by David Lodge
It happened that the annual Gauss Seminars in Criticism were in progress at the time of my visit, a handsomely endowed series of talks given by distinguished visiting speakers in the humanities to a small, select audience. This year the visitor was Harold Bloom, a legendary figure from the Yale English Department. He was associated with the Yale Deconstructionists such as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, but was in fact a totally idiosyncratic critic, opinionated and omnivorous, ranging over the whole canon of Western literature which he interpreted with entirely original theories and a jargon of his own that had a psychoanalytical and prophetic slant. The first book of his I had read was not one of his best, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, published in 1975. Martin Amis, who was then assistant literary editor of the New Statesman, had asked me to review it, encouraging me to be candid if I was not impressed – and I was not.1 While I was eating dinner with Walt Litz in the Faculty Club on my second evening, a tall, stout figure stalked in with an entourage, paused and glanced around the room. It was Harold Bloom, and it seemed to me that his gaze focused balefully on me for a moment before he moved on to his table. I wondered if he had been told that I was another visitor on campus. I told Walt that I had written a distinctly unflattering review of Bloom’s book, but I didn’t suppose he would remember it. ‘Harold remembers everything,’ Walt said discouragingly. And it was true: Bloom’s memory was prodigious. It was said that he knew all the poetry he wrote about off by heart, including the entire text of Paradise Lost, and for this reason gave no references for his numerous quotations, though I suppose some editor must have checked their accuracy. I kept my head down for the rest of the meal.
Mary arrived the next day. The University sent a car to Kennedy to meet her and bring her to the Nassau where I was waiting, and I embraced her with huge relief. Up till then I had managed to keep the depression attached to Mum’s death and the experience in New York on ice, as it were, while I concentrated like an actor on playing the role of the visiting scholar. Now with someone to confide in, I was able to purge some of the bad feelings and take spontaneous pleasure in the rest of the trip. Mary had arrived in the afternoon, and after a few hours’ sleep she was ready to join me for dinner in the Princeton faculty’s favourite restaurant, with a group of the English Department’s PhD students. They were a bright, talkative bunch of intensely ambitious young people, and the evening gave me an insight into how carefully Ivy League universities like Princeton groomed and assisted their best students to get a footing on the first rung of an academic career – which none of these seemed to doubt they would achieve.
There was more hospitality the next evening in the form of a dinner party given by Joyce Carol Oates and her husband. A famously prolific novelist whose readers could hardly keep up with her growing oeuvre, she also managed at the same time to be the jewel in the crown of Princeton’s Creative Writing programme. She was a striking figure with a pale oval face and huge eyes framed by dark curls, set above a long narrow white dress, who spoke quietly and economically. The other guests were Elaine Showalter and her husband English (an unusual first name made all the more memorable by the fact that he is a specialist in French literature). Elaine could not be more different from her friend Joyce: plump, exuberant, talkative. In 1978 she had published A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, a stand-out book in the new wave of feminist criticism. I had met her before in London and invited her to give a lecture at Birmingham. She was then teaching at Rutgers University, but would shortly join Joyce at Princeton. Elaine and English were Anglophiles who made regular visits to England, where we would meet them frequently in the future.
Our next destination was Philadelphia, where I had been invited to give a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania (known colloquially as Penn) by Larzer (‘Larry’) Ziff, who was a senior professor there. He and his wife Linda put us up for two nights in their period town house in a tree-lined street in an older part of the city. We had first got to know them in 1969 during my spell at Berkeley, where Larry taught and wrote books about American literature and culture. A few years later the Oxford English Department introduced an American literature option into their syllabus and appointed Larry to run it, which he did very effectively for several years at the Lecturer grade, but eventually despairing of promotion he returned to America and the prestigious professorship which was his due. While they were in England Larry and Linda lived in a village outside Oxford and occasionally they invited Mary and me to visit them at weekends, which we were glad to do, for they were good company and it was always amusing to hear Larry’s tales of the eccentricities of Oxford academia.
It was on one of those weekends that I met for the first time Richard Ellmann and his wife Mary, who were invited to dinner by Larry after he discovered that Ellmann was a great fan of Changing Places. Larry Ziff himself had been alarmed when he first heard that I had written a satirical campus novel set partly in a fictionalised Berkeley in which one of the main characters was called Morris Zapp, but was relieved when he read it and according to some reports went about Oxford afterwards chuckling to himself and accosting acquaintances to tell them, ‘It’s not about me, it’s Stanley Fish!’ Like Larry, Richard Ellmann (Dick to his friends) had had a distinguished career in America, teaching at Yale and Northwestern University, and writing outstanding biographies of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce before moving with his family to Oxford where he was Goldsmith Professor and a Fellow of New College. He was a critic I had revered and learned from ever since I was an undergraduate studying the Irish authors he specialised in, so I was very glad to meet him, and he proved to be a charming man.
