Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  As it was a small, elite conference, at which everybody attended every session, we soon became a unified group, or rather two groups, the home team and the visitors. The Israeli academics, with the exception of the suave and smiling Hrushovski, seemed different from the Jewish intellectuals I had met in America – more earnest, less witty, and although always courteous to the visitors, ferocious in argument with each other. The programme was absurdly crowded. Every participant had been asked to send to the organisers in advance a copy of their paper, to be distributed to all the others before the event, so that each session could consist of a brief summary of the paper by its author, followed by questions and observations from the audience. This procedure is a good one in principle, but as usual several participants had not submitted their papers in time, or had revised them since doing so, or took too much time summarising them, and so the programme tended to get more and more behind schedule as the day wore on. There were eight to ten papers a day, with titles like ‘A Theory of the Impossibility of a Theory of the Literary Text’, ‘Isotopic Organization and Narrative Grammar’ and ‘The Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structure or Allegory’. Israel was experiencing a heat wave. We were crammed into a low-ceilinged room only just big enough to contain our number, with air conditioning that was barely adequate, and at the end of the day we tumbled out of it, exhausted, sweating, and gasping for a drink and a swim. Then we went out into the city in groups to eat at one of the many open-air restaurants in Tel Aviv, some of them set up on the street pavements, serving delicious Middle Eastern food in the warm Mediterranean night.

  On the evening of the second day this relief was almost intolerably delayed by an official reception at Tel Aviv University, an address by the Rector, and two public lectures, one by me entitled ‘Ambiguously Ever After: Problematic Endings in English Fiction’ and the other, ‘What is Semiotics?’, by Umberto Eco, of the University of Bologna, who had joined the conference late. He was not yet the world-famous author of The Name of the Rose, which was published the following year. I was acutely conscious that the last thing my fellow conferees wanted to do that evening was to listen to two academic lectures, back to back. Their misery was compounded by the fact that the air conditioning in the auditorium was obviously not working, because the atmosphere was stifling. Even the ‘public’ members of the audience soon began to wilt. The chairman of the evening took Eco and me aside and begged us not to take more than 45 minutes each to deliver our lectures. With an effort, editing as we went along, ‘We did it!’ as Umberto said triumphantly to me at the end of his lecture, with perspiration pouring down his face into his beard. He seemed to have enjoyed the challenge and had delivered his lecture con brio.

  When you go to a conference of this kind you always feel a certain tension as you wait for your turn to speak, but as I had given both my paper and my lecture by the end of the second day, I felt free to relax and enjoy the rest of the event. In our precious off-duty hours something like a party spirit developed among some of us, inspired and encouraged by Mieke Bal of the University of Utrecht. She had quickly made friends with another conferee, Susan Suleiman, who was then attached to a college in California, but not long afterwards moved to Harvard where she had a distinguished career as Professor of French and Comparative Literature. Together they befriended me, and in the case of Susan the friendship has been long-lasting. Professional engagements brought her to England from time to time, and me to Cambridge, Mass., and we are regular correspondents. Mieke Bal too went on to have a distinguished academic career, in the Netherlands, publishing books on an impressively wide range of cultural subjects, but I saw her only once again after the Israel conference. It was years later in America, and I scarcely recognised her. I described her in my Israel diary as ‘blonde, voluptuous, dressed in semi-diaphanous silk or cotton dresses and smocks, with matching hair ribbons and plastic pop jewellery – butterflies, cakes, ice cream cones etc.’ In America she was blade-thin, short-haired, and austerely dressed, but what had prompted this transformation I never discovered.

  After three days the conference ‘went up to Jerusalem’. The biblical phrase became a reality as our bus climbed steadily, the road lined on each side by burnt-out trucks treated with preservative paint and placed there to commemorate the blockade of Jerusalem in 1948. Soon after arriving we were given a walking tour of the Old City, plunging into labyrinthine alleys lined with stalls selling kaftans, leather goods, jewellery and sweetmeats that, I opined in my diary, ‘could give you dysentery just looking at them’. We visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre looked after by Greek Orthodox priests, one of whom pressed saccharine holy pictures and miniature crucifixes on us in return for donations. The place resounded with the noise of restoration work, and had no religious atmosphere. In fact most of the Holy Places we saw in Jerusalem and on later excursions outside were a disappointment to me. Bethlehem was perhaps the worst, the main square a bazaar of tawdry devotional objects, the shrine of the Nativity full of flashlight-popping tourists.

