by David Lodge
The short film at the beginning of the BBC’s Bookmark programme, showing me checking in at the airport, was quite amusing, but the discussion of the novel that followed, between three well-known figures from the literary world, began with a sourly disapproving verdict from Christopher Ricks. He said it was not an accurate description of academic life, and was indifferent to anything important about universities, with tired jokes that didn’t make him laugh much, and in general was ‘the work of a tired man’. Beryl Bainbridge, who looked rather intimidated by Ricks or the occasion, said timidly she had enjoyed it and had found it funny but thought it was over-long and many of the lit. crit. references went over her head. Fortunately Leo Cooper, publisher and husband of the writer Jilly Cooper, said it was a very funny book which had a good chance of being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and several of the characters in it had reminded him slightly of Professor Ricks. Ricks did admit that the only occasion on which he met me was on a plane going to a conference, and I was reminded also of the Bristol UTE conference where I met Pat Sheeran. That conference featured a lecture by Ricks, who arrived one morning, having flown overnight from New York where he had delivered another (or possibly the same) lecture the previous day, hired a car at Heathrow and drove to Bristol just in time to perform a brilliant discourse on Samuel Beckett, and departed shortly afterwards to his next engagement: typical behaviour of a star of the global campus. John Blackwell wrote next day, ‘We are thinking of putting out a contract on Christopher Ricks’, and pretended similar malevolence towards Peter Kemp. But as cuttings from other newspapers began to flow in it became evident that favourable reviews greatly outnumbered the unfavourable, and there were several that could be called ‘raves’. A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble each wrote one, a rare example of agreement between these sisters. Antonia Byatt’s review in The Times contained a small but piquant example of writer’s luck. In Small World Philip Swallow, whose wife is called Hilary, has a passionate affair with a woman called Joy, who resembles Hilary when she was younger and prettier. When he first meets her, Joy is wearing a dressing gown like one Hilary used to wear. In her review Antonia noted approvingly that the theme of identity and difference which runs through the whole novel, most obviously in the story of the two twins, was neatly encapsulated in the names of the two women, Hilary deriving from the Latin hilaritas, meaning ‘joy’. I did not intentionally produce this pleasing symmetry. I called Philip’s wife Hilary in Changing Places because it is an androgynous first name and at that stage of their marriage she was the dominant partner, or as people used to say, she wore the trousers. I gave Joy that name because when Philip falls in love with her he is in pursuit of what he calls ‘intensity of experience’, an essentially Romantic quest, with a capital ‘R’. At the moment of consummation he exclaims ‘Joy!’ fusing the proper name and the abstract noun. I had no conscious knowledge of the Latin root of the name Hilary when I wrote the novel, but the play on words enriches the text and I gratefully appropriated it. It is a good example of what Roland Barthes called ‘the text working’ (rather than the author).
Small World appeared on the lower rungs of the Sunday Times bestseller list two weeks after publication, and I felt more cheerful about its prospects as I set off shortly afterwards for a sojourn in the Italian Lakes. It was my Harvard friend Donald Fanger who first told me, some time in the early eighties, about the Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio. It was acquired shortly after the Second World War by the immensely rich Rockefeller Foundation, who turned it into a luxurious conference centre and residential retreat for ‘academics, artists, thought leaders, policymakers, and practitioners’ (as its website states), mainly, but not exclusively, Americans. It is a palatial building which traces its history back to the fifteenth century, in an idyllic situation high above the village of Bellagio, on the steep-sided promontory where Lake Como and Lake Lecco meet and merge. Donald explained that you applied to be a resident for periods of four weeks’ duration to work on a specific project. You were given a study, either in the Villa or in one of the gazebos scattered through the surrounding estate, and a spacious bed-sitting room in the Villa. The routine was like that of a traditional country house party, and applicants were encouraged to bring a spouse or partner. (It was said that one had twisted the arm of his recently divorced wife to accompany him, rather than jeopardise his chances by applying solo.) Every day there was a sit-down lunch, preceded by aperitifs on the terrace, with the alternative of a packed lunch for the more industrious residents, and in the evening a dinner, followed by civilised socialising in the drawing room. Donald and Margot had been guests there and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. He said I should apply and kindly offered to be one of my referees. I needed no urging: I had just begun to make notes for Small World, and it seemed to me that the Villa Serbelloni would be the ideal place to work on it.
Spring and autumn were thought to be the best seasons to be there, and I accordingly applied to spend four weeks in April 1983, when Mary would have an Easter holiday from teaching and could join me for part of the time. But I was too late – the Villa was already booked up for that year. I was encouraged by the Foundation in New York to reapply for the following year, and did so, but by that time I had nearly finished writing the novel. Accordingly I changed the project I proposed to work on at Bellagio to something academic. I had recently accepted a commission from Walt Litz to contribute an essay on ‘Form and Structure in Jane Austen’s Novels’ for a book called The Jane Austen Companion of which he was a co-editor, so I proposed to spend my time at the Villa Serbelloni preparing to write that piece. Re-reading Jane Austen’s oeuvre in that setting would, I thought, be a very enjoyable and stress-free project. In due course I was accepted as a resident in April 1984, and I looked forward to the experience.