Subsequently he twice invited me to be his guest at the New College Feast, an annual black-tie event when the Fellows and their friends consume a multi-course dinner and a vast quantity of expensive booze to celebrate the college’s foundation. I also called on him at his house in St Giles on other occasions when business took me to Oxford, and once I climbed the stairs to Mary Ellmann’s room where she occasionally received visitors, seated in an armchair. The Ziffs’ dinner party must have been at that time one of the rare occasions when she ventured out for a social evening, for she was a chronic invalid and increasingly confined to her home. Earlier in life she had been a respected literary journalist, and her book of essays Thinking About Women, published in 1968 when second wave feminism had barely begun, anticipated some of the key ideas of later criticism in that mode. When they moved to England she wrote witty journalistic pieces about English life. I especially remember an article, in Encounter I think, harking back to an earlier visit to England when her children were young, describing their amusement when listening to a BBC radio programme called Top of the Form, a quiz competition for schoolchildren which I knew well from my own early years. What convulsed them was the upper-class accent and patronising tone of the quizmaster, and the crushing manner in which he informed the nervous contenders that they had given a wrong answer. The Ellmann children would mimic him, asking each other impossibly difficult questions, deriding the answers offered, and then fall about laughing. One of these children was Maud, whom I met at the Joyce conference in Zurich and later invited to speak at Birmingham, and another was Lucy, who won the Guardian Fiction Prize with her first novel, Sweet Desserts, in 1988 and has published several others since then. It was a brilliant literary family which seemed unfairly singled out for suffering by fate – first in Mary’s long debilitating illness and then by Dick’s later affliction with motor neurone disease. I remember reading with dismay the letter in which he informed me, without a trace of self-pity, of the diagnosis and the bleak prognosis. For some years Dick divided his time between Oxford and Emory University, Atlanta, but he and Mary both died in England, Dick in 1987, and Mary two years later. In 2001 I was honoured to give the Ellmann Lectures founded at Emory in his memory, published in Consciousness and the Novel in the following year.
We broke our journey to Philadelphia for a few hours in
Baltimore, where Lenny Michaels, on leave from Berkeley, was a visiting teacher at Johns Hopkins, to have lunch with him and his new wife, Brenda, who was now a mother too, of a baby girl. In February he had sent me a long letter handwritten in green ink relating with gloomy relish various woes he had recently suffered, including flu, skidding off the road in a snowstorm, having the car stolen in New York, the chilliness of the Johns Hopkins faculty and administrative staff towards him, and the stresses of sharing custody of his two sons with Priscilla, who was living in Pittsburgh. Lenny’s letters always emphasised misfortune: his prose style thrived on it. He was also nervously awaiting the reception of his first novel, The Men’s Club, soon to be published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, and mentioned that it had just been accepted by Cape in England without seeming to be greatly encouraged by this. I wrote back that he should be very pleased because Cape was the ideal British publisher for his work.
Lenny met us at the railway station and drove us to the small modern house which he had found on the outskirts of the city. He seemed happy with his new wife and family, but Brenda looked so young beside him, and seemed so different in personality and background (she had been brought up in a God-fearing Protestant family in the South) that it was hard to believe the marriage would last. Before we left, he gave me a bound proof of The Men’s Club, which I read on the remainder of our trip. It begins:
Women wanted to talk about anger, identity, politics, etc. I saw posters in Berkeley urging them to join groups. I saw their leaders on TV. Strong, articulate faces. So when Cavanagh phoned and invited me to join a men’s club, I laughed. Slowly, not laughing, he repeated himself … He and some friends wanted a club. ‘A regular social possibility outside of our jobs and marriages. Nothing to do with women’s groups.’
In fact it is more like a negative image of a women’s group than a club. The narrator agrees to go to the first meeting, which also turns out to be the last, held at the house of Kramer, one of the seven members, most of whom are strangers to each other. They agree that each should tell the story of his life, which turns out to mean their relationships with women. Their tongues are loosened by liquor, and their stamina is fortified by raiding the kitchen for the lavish cold supper prepared by Kramer’s wife for her women friends who are to meet in her house the following evening. The stories the men tell are funny, sad, bizarre and sexually explicit. They get increasingly drunk and violent, smashing things, howling like wolves and throwing knives at the living room door. At this point Mrs Kramer returns home. The denouement is brilliant. The whole book is brilliantly written. I read it with delight, and an envy for Lenny’s use of language that is the highest compliment one writer can pay to another. It did very well in the US, but when it was published in Britain it sadly made little impression. It was reissued in 2017 by Daunt and much more favourably reviewed, but that was no consolation to Lenny.
Our last reunion on this trip was with Martin and Carol Green whom we knew well from the years Martin spent teaching in the Birmingham English Department, as described in QAGTTBB. He was now a professor at Tufts University, Boston, but at present on a sabbatical which he was spending in Washington DC, doing research for his current book. Martin always had a book in progress, being almost as prolific in non-fiction as Joyce Carol Oates was in fiction. We were with them for little more than 36 hours, but there was time for a perambulation round the Washington sights. It was April, the weather was warm and the city’s famous cherry blossom was in bloom, which gave me premature hay fever. I remember the relief of entering the air-conditioned National Gallery of Art and being able to breathe normally for an hour or so. Some confusion about which of the two Washington airports we were departing from nearly caused us to miss our plane, but happily Carol got us to the right one just in time. It was a night flight, and in the early morning we had the surprising sight of England spread out beneath us blanketed with snow. The runways at Heathrow had been cleared but the unseasonable snowfall had had an all too familiar effect on the British railway network. When our taxi arrived at the entrance to Euston officials waved their arms and shouted that no trains were running in or out of the station. They advised us to try an alternative route from Paddington, so we did. The journey via Reading and Oxford in a packed train took about six hours – all in all it took us longer to get from Heathrow to Birmingham than it had taken us to get from Washington to London. But I had been gifted a great idea for the beginning of Small World.
