Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  These developments shaped my thoughts about a new novel. It would be about work – what their work meant to people in different walks of life and how it defined their identity. One of the attractions of an academic career was that for those in it their work was what most interested them intellectually. Of course there were aspects of teaching – ‘marking’, for instance – that could be tedious; but essentially one was paid to do what one would want to do anyway for personal pleasure and satisfaction – in my own case reading, discussing and writing about literature. It was obvious to me, however, that many people in other occupations were equally committed to their work, whatever it was, as a source of personal fulfilment and self-esteem, and could be devastated if they were suddenly deprived of it. I began to make notes for a story about a man who was the boss of a factory or similar business in a city like Birmingham, who had lived wholly for his work and was suddenly made redundant. How would he cope, rejected by the only milieu in which he had any expertise? What effect would it have on his personal life, his marriage and family? I thought he might have some kind of breakdown, until he met a woman with an academic background, whose career was also under threat but whose professional involvement in the humanities, which he would at first despise, gradually persuaded him that there was more to life than profit and loss. Originally I thought the novel would begin with the man being made redundant, but I realised that to make his character convincing I needed to convey what his working life had been like before he was deprived of it – and I had very little idea of what that might be. I would have to research it.

  Fortunately I had a personal contact in the world of industry. His name was Maurice Andrews, known to his family and friends as ‘Andy’. I had met him through his wife, Marie, who was one of several mature students who enrolled for degrees in English at Birmingham in the 1970s. They were bright women who for various reasons had left school without proceeding to higher education, got married and had children who no longer needed continual supervision, and then studied for the necessary exams to obtain the free university education to which they were entitled. They were a very welcome addition to the student body, highly motivated and bringing more experience of life to the study of literature than the average undergraduate. Marie Andrews caught my attention as a member of a seminar group I taught in a course for all first-year students called ‘Close Reading and Composition’, which included some creative writing exercises. One week I asked them to write a short autobiographical narrative and she astonished me with an account of having a baby at the same time and in the same maternity ward as her mother, who was giving birth to her twelfth child. It was written in a simple, direct style which made it all the more effective. I discovered that Marie belonged to a Catholic family who had come to England from Northern Ireland and settled in Birmingham. She had left school at sixteen and gone to work as a typist in an industrial firm where she met and married Andy, a native Brummie who had studied mechanical engineering at Birmingham University and was climbing the ladder of manufacturing management. They were practising Catholics, occasionally attended events at the Chaplaincy, and their eldest son Jonathan shared my Stephen’s interest in astronomy, so our two families became friends. By this time Marie had obtained a 2.1 BA degree, followed by an MA in Old Icelandic, then did a law conversion course and became a solicitor. Andy continued to advance his career in industry, moving from one firm to another.

  Andy may have deduced from our conversations that I had a very limited knowledge of life outside the university. Perhaps I made some ill-informed remark about the strikes that disrupted British industry in the seventies, especially in the local Longbridge plant then occupied by British Leyland. At any rate, one day he spontaneously invited me to sit in on a meeting he was due to have shortly with union representatives concerning a dispute at a factory he was running near Coventry that made Triumph cars. ‘You might find it interesting,’ he said, and I did. The issue over which shop stewards were threatening to call a strike was a proposed reduction in the number of men required to operate the paint shop – in Andy’s view this factory, like many others in the car industry, was excessively overmanned. He gave me a quick tour of the plant before the meeting. Two shop stewards, representing different unions, came to his office and looked suspiciously at me sitting beside him, but seemed satisfied by his explanation that I was a writer, simply observing. After some discussion they retired to another room where their colleagues were gathered to report on the meeting, and returned with a revised set of demands. This procedure was repeated perhaps twice, until agreement was reached and the strike was averted. I was impressed by the orderly manner of the negotiations but also struck by the adversarial relationship between management and labour which they revealed.

  It was this experience that emboldened me, at the beginning of 1986, to tell Andy that I was planning a novel about the boss of a factory, and to ask if there was any way I could observe him at work over a longer period in his current position, Managing Director of a firm manufacturing steel tubing. He said, ‘Yes, no problem – you could shadow me.’ This phrase and the activity to which it referred were new to me, but he explained that it was common practice in business and industry. For instance, if someone was leaving or about to be promoted, the person appointed to replace him would follow him about for a period to learn what the job entailed. The only problem was to devise some plausible explanation of why I was shadowing Andy without revealing my true motive.

