Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  11

  In late 1984 I found myself in the enviable position of being wooed by producers in BBC Television and the ITV company Granada, each of whom wanted to option the rights to make a drama serial out of Small World. I met people from both organisations and listened to their ideas about adapting the novel. I was (and still am) a great admirer of BBC drama and detest the intrusion of commercial breaks in television programmes, especially dramatic ones, but I decided in favour of Granada. The BBC producer did not seem to have the sense of humour that I thought was requisite for the task, and when I questioned whether BBC2 (the channel for which it was proposed) could provide a budget that would be adequate for the variety of locations in the story, his plans to reduce their number did not reassure me. The executive producer at Granada, Mike Cox, convinced me that they had the means and the will to represent the international scope of the novel, and conveyed a personal enthusiasm for the project, so I favoured them. Charles Elton, who had taken over this aspect of my affairs at Curtis Brown, was in agreement, and negotiated an option contract with Granada.

  Some famous names were approached to write the script, but declined in spite of their admiration for the book, one saying that he couldn’t see how he could add anything to it. When I was asked if I had any ideas, I suggested Andrew Davies. Andrew had been an undergraduate in the English Department at UCL a year or two after me. He knew who I was then, but we had no contact and I didn’t know him. After graduating from UCL Andrew became a schoolteacher and later moved into teacher training, where he introduced creative writing into the curriculum. We met for the first time in the mid-sixties when he invited me to give a reading to his students in a course of this kind at Coventry College of Education. It was the first time I had been asked to read to an audience and I was sufficiently intrigued and flattered to accept. He told me in the same letter that he had a television play coming on soon, called Bavarian Night, that I might find interesting – as I did, and wrote to tell him so. It was about tensions in a marriage between a couple who had met at university, set against a Parent–Teacher Association party with entertainment from a pseudo-Bavarian band. In a poignant domestic scene the husband reminds his wife of how he used to sit behind her at ‘old Emslie’s lectures, and try to will you to turn your head and look at me.’ That was a reference to MacDonald Emslie, the lecturer in the English Department of UCL who had supervised my MA thesis, as I described in QAGTTBB. I imagined Emslie, who had since moved to Edinburgh and was reputed to be an alcoholic, idly watching his TV one evening, sitting up suddenly in astonishment at the sound of his name and spilling his glass of malt.

  After that meeting at Coventry I observed that Andrew was an increasingly successful writer of television drama, including a very popular series aimed at younger viewers about a rebellious schoolgirl called Marmalade Atkins. In October 1984 he wrote to me again. He was still teaching, but now at the University of Warwick which had absorbed the Coventry College, and he asked if he could give my name as a referee for his promotion there to Reader in Arts Education, a function I was very willing to perform. In the last paragraph of his letter he said: ‘I’m currently reading and enjoying very much (for the second time) Small World. Actually I’d love to have a crack at adapting that and/or How Far Can You Go? Has anyone bought options on either of them?’ I replied that there had been nibbles, but no offers, and that I thought he would be a very eligible adaptor of Small World, but if How Far Can You Go? was ever optioned I would want to do it myself.

  When I suggested Andrew for Small World, Granada were aware of his growing talents and agreed that he was eligible; but perhaps he hadn’t yet done enough large-scale projects to convince them that he was the right person for the job, because they didn’t offer it to him. Later, of course, he became an acknowledged master of adapting novels for television, of every kind, from House of Cards to Pride and Prejudice and War and Peace, and is constantly in demand. Granada commissioned Howard Schuman, an American who came to Britain in the 1960s and never left, to write the script for Small World. At that time he was best known for Rock Follies, a very successful series in 1976–77 about the struggles of a girls’ band. I hadn’t seen it, or any of his other work, and when I heard he was to write the script I wondered if Andrew, with his experience of academia, wouldn’t have been a better choice. In fact Howard, who turned out to be a lovely man and a pleasure to work with, wrote a very good script, and that was not the reason why the eventual production was not entirely successful.

  Knowing that I had no qualifications to show for such a task, I did not put myself forward as scriptwriter. I had written two draft scripts of Out of the Shelter, and had found the exercise interesting and instructive, but Channel 4 had withdrawn their offer to make this film, allegedly because Charles Elton was demanding an excessive fee. We presumed they had lost interest in the subject and were using this as an excuse. However by the following March the project was still in play, and I was in correspondence with David Rose, the Head of Drama at Channel 4, to say I would prefer to do another version of the script in collaboration with a director. I suggested Claude Whatham, who had done some well-received films and TV adaptations based on novels, most recently Beryl Bainbridge’s Sweet William. I met Claude to discuss Out of the Shelter and found him sympathetic, but nothing in the end came of this proposed collaboration. Writing for film is like fishing – casting your baited hook into the water time after time, feeling an occasional tug on the line, but very seldom catching a fish. Nevertheless I persisted in trying for many years to come, mainly because it is very difficult to think of a story that is interesting and has not been told before, and having told it as a novel, it is tempting to present the material to a different audience, and to different effect, in another medium.

