Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  The shuttle from Victoria to Vancouver was delayed, and I nearly missed my flight to Honolulu, where I had to wait a couple of hours in the middle of the night for the flight to Fiji. Fortunately that plane was almost empty so I was able to stretch out and sleep fitfully for several hours. Whenever I woke, the elderly man across the aisle was in the same posture, sitting upright with his reading lamp on, staring fixedly at the card with emergency instructions for vacating the plane, which he held in both hands. It was not a good idea to think of the breadth and depth of water over which we were passing, and what might happen if the engines failed. Better to sleep, or read, or listen to music while looking out at the changing sky as dawn began to tint the clouds. The voice of the captain pointed out that Halley’s Comet was visible near the sickle moon.

  The international airport of Fiji is at Nadi on the opposite side of the island from the capital, Suva, another short flight away, where the University of the South Pacific is situated. Looking down from the plane I saw nothing but dense vegetation covering steep hills with summits that looked as if they had been pinched into shape by a giant hand. The man who had persuaded me to make this visit, Dr S, had informed me late in the day that he would not after all be in Fiji himself at the time, but would arrange for someone from the University to meet me. Nobody was at the airport, however. I had been given the name of Andrew Hook, a professor in the English Department, but no telephone number. I managed to obtain it by phoning the University from a public call box with the assistance of a taxi driver who explained how the phone worked, and a lady selling flowers who gave me change. All the Fijians I met subsequently were equally friendly and obliging. When he collected me Andrew Hook apologised and explained that he had been given the wrong time for my arrival. He drove me into the city and gave me breakfast at the Travellers Lodge overlooking the bay of Suva. Somerset Maugham had stayed at the hotel next door, and it seemed to me, when Andrew took me on a stroll along the waterfront later, that the whole city had the atmosphere of a Maugham short story. He briefly explained the social and political tension in the country between the native Fijian population and the wealthier, mainly Indian middle and upper class. He himself was American, but spoke with a British accent, and was married, he told me, to an African from Uganda.

  He took me to my accommodation at the University Lodge, a large one-storey building with a pleasant veranda and lounge, and ceiling fans instead of air conditioning, looked after by a motherly Fijian housekeeper who cooked an excellent early dinner for me. I showered and rested in preparation for the meