Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  But I did not repine. I was cheered by the enthusiasm of the great majority of the reviews, and encouraged to take an important step which I had been meditating ever since winning the Whitbread prize: to become a part-time professor. That spring I made a formal request to the University to alternate a period of paid employment, including a teaching term, with an equivalent period of unpaid leave, and they agreed to this arrangement for a three-year trial period. They would save some money by employing a young academic to cover my teaching when I was away. At this time the Thatcher government’s cuts in funding were beginning to bite, and all universities were struggling to reduce their salary bills. Nevertheless I’m not sure I could have made such a deal at any other British university. Now I had the time I needed to complete Small World.

  8

  Ever since I made that note in my Zurich diary about the ‘global campus’ I had been mentally nurturing the idea of a comic novel about academics going to international conferences, combining professional self-advancement with the pleasures of tourism and romantic dalliance. It would have a big international cast of characters, some of whom could be taken from Changing Places, including Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, whose futures I had fortunately left completely open at the end of that novel. In the notebook I dedicated to this project I wrote down ideas for new characters, suitable locations, amusing episodes and situations, but for some time I was unable to see how they could all be connected in a unified narrative. I thought it might start at a depressed and depressing conference in the Easter vacation at a provincial British university. Rummidge would serve again as the setting for that, and to make life more uncomfortable for the conferees I would have an unseasonable snowfall blanket the campus. Then the novel would open out eventfully into the big wide world. But how? ‘What could provide the basis for a story?’ I scribbled rather desperately in my notebook one day; and then just below, ‘Could some myth serve, as in Ulysses?’ I was thinking of the way James Joyce used the mythical story of Homer’s Odyssey as a structural model for his realistic rendering of the lives of modern Dubliners on a single day in 1904. And a little later, immediately below that, I wrote: ‘E.g. the Grail legend – involves a lot of different characters and long journeys.’ I had found the solution to my problem.

  I have described this breakthrough elsewhere,1 and I cannot do so more concisely than by repeating it here:

  The Grail legend – the quest for the cup which Jesus used at the Last Supper – is at the heart of the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I thought of it at that moment because I had just seen Excalibur, John Boorman’s slightly over-the-top but highly enjoyable movie treatment of this material, and been reminded what a wonderfully gripping narrative it is. I saw an analogy, comic and ironic, between modern academics jetting round the world to meet and compete with each other for fame and love in various exotic settings, and the knights of chivalric romance who did the same things in a more elevated style assisted by poetic licence and magic. The Grail sought by the modern knights might be a Chair of Literary Criticism endowed by UNESCO, with an enormous salary and negligible duties. The volatile state of contemporary literary studies, with various methodologies (structuralist, deconstructionist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, etc.) challenging traditional scholarship and each other, would generate rivalry and conflict. I also thought of T.S. Eliot’s great poem, The Waste Land, and its use of the Grail legend as interpreted by the folklorist Jessie Weston, who saw it as a displaced and sublimated version of an older pagan myth about a Fisher King with a parched, infertile kingdom. I saw connections here with various kinds of sterility afflicting modern writers and literary intellectuals. There might be an elderly, immensely distinguished, unhappily impotent professor called Arthur Kingfisher somewhere in the story …

