by David Lodge
Between 1982 and 1983 I was intermittently engaged on an interesting project in a form new to me: the television documentary. I was approached by Jim Berrow, a producer at Central, the independent TV company which then served the Midlands and had its headquarters in Birmingham. At that time he made documentaries for a weekly half-hour slot dedicated to subjects of regional interest, and he asked me if I would write and present a programme about Birmingham writers in the 1930s. He had got the idea from reading a recently published memoir, As I Walked Down New Grub Street, by the novelist and critic Walter Allen, who was born in 1911 and brought up in the working-class inner suburb of Aston, Birmingham. He was a scholarship boy who studied English at the city’s University before beginning his career as a freelance writer, eventually moving to London like many other young men from the provinces with literary ambitions. I knew him mainly as a book reviewer for the New Statesman and author of The English Novel: A Short Critical History, a book widely read by several generations of students. The memoir which Jim passed to me contained intriguing information about other writers connected with Birmingham in the thirties. W.H. Auden’s father was the city’s Chief Medical Officer and his son grew up in Harborne, the adjoining suburb to Edgbaston. He wrote later in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’: ‘Clearer than Scafell Pike my heart has stamped on/The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton’. It’s a sentiment likely to surprise most people who have travelled by train between those two cities, but as he explained in the next stanza, ‘Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,/That was, and is, my ideal scenery.’ That Auden’s friend and collaborator Louis MacNeice was a lecturer in classics at the University from 1930 to 1936 was no doubt an incentive to return frequently to the family home at this time. There were several novelists and short-story writers in the region who attracted the attention of the London literati with their authentic descriptions of proletarian life and were known as ‘the Birmingham Group’, John Hampson being the best known. His first novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound, was published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, and widely admired. Walter Allen was acquainted with Henry Green, whose posh family derived their considerable wealth from a Birmingham foundry, and who worked his way up in the firm from factory floor to director, using the experience to write his first novel, Living, arguably the best, and certainly the most original, work of fiction written about British working-class life between the wars.
Jim Berrow arranged for me to record a video interview with Walter Allen in his flat in north London. He had recently suffered a stroke, and his speech was slightly impeded, but he spoke with animation, candour and humour. Later I interviewed Reggie Smith, who grew up with Walter in Aston, and was a fellow student at Birmingham before making his career in the British Council and the BBC. He married the novelist Olivia Manning, who portrayed him unforgettably as Guy Pringle in her novel sequence, Fortunes of War. When I interviewed Reggie, he provided a vividly amusing account of the farewell party Louis MacNeice gave to his writer friends when he decided to move to London, an event which Reggie claimed ‘went on for days’. He recalled the avant-garde theatre director Rupert Doone, who must have come up from London for the occasion, tossing a glass of vodka into the fire with a careless conversational gesture, causing a jet of flame to leap out and singe the trousers of the poet Henry Reed, another alumnus of Birmingham University, who later wrote one of the best poems to come out of the Second World War, ‘The Naming of Parts’.
Louis MacNeice’s flat was in a converted coach house and stables next to a Italianate Victorian villa in spacious grounds, called Highfield, the home of Philip Sargant Florence, Professor of Economics at the University of Birmingham, and his American wife Lella, a committed feminist, pacifist and pioneer in promoting birth control. Between the wars they made Highfield a refuge for several distinguished refugees from Nazi Germany, including Nikolaus Pevsner and the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Other guests included Vera Brittain, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Margaret Mead and I.A. Richards. Lella was related by marriage to James Strachey, brother of Lytton and biographer of Sigmund Freud, who often visited with his family, and one might say that Lella and Philip created their own version of ‘Bloomsbury’ in Selly Park, Birmingham. The young William Empson, future author of the seminal Seven Types of Ambiguity, stayed at Highfield when he was expelled from the Cambridge college where he was a postgraduate research fellow, after his bedder reported that he had contraceptives in his room. Philip Sargant Florence hoped to get him a job in the English Department of the University and invited its head, Ernest de Selincourt, to tea with this design, but Empson blew his chances when De Selincourt (whom Walter Allen remembered as ‘a stuffy old bore’) asked him what he was reading and received the answer, ‘Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages.’