  By happy chance 1986 had been declared by the government ‘Industry Year’, during which there would be all kinds of initiatives to improve the efficiency and morale of British Industry. Universities were involved, and like all academic staff at Birmingham I had received a circular letter from the VC urging us to develop contacts and co-operation with local industry. This message was directed mainly at science and technology departments, but I saw how it could give me a plausible role as Andy’s shadow at Tube Investments. Under my part-time contract I would be ‘off’ in the spring term of 1986. It was not unknown for humanities graduates to be employed in industry, and I could pretend that, as a project for Industry Year, I was devoting part of my study leave to discovering what sort of careers my students might find in this sector. It proved to be a perfect alibi. For two weeks in January I drove on every working day to the factory in Oldbury, one of the towns and boroughs that make up the urban-industrial sprawl north-west of Birmingham known as the Black Country, and followed Andy about, sitting in on meetings with his senior management team, touring the factory with him, eating in the staff canteen, and accompanying him on his occasional trips to do business with other firms. Only one of his colleagues recognised my name as that of a novelist, and he kept schtum. Andy also gave me introductions to other factories which I visited later on my own. At first I was shocked by the dirty, sometimes dangerous, and boringly repetitive nature of much factory work, and by the instrumental attitude of management to labour, as if they were a quantifiable source of energy rather than human beings. But I developed a respect for the foremen on the shop floor and the managers in their offices who were doing their best to keep companies going in an adverse economic climate, providing employment and contributing to the wealth without which universities, and the civilised way of life their workforce enjoyed, would not exist. I was struck by how little those who worked in one of these sectors of society knew about the other.

  As soon as I started shadowing Andy I realised that the procedure was a perfect mechanism for driving the plot of my novel, with many more possibilities for development, especially in the form of comedy, than the rather sentimental scenario I had originally sketched. For my heroine I imagined a young temporary lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge – I thought I would use this fictional version of Birmingham, and a number of characters who belonged to it, once again – who fears she may be ‘let go’ at the end of the academic year in spite of being a popular and dedicated teacher. She is a left-wing feminist and devotee of literary the
ory, and has never even peeped inside a factory till she is asked, as part of the University’s contribution to Industry Year, to shadow on one day a week the managing director of a local foundry and engineering works, a man totally immersed in the macho culture of business and engineering, struggling to keep the firm in profit. The Shadow Scheme, as I called it, is at first an equally unwelcome distraction from their work for both of them, but she dares not refuse to participate because of her precarious position at the University, while he is similarly helpless to resist the pressure of his divisional chief in the corporation to which his firm belongs. I called them Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox. Her first name, communicated by telephone, causes him to expect a male shadow, compounding his resentment and dismay when she arrives at the factory.

  As the novel developed I made Robyn the author of a book on early Victorian industrial novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Disraeli’s Sybil, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Mrs Gaskell’s North and South. These books dealt with the social unrest in England generated by economic recession and the Chartist movement: strikes, demonstrations and riots. There were analogies with events in Britain in the 1980s, especially the miners’ strike. The Victorian authors were haunted by the memory of the French Revolution and sought to encourage reconciliation between the warring classes, often expressed through a love story. Mrs Gaskell’s novel was particularly relevant to my project. Its heroine is an idealistic young woman who is compelled to move from a genteel milieu in the south of England to an industrial town in the North, where she gets involved in a dispute between the master of a factory and his workforce which arouses conflicting feelings in her. To help readers who might not be well versed in Victorian fiction I described Robyn lecturing on these novels, and used quotations from them as epigraphs for the chapters, beginning with a passage from Shirley:

  If you think … that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you will never be more mistaken … Something real, cool and solid lies before you, something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.

  I hoped some readers would remember that Small World was subtitled ‘An Academic Romance’.

  I started writing the novel in February 1986 with a chapter that intercut between my two main characters as they rose on a chilly Monday morning in winter and went to their respective workplaces. The beginning of a new novel is always slow, because there is so much detail about the characters and settings to be decided; but I was pleased with how it was going and eager to continue. Unfortunately I had committed myself to another round-the-world tour in March, more extensive than the one in 1982. It had begun with a letter from Harriet Harvey-Wood, Head of the British Council’s English Literature Department and a regular presence at the Council’s Cambridge seminars, asking me if I would take part in a literary festival in Wellington, New Zealand in the spring of 1986. It would be the first such event mounted in this city at the southern tip of the country’s North Island and the Council was anxious to support it with well-known British writers. At about the same time I received an invitation to be a Lansdowne Scholar at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. This was an endowed scheme to bring academic visitors there for a few days, to give a lecture or two and meet faculty. I thought I could conveniently combine this with the invitation to New Zealand, breaking up the long journey to the Antipodes, so I accepted both proposals. Over the next few months I added several other stages to the trip: a visit to Fiji, urged on me by an academic from that country who was spending a sabbatical attached to the Birmingham English Department, visits to Melbourne and Sydney, giving lectures or readings at universities, and a final stopover of a few days in Hong Kong. American Express eventually gave me an itinerary which listed sixteen flights in twenty-three days.