Later in the summer of that year, 1981, How Far Can You Go? at last found an American publisher. Jim Brown, my new American agent, had sent it to William Morrow, an established New York imprint, and they made an offer which the senior editor there, Howard Cady, candidly admitted to Mike Shaw in a letter confirming the deal was ‘picayune’. It was a word I had to look up, and Collins dictionary told me it meant ‘of small value or importance; mean, petty’, being derived from the name of a small Spanish-American coin. Morrow’s position was that they were doubtful about the novel’s sales prospects in the USA, but they admired my writing and wanted to have an option on my future work. I was in no position to turn down their offer, or to refuse the request attached to it – namely, that I think of a different title for the novel. Cady and his colleagues thought that How Far Can You Go? might confuse booksellers and put off potential readers who would associate it with ‘How To Do It’ manuals and psychological self-help books. I agreed reluctantly, because the phrase ‘How far can you go?’ runs like a refrain through the text of the novel, but I composed some alternative titles, of which Souls and Bodies was the agreed choice. The change of title later caused endless bibliographical confusion, and annoyance to American readers who had enjoyed Souls and Bodies, and purchased How Far Can You Go? in the British Penguin edition when they came to the UK, assuming that it was a different book. I never encountered a single American reader or bookseller who understood Morrow’s objections to the original title.
Souls and Bodies got excellent reviews all over the USA when it was published in January 1982. Howard Cady’s colleague wrote to me when forwarding a fresh bunch of cuttings, ‘We have certainly never seen such consistently positive reviews, and in such quantity to boot.’ Unfortunately the one significant exception was the most important and influential – the New York Sunday Times Book Review. It was written by the novelist (and later travel writer) Paul Theroux, who had had a Catholic upbringing himself, and wrote about it evocatively at the beginning of his semi-autobiographical novel My Secret History (1989). After spending some time in Africa, and writing about his experiences there, he married an English woman and settled in the 1970s in south-east London very near where I grew up myself. I remembered reading his thriller The Family Arsenal in 1977, about an anarchist terrorist cell holed up in Deptford, and being impressed by how well he had captured the character and atmosphere of that seedy and depressed borough.
Theroux made it clear that he didn’t like my novel, which was his prerogative; but I resented his patronising tone and his complaint that the novel contained ‘a culture-bound set of references that will ring no bells for the American reader’ – citing as an example Blue Peter, the name of an immensely popular and long-running BBC television programme for children, named after a nautical flag that signals departure from port. Theroux must have known perfectly well that, whereas in the past American publishers re-set the texts of British novels and discreetly edited them to assist American readers (e.g. ‘plimsoles’ was changed to ‘sneakers’ in the Doubleday edition of my novel Ginger, You’re Barmy), this was a luxury they could no longer afford, and they now reprinted the British texts, as we did American ones in the UK. This was actually a positive development, preserving the integrity of the author’s work; and part of the pleasure and value of reading a book in a variety of English which is different from one’s own is learning what unfamiliar expressions mean from their context. I wrote a letter to the NYT Book Review to this effect, which they published. It concluded: ‘If a mentally handicapped child is sat down
in front of the TV by her mother to watch something called ‘Blue Peter’ isn’t it pretty likely that this is the name of a TV programme for children, rather than, say, a pornographic movie?’ Tom Rosenthal, who subscribed to the Times Book Review, and knew that peter is US slang for penis, enjoyed the joke.
A rave review in that place can sometimes propel a book on to the newspaper’s bestseller list, which is the US book trade’s bible. Souls and Bodies did not figure there, needless to say, though some national magazines like Newsweek and the New Yorker reviewed it favourably, and Time, with the biggest circulation of all, proposed to run a feature review with photo. But there was a tight deadline. A photographer came to my house in Birmingham and kept a taxi waiting outside for an hour and a half with the meter running, before hurrying off to deliver the negatives to a courier who would take them to New York by Concorde. For a few days I was buoyed up by this glamorous scenario, but it all ended in anticlimax. Either the deadline passed, or editorial decisions changed, for the review and photo never appeared. Howard Cady told me this was a frequent occurrence at Time. The book probably did better than expected – he reported sales of just under 5,000 later that year, a decent figure by British standards; but it would have sold more if they had had more faith in the book, paid more upfront, promoted it more vigorously and made sure that it was available when the good reviews came out. ‘Our main problem is getting books into the bookshops,’ Cady admitted in a letter to me shortly after publication.