  With this inspiration my novel began to take shape. The hero would be a young Irish academic, a conference virgin as well as a literal one, who comes to the Rummidge event from the University of Limerick (a fictitious institution, though somewhat embarrassingly a university with that name was established some years later). I called him Persse McGarrigle: Persse recalling the chaste knight Percival of Arthurian legend, and McGarrigle because I liked the music of the McGarrigle sisters at that time – though I was delighted to discover that the surname means ‘Son of Super-Valour’ in Gaelic. One of the pleasures of writing this book was finding such unexpected symmetries and correspondences, which thickened the mix of motifs and echoes linking the mythical and the modern. At the conference Persse is befriended by Morris Zapp, who has flown in from California at the invitation of Philip Swallow and shocks the conference with a lecture called ‘Textuality as Striptease’; and he falls in love with a beautiful young scholar called Angelica, who is pursued by several admirers but proves as elusive as her namesake in Ariosto’s chivalric romance Orlando Furioso, possessor of a magic ring which she rubs to make herself invisible to importunate males. I read this classic of Italian literature in the Penguin translation as I began to plan my novel, led to it by a lucky discovery in Birmingham University’s bookshop. This was a small facility which mainly stocked texts prescribed for courses, but the Literature section carried a random selection of scholarly books, and among them was Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode, by Patricia A. Parker, published by Princeton University Press in 1979. I bought it, and it opened my eyes to a whole range of romance narratives in classic European literature, which one of the characters in my novel, Cheryl Summerbee, a check-in clerk at Heathrow airport, learns to distinguish from the debased modern form of the heroine-centred love story published by Mills and Boon to which she was previously addicted. ‘Real romance,’ she says, ‘is full of coincidences and surprises and marvels and has lots of characters who are lost or enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that. Of course they’re often in love too.’ When Small World was published it was subtitled An Academic Romance, in the double sense of being about academics and drawing on the academic rather than the popular concept of romance as a genre; and one of the two books to which I acknowledged a special debt in an Author’s Note was Inescapable Romance. The other was Airport International, by Brian Moynahan, a documentary survey of modern air travel.

  Patricia Parker was described on the jacket of her book as Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and several academic readers of Small World who knew her told me that my heroine Angelica resembled her to such an extent that they assumed I knew her personally. In fact I met her for the first and only time a year after the novel was published, when I was passing through Toronto on my way to visit the University of Newfoundland. It was a brief meeting, which may have been at a bookshop signing arranged by Penguin Books, and I have no clear memory of it. Some months later Patricia sent me a warm invitation to spend a week and give a public lecture at the University of Toronto. She wrote that ‘lots of people here have been enjoying Small World … and I feel it is such a honour to have in some way been part of that book’, which I interpreted as a reference to my acknowledged debt to her book rather than any resemblance between herself and Angelica. I wasn’t able to accept the invitation, but I was relieved that she took pleasure in her association with my novel.

  There was also a putative real-life model for my hero. I was occasionally asked by Irish readers if Pat Sheeran, a writer and critic who taught at University College Galway, was the model for Persse McGarrigle, as he apparently claimed. I prevaricated in response, though there was a smidgeon of truth in the assertion. Some time before starting to write Small World I attended the annual conference of university teachers of English, hosted that year by Bristol University, and there I met a likeable young lecturer from Galway whose name I soon forgot subsequently. Over a drink in the bar he told a group of us a droll story of going to a chemist’s shop in the city centre that afternoon to buy a large quantity of condoms, which were then unobtainable in Ireland due to t
he Catholic Church’s ban on contraception. He had experienced much embarrassment in making his purchase, due to the difficulty the female shop assistant had in understanding his accent, and he hers. This later inspired a farcical episode in Small World, when Persse, preparing to lose his virginity (as he hopes) to Angelica, buys a package of the baby food Farex instead of the Durex he requested. Pat Sheeran must have been the source of this episode, though nothing else in Persse’s story, apart from his belonging to a small university in the west of Ireland, bears any relation to Pat’s life and career. He was evidently a very popular lecturer at University College Galway and a lively creative presence on the Irish literary scene until his too early death in 2001. He published several books of fiction with his Polish wife Nina Witoszek, who wrote under the name of Nina Fitzpatrick, including a collection of stories, Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia. It won the prestigious and valuable Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Fiction Prize for Literature in 1991, but when it was discovered that the real Nina was not an Irish citizen, the prize was withdrawn and given to another novel. I felt a retrospective pang of sympathy when I read about that, for the writer’s life is difficult enough without such unexpected reversals of fortune, and regretted that I never met Pat Sheeran again after our encounter in Bristol.

