Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  As I think you know, I have been on a part-time contract with the University for the past three years. I have been flirting with the idea of becoming a fulltime writer, but Mary thinks I would disintegrate psychologically without a regular job and she may be right. I shall, I think, try to go half-time. I must admit that I am losing my zest for teaching as the years go by and I can’t decide how much that is due to the fact that I have been in the same place so long. I think I told you that I had applied for a chair at Oxford which has very light duties, but I didn’t get it … There really isn’t anywhere else where I could go in the British academic system that wouldn’t mean more teaching and administration than I do now … So I find myself turning more and more to writing for personal satisfaction. I’m also getting deaf, and my boredom tolerance is diminishing, all of which makes me increasingly unfitted for teaching.2

  The temptation to become a full-time writer was strengthened after Tom Rosenthal rang me up late one afternoon in mid-September to tell me jubilantly that Small World had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize – not that I had any realistic hope of winning it, but to be in contention at the final stage was a considerable boost to my self-confidence. I had been sent a proof copy of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun in May, and I was quite sure that it would carry off the Booker, as were most reviewers and commentators. This story about a young English boy who was separated from his expat parents in Shanghai by the Japanese when they occupied the city in 1941, and precariously survived internment until near the end of the war, was known to be based on Ballard’s own experience. It was more realistic and emotionally involving than his previous novels, mostly dark dystopian fables about aspects of contemporary urban life which were greatly admired by younger writers like Martin Amis. Not only was I gripped and impressed by Empire of the Sun – I could see how perfectly it would fit the narrative appeal of the Booker Prize itself, bringing fame and fortune to a serious and original writer whose work had hitherto been a minority cult.

  Tom Rosenthal told me who the other shortlisted candidates were: Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot; Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac; Anita Desai, In Custody; and Penelope Lively, According to Mark. I read the Barnes and the Lively and press coverage of all the books in the interval before the prize was awarded, and did not revise my opinion that Ballard would win it. The bookmakers agreed. A few days after the shortlist was announced, Ladbrokes had Empire of the Sun a clear favourite at 6–4 – but to my pleased surprise Small World was second in the list at 3–1. Literary novelists of the past such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf would probably have been outraged at the idea of being treated like racehorses, but it was a crucial element in the publicity generated by the prize. In the weeks between the shortlist announcement and the award ceremony, the newspapers were full of articles about the six lucky authors (and we were lucky, for there were other eligible books which, with a different set of judges, might have filled some of the six places). The interval was designed to encourage readers to buy the books and form their own opinions, and in those early years of the revamped prize it was effective, helped by bookshop readings and signings of the shortlisted novels by their authors. Sales of Small World, published in March, had begun to tail off by late summer, but the shortlist prompted a new surge which doubled the total by the end of the year. (Later the Booker lost its unique influence on the market, and these days only the winner usually benefits significantly in terms of sales.) The announcement of the shortlist brought messages of congratulation from friends, including a characteristic letter from John Blackwell sent the next morning, enclosing some review cuttings from foreign newspapers: ‘What do we learn from the enclosed? … That the Dutch for “castigate” is “op der hak nemen”; that the Swedish for “subtitle” is “underrubrik”. These things do brighten the day. The announcement of the Booker shortlist brightens an entire year – nay, more. Only one man in England can conceivably be more pleased than Yours, John.’

  The euphoria of all this attention and excitement was much reduced by a letter dated 24th September from Tom Rosenthal, beginning ‘It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that in order to pursue other interests in publishing, I have decided to resign as Chairman of Secker & Warburg and will be leaving here at the end of this month.’ It was a short letter, obviously sent to other Secker authors, and though he followed it up with a longer and more personal one, neither gave any hint of what the ‘other interests’ were. I gathered later that there had been serious disagreement between Tom and other members of the board of the Heinemann Group of publishers to which Secker then belonged, ending with his resignation. I was stunned by this turn of events, and its timing, for I had looked forward to attending the Booker banquet in Tom’s company. He did his best to make up for my disappointment by inviting Mary and me to spend that day and stay the night with him and his wife Ann at their London home in Primrose Hill, but we both had commitments in Birmingham which made that impracticable, so we booked into a hotel.