I could not, however, resist the temptation to anticipate it by incorporating the Villa Serbelloni into the story of Small World – it seemed such a quintessential example of the perks of the global campus that were available to its most successful denizens, and I thought I could get enough information from Donald Fanger to describe it accurately (which turned out to be the case). I decided to send Morris Zapp there. Looking down from the balcony of his suite at the pre-lunch aperitifs on the terrace:
He surveyed the scene with complacency. He felt sure he was going to enjoy his stay here. Not the least of its attractions was that it was entirely free. All you had to do to come and stay in this idyllic retreat, pampered by servants and lavishly provided with food and drink, given every facility for reflection and creation, was to apply. Of course you had to be distinguished – by, for instance, having applied successfully for other, similar handouts, grants, fellowships and so on, in the past. That was the beauty of the academic life, as Morris saw it. To those that had, more would be given.
Morris is punished for his hubris by the plot, when he is kidnapped by Italian terrorists while jogging on the footpaths of the Villa’s estate and held for ransom, but even so it was a passage that made me increasingly uneasy as the time approached for me to take his place in actuality, only a couple of weeks after Small World was published. When I was writing the novel I had not envisaged such a close contiguity between these two events. How would the custodians of the place and my fellow residents react when they heard about the novel? Would I stand accused of biting the hand that fed me? Would it be any mitigation that I had bitten before I was fed?
To my surprise and temporary relief I found that no one at the Villa had any idea that I was a novelist. The paperwork connected with my visit, including the list of current residents, had me down only as a professor of English Literature working on Jane Austen. (There was an additional irony in the fictional fact that Morris Zapp was ‘a Jane Austen man’; indeed, he liked to think, the Jane Austen man.) It is not my habit to volunteer the information that I am a novelist, and I resolved to keep schtum on the subject in Bellagio. It so happened that there was no one among the other residents with an interest in contemporary fiction
who might have recognised my name in that context. The only other literary scholar among them was a German-American professor of Comparative Literature at Washington University, Seattle, whose subject was the influence of Nietzsche on critical theory. His beautiful blonde wife was a professor of Germanic Studies at the same university, and after Mary joined me we played tennis doubles with them on the Villa’s tree-shaded court. Mary, needless to say, was happy to follow my lead in making no reference to my novels in conversation with them and other residents. There were two rather jolly female Canadian professors of nursing who were collaborating on a book about life and death decisions in medical treatment, one of whom proposed as after-dinner entertainment that we should all collaborate in composing the scenario of a whodunnit called Murder at the Villa Serbelloni, and she was disappointed that I showed no enthusiasm for this exercise.
Then one day a resident went to Milan airport to meet his wife and returned alone (her flight was delayed) but with a Penguin edition of Ginger, You’re Barmy in his hand which he had picked up from the airport’s bookstall. He confronted me with it and accused me genially of hiding my light under a bushel. My cover was partly blown, but evidently nobody had heard of Small World. I wondered how long I could keep the Villa’s inhabitants ignorant of its existence. Twice during our stay there was briefly an influx of people from all over the world for small-scale elite conferences – one on ‘Privacy’ and another on ‘The History of European Ideas’ – with whom we mingled at dinner, and it seemed quite possible that one of them would have brought a copy of Small World, or a British magazine containing a review of it, to read on the plane. What I most feared was an arrival of the latest issue of the London Review of Books in the Villa’s library, for I had noticed that they subscribed to it, and Frank Kermode had written to me that he was reviewing the novel for the LRB.
Our time at Bellagio passed very agreeably. The sun shone, the spring flowers bloomed, the Villa’s huge estate invited walks which gave breathtaking views across the lakes, and we made a couple of excursions by boat to Como. I enjoyed revisiting Jane Austen’s novels, and Mary was given a gazebo of her own to do some course planning for her teaching at a Further Education unit in Birmingham she had just joined. Nevertheless, I suffered a lingering sense of guilt, or bad faith, and occasional urges to confess my secret. At the end of our stay I shook hands with our hosts and fellow guests with it still intact, resolving that as soon as I got home I would write a letter to the Villa’s chief administrator revealing all, and donating a copy of Small World to the library.
This I did, and both letter and book were received with great good humour. But towards the top of the heap of mail that awaited us at home was the latest issue of the London Review of Books, containing Frank Kermode’s review. It was a very favourable one, which was no surprise because he had told me how much he admired the novel. What struck me most forcibly was the heading it had been given by some member of the editorial staff – by whom, I do not know, nor upon what whim, or with what telepathic insight into my own anxiety, for it was not the most obvious strapline for the review of a novel with so many exotic locations. It was entitled ‘Jogging in Bellagio’.
