Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  I suggested the ‘Psychobabble’ article to Anthony myself. Someone had sent me a novel called The Serial by an American writer, Cyra McFadden, which was a satirical portrait of the affluent, self-obsessed people who lived in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Readers of my previous memoir may recall our enjoyable family excursions to its attractions, like the little port of Sausalito and Stinson Beach, when we were living in the city in the summer of 1965. The Serial, so called because it was originally serialised in a Marin County alternative newspaper, is a kind of soap opera about crises and conflicts in the personal relationships of Marin folk as expressed in their characteristic dialect, which may be illustrated by the following quotation:

  ‘Harvey and I are going through this dynamic just now, and it’s kinda where I’m at. I haven’t got a lot of psychic energy left over for social interaction. So whatever it is, maybe you should just run it by me right here. Off the wall.’

  It was another American writer, R.D. Rosen, who a little later gave this kind of speech a name, in his Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling, which Cyra McFadden herself endorsed. She was quoted as saying that conversations conducted in psychobabble ‘make any exchange of ideas impossible, block any attempt at true communication; substitute what Orwell called “prefabricated words and phrases” for thought’. Though The Serial works brilliantly as satire on the behaviour of a particular social group by exaggerating their dependence on this vocabulary, I questioned her denunciation of the vocabulary itself. Most of the language we use in speech is ‘prefabricated’ inasmuch as we don’t coin the words and rarely invent the phrases we use in normal speech. Colloquial slang, of which psychobabble is an example, is generated to overcome the deadening monotony of simple referential discourse, until it itself becomes too familiar to perform that function, when it either disappears or is absorbed into the received lexicon. And it seemed to me that the very success of psychobabble, which quickly spread across America from the West Coast, suggested that it had some stylistic appeal to its users which would be worth analysing. Examining the vocabulary of the characters in The Serial – coming from, coming down, where it’s at, get down, get centered, get it on, get to, get off on, get together, hang in, blow away, run by, upfront, off the wall, spaced out, etc. – I concluded that psychobabble is a metaphorical type of slang, which presents experience primarily in terms of the movement and organisation of matter in space:

  Human existence is seen as a process of incessant change, readjustment and discovery – no one’s condition is static or fixed. This is ultimately a very optimistic world view of a characteristically American kind, since it banishes ennui and promises that no evil will be permanent. It also tacitly allays the fear of death by avoiding metaphors drawn from organic life, in which change means eventual decay. Its model of experience is drawn from physics, not biology – the individual is pictured in terms of energy and mass, moving about in a curiously timeless space …

  Soon after this article appeared my Berkeley friend Lenny Michaels wrote to say he had read it and wanted me to write something on the same theme for a book he was co-editing with Christopher Ricks called The State of the Language, which was to be published by the University of California Press in association with the English Speaking Union, and launched at the San Francisco Symposium. It seemed to me a surprising collaboration, and Lenny was deviating from his editorial brief since Ricks was supposed to commission the British contributors, and Lenny the American ones. I said he was welcome to reprint the article but I couldn’t write a new one. Most of the book’s contents were new essays by a variety of distinguished authors, but there were a few previously published articles, including mine, and I was invited to take part in the Symposium.

  One of its sponsors was the British entrepreneur Freddie Laker, who pioneered low-cost air travel from 1966 onwards and in 1977 started his Skytrain operation between Britain and America. He generously provided free travel for three of the Brits who attended the conference – the critic and Cambridge professor Christopher Ricks, the art critic Marina Vaizey and me. I was seated next to Ricks, whom I had met once before, but so briefly that he did not recall it. He was two years older than me and had by this date established a reputation as an outstanding critic and scholar in the field of English Literature. He had been educated and later taught at Oxford, was appointed to a professorship at Bristol University at the age of thirty-five, and moved to Cambridge in 1975. As I mentioned in QAGTTBB, he had reviewed Ginger, You’re Barmy sympathetically in 1962 in the New Statesman, but neither of us had reviewed the other’s work since then, perhaps because, as regards criticism, his interest was focused mainly on poetry and mine on prose fiction. I was aware however that he was hostile to the growing influence of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism on literary studies, and that he would probably disapprove of my attempt in The Modes of Modern Writing to combine some of those methods and concepts with the kind of interpretative close reading of texts typical of the British and American New Criticism, of which he was a brilliant exponent. Ricks also had the reputation of being emotionally volatile. Our conversation on the journey was sparse and somewhat wary, and I can recall only one thing he said, at its outset. As the DC10’s engines rose to a high pitch at the end of the Gatwick runway, straining against the brakes, and the plane suddenly surged forward to take off, he said: ‘I love this moment – the sheer power – like a punch in the small of the back’, a phrase I used later in Small World. Marina, seated on the other side of the aisle, was jollier and I was glad of her company on the long journey, which entailed a stop at Bangor, Maine to refuel and clear immigration, and a change of planes at Los Angeles to get to San Francisco. At the end of the day I fell gratefully into bed, in a luxurious room in the Mark Hopkins Hotel overlooking the Bay.

  I had negotiated eight days’ leave from Birmingham, from Tuesday 30th October to Tuesday 6th November. Wednesday was for long-distance travellers to recover and be entertained by the hosts. The Symposium was held on the Thursday and Friday. To justify the length of my absence in term-time I had arranged to give a talk or reading at Berkeley on the Monday, so that I could make a flying visit to Eileen in Honolulu at the weekend. On the day after my arrival I walked into the first travel agency I found and booked flights. Then I took a stroll to remind myself, after a ten-year absence, of the civilised ambience of San Francisco, and later mingled with the other conferees in and around the Mark Hopkins. It was an interesting gathering, with other Brits besides the Laker-sponsored trio. The most famous of them was Alistair Cooke, whose weekly Letter from America was probably the longest-running talk programme ever broadcast by the BBC. Among the distinguished academics was Randolph Quirk, who had been a lecturer at University College London when I was an undergraduate, and was now Quain Professor there, and Director of a ground-breaking Survey of English Usage. Christopher and Lenny, as editors, moderated most of the panel discussions, and the former began the opening session, entitled ‘Where Is Our Language Going? Are We Getting It Right?’ provocatively by circulating Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be The Verse’, with its decorum-busting first line, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, less familiar and more shocking to some Americans in the audience than to the Brits.

  One of the American participants, John Simon, a drama and film critic based in New York, commented: ‘I don’t give a flying fuck whether people speak in the right tone, but I do care about grammar and syntax.’ He quickly established himself as the Symposium’s prime defender of ‘correct English’, a concept rejected by most modern linguists like Quirk, who regard change in living languages as inevitable and unstoppable. One of the cherished causes of linguistic conservatives is to preserve the distinction between disinterested (meaning objective, unbiased) and uninterested (meaning not interested). In common speech and increasingly in writing the former word is often used as if it were synonymous with the latter. In his contribution to the closing session of t
he Symposium, Randolph Quirk said the attempt to preserve disinterested as a term of approval was bound to fail because English words beginning with the prefix dis were always emotively negative, and to prove his point he recited a long list – ‘dislike, disapprove, disappoint, distress, disgust,’ etc. John Simon, who was on the panel, said: ‘Looking at the woman I love in the audience, I think of one of the most beautiful words in the English language: disrobe.’ For perhaps the only time in his life, Randolph could think of no effective riposte, and stared blankly ahead as the audience erupted in laughter and applause.

  When Lenny first wrote to me about contributing to The State of the Language he asked me if I knew that Stanley Fish, who had first brought us together at Berkeley in 1969, had recently split up with his wife, Adrienne, and was now living with another woman. I didn’t know, and was surprised and sorry, as one usually is when it happens to friends, but in this case with an extra twist that only novelists experience. I had created the character of Morris Zapp partly out of certain attributes of Stanley recognisable to all who knew him, but I invented a fictional history for Zapp which had no parallels in the life of Fish, one of them being a matrimonial breach between Morris and his wife Desirée, brought to a head by his infidelity with their babysitter. It is to disguise the humiliating separation demanded by Desirée that Morris Zapp, to the surprise of his American colleagues, agrees to exile himself for six months to unfashionable Rummidge University on an exchange scheme. But now there was a parallel between the lives of Stanley and Adrienne Fish and Morris and Desirée Zapp. Life had imitated art. I felt uncomfortable about this coincidence, fearing that some readers of the novel familiar with its source material would infer that I had consciously anticipated the breach between the Fishes, whereas it had always seemed to me that they were as firmly married as Mary and I.

  It was less of a surprise that not long afterwards Lenny told me he had split up with his wife Priscilla, and was living with a young poet whom he had met when she was a student at a summer school where he was teaching. It had been obvious to Mary and me in Berkeley in 1969, when we saw a lot of Lenny and Priscilla, that there was considerable friction between them. Unlike Stanley and Adrienne they had always seemed antithetical types, Priscilla blonde, willowy, reserved and quietly spoken, Lenny dark, tense, mercurial, declamatory. In due course they divorced, sharing custody of their two boys, and Lenny married the poet, Brenda, though I did not meet her until 1981.

  Glanced at on a small-scale map Honolulu did not look all that far from San Francisco, but the Pacific is a very big ocean and I discovered that it would be a five-hour flight. Looked at rationally, at least through British eyes, it was absurd to travel nearly five thousand miles there and back for a short weekend, but Eileen appreciated the effort, and flying then was much less of a hassle than it is now. It was the first of four visits I made to Hawaii between 1979 and 1990, and I will have more to say about the place later. On this occasion I did little more than talk to Eileen and let her show me something of Waikiki. She had a comfortable air-conditioned apartment with a pleasant outlook from its balcony, though she drew my attention to a lot that was being prepared for a high-rise building which would take light away from her. The apartment was about ten minutes from the beach, where she introduced me proudly to a little group of friends whom she joined there nearly every day. I was very conscious of being a kind of surrogate son to her, the son she never had and never would have. I had brought a pair of swimming trunks with me and enjoyed a dip in the warm, milky swell of the sea. In the evening she took me to her favourite Chinese restaurant where the tables were arranged on little platforms above ponds filled with water lilies and carp.