  Tom had been temporarily replaced as head of Secker by the Marketing Director, Peter Grose, and forfeited his place at the Booker banquet in the Guildhall. But he wangled an invitation to the event and sidled up to me during the pre-dinner drinks with a bizarre request: that if I won I should, in my acceptance speech, ask the guests to stand for one minute’s silence in protest against a threatened imposition of VAT on books which was then in the news. He was entirely serious. I inwardly recoiled from this alarming proposal and I thought it was tactless of Tom to make it at such a moment, when I was already under sufficient stress. Fortunately we were summoned into the dining hall at that point so I did not have to refuse point blank. The Guildhall looked magnificent with its glittering chandeliers, ancient panelling and white napery, but I doubt if shortlisted authors in their dinner jackets and evening gowns ever really enjoy the dinner itself. Each one sits at a separate round table with his or her publishers, partner, agent, etc., like boxers with their seconds and trainers, surrounded by other tables occupied by literati, senior executives in the book trade, and representatives of the great and the good. TV cameramen roam the aisles peering here and there, and I was advised by a veteran of the occasion not to be caught eating as it invariably results in an unflattering shot. You also had to be careful not to drink too much, since there is always the possibility that you might win and be required to say a few words of thanks, and to stumble over them, or over the steps up to the podium, would be embarrassing.

  At the end of the meal, after a brief interval, and in an atmosphere of rising expectancy there were speeches from Sir Michael Caine, the Chairman of Booker McConnell (the company’s full name), followed by the chairman of the judges, who that year was the Oxford historian Professor Richard Cobb. This ritual speech is a description of the shortlisted books, which are already familiar to most of the audience, with praise distributed to each without revealing a preference for one of them. Then came Cobb’s final sentence: ‘The 1984 Booker McConnell Prize for fiction goes to …’ As he paused tantalisingly, all eyes were focused on the Gollancz table where Ballard was sitting. But the TV people had been tipped off, and a camera caught the truly amazed – almost shocked – face of Anita Brookner as her name was announced, an image which was reproduced in several newspapers the next day. She had been a 6–1 outsider when the betting closed the day before.

  Several people, including Malcolm, who was present as a member of the management committee, came up to our table afterwards and commiserated with me for ‘losing’ to a slighter book, an opinion generally shared by the Secker contingent. Not having yet read Hotel du Lac I could not honestly share their indignation, but I certainly felt more disappointed than I would have been if Ballard had won, and found some relief in accepting the general opinion. In fact I had been very impressed by Anita Brookner’s previous novel, Look at Me, when I reviewed it two years previously in the Sunday Times, as I was reminded a little later that evening. One of the judges joined a small group of us drinking at the bar. He wa
s Ted Rowlands, a Welsh Labour MP, who had been appointed according to a practice which the Booker management committee later abandoned, of having one person on the panel who was outside the literary world, a kind of People’s Tribune. He confided that one of the other judges, the Irish writer and journalist Polly Devlin, had swung the argument in favour of Brookner at the final meeting by reading out words of praise for Look at Me taken from my Sunday Times review, which were quoted on the back cover of Hotel du Lac. It was an ironic disclosure I could have done without at that stage of the evening.

  Writing this account thirty years later I wondered what passage in my review had been quoted, so I looked it up in my files and decided it was probably the last paragraph.

  Look At Me is a good example of the excellence that contemporary British novelists can achieve by a conscious formal constraint. Like a tear trembling in an eyelid, it continually threatens to spill over into existentialist metafiction … but manages to stay – just – within the bounds of the English novel of sentiment and manners … If she should ever transgress those bounds the results would be interesting. Meanwhile I cannot praise too highly this novel’s poise, perceptiveness and purity of style.

  Although I did not keep up with Anita Brookner’s formidable rate of production, very nearly a novel a year for twenty-odd years, I don’t think she ever did transgress the limits of the well-made English novel of manners – and certainly not in Hotel du Lac. When I got round to reading it I enjoyed it, but thought it lacked the dangerous edge of its predecessor. She was however, in her own line, a very skilful artist, and in retrospect by no means an unworthy winner of the Booker.