  On the last day there was an excursion by coach, first to Masada, site of the fortifications under siege by the Roman army in AD 70, which ended in the mass suicide of the Jewish defenders. Tourists reach it by a vertiginous cable car ride. We concealed our misgivings by joking that the progress of narratology would be seriously retarded if the cable snapped, which was hard on Mieke Bal who was genuinely terrified. We proceeded to Jericho, a sad disappointment, and then to the Dead Sea which was fun – floating effortlessly in the soup-like water, followed by a mineral-rich mud bath. The prone barrel-chested figure of Umberto Eco encased in black mud, save for his head and beard, was a sight to remember. Back in Jerusalem Mieke, quite recovered from the trauma of the cable car, led a party of those who were up for it to a discotheque at the Hilton. It was something I had never done in Birmingham, though Birmingham had dozens of discotheques and Jerusalem seemed to have only two, of which the Hilton’s was the more exclusive and expensive, where we danced incongruously among the city’s gilded and smartly dressed youth. The next day the conferees dispersed, except for those of us who had signed up for an optional three-day tour of Israel which included the Jordan Valley, a delicious swim in the Sea of Galilee, an illuminating stay at a kibbutz run on the traditional communitarian model, and visits to the historical sites of Acre and Caesarea.

  In Small World Morris Zapp organises a conference on ‘The Future of Criticism in Jerusalem’ which (until Philip Swallow apparently contracts legionnaires’ disease) is a huge success because ‘there is just one paper a day actually delivered by its author early in the morning. All the other papers are circulated in Xeroxed form, and the remainder of the day is dedicated to “unstructured discussion” of the issues raised in these documents, or in other words to swimming and sunbathing at the Hilton pool, sightseeing in the Old City, shopping in the bazaar, eating out in ethnic restaurants and making expeditions …’ This totally fictitious event was intended as a climactic example of ‘the appeal of the conference circuit: it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world!’ It suited my fictional purposes to exaggerate the hedonistic character of Morris Zapp’s conference, but I always feel a twinge of remorse when I re-read this travesty of the real one. In spite of the flurry of sightseeing at the end, it was a hard-working, serious and rewarding intellectual event. As always there were some dud papers, but the general standard was high, and the engagement of the participants intense. One paper, by Anne Banfield of Berkeley, aroused so much interest and disagreement that we voted to schedule an additional session to continue the debate. Admittedly that was on the first day of the conference, before the gruelling nature of the programme had fully sunk in.

  5

  The late seventies and early eighties were years of professional advancement and widening horizons for me, but over the same period illness and mortality took a heavy toll on the previous generation of my famil
y. In 1976 my uncle John, who had been suffering from what he thought was back pain, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. When the specialist broke this bleak news to my aunt Lu she decided that John should not be told, and instead he was informed that the pain he was experiencing was caused by shingles. He was however ill enough to need care in a private sanatorium in Knokke-le-Zoute, the resort on the Belgian coast where they lived in retirement, and I accompanied my mother to visit him. We travelled by train and boat to Ostend where Lu met us with her car. She had been devastated by the diagnosis and was irrationally angry with the doctors who insisted that there was nothing to be done except palliative care. Lu was I think an atheist, while John was a long-lapsed Catholic, and both were strongly anticlerical. Unable to invoke the consolations of religion, she used the fiction of ‘shingles’ to spare him the knowledge that his plight was hopeless. I doubt whether he was deceived. I was shocked when I saw him in his room in the sanatorium, thin and haggard, moving with difficulty between his bed and the bathroom, his dressing gown drooping from his bowed shoulders. He had always taken a pride in his appearance and physique, and enjoyed challenging sports like sailing and gliding, and it was distressing, especially to Mum, to see him brought low by disease. I visited him again on my own during our brief stay in Le Zoute, and he said to me at some point, ‘I’ve been a bloody fool in my life, Dave.’ He had been a habitual cigarette smoker, and I assumed he was referring to that, but he may have been regretting other things done or not done in the past.

