Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  In this kind of situation an elderly widow or widower will often go to live with a married son or daughter. It was a relief to Mary and me that Dad never showed any inclination to make such a move, because we both felt that we had enough to cope with, professionally and domestically, without taking on that additional responsibility. Dad for his part would not contemplate moving out of the house where he had lived contentedly for so long, in a part of London that he knew intimately. Birmingham always seemed to him like a foreign country, which he was glad to visit occasionally but could never belong to. So he and I settled into a routine of regular contact by phone and letter, with his occasional visits to us in Birmingham and mine to Brockley when business took me to London. He always spent Christmas with us, along with Mary’s mother and other members of her family, and these were usually successful visits. When Dad set himself out to be sociable, drawing on his experience as a bandleader, he could be good company, and friends who got to know him at the parties we usually had at the festive season have warm memories of him. But there was always a gap between his domestic habits and ours which could produce friction, especially between him and Mary, as it had in the past between her and my mother, and the longer the visit lasted the more likely it was to occur. One of several reasons why I felt fortunate that chance led me to make my home in Birmingham for the greater part of my adult life, while keeping it to myself as a slightly guilty secret, was that it was close enough to London for me to see Mum and Dad quite often, but distant enough to ensure that most of the time we were able to lead our own lives without much involvement in theirs. Fortunately Dad didn’t seem to suffer from loneliness after Mum’s death. He had always been content to be on his own, a trait I recognise in myself to a lesser extent, and it may be something that comes naturally from being an only child, as we both were.

  There were several strands to my life as a writer at this period. There was the prospective TV serial of Small World which I looked forward to being involved with, for Mike Cox promised to send me Howard Schuman’s draft of the first episode for my comments. In September I went to Germany for a week to promote the edition of this novel published by List – the first time I had done anything of the kind with a foreign translation. The tour, taking in Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich, was sponsored in part by the British Council, though I presume my German publishers paid for the hotel accommodation for me and my editor, who accompanied me on the tour. She was an elegant and confident young woman called Erica who spoke perfect English and informed me early in our acquaintance that she was engaged to be married, perhaps to discourage any flirtatious behaviour on my part. She was obviously very intelligent but I thought rather young to be entrusted with total control, as it seemed, over the editing and production of Schnitzeljagd – for that was the title of the German edition. She had written to me soon after List acquired the rights to say that the literal translation of the English title, Kleine Welt, would not be appropriate since it would suggest that it was a book for juvenile readers, and she asked me to suggest some alternative titles. I did so, and from them she selected ‘Paperchase’, which I proposed as a concise metaphor for the hectic peregrinations of my academic characters around the globe. It was however an obsolete sporting event even in England and almost unknown in Germany, while the pun on ‘paper’ in the scholarly sense did not carry over into the German equivalent, Schnitzeljagd. Several German readers told me subsequently that they had never encountered the word before, and that Kleine Welt would have been a perfectly appropriate title for the novel. Erica’s decision enabled her to use the very attractive illuminated ‘S’ on the cover of the English novel for the German edition, and when I saw the latter I wondered if that had influenced her choice of this dud title. In spite of that, the novel did well in Germany. Later editions issued by different publishers were called Kleine Welt, no doubt causing confusion to readers and booksellers.

  More than a year had passed after Small World was first published but I hadn’t started another novel, because I didn’t have an idea for one. I did however have an idea for a stage play, and in the early summer of 1985 I decided to write it, prompted by seeing an advertisement in the Guardian for a play competition sponsored by Mobil Oil, for which the first prize was £5,000 and a guaranteed production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. I wanted to do something creative, and if it didn’t work out I would soon know, and not waste much time on it. The idea had originated in an invitation from the novelist Deborah Moggach to partner her as tutor of an Arvon Course on writing prose fiction in the summer of 1984. In the late 1960s the Arvon Foundation pioneered the provision of short residential courses in creative writing of various kinds, open to all comers and tutored by professionals. Their programmes had since become extremely popular, starting several aspiring writers on the road to publication. Debbie was a client of the Curtis Brown agency, and I had met her for the first time at Graham Watson’s retirement dinner, when I was seated next to her and much enjoyed her lively conversation. I was curious to see what an Arvon course was like, and seized the opportunity she offered me. She had tutored on several of these courses and briefed me in London one day about what to expect, some weeks before we met our students in a converted farmhouse at Totleigh Barton in Devon, which was the first of the three centres the foundation established in Britain.

  At that time Arvon courses lasted for four to five days over a weekend, and there were usually up to fifteen students, who were admitted on a first come, first served basis without being vetted, so the level of ability was uneven and unpredictable. At Totleigh Barton they were accommodated in the main building and took turns to help prepare and cook the evening meal and wash up afterwards, under the supervision of the manager. The tutors occupied a converted barn which had a large living area, a bathroom and three bedrooms – one being for the ‘guest writer’. Halfway through the course another professional writer was invited to stay for a night, to read from his or her work, chat to the students and generally offer some diversion and relief from what could become a somewhat intense and introverted communal life. The visiting writer on our course was Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese writer brought up in England since childhood and known then chiefly as the author of a highly praised first novel, A Pale View of Hills. He turned out to be charming as well as gifted. Tutors made their own arrangements for teaching, usually a mixture of group workshops and individual tutorials. Students could bring work in progress with them to show their tutor but were encouraged to write, or at least start, something new while in residence. On the last evening they gave readings from their own work, followed by a party. The tutors had also read from their own work after dinner on two previous evenings. That was how it was in 1984.