10
A couple of weeks after our return from Bellagio, I received a letter from the Registrar of Oxford University:
Dear Professor Lodge,
The electors to the Goldsmiths’ Professorship of English Literature were glad to have the opportunity of considering your application. They have, however, appointed Mr E.L. Jones to the professorship and his election will be announced shortly.
Yours sincerely, A.J. Dorey
This was the first communication I had received from Oxford since I applied for the chair six months earlier, during which time I had given less and less thought to the matter, assuming that as I had not been called to an interview I was not in the running. It had also crossed my mind lately that the irreverent treatment of academia in Small World might have an adverse effect on my chances. But my immediate reaction when I read the letter was an ejaculation of surprise. Who on earth was Mr E.L. Jones? I could not think of a likely candidate of that name, with no ‘Professor’ or ‘Dr’ prefixed to it. He was, I soon discovered, Emrys Lloyd Jones, Reader in English Literature and Fellow of Magdalen College, who had spent his entire academic career at Oxford, and like many dons of his generation had not bothered to acquire a PhD. He was a highly respected scholar specialising in poetry and drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, including Shakespeare, and by all accounts a very amiable man, but he was a surprising choice to succeed Richard Ellmann. He was married to another Shakespeare specialist, Barbara Everett, a Fellow of Somerville College, who also wrote criticism on modern literature. Coincidentally, she had written to me in February, though we had had no previous contact, to express appreciation of a selection of Ring Lardner’s stories I had recently published with Dent, and also her enjoyment of Changing Places, for which I thanked her, neither of us knowing that I was competing with her husband for the same chair.
Not that there had been any competition in the usual sense. In those days each named chair of English at Oxford had a small standing committee of electors dedicated to it, with autonomous power to make appointments. I learned later, from various sources, that the Goldsmiths’ committee of four, chaired by Rachel Trickett, Principal of St Hugh’s College, had decided that they need not interview any outside candidates since there were two eligible insiders. They were however evenly divided in their preferences between these two, and so entrenched in their positions that the appointment was delayed for months, until eventually the Vice-Chancellor of the University was obliged to break the deadlock and decided in favour of Emrys Jones. I was told there was a great row in the Oxford English Faculty when the decision was announced, and the committee was criticised for appointing a Renaissance scholar rather than a modernist who would fill the gap left by Ellmann, especially in the supervision of postgraduates. In due course a new Readership in Modern Literature was created to make good this deficiency, to which Jon Stallworthy was appointed. I believe that these days they make professorial appointments at Oxford with a procedure more like that of other universities.
Writing to Mike Shaw about another matter shortly after receiving the Registrar’s letter I said: ‘I shan’t, by the way, be moving to Oxford. They’ve made an internal appointment to the chair I told you about. This rather encourages me to emphasise more the creative side of my life.’ As an Oxford graduate himself, in History, Mike had been supportive of my application, but as an agent he welcomed my response to the result. Since I had applied for the position, my career as a creative writer had developed more momentum and an enticing set of future possibilities. Small World was doing well in Britain, and had finally found an American publisher in Macmillan (which is independent of the British firm) and the senior editor there, Hillel Black, sounded genuinely enthusiastic in correspondence. This was followed by a good offer from the German publisher List for the same title, which would be my first appearance in that language. Meanwhile Secker had reprinted some of my earlier books with introductions by me, starting with Ginger, You’re Barmy and The British Museum is Falling Down, and Penguin were issuing them in paperback at intervals. It was agreed that the new edition of Out of the Shelter would be re-set, erasing the memory of the deplorable Macmillan first edition, and I proposed to use this opportunity to revise the text substantially.1 It was the only occasion on which I have done this, and in principle I disapprove of the practice, because it can weaken the imaginative unity of the original text, whatever its flaws, and confuse the record of a writer’s development. But in this case I felt I had been pressured into cutting the original text too hastily, and I thought I could improve the novel without changing its essential character, restoring some cuts in the process and making some new ones. At about the same time, Channel 4 expressed interest in a film adaptation of this novel to be produced in collaboration with a German TV company, and in August they took an option
on the book and gave me a contract to write a draft screenplay. These were the projects I intended to work on next, and I would not have been able to pursue them if I had been preoccupied with all the entailments of a move to Oxford. I realised that, if I had been offered the chair, it would have presented a much more difficult decision than it would have seemed when I applied, and as time went on I became more and more grateful that I had not been required to make it. Had I gone to Oxford, I’m sure I would have had a less rewarding (in every sense of the word) career as a writer.
Nevertheless the immediate effect of a new door being firmly shut rather than opened wide was somewhat deflating. A long letter I wrote to Lenny Michaels a few months later, bringing him up to date with my life, reflects my mood at this time:
