talk a woman engaged him in conversation and invited him to spend the night with her. ‘People only come to this circus to get laid,’ she assured him, as he struggled to find a polite way of declining. My own talk, ‘Historicism and Literary History: Mapping the Modern Period’, was well received, though nobody tried to seduce me afterwards. I was sufficiently entertained by everything else that was going on, and arranging to have breakfast, lunch or dinner with old friends from Brown and Berkeley. I was especially pleased to see Stanley and Adrienne Fish again, though Stanley had left Berkeley and was now at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, a step up towards fulfilling his ambition to be the highest-paid professor of English in America.

  Every MLA convention has a particular, though by no means exclusive, theme, and that year it was Modernism and Postmodernism. On the first morning the biggest of the Hilton’s ballrooms was packed for a session on Postmodernism with three well-known speakers: the Arab-American literary theorist Ihab Hassan, who was one of the first to apply the concept to contemporary writing; Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian-French feminist poststructuralist critic; and Christine Brooke-Rose. I was personally acquainted with this lady. Born in 1923, she had produced by this time a substantial oeuvre of fiction and criticism, and would add to it substantially in the rest of her long lifetime, which she spent partly in England and partly in France. In 1968 she moved from the former to the latter to take up a professorial appointment at the radical university of Paris Vincennes. She took a sympathetic interest in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and other exponents of the nouveau roman, translating some of their books, but continued to be a presence in the British literary avant garde in the 1970s with her own novels, full of postmodernist metafictional devices and language games, and wrote academic criticism in the structuralist and poststructuralist modes.

  In 1977 it was Birmingham’s turn to host the annual Conference of University Teachers of English (UTE), and I volunteered to organise it with the help of my colleague Ian Small. I had been impressed by an article Christine Brooke-Rose had recently published, wittily entitled ‘The Squirm of the True’, about Henry James’s famously ambiguous ghost story, which prompted me to think that she would be an interesting guest speaker who might entice our colleagues in other universities to give up three days of their Easter vacation to attend the conference. Ian agreed.

  Although we were able to offer only travel expenses a
nd accommodation in the University’s Staff House, she accepted our invitation, and I was responsible for looking after her. She flew from Paris to Birmingham, where I met her at the airport. She wrote to me in advance, ‘How shall we recognise each other?’ and answered her own question with a description of her planned attire as meticulously detailed as anything in Robbe-Grillet’s novels:

  I am medium height (5'7") with short blonde hair (shortish with fringe). Will be wearing black trousers and, if mild, a yellow raincoat top, ¾ length, if cold, a black fur coat with grey fox collar. But may just wear a black, tan striped cardigan & carry the coat. I think I’ll wear my black velvet cap, that is probably the most distinctive.

  She was at this time teaching part-time at Vincennes while living in the country outside Paris, alone except for occasional visits, she told me, ‘by my lover’. The way she referred to this person, somehow implying that every attractive single lady of a certain age would have one, struck me as the quintessence of French sophistication, and the relentless specificity with which she had prepared me to recognise her made me apprehensive that she would be a rather demanding guest. But she was not. Our conference, like most of its kind in Britain, was a small and unglamorous affair, taking place in one of the University’s halls of residence, and attracting only about seventy-five participants, but if she was disappointed she did not show it and seemed pleased to be part of the event. I never felt completely relaxed in her presence, because I was not as familiar with her work as I ought to have been and as she assumed I was. I do not remember what she spoke about, but that goes for most of the many lectures I have heard in my life, and I believe hers was well received. We parted on amicable terms, expressing mutual pleasure in her visit.

  The Modes of Modern Writing was published about six months later, and I put her name on a list of people to receive advance copies from the publisher. I soon received a letter from Christine complimenting me handsomely on the book, making two criticisms on technical points, and then continuing:

  I do, however, have a more personal complaint, which I hope won’t sound peevish. It is not meant to, I assure you, for I have become quite philosophical on this odd state of affairs. And that is, you don’t once mention me, either as critic or as writer. I’m used to it now, after 20 years, but immensely puzzled.

  It was an immensely long letter, typed in single spacing on both sides of a foolscap sheet, a cri de coeur, a catalogue of complaints about being ignored by British academic and journalistic critics, her ideas borrowed without acknowledgement, her novels misunderstood, misrepresented or simply ignored. I read this letter with increasing discomfort, for I was keenly aware that Christine was perfectly justified in complaining that I had not made any reference to her novels in the final chapter of my book, which was on Postmodernist Fiction, since they were obviously eligible for inclusion by virtue of their formal and linguistic experiment. The simple reason was that I hadn’t read any of them when I finished Modes and sent it off to my agent, some months before I thought of inviting Christine to speak at our conference and started belatedly to acquire some knowledge of her work. I felt free to confess this in reply to her letter because at the end of it she suddenly abandoned the tone of an embittered victim and said disarmingly, ‘Well, that’s enough complaint. And I who complain haven’t read your novels! That’s the way it goes, life speeds by, one can hardly keep up.’ On the basis of these mutual mea culpas we were able to draw a line under this contretemps. Or so I thought.