  Not long afterwards I returned to Knokke-le-Zoute to attend his funeral – alone, because Mum, who was getting increasingly frail, was not equal either physically or psychologically to making this second journey. John and Lu had a wide circle of friends, including her relatives, so it was a big bourgeois funeral with a great display of expensive wreaths vying with each other to demonstrate the mourners’ status and grief. Lu tactfully advised me on the choice of one to represent John’s British family. She told me that when he was near the end of his life she had been asked by the sanatorium if he would like to see a priest, and when she put the question to him, he nodded; so like many a lapsed Catholic he received the last sacraments. I was pleased, knowing that this would be a great consolation to his sisters. In consequence a Catholic priest officiated at the funeral, though it was a simple service, not a requiem mass. I observed that when one of the cars conveying mourners drew up at the cemetery the occupants emerged coughing in a cloud of smoke, caused, one of them told me, by a cigarette stub smouldering in the vehicle’s over-filled ashtray – a mishap which to a novelist’s eye had a black comic appropriateness in the circumstances, and which I later incorporated in a funeral scene in How Far Can You Go?

  Mum, who was now seventy-four, had given up some time ago a part-time clerical job in the library of Goldsmiths’ College in New Cross, which she had greatly enjoyed for the pleasant company of the staff and the interest they took in the publications of her son. She no longer made occasional visits to us in Birmingham, and led a sequestered life at home with Dad, who became increasingly worried by her mental deterioration and loss of weight. In the autumn of 1977 she was admitted to King’s College Hospital and was also referred to the Maudsley, London’s premier psychiatric hospital. The Maudsley diagnosed depression, though they were not certain, and King’s College more confidently determined that she had mild Parkinson’s disease. In fact she was suffering from both conditions.

  When I informed her sister Eileen in Hawaii of Mum’s sad state she immediately recognised the symptoms of depression from episodes in her own life: ‘almost identical to mine, all the same symptoms – the lassitude, the tiredness, the lack of interest in anything, the constant depression – so that I can understand just what hell she is going through.’ I had wondered in my own letter whether this propensity was inherited, since I knew that Adèle Murphy, my maternal grandmother who died when I was an infant, had suffered from depression, and Eileen emphatically agreed. ‘You are quite right. I am convinced that we all inherited this unfortunate trait … Our mother had two breakdowns and each time had to be sent away to a mental hospital for approximately a six-month stay … I am sure, too, you knew that John had a breakdown a few years after he was married and had to go away. He received the “Shock Treatment” which apparently was effective.’ I knew vaguely that my uncle John suffered some kind of nervous breakdown at that time but not the seriousness of it, nor did I have any idea that my grandmother had spent such long periods in a mental hospital, for Mum seldom spoke of her parents. Eileen added: ‘the weakness is definitely on the maternal side, because I can relate other instances in my mother’s sister’s family. There has been no trace of any such weakness in my father’s siblings and their offspring.’ These revelations and Eileen’s shrewd analysis of them (‘In every case it seems to indicate an inability to cope with setbacks, not from mental weakness per se’) had uncomfortable implications for my own tendency to overreact to setbacks with anxiety and depression, of which I am more conscious now than when I read Eileen’s remarkable letter. I was saddened to learn that what she identified as her own ‘first lapse into depression’ was precipitated by the reunion with her two siblings in Hawaii in 1969, in which I had had a hand. She was already sinking into a depressive state when they arrived, and so far from being the happy occasion she had anticipated, it was perceived by her as a disaster for which she was chiefly responsible. ‘I became burdened with guilt and remorse, dwelling on the fact that I had not given them the happy time I had planned. Everything seemed to go wrong … I felt terrible on the morning they left, they didn’t realise I’m sure what a state I was in, but I couldn’t believe they could go off and leave me – it was devastating and I felt I had no-one to turn to.’