  Immediately after a Booker Prize is awarded there is always a flurry of speculation, rumours and leaks in the press about how the result was arrived at. As it happens, an unusually full and reliable report of the proceedings of the 1984 judging was published fourteen years later, though I did not find it myself until I was writing this book. One of the judges, Anthony Curtis, then literary editor of the Financial Times, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-eight, wrote a quite detailed account of their deliberations in his memoir, Lit Ed (1998). He listed twenty-five novels, out of well over a hundred submitted, which he and the other judges – Cobb, Ted Rowlands, Polly Devlin and the Oxford don and poet John Fuller – reduced to a long list (though it wasn’t known as such or made public then) of twenty-five arranged in alphabetical order, beginning with Amis, Kingsley for Stanley and the Women and Amis, Martin for Money. The media would have been delighted with a contest between father and son, but neither book was shortlisted. According to Curtis, ‘Cobb’s guillotine came down sharply … on any mention of Martin Amis’s Money.’ He was apparently shocked and disgusted by Amis’s rhetorically brilliant, mordantly satirical account of the squalid and humiliating adventures of a young would-be filmmaker jetting between England and America, and it would seem that neither Curtis nor the other judges felt strongly enough to defend it. When I read Money later I had no doubt that its exclusion from the shortlist was a great injustice, and that it would have been deserving of the prize. It confirmed Martin Amis as the stylistic leader of the younger generation of British novelists, and it is still arguably his finest achievement.

  According to Curtis, when the judges agreed the shortlist there was a general consensus among them that Ballard was the likely winner. But when they gathered four weeks later for the final meeting, sentiment had subtly shifted. In the meantime two people who had been interned in Shanghai during the events described in Empire of the Sun wrote to The Listener, where it had been reviewed, to say that it bore no resemblance to what actually happened there. It also became known that Ballard had not in fact been separated from his parents at that time. Empire of the Sun did not pretend to be anything other than a work of fiction inspired by personal experience; but these revelations had the effect, for some readers, of undermining the authenticity of the story to some degree. Curtis admits that this may have contributed to a cooling of the judges’ admiration for the book, and after re-reading all the shortlisted titles some shared Fuller’s view that Empire of the Sun was damagingly overwritten in places. Hotel du Lac was brought forward in contrast as a formally perfect novel and obtained general support – except for Curtis. He recalled: ‘I admired Hotel but it was not my choice … I wanted to give the prize to David Lodge for Small World. It seemed to be a much more ambitious novel, breaking new territory as well as being hugely, hilariously enjoyable … I went on and on about it at that last meeting … but to no avail … in the end it was Fuller who said, “Well, you’re not going to resign if we give it to Brookner.” Put like that I had to admit I wasn’t, and to Goff’s relief I caved in, and we had a winner, Hotel du Lac.’

  Naturally when I read this I felt grateful to Anthony Curtis for championing my novel. I also felt regretful that I never knowingly had a conversation about the matter with him. I say ‘knowingly’ because I did meet him and his wife in the 1990s at the annual Sunday Times Christmas books party, a large noisy gathering held in the library of the Reform Club. By this time I was suffering serious hearing impairment and reliant on hearing aids in both ears that could not cope with the volume of background noise. Readers of my novel Deaf Sentence will recall the opening scene in which the hero is in a similar plight. I remember that at one of those parties Anthony addressed me at some length, evidently expressing enthusiasm for my work, though I could not distinguish more than the occasional phrase, and was reduced to nodding and smiling and uttering phatic murmurs. When I read his memoir I wondered whether he had been telling me on that occasion of his part in the award of the Booker Prize in 1984.

  Shortly after that event I heard from Mike Shaw that Tom Rosenthal had gone into partnership with André Deutsch, owner of one of the few remaining independent publishers in London, to form a new company with the same name. They were joint heads of the firm but it was understood that Tom would take it over when André retired. In fact the two men did not get on well and André sold out to Tom three years later. Tom worked hard to make the firm profitable in a publishing climate increasingly dominated by big conglomerates (Secker was soon acquired by the Reed Group, which was later swallowed up by Random House) and although he had some coups – getting Gore Vidal on his list, for instance, and publishing Penelope Lively’s Booker winner, Moon Tiger, in 1987 – he was able to keep Deutsch going only by selling off backlist assets, and eventually he sold the business in 1998. I kept in touch with him after he left Secker, and whenever I published a new book he would send me a mint copy asking me to inscribe it. He said that he was building up a complete collection of my work to bequeath to his two sons, and I gave him some rare items from my early years which he received gratefully.