  Our students were a mixed bunch as regards age, background and ability, and it was difficult to get them to bond. The best of those I tutored was herself a teacher and a veteran of Arvon courses, who had written one novel which was looking for a publisher, and brought with her the beginning of another. She wrote to me later to thank me for my advice and tell me that the first one had been accepted by Bodley Head, for which I could take no credit, but I congratulated her on the achievement. At the other end of the spectrum there were one or two students painfully lacking any literary talent, but Debbie and I did our best for them all, and the course went off reasonably well. One heard lurid stories on the grapevine of some Arvon courses that were total disasters, disrupted by heavy drinking, violent arguments and debauchery, but we were happily spared anything of that kind. Nothing very dramatic happened over our five days, but very soon it struck me that the set-up, bringing together a disparate group of strangers in an isolated location and putting them under competitive pressure, would be perfect for a stage play. It had the classical dramatic unities of time, place and action. One day, I thought, I might try writing a play about a residential creative writing course.

  In writing a novel there are no practical constraints on what your imagination conceives and represents, but in writing for the
stage there are several, and they affect the content of a story as well as the way it is told. A novel can be as long as you like, and if necessary split up into instalments of a roman-fleuve, but a play that lasts longer than three hours in performance is likely to test the audience’s patience, and something like two and a half hours, including an interval, was the average in Britain at that time. It has since become shorter. A novel can have a multiplicity of characters, but I was aware that my first attempt at drama would have a better chance of being staged if it didn’t require more than five or six actors. This meant that the play couldn’t present the students together as a group, but would have to be focused on the tutors, with one student who would interact with them. A feature of the Arvon course I wanted to exploit was that the tutors and the visiting writer all read from their work to the students. This seemed a natural way to translate the normally silent mental process of writing and reading prose fiction into performance; it also offered possibilities for arousing rivalry and anxiety on the part of the writers, and revealing the personal sources of their writing. In these scenes I envisaged that the actor, seated in a spotlight at the front of the stage with the set darkened, would read to the theatre audience as if they were the students gathered in the farmhouse. In reality such readings each lasted at least half an hour, and three of them would take up the larger part of a play’s duration, so each one had to be interrupted and cut short in a different way – an example of how the formal constraints of drama can stimulate the invention of narrative content.

  The main set would be the open-plan living room of the converted barn where the tutors are accommodated, with doors off to bedrooms and bathroom. The dramatis personae would be the three writers, the student and the manager of Wheatcroft, as I called the fictional establishment, and to create the drama there would have to be conflicts between them. The source of conflict between the writers would be professional and sexual rivalry; between them and the student it would be the quality of her work and the tutor–student relationship. I made this student a young primary school teacher called Penny who has brought with her the beginning of a novel she is writing. For one of the tutors I created a character called Leo Rafkin, an American writer currently in England on a Guggenheim fellowship, a last-minute substitute for an English writer who cancelled because of illness. Leo is a kind of synthesis of Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, but less famous and successful, and has a low opinion of contemporary British fiction. He teaches Creative Writing to graduate students at an American university and is dismayed to discover on his arrival in the first scene that he will have to tutor beginners. To the consternation of the manager, Jeremy, he decides to leave immediately, but changes his mind on the arrival of the other tutor, Maude Lockett, an attractive woman in her forties who has written a number of bestselling novels of middle-class English manners, and is married to an Oxford don. Leo makes a clumsy pass at Maude on their first evening together and is rebuffed. Next day they quarrel about Leo’s harsh criticism of the manuscript Penny shows him, which caused her to flee in tears. In the evening Maude reads from her novel in progress, and is interrupted by Jeremy bursting into the room to ask if anyone has seen Penny, who is missing and whose hat has been discovered beside a nearby lake. In the next scene Leo returns to the barn alone while the rest form a search party, and finds Penny asleep on the couch in the barn. As he supposed, she has not tried to drown herself because he told her what was wrong with her work, but now she wants him to tell her how to do it right. Disarmed by her sincerity, he makes some more constructive comments on her novel draft, and tells her how he solved a problem in writing a story of his own, based on the experience of making a visit to Poland and feeling, as a Jew, oppressed by its association with pogroms and Nazi extermination camps. At this point Maude returns to the barn from the search party, her shoes covered in mud, and makes some acid remarks on the pair’s reconciliation before retiring to bed. On the following evening Leo reads his Polish story to the students. At its climax the Jewish central character sodomises a Polish prostitute with a bar of soap in a symbolic act of revenge for the extermination of Jews whose bodies were boiled down to make soap. Sound effects of a door slamming several times indicate that a number of the students walk out in disgust. Back in the barn afterwards, helping herself liberally to a bottle of wine, Maude tries to explain to Leo the hostile reaction of the audience, and the conversation becomes a discussion of the different ways in which male and female novelists write about sex. Maude evidently finds this conversation arousing, for she leaves the door of the bathroom open when she takes a shower before going to bed. Leo, looking up from the computer on which he is revising the text of his story, takes the steam coming from the bathroom as an invitation to join her. So ends the first of two acts.