  Film and TV rights play an important part in the economics of literary fiction for both writers and their agents, whether or not the author adapts his or her own work. A large proportion of films and TV dramas are based on novels, and the income from the sale of the author’s rights can be considerable. (For publishers the main benefit is the second wave of publicity and sales which the film or TV serial of a well-known novel can generate.) Most novels that are optioned are never made in either form, in which case the financial yield is much smaller, but it is a useful supplement to an author’s earnings without requiring any more work from him – especially if, as not infrequently happens when a film is ‘in development’, the duration of the option (usually set at 18 months or two years) runs out and is renewed. Eventually the producer may be asked to purchase the rights or relinquish them. This happened with my novel Changing Places. Otto Plaschkes, owner of a small independent production company called Ariel, who in 1966 had made a successful film called Georgy Girl based on a novel by Margaret Forster, took an option on my novel when it was published in 1975, and decided to purchase the rights in 1978 ‘in perpetuity’, as was common practice then. Nowadays there is normally a time limit, after which the rights revert to the author. This sale brought me a very useful sum but, as in most film contracts, the full potential yield was tied to percentages of the budget and profits (if any) of the film when it was eventually made. Otto commissioned the playwright Peter Nichols to adapt Changing Places, and Michael Blakemore, who had directed several of Peter’s plays for the National Theatre, was provisionally attached to the project in that capacity. They came up to Birmingham together to meet me, and I drove them around the city to give them an idea of Rummidge. I was particularly pleased to meet Peter, whose plays I admired. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, about a married couple struggling to care for a severely handicapped daughter with the aid of wryly comic music hall routines, had been an unforgettable theatrical experience for Mary and me when we saw it in 1967, a year after Christopher’s birth. Peter and I have kept in touch ever since that meeting in Birmingham.

  I met Otto on a few occasions over the years and corresponded with him more frequently. I found him very likeable – courteous, cultured and articulate –
but it was not until I read his obituary in the Guardian in February 2005, when he died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of seventy-five, that I fully realised what a very interesting life he had had, and wished I had known him better. He was a Jewish refugee from Vienna who came to England in 1939 as a child on the Kindertransport and was lucky to be later reunited with his parents in Wiltshire. He attended Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury where he was taught by William Golding and is credibly reported to have been the model for Piggy in The Lord of the Flies, the tubby, bespectacled innocent victim of the savagery that breaks out among the schoolboys abandoned on their desert island. Otto fell in love with film as a student at Cambridge and after graduating started his career as a runner at Ealing Studios, then worked his way up through the various levels of the industry until he became an independent producer. He worked with many famous directors, writers and actors, but produced few notable successes himself. Perhaps he was too nice a man to succeed in the film industry, or perhaps he was just unlucky. Once he had a fort built in the North African desert at the cost of a million pounds which had to be demolished when the epic film for which it was designed was cancelled.

  To me Otto was mainly a source of letters at long intervals alternately raising and dashing hopes of Changing Places being made. He had useful contacts with some Hollywood actors, such as Walter Matthau, with whom he made his most successful film, Hopscotch, and entertained ambitious plans for casting Changing Places. There was a period when he was working on a dream cast of Matthau for Morris Zapp, John Cleese for Philip Swallow, Shirley MacLaine for Zapp’s wife Desirée and Judi Dench for Hilary Swallow. If there is a heaven where deserving writers and producers frustrated in this world can view perfect versions of their favourite films which were never made, I would like to see that one more than any other. But Otto never managed to get all the pieces of the jigsaw together, and the longer he tried the more difficult it became. The novel is tied to its period setting in 1969, focusing on the student revolution and the counter-culture, and in the early seventies several American movies exploited this material. They were not very good but they took the gloss of novelty off Changing Places for potential backers. Later the big British company EMI, whose chief interest was music but who were diversifying into drama, expressed interest in developing the novel for television, and Peter Nichols was commissioned to write a new script. But in March 1985 Otto wrote to me: ‘EMI don’t want to go ahead on the present screenplay and they don’t wish to spend any further monies on it.’ It seemed like the end of the road.

  When Granada heard about this, they became interested in acquiring the TV rights to Changing Places and combining the plot with that of Small World, which shared many of the same characters, but the terms Otto demanded were too high and the idea was dropped. I was in fact relieved when this project fell through, because it seemed to me that the two books were thematically distinct and structurally incompatible. After that, my agents periodically received enquiries over many years from TV and film companies about the availability of the rights and were referred to Otto, with the usual negative outcome. I sometimes suspected that he asked an unreasonably high price because he couldn’t bear to part with a property on which he had expended so much time and effort, or risk seeing other hands botching it.