We filmed a section of the TV programme in the flat once occupied by MacNeice, which was still in good shape. But both Philip and Lella were dead by this time and the house had fallen into a sad state of disrepair as local residents struggled to resist the attempts of property developers to buy it – ultimately in vain. Our video camera was probably the last to record the gay, brightly coloured murals of dancing couples that decorated the hall and some rooms. Not long afterwards the building was demolished and an executive housing estate obliterated all trace of the civilised life that had flourished there. Jim Berrow was as fascinated as I was by the story of Highfield, and given more time would have made another film about it. We called the one we did make As I Was Walking Down Bristol Street, adapting the first lines of an early Auden poem referencing the main road into the city centre from the west. I enjoyed the experience, and was grateful to Jim for coaching me in the art of writing and presenting documentary television. He is a man of many talents who did not remain for long in the employ of Central, but diversified into writing, lecturing and practising in fields in which he has expert knowledge: music, architecture and the preservation of historic church organs. At the time I met him he also flew his own light aeroplane for recreation. He offered to take me up in it as a passenger, but I declined. I did not doubt Jim’s competence as a pilot, but I had the impression that small, privately owned planes crashed more often than big commercial jets, and I did not wish to increase my chances of dying before Small World was published.
I delivered the typescript of Small World to Secker in May 1983, which was later than I had predicted and too late for it to be published in that year; but Tom Rosenthal was pleased by the delay because he was about to publish Rates of Exchange, Malcolm’s first new novel for eight years, and he didn’t want us to be competing with each other once again for the same prizes, especially the Booker. Like every other publisher in London he was excited by the sudden rise in the public profile of this prize and its impact on reputations and sales. When he read Small World he ‘loved it’ and a contract was quickly drawn up. John Blackwell was equally delighted, but made a useful suggestion for improvement. He feared that the first chapter, describing the comical discomforts and fiascos of the Rummidge conference, would create an expectation that the whole novel would be a campus novel of a familiar type in the mode of Lucky Jim, and he suggested some kind of prologue which would signal the later opening out of the story thematically and geographically. I saw his point, and quickly wrote a prologue that borrowed the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, about the coming of spring, when ‘longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, only these days, professional people call them conferences’. John wrote in early August to report that enthusiasm was spreading through the stacked floors of 54 Poland Street, the tall narrow town house in Soho occupied by Secker & Warburg. Sales and Marketing were extremely positive, and ‘the major difficulty now is getting the TS out of production and to the printer, as the entire department want to read it, and refuse to let it go until I’ve sent a spare Xerox’. John knew how, with a little exaggeration, to lift an author’s spirits.
But mine seemed destined to go up and down unpredictably – like every writer’s spirits, n
o doubt. Soon after Secker accepted Small World, Morrow – who had taken on How Far Can You Go? because they believed in my future as a writer – rejected it. Jim Brown had sent it confidently to Howard Cady, who returned the typescript to him with exceptional speed, as if he couldn’t wait to be rid of it, with a covering letter, copied to me, in which he declared himself ‘terribly disappointed and somewhat bewildered’ by the novel. These words described exactly my own reaction to his rambling and emotional epistle, e.g.: ‘Although happy endings are not essential, each one of the facets of the story involving suspense tends to end with a whimper and a sigh. Nothing works and nothing turns out to be worthwhile. Although I found it fascinating, there is too much of it and it is too deliberately disenchanting.’ He devoted a paragraph to his father’s career as a professor of English who always attended the MLA convention after Christmas, and to supplement his meagre income taught summer schools at several universities, including Berkeley, all through the Depression. It seemed to me that my carnivalesque satirical novel had somehow dishonoured the memory of his father, or else stirred up some repressed Oedipus complex, in Howard Cady’s psyche. Jim Brown, who was equally astonished by the rejection, agreed with me. Cady himself evidently regretted the tone of his letter because he attached to it another one addressed to me personally, saying he wrote it on ‘a bad day for me with all kinds of pressures’, and his last word about the novel was ‘may you soon prove that I am totally wrong about it.’ Eventually I did, but it took some time.