  On the following day the visiting writer arrives. He is Simon St Clair, a young Cambridge-educated Englishman who has published a scabrous novel called Wormcasts and a collection of his cultural journalism. His reading to the students that evening is a work in progress called Instead of a Novel which consists of a detailed description of the book’s physical appearance and prolegomena – jacket, blurb, author’s photo, list of previous publications, dedication, epigraph, acknowledgements, etc. – and when published will otherwise consist of 250 completely blank pages. Simon is disconcerted to learn that Leo is a late recruit to the course because he once wrote a very destructive review of one of Leo’s books, but continues to goad him with sarcastic mockery of his career, to which Leo responds with scornful denunciations of the English literary scene. As Jeremy reveals to Leo, Simon is one of several young writers whom Maude ‘collects’, and the two writers become rivals for her favour in a war of literary words, which eventually turns to blows – or at least one blow, which gives Simon a nosebleed and turns Maude into his sympathetic nurse for the night. Next morning, in the last scene of the play, Simon has departed. Leo also intends to leave as soon as possible, missing the finale of the course, but sees Penny to return the revised text of her novel in progress. He is impressed and tells her it is a terrific improvement – that she has it in her to become a ‘real writer … But it’s a hard lonely road, Penny. You sure you want to go down it?’ Disconcertingly, she replies,‘No … Coming on this course has sort of cured me of wanting to be a writer.’ Maude, who has overheard this conversation, tries to console Leo for the rebuff and persuades him to stay on for the final evening of the course. A kind of reconciliation occurs, but Leo disturbs her with his last line: ‘I’ve just had a great idea for a play …’

  I have described the action of this play in some detail because I will be recalling its varied fortunes in later chapters. My working title for it was ‘The Pressure Cooker’, a metaphor for the course invoked enthusiastically by Jeremy in the first scene to persuade Leo to stay, which actually has the reverse effect. I wrote the first draft in the summer of 1985 with what seemed to me surprising speed (little did I know then how much rewriting a play normally requires before it is performed) and with considerable enjoyment. I sent it off hopefully to the Mobil Oil competition, and a copy to Charles Elton who was then handling drama as well as TV at Curtis Brown. It wasn’t until December that I heard I had been unsuccessful in the competition, in a kindly letter saying that ‘The Pressure Cooker’ hadn’t quite made the shortlist of thirty-three plays selected from the two thousand which had been submitted, but the judges had enjoyed reading it. Meanwhile Charles had been showing it to London producers, and reported early in the New Year that Robert Fox, a well-known member of this fraternity, had found much to admire in it and described it as ‘a near miss’ for him, which I considered encouraging.

  By then I had decided what my next novel would be about. Although Small World was a success, and elicited enthusiastic fan mail from an international academic readership, I was aware that some colleagues at Birmingham and elsewhere thought it was irresponsible to publish a satirical novel about academics swanning around the world to exotic locations at public expense in 1984, whe
n British universities were reeling from drastic cuts in their funding under Margaret Thatcher’s government. A few reviewers of the book who worked in universities, including Philip Larkin in The Listener, and Germaine Greer when she was on the critics’ panel in the Booker Prize TV programme, took this line. Larkin described the novel as only ‘fairly funny’, while Germaine Greer found it not amusing at all, and at Christmas named it in the Guardian as the novel she had most disliked that year.1

  There is always a gap between the time when a novel is written and the time when it is published, and one expects competent readers to take that into account. Small World is set explicitly in the spring and summer of 1979, just before and after the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, and most of it was written before the effects of her government’s policies on British society were fully felt. In any case it was not a novel about British university life but a novel about the ‘global campus’, and the international conference circuit which was part of that phenomenon was still in full swing in 1984. The novel was true to the milieu it represented, granted a degree of exaggeration that goes with its genre, but I had no intention of writing a sequel in the same carnivalesque mode. I was not oblivious to the effect of the Thatcher government’s monetarist economic policies on British universities and on society at large. ‘Sadomonetarism’, as it was sometimes called by its critics, meant high interest rates, designed to make British industry more competitive by eliminating inefficient businesses, and drastic cuts in public spending. The effect of the first measure was a steep rise in unemployment at all levels from the shop floor to management (in the West Midlands it reached 17 per cent) and one effect of the second was a substantial reduction in the funding of British universities, leading to the freezing of new appointments at many, including Birmingham. Our students were graduating without any confidence that they would find a job, and the prospects for the brightest ones to pursue an academic career were especially bleak.