  As the time approached I lost all desire to make this labori-ous and entirely unnecessary journey, and felt I had made a terrible mistake in planning it. What I really wanted to do was to stay at home in my term ‘off’ and get on with the new novel, but it was much too late to back out of my commitments. I succumbed to a familiar syndrome: regret for a decision triggering anxiety and depression. A friend suggested recourse to yoga, and recommended a retired teacher of Pranayama yoga, a gentle, calming form of yoga focused on control of breathing, who would sometimes take on beginners like me. Mrs F, as I shall call her, kindly agreed to help me. In the sitting room of her semi-detached house this elderly lady disconcertingly whipped off her long skirt to reveal spindly legs in grey tights. She looked frail, but was able to demonstrate the lotus position with ease; I settled for the half-lotus. I got some relief from the exercises she taught me, and still use a few of them occasionally, but as the day of departure approached my dread of the journey ahead intensified. This of course was entirely irrational. However awful the trip turned out to be – and I had no reason at all to think it would be awful – it would only last for three weeks, and then I would be back home again. That didn’t seem to make any difference to my state of mind. I didn’t want to go. But I had to go – or suffer humiliation and disgrace.

  Leaving home in the morning of the 3rd of March was a miserable experience. Mary had never really approved of the trip and was understandably unsympathetic to my tardy regrets about undertaking it. She saw Christopher off to college after breakfast, then discovered that he had left his bus pass behind and had to run after him with it, which would make her late for her own teaching job. My taxi was waiting to take me to the airport and our goodbye embrace was hurried. She was in tears as I left the house, which made me feel I could not have managed my departure worse.

  I took the shuttle which existed then from Birmingham airport to Heathrow, transferring on to an Air Canada flight to Vancouver, all the time in a state of mental distress which became acute in the darkness over Alberta. I actually considered consulting a doctor in Victoria and indulged in fantasies of being declared unfit to travel further and sent home to recuperate. In my hand baggage there was a pamphlet on meditation which Mrs F had given me and I had packed on impulse that morning. She was a Christian and the little book had a Christian slant. I took it out and found it had an immediate calming effect. I also had with me a new notebook in which to keep a diary of my journey, and when we landed at Edmonton, with a long wait on the tarmac before continuing, I described the experience of reading the pamphlet. Thirty years later, while writing this book, I found the diary in my files, with a passage about this episode on the second page. I had forgotten reading the meditation pamphlet, and was astonished by the language in which I expressed its effect on me:

  What a Godsend (literally). What good luck (providential?) that I thought to put it in my flight bag this morning. It seemed to speak directly to my condition, and the first meditation was so apropos. ‘Be still and know that I am peace within thee.’ Peace is exactly what I need. This meditation, undertaken as we descended towards Edmonton, certainly calmed me. It also made me for the first time in a long while think that I do believe in God, that without God I couldn’t manage to carry on – or that perhaps I have been trying to carry on my life all on my own, and that is the source of my depression. The plane which had been a hateful symbol of alienation and pointless travel (cf. M. Amis) was suddenly redeemed, and the miracle of flight, sustaining these tons of metal in the air, became a symbol of God’s sustaining presence in the world.

  Apart from the reference to the plane and Martin Amis (I was thinking of John Self’s joyless commuting across the Atlantic in Money) this passage might have come from one of the testimonies of born-again Christians in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, a book I did not read until many years later. It was, I think, the only genuinely spiritual experience I have had in my life, for the foundations of my Catholic faith had always been essentially intellectual, cultural, familial, and continued to be for many years after this episode, until I felt free in old age to openly confess my agnosticism.

 
The epiphany I recorded on the tarmac at Edmonton did not fundamentally change me, or cure my malaise, but it did enable me to go on with my trip impersonating the person I was supposed to be, hotshot academic and successful comic novelist, and even to enjoy parts of it. I possess a photo of myself at the University of Victoria, laughing uproariously, from which one would never guess the stoical gloom with which I rose each morning in the University’s Guest House to face the day’s engagements – a mood not improved by the breakfast arrangements. There was no catering for guests except the means of making coffee and tea for oneself, and a toaster – but no bread, only muffins, the intolerably sweet cupcakes which go by that name in Canada and the USA. Later some members of the Faculty in whom I confided kindly gave me slices of bread in paper bags, which I was able to toast, sharing the excess with other guests. I met some very pleasant and interesting people at Victoria but there was too little time to get to know any of them well. They divided between a majority who found the mild climate and easy pace of life in British Columbia congenial, and those who felt as if they were on the very edge of civilisation and in danger of falling off it. I managed to do a little sightseeing in downtown Victoria, and spent some absorbing hours in the Museum with its magnificent displays of BC’s wildlife and history, before I had to move on.