  We talked incessantly, about family, about John’s death and Mum’s illness, about her past life, about my career, about her depression and its causes. It was a relief to her to express the anxieties which she concealed from her friends. The imminent construction of the high-rise building next to hers was an ominous sign of the growing property boom in Waikiki, and she knew it was only a matter of time before her rent would be increased beyond her means. The thought of having to find a cheaper apartment, probably in some less attractive location, filled her with panic. I suggested that she should start looking at possible alternatives now, before the matter became urgent, and I offered to give her some financial help myself. She resisted the idea at first, but I pointed out that she had told me I was the only legatee of her will, so that unless she died a pauper it would be a kind of loan, and later I made covenanted contributions to her income.

  Eileen wrote to me after I got back home, thanking me for making the effort to spend just thirty-six hours with her, adding: ‘And thank you Mary, too, for encouraging David to do so.’ I was glad to show this to Mary, for I felt spasms of guilt at having had a year full of such interesting travel without her, even though she didn’t like flying and I usually had to persuade her to accompany me when opportunities arose.

  6

  A few days after my return home from Hawaii, the proofs of How Far Can You Go? arrived in the post, always an eagerly awaited and slightly anxious event in an author’s life. So much of the act of writing consists of reading, and re-reading, what one has written, trying to read it as if one had not written it in order to assess its effectiveness, and then revising it if that seems appropriate. The gaps between the various stages of a book’s production assist this process. Each change in the physical appearance of a text – from handwritten manuscript to typescript, from typescript to printed proof, and from that to the first finished copy of the bound book – defamiliarises the text to some degree for the writer, and allows him or her to see previously unperceived flaws to be remedied and new possibilities for improvement, until the last stage – the first printed and bound edition – when it is too late to change anything.

  That is a simplified description of the physical evolution of a book as it was in the pre-computer age. When my early novels were published I received galley proofs before page proofs – long strips of paper which the writer could emend substantially without creating problems for the printers. For James Joyce this was an essential part of the creative process, and he was notorious for making innumerable changes and additions to the texts of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake while they were in galleys. But fairly early in my own career publishers began to skip the galley proof stage and set the author’s typescript (usually still termed the manuscript or ‘ms’) immediately in page proofs, which meant that extensive additions and deletions could upset the pagination and be expensive to incorporate. Publishers’ contracts usually specify the percentage of emendations, excluding printers’ errors, above which the author must bear the cost. The page proofs of a novel by a friend of mine contained a long paragraph which had been printed twice by mistake and he was begged to compose a passage of entirely superfluous description exactly long enough to fill the space left when the duplicate paragraph was deleted. Nowadays with computer software a writer can effortlessly produce the simulacrum of a printed book from the very first draft, and much of the defamiliarising effect of the traditional process has been lost, though that advantage is greatly outweighed by the physical ease of editing and revising text on a computer. And there is a real difference, which assists revision, between reading text on a screen and reading it on pages of A4. For me, and I imagine for other authors who are not still wedded to their pens and/or typewriters, writing now consists of putting words on a screen, printing them out, reading them, making emendations, deletions and additions, and returning the revised text to the screen for, in due course, further reworking. I use a lot of paper.

  Another way for an author to measure the effectiveness of work in progress is to show it to others and invite comments. I never did this until much later in my career, and then very rarely, fearing that I would get different or contradictory reactions which would disturb and distract rather than help me in continuing with the book. But it is undoubtedly a strain to be the only reader of a novel in progress, often
for years, when you are longing to get some reaction to it. Mary was always the first to read my novels when they were finished, and before I sent them to agent and publisher. We had an agreement that she could veto anything to which she strongly objected, but she never invoked it. This didn’t stop her from making critical observations, which I took seriously and often acted on. The spouses of novelists can easily become the object of intrusive and prurient interest from readers, but Mary had a forceful way of dealing with comments from those who assumed, because some elements in a novel are probably autobiographical in origin, that everything in it must be. I remember someone at a party getting a crushing response when he said to her, ‘I did enjoy that bit in The British Museum is Falling Down where you dried David’s underpants under the grill.’ It was an incident which I had in fact pinched from someone else’s life, mentioned in a newspaper or magazine. The man at the party wrote to me later saying, ‘I enjoyed meeting your wife. She bites.’ How Far Can You Go? contained more material with analogues in our own lives and friends’ and relatives’ lives than the earlier novel, and I was a little apprehensive when I finished it and gave it to her to read. She didn’t really like it – mainly, I think, because of the ironic perspective in which it viewed Catholicism – but she didn’t find fault with it as a novel.