  Small World is divided into five Parts. The first is set in Rummidge and establishes Persse, Swallow and Zapp as the three main characters whose adventures in the wider world provide the narrative continuity of the novel. Some minor characters were carried over from Changing Places, but my intention was that those three would become involved with a host of people from other countries whom I had to invent from scratch. I stalled at this point for some time, until I thought of introducing most of them in a long sequence in which they are shown doing various character-revealing things simultaneously, but in different time zones in different parts of the world. For some of those locations I drew on my own recent academic travels, and I accepted new invitations in the hope that they would yield more material and local colour for my work in progress.

  In April 1979 I went to Genoa as guest speaker at the Italian equivalent of the British UTE conference. The airport is situated in a valley between mountains and a high promontory projecting out into the sea which planes must circumnavigate to land and take off, a challenging manoeuvre for pilots; and this association prompted me to make it the site of an alarming emergency landing for Philip Swallow which precipitates the commencement of his particular romantic strand in the novel. As previously noted, the MLA convention in New York at the end of the same year provided the stage for the novel’s denouement, in which many mysteries are resolved and Persse’s quest for Angelica appears to end. An earlier episode in this quest, which takes place in Hawaii, draws on my impressions of the place during my weekend there after the San Francisco Symposium and on another subsequent visit. In early April 1980 I went to Turkey with a group of colleagues sent by the British Council to attend an ‘All-Turkey Seminar on Contemporary English Literature and its Teaching’ in Ankara, followed by several days in Istanbul where we gave lectures at two universities. I sent Philip Swallow on a similar trip: in dusty, smog-polluted Ankara he suffers comical humiliations of various kinds, but on his last day finds the lover he thought he had lost for ever and carries her off to Istanbul, which provides a suitably romantic backdrop for their reunion.

  Private holidays could also feed into the work in progress. In the summer of 1981, after visiting my aunt Lu, the widow of my uncle John, on the Belgian coast, Mary and I spent a few days in Amsterdam. As well as visiting the Van Gogh Museum and other high cultural attractions we strolled through the red light district where prostitutes sit at their front windows in their underwear, a street which would figure in Persse’s search for Angelica; and I discovered a luxury hotel in the city that incorporated a circular Lutheran chapel converted into a conference auditorium, which in the novel became a modern version of the Chapel Perilous in the Grail legend, where the Grail Knight fights a gigantic Black Hand – in my story a German professor who is hostile to Persse and always wears a black glove on one hand.

  In the spring of 1982 Mary and I had one of our most enjoyable holidays, added on to another British Council specialist tour, this time in Greece. After I had done my professional stuff in Salonika and Athens, she flew out to join me in the latter city and we spent a week in a hired car, going first to Delphi and then exploring the Peloponnese, the former providing the perfect setting in the novel for an ambiguous prophecy about the fate of the Unesco Chair, which is received by Philip Swallow from a sibyl-like female scholar first encountered at the Rummidge conference. We were fortunate to arrive in the Peloponnese simultaneously with the Greek spring. The weather turned warm, the snow was beginning to recede on the mountains, the wild flowers were blooming under the olive trees in the valleys, the seaside hotels and restaurants were just opening up for the season, and we stopped overnight when and where we fancied. We visited several famous ancient sites including Mistras, remnant of the medieval city that was once the flourishing capital of a Byzantine state, and the great theatre of Epidaurus where the cycles of classic Greek drama were originally performed. On a hillside at Mistras, as we were exploring the amazing fortifications, churches and monasteries, a few still inhabited but most in various stages of dilapidation, we came across an aged workman or caretaker digging the stony soil. We greeted him and he responded in some unintelligible Greek. ‘We are English,’ I said. His face lit up with a toothless grin. ‘Ah, Engleesh!’ he said. ‘Thatcher!’ I was impressed that her reputation had reached the ears of such a man in this remote spot. But later I wondered if perhaps he had known something we did not. While we were taking our holiday and out of touch with news, Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands, and Britain was at war.