Later that summer I received a dramatic and disturbing phone call from Eileen in Hawaii. She had come to England in the previous year to assess the advisability of returning permanently. Her cousin Lilian, and Lilian’s daughter, Pat, a schoolteacher married to another, John, were virtually her only relatives in Britain apart from me. They lived comfortably together near Henley on Thames, were very fond of Eileen, and generously offered to help her settle near them. This was a great relief to me as Mary and I had no spare time or energy to devote to this task ourselves, and Birmingham was not a place Eileen was likely to find congenial. The cousins found a private residential home for retired people fairly near them which agreed to take Eileen for a trial period of a month. She came in the autumn, and Mary and I visited her there one day and took her out to lunch. She had a bed-sitting room, but ate her meals communally, and had the use of a large lounge with upright armchairs which, like all such rooms in such places, gave an impression that time passed very slowly there. The building was a large villa, clean but old-fashioned and somewhat dingy in décor and furnishings, presided over by an authoritarian female manager, and its general ambience was cripplingly genteel. I immediately sensed that Eileen could not possibly be happy there, though she was tactful in her remarks about the place, not wishing to appear ungrateful to Lilian, Pat and John for all their efforts on her behalf.
It was not until she returned to Hawaii that she expressed in a letter to me the full depths of her unhappiness during her stay. It had been exacerbated by the fact that she was not feeling well at the time, suffering pain that was diagnosed as arthritis. The phone call I received in July 1983 revealed the real cause. She had been diagnosed with terminal abdominal cancer, and then unluckily had a fall and broke her shoulder. She spoke to me from the hospital where she was being treated, very distressed because she was sure she was dying and unable to do anything to settle her affairs. She asked if I could possibly come out to help her, and I said I would. I then phoned her doctor who told me that she might live for a year, but she had refused chemotherapy so it could be much less. I decided to go sooner rather than later and flew to Honolulu in mid-August, changing planes in Los Angeles. By now I was used to the eighteen-hour journey, and my previous acquaintance with Waikiki was helpful for this mission.
I stayed in Eileen’s apartment and as soon as I had slept off the fatigue of the journey I hired the cheapest car I could find and went in search of her. She was no longer in the hospital but in what was described as a ‘care home’, i.e. the home of somebody who was making a little money by looking after convalescent patients whose insurance did not cover the cost of a proper nursing home – nor, in Eileen’s case, a very high standard of care. I found her in a shabby bungalow in a run-down suburb of Honolulu, and we had an emotional reunion. She was overjoyed to see me, but in poor shape, weak and thin, with one arm still in a sling, lying under a sheet on a low bed in a scruffy room. She was chronically constipated from the pain-killing drugs she was taking, and had no appetite for the food her Filipino landlady provided. I promised to see her doctor as soon as possible and to insist that he came to see for himself that she needed to return to hospital. This was accomplished by the end of the next day. Her constipation was treated successfully, and she was allowed to remain in the hospital while I looked for the best nursing home she could afford without exhausting her savings before she died – a grimly delicate calculation.