  I was unaware that Christine was speaking at the MLA until I got to New York and studied the programme of events. Her presence gave the forum on Postmodernism a special interest for me, but the topic was interesting to a great many delegates, and I could only find an unoccupied seat towards the back of the hall. I regretted this until Christine began to speak and quite soon uttered some very disparaging remarks about The Modes of Modern Writing, and then I was glad to be sitting among strangers well back from the platform. It seemed that she had not after all forgiven me for ignoring her work in my book. Later in the day somebody who recognised me and knew Christine well told me that she was distraught and refusing to leave her room, having learned that I had been present in the audience for her talk. She had had no idea that I was at the MLA. I asked my informant to assure her that I was not seriously upset or offended, which was true. I completely understood her continued resentment, and how embarrassed she would be by having unwittingly exposed it to me so publicly.

  There was a vase of red roses in my hotel room, placed there by the organising committee to welcome me to the convention. I took one out, dried and trimmed the stalk, and attached it to a brief note telling her I was more amused than offended by the episode, and bade her think no more about it. This I gave to Reception to deliver to her. We patched up our friendship in subsequent correspondence, but we did not meet again. In September 1984 she sent me a copy of her latest novel, Amalgememnon, inscribed, ‘For David, whom I should have put into this as a fleeting character, tit for tat. With love, Christine.’ Small World was published earlier that year, but she was not the model for any of the characters, so I assumed she meant she had resisted the temptation to take satirical revenge for my neglect of her work in The Modes of Modern Writing. The affectionate conclusion of the inscription, however, indicated that she bore no real grudge. In the latter years of her life Carcanet Press ensured that her old and new work was kept in print, and it attracted more attention, but she was always chiefly famous for not being famous. ‘Christine Brooke-Rose, brilliant and neglected’ was the heading of a Guardian obituary article when she died in 2012.

  Readers of Small World will recognise the MLA convention in New York I have described as the setting of that novel’s penultimate chapter and narrative dénouement. It ended with a VIP champagne reception on the penthouse floor of the Hilton, to which Malcolm and I were invited, and later I contrived a brief Hitchcockian appearance for both of us among the guests at the fictional party. The young hero, Persse McGarrigle, also present, has his glass refilled

  in an absent-minded fashion by a shortish, dark-haired man standing nearby with a bottle of champagne in his hand, talking to a tallish dark-haired man smoking a pipe. ‘If I can have Eastern Europe,’ the tallish man was saying in an English accent, ‘you can have the rest of the world.’ ‘All right,’ said the shortish man, ‘but I daresay people will still get us mixed up.’

  In 1978, when the action of my novel takes place, Malcolm was writing his novel Rates of Exchange, about a fictional eastern European communist state called Slaka, which he published in 1983; and though I had not started Small World, it wouldn’t be long before I did.

  The morning after the MLA ended we took the train to Boston to see in the New Year with Donald and Margot Fanger, their family and friends. It was a jolly occasion, but the icing on the cake of this trip for me was that Donald, knowing I had written a book inspired by the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson, and having been a colleague of the great man at Harvard, had thoughtfully arranged for the three of us to have breakfast together before my return to England later the same day. It took place at the Hyatt hotel overlooking the Charles River, a new and trendy structure having a large atrium with real trees growing inside it and glass elevators. It also had a revolving restaurant at the top, but we breakfasted in a more modest one on the ground floor. I recall I had Eggs Benedict for the first time on Donald’s recommendation, and enjoyed them. Roman Jakobson ate more sparingly. Small in stature, neatly dressed in suit and tie, he was then aged eighty-three, physically frail but mentally alert. He smiled as he shook my hand and said he was glad to meet the author of The Modes of Modern Writing. Two years earlier he had thanked me for ‘your very interesting book’ when I sent him a copy – these words handwritten on one of the customised postcards he used to acknowledge such gifts, which were evidently numerous. I later discovered that I had misrepresented one element of his seminal paper, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in my
book. I corrected this in the second edition published in 1979, sending a copy to Jakobson. He thanked me on another customised postcard for ‘the new, improved edition of your fundamental Modes’, a conative message which gave great pleasure to the addressee, to use Jakobson’s own linguistic terminology. At the breakfast I apologised once more for my error and took the opportunity to mention what appeared to me a more serious misrepresentation of his metaphor/metonymy distinction by a guru of poststructuralism, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in one of his seminal papers, ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’. In a brief reference to Freud’s terms for the different ways in which dreams are structured, Jakobson had identified both ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’ in the dream-work as metonymic substitutions, as opposed to what Freud called ‘symbolism’, which is based, like metaphor, on similarity between dissimilars (e.g. long pointed objects as phallic, open-ings as vaginal). Lacan however, though referring to Jakobson’s work, identified ‘condensation’ with metaphor, in opposition to the metonymic ‘displacement’, and made no reference to ‘symbolism’. I asked Jakobson if he agreed that Lacan seemed to have either misunderstood the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, or revised Jakobson’s formulation without acknowledging it. The old man smiled and nodded an ambiguous assent but made a deprecating gesture as if to indicate that it didn’t bother him, and perhaps it didn’t at this late stage of his life. He was glad that his ideas were still in circulation, but evidently he didn’t want to be drawn into any further controversy about them. At some later point in the conversation he said that if he had his life over again he would like to devote himself to a more thorough investigation of aphasia.