  Later that year I contributed to Authors Take Sides on the Falklands, one of a series of books on international crises edited by Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson, modelled on a famous compilation of 1937 about the Spanish Civil War. I wrote:

  I do not know how far I might have shared the feeling of outrage that seems to have swept the House of Commons, and most of the country, that fateful weekend. Returning a week later, and taking stock of the situation after initial dazed incredulity, I came to the conclusion that we should not have sent the Task Force, for the following reasons: 1. The enterprise was inherently very risky, and the repossession of the Falklands was not worth the loss of human life, especially British lives. 2. Even if we were successful in repossessing the islands, we could never defend them indefinitely without an absurdly disproportionate investment of military capability. I still hold to that view as I write this, on the 8th June, with the British forces poised to retake Port Stanley, while feeling great admiration for the courage and resourcefulness with which they have conducted the campaign. If there had to be a war, it is obviously vital that we should win it, since our cause, it seems to me, is just.

  In fact I had been completely caught up in the fortunes of the Task Force, and addicted to the radio and television news reports, sparse and carefully controlled though they were. My disaffection with the military as a National Serviceman was suppressed, and the patriotic emotions of my wartime childhood were revived. The French narratologist A.J. Greimas proposed that most narratives are basically of three kinds: their stories concern a journey away from and back to home, or the making and breaking of a contract, or the performance of a difficult and decisive action. The Falklands War, combining all three elements, had an imaginative and emotional appeal comparable to classical epics like the Iliad.

  I did not mention in my contribution to Authors Take Sides the sinking of the Belgrano, which was, I came to think, a deed of doubtful legality. The rest of the piece surveyed various options for ending the dispute without further bloodshed, and came down in favour of a formal recognition of Argentinian sovereignty combined with a leaseback of the Islands to their British inhabitants. What I and most people failed to foresee was how qui
ckly the military junta governing Argentina would collapse following defeat. And it surprised me as time went on that those in Britain, mainly on the left, who had opposed the war and continued to condemn it, failed to recognise that it had rid Argentina of an evil and oppressive regime which would have gained a long lease of life from victory and thus made a return to democratic government possible. Perhaps the saddest and most troubling fact of the war is that ninety-five British servicemen who served in it have subsequently committed suicide – nearly half as many as died in the campaign.

  In the same month that the war ended, and relieved of anxiety on its account, I attended another James Joyce Symposium – a very special one, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Joyce’s birth, and held in Dublin to coincide with Bloomsday. I gave a paper on ‘Joyce and Bakhtin’ alongside Colin MacCabe on ‘Joyce and Benjamin’ and Seamus Deane of University College Dublin on ‘Joyce and Lukács’. But the academic programme was almost a sideshow to the plethora of performances, recitals, dramatisations and exhibitions related to Joyce’s life and work. On Bloomsday itself, 16th June, actors representing characters in the novel and wearing clothes appropriate to 1904 appeared at various places in the city at the times when they appeared there in Joyce’s text. At three in the afternoon a procession of horse-drawn coaches carrying the British Vice-Regent and his retinue in period costume drove through the streets of the city along the route described in the episode of Ulysses known as ‘The Wandering Rocks’; while the Ormond Hotel, scene of the ‘Sirens’ episode, was mobbed as it sold Guinness at 1904 prices for several hours. And all through the day a local radio station broadcast a reading of the entire text of Joyce’s novel, so that wherever you went you heard it coming out of open doors and windows, or inside pubs and restaurants, or from the lowered windows of cars. It was a magical, unforgettable experience to be in Dublin that day, and it inspired me later to invent a somewhat similar piece of street theatre in my novel – an enactment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in Lausanne, the town on Lake Geneva where he wrote most of that poem, performed by actors dressed up as the personae, ancient and modern, who speak its lines.