  Small World was published by Macmillan in America in March 1985, and received the kind of reviews an author dreams of. At last I received an unqualified rave in the New York Times Book Review, which described it as ‘an exuberant, marvelously funny novel’, while the Boston Globe declared: ‘It is hard to imagine a funnier book about academe. In fact it’s hard to imagine a funnier book about anything.’ It did not sell as well as might have been expected after this kind of reception, because Macmillan (like Morrow with How Far Can You Go?) had not strongly promoted the novel to the book trade before publication. They tried to compensate by auctioning the paperback rights, and the winner was Warner, an imprint of the Time Warner corporation which I did not associate with literary fiction. They published a large-format paperback, with three pages of review quotes at the front, which I assumed was photographically offset from the Macmillan hardback, and so I did not bother to check the text. Two or three years later I received a letter from a reader who admired the novel but complained about the number of gross misprints the Warner edition contained, citing some of them. I immediately sat down to read the book myself and found many more, which I reported to Warner. They were very apologetic and reissued a corrected edition, but it was another manifestation of the jinx that seemed to haunt my dealings with American publishers.

  Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, I continued to maintain the academic side of my twin-track career, exploring the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theories in a series of essays on subjects like ‘Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction’, ‘Dialogue in the Modern Novel’ and ‘Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin’, which would eventually be collected in After Bakhtin (1990). I was now experienced in getting the maximum mileage out of a single idea: I would for instance agree to write an essay for a journal, or as a contribution to a book to be published in the future, drafting it first as a lecture or conference paper at venues around the world whose audiences I could be reasonably sure would not overlap, and eventually collect the essays together in a book of my own. Sometimes this process would begin with an invitation to give a lecture on a topic of one’s choice on some special occasion. ‘Dialogue in the Modern Novel’ had its first airing in 1985 at the Memorial University of Newfoundland as the Pratt Lecture – an unfortunate but unavoidable collocation, an annual event founded in honour of the distinguished Canadian poet and versatile prose writer E.J. Pratt (1882–1964), who was a native of the island and had been a professor in the University’s English Department for a time in his long and varied career.

  I went there for a week in April, enticed by the warmth of the invitation and the opportunity to see this remote, poetically named island (for me inextricably associated with the line ‘O, my America! my new-found-land’ in John Donne’s famous erotic poem ‘To his mistress going to bed’.) April in Newfoundland is not spring, but a continuation of winter. I was told that there are about two months in the summer when the place is idyllic, and I could believe it, but I arrived at night in the middle of a snowstorm and there was snow on the ground and intermittently in the air all the time I was there. Unsurprisingly the weather is a constant, obsessive subject of conversation. St John’s, where the University is situated, is the chief city of the island, built around a natural harbour. Its clapboard houses are painted in various bright colours, no doubt to make up for a dominantly monochrome habitat during most of the year. Visitors to a community like this, in a place like this, where new faces are rare, are usually warmly welcomed, and I certainly was. The high point for me was a day-long party at the home of Christopher and Mary Pratt, a rambling white clapboard house beside a tidal salmon stream which flows into St Mary’s Bay. He is related to E.J. Pratt, and one of Canada’s most distinguished artists, painting and drawing common objects and domestic interiors in a meticulous fashion that goes beyond a merely photographic realism and endows them with a hypnotic fascination, so that you feel you have never really looked at and appreciated a window frame or an iron bedstead before. He does something similar with the softer shapes of nude and semi-nude female figures, and sometimes juxtaposes the animate and the inanimate to striking effect. Before I left the house, he kindly presented me with a beautifully illustrated book, Christopher Pratt with text by David B. Wilcox and Meriké Weiler. The first illustration is a long landscape-size painting spread over two pages, which depicts the artist seated on one side of a bare room of austere modern design, working with calm concentration on a picture of a nubile young woman who is standing on the other side, wearing only a pair of plain pink underpants. She has turned her head and glances suspiciously out of the picture at the viewer, as if warning us to keep our distance and not violate this private collaboration with a lascivious
gaze. The picture is entitled Me and the Bride. Pratt’s wife Mary is also an artist, with her own studio in the house beside the salmon stream.

  Houses were very much on our own minds at that time. The three-storey semi-detached Edwardian villa in Norman Road, Northfield, had served us well for nearly twenty years, but the contours of the family were changing and it no longer met our needs or satisfied our desires. Julia was working on her PhD at Aston and had recently left the parental home to rent a bedsitter in the house of friends. Stephen was due to graduate in Politics at Newcastle University in the summer of 1985, and intended to save up enough money to travel extensively around the world by working for a time in clerical jobs in London. Only Christopher was living with us now.