  In fact they did realise what a state she was in, though they concealed it from me at the time. This depression lasted two years, in the course of which Eileen was treated by a psychiatrist, and her brother John wrote a letter to the doctor, which he copied to me, giving a detailed account of Eileen’s disturbing behaviour while they were with her, in the hope that it would be useful. By one means or another Eileen recovered from the depression, and in the letter of 1977 she said, ‘I really think this is one of the happier periods of my life. All my projects and interests I find so enjoyable and no two days are alike.’ She was supporting herself mainly by babysitting for the tourists in the Waikiki hotels – with her beautiful manners and classy British accent she must have seemed like a reincarnation of Mary Poppins to these families – supplemented by some investment income and an occasional day’s work as an ‘extra’ in the long-running TV series Hawaii Five-O. She wrote: ‘I cannot think of any other place where I could lead such an interesting, full and diversified life, and still in one of the most delightful places to live.’

  Mum came out of hospital and her condition seemed to improve as a result of the drugs she was given, but she was very thin and lacking in energy and became increasingly dependent on Dad’s loving care. I did my best to visit them when I was in London on business, and she always managed a rare smile for me and took an interest in my professional and family news, but each time I returned to the house in Brockley, it seemed to me that she had faded a little more, like a photograph. The house, however, still looked almost exactly as it had done when I left it to get married. I could have helped them financially to modernise the house, or to move to a more comfortable one, but it was far too late for either of them to contemplate such upheaval.

  Dad’s mother, my much-loved Nana, was living contentedly, as she had done since Pop died in 1969, in a little apartment of her own in a house in East Dulwich belonging to her niece Hilda and her partner, Stan. They were unable to marry because Stan could not obtain a divorce from some previous union – a fact known to their close acquaintances but never mentioned. At some point I cannot now identify, Hilda and Stan revealed that they wanted to retire to the seaside, and were willing to take Nana with them. This precipitated an uncharacteristic anxiety
crisis in Nana. She did not want to leave her cosy apartment with its proximity to Dad and Mum, and to me too since I used to take opportunities to visit her when I was in London; but she could not live alone, and clearly she could not move into Millmark Grove where Dad already had his hands full. She became so seriously disturbed that she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where, after all other treatments had failed, she was given electroconvulsive shock therapy and miraculously cured. Two of my relatives benefited from a medical procedure that would soon be regarded as dangerous and oppressive. Nana returned home serene and cheerful, Hilda and Stan heroically agreed to stay on in East Dulwich for her sake, and their three lives continued as before.

  By the autumn of 1979 Eileen was depressed again, and with some reason. The trigger was a sudden fall in the US stock market which greatly reduced the value of her investment income. She lived in Waikiki, Honolulu’s beach resort, in a rented apartment the cost of which was likely to be increased, and she was afraid she would not be able to afford it. I took the opportunity offered by yet another conference, at the beginning of November that year, to visit her briefly and give her some support. It was a symposium entitled ‘The State of the Language’ organised by the English Speaking Union in San Francisco, and my participation came about through an article I published in Encounter in 1978, entitled ‘Where It’s At: The Poetry of Psychobabble’. I had been contributing regularly to this magazine ever since Frank Kermode, who was co-editor with Melvin Lasky, had asked me to review a clutch of books about H.G. Wells published in 1966, his centenary year. In the following year it was revealed that Encounter had always been covertly funded by the CIA. Frank, who had been kept entirely ignorant of this fact when he accepted the editorial position, understandably felt betrayed by Lasky and resigned, but I continued to write for Encounter. The CIA’s motives for subsidising the magazine were to demonstrate what quality journalism was like in a free society, in contrast to equivalent publications in the Soviet bloc, and it seemed to me to do this admirably in spite of the underhand methods of the sponsors. I always read the magazine with pleasure and instruction, and never experienced the slightest politically motivated attempt to influence my own contributions. For much of this time the literary editor I dealt with was my friend Anthony Thwaite, who from 1973 became co-editor of the magazine. I valued the fact that Encounter gave its contributors plenty of space, so that it was worth taking the trouble to write a piece that could later be collected in a book – as several of mine were.