  Tom made it plain that if I ever became dissatisfied with Secker & Warburg as a publisher of my novels he would welcome me with open arms at Deutsch, but I never contemplated such a move, and he respected my reasons. I’m sure he did the same with Malcolm, with the same result, but Deutsch did publish several of Malcolm’s non-fiction titles, including the cod guidebook Welcome to Slaka (1986), a spin-off from Rates of Exchange. They wanted to have it printed on the kind of coarse, unbleached paper, with occasional fragments of wood embedded in it, characteristic of cheap books produced in East European countries at this time, but it proved to be unobtainable and, ironically, too expensive to manufacture for this purpose. In 1987 Tom published Malcolm’s Mensonge, its full title being My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism’s Hidden Hero. This began life as an April Fool’s hoax printed in the Observer in 1984, a spoof report about a French literary theorist called Henri Mensonge who had anticipated the key ideas of the fashionable French exponents of structuralism and poststructuralism in a little-known book published years earlier, entitled La Fornication comme acte culturel, a discovery that was causing great excitement and controversy in the cafés and salons of Paris. The article apparently deceived a surprising number of readers, who failed to note the date on their newspape
rs or to recognise that mensonge is the French word for ‘lie’. Malcolm proposed to extend this squib into a short book, writing as a British critic earnestly pursuing the truth about the mysterious and elusive penseur. Tom accepted it and asked me to write a foreword or afterword. I relished the challenge, and decided to do it in the persona of Michel Tardieu, the structuralist narratologist at the Sorbonne in Small World, whose contribution is ‘translated by David Lodge’. Tom donated a photograph of his bald pate, taken from behind, as a portrait of Mensonge for the frontispiece. I enjoyed taking part in this parodic entertainment, which revived memories of collaborating with Malcolm in our younger days.

  When Tom sold Deutsch, he did not retire completely from publishing, but set up a small firm called Bridgewater Press with the antiquarian bookseller Rick Gekoski, specialising in limited editions of new books for collectors, beautifully bound and printed on high-quality paper. In 1998 they published in this format a small collection of six stories of mine which had been published previously in several European countries but not in the UK,3 and later my novel Thinks … simultaneously with the Secker edition in 2001. Though increasingly afflicted with various maladies, Tom continued to live an active professional life and to pursue his many interests in the post-Deutsch years, and had an ‘office’ in central London as a concrete demonstration that he had not retired. He had started his career with the art publishers Thames and Hudson, was a keen collector of modern art, and used his release from the burden of commercial publishing to add to the lavishly illustrated books he authored on modern artists including Jack Yeats, Sidney Nolan, Paula Rego and L.S. Lowry – whose work he had studied and lauded long before its importance was widely recognised. He had a passion (which I did not share) for opera, and reviewed it for national newspapers. His office was a little flat tucked away behind Leicester Square, and I called on him there occasionally after I acquired a London pied-à-terre nearby. Like me he suffered from impaired hearing, and if we had lunch together he always stipulated that the table was booked for two o’clock so that the noise level in the restaurant had begun to decline by the time we took our seats. He was passionately interested in Test cricket, and when Edgbaston hosted a match he came up to Birmingham to watch it and we would give him dinner. I was a contributor to A Life in Books, a liber amicorum privately published in 2005 to celebrate Tom’s seventieth birthday, in which I said truthfully that when he accepted Changing Places ‘he rescued my career as a novelist from the doldrums and set it on a course that proved increasingly prosperous – for which I remain eternally grateful to him’. The long list of contributors to this book impressively demonstrated the number and variety of his friends, and the breadth of his interests. The most serious of his afflictions was kidney disease and towards the end of his life he required frequent dialysis, but with extraordinary fortitude, and the devoted support of his wife Ann, he carried on working and travelling and opera-going, until at the age of seventy-eight he gave up the struggle and stopped the dialysis. Tom had a great appetite for life and I admired his determination to persist until there was no drop of quality to be wrung from it.