I devoted several days to this quest, which took me to some deeply depressing institutions stinking of incontinence and abandoned hope, but I finally found one on the outskirts of the city which I thought would be acceptable – the staff were warm and friendly and the management inspired trust. I obtained power of attorney for Eileen – we signed the forms in the presence of a lawyer beside her hospital bed – and had meetings with her bank and stockbroker to sell her shares and consolidate her funds. I made arrangements for the termination of her lease on the apartment and disposal of her furniture and other effects. These appointments took me into downtown Honolulu where there was a small-scale imitation of Wall Street like a movie set, with tower blocks whose occupants wore suits and ties in their icily air-conditioned offices. My dealings with them were totally incongruous with the hedonistic pursuits of the tourists in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops who swarmed over the beaches and pavements of Waikiki, and I could not be unaware of the ironies of my situation, helping an elderly Christian woman in pain to die as comfortably as possible, in a place dedicated to commercialised pleasure. Even as I went about my melancholy business in this setting, I thought that one day I might explore its thematic possibilities in fiction.
When I got back to the apartment in the late afternoon I usually refreshed myself with a swim in the small pool provided for residents, but one evening I put on a pair of swimming trunks under my shorts and drove to the beach instead, to a quiet stretch beyond the last big hotels, where only a few other people were scattered over the sand. After an enjoyable dip I dried off and sat down to watch the sun set over the calm sea. When I decided to put on my shorts I discovered that my keys – the car key, the apartment key, and the key to Eileen’s safe-deposit box, all together on a key ring – were not in the pockets of the shorts, or in any other item of my clothing, so must have fallen into the soft dry sand when I changed. I rotated very carefully without moving from the spot, conscious that doing so might only cover the keys with more sand, but could see no sign of them in the small hillocks and hollows of the beach. I groaned aloud. The difficulty of replacing the keys didn’t bear thinking about, and the merit of my efforts on Eileen’s behalf would be cancelled out by the worry this mishap would cause her.
Soon it would be too dark to search, for the huge golden disc of the sun was now almost touching the horizon, its beams reflected in the surface of the sea. This gave me an idea. Looking down very carefully at where I was planting my feet for any sign of the keys, I walked straight down to the water’s edge, some fifteen yards away, turned my back to the sun, squatted down and looked at the place where I had changed for my swim. I was aware of a couple of youths further up the beach watching me curiously. A yard or two to the right of my towel something glinted. When I stood up the gleam disappeared; when I squatted again it returned. Keeping my eye fixed on the spot, I walked to it and with indescribable relief plucked from the sand the protruding tip of Eileen’s safe-deposit key and the key ring to which it was attached. A few moments later the sun disappeared beneath the horizon. I have no idea what inspired this
ingenious recovery of the lost keys, for I am not of a practical and scientific turn of mind. Perhaps it was the buried memory of a similar feat in some adventure story read in boyhood. In due course the incident, somewhat elaborated, was incorporated into the novel which was already germinating in my mind.
Eileen’s faith was a great help to her and I did not disturb it by voicing my private agnostic views, though we did discuss religion from time to time and she was by no means uncritical of the Catholic Church as an institution. I arranged for a priest to visit her regularly after I had gone, and made a phone call to a Catholic hospice organisation which was answered by a voluntary helper called Marian Vaught, who generously offered to do the same. When I came to the nursing home to say goodbye to Eileen the evening before I was due to fly home, a meeting I was dreading because we both knew we would never see each other again, she was eager to tell me of the wonderful woman who had visited her earlier that day, a tall, fair, gracious lady, wearing the long loose cotton dress Hawaiians call a muu-muu, who had spoken to her so kindly and comfortingly that she felt she had been visited by an angel. In consequence our parting was much less painful than I had feared. Marian Vaught was indeed a treasure whom I had been lucky to stumble on. She visited Eileen frequently and kept me in touch with her condition until she died, peacefully in her sleep, on the 15th of September, only a few weeks after she entered the nursing home. It was a merciful release from a situation that no amount of kindness could make tolerable for long. About two years later Marian and her husband came to England on a vacation that included a canal cruise on a narrowboat which brought them near Birmingham, and I was able to invite them to visit us and to thank Marian in person for what she had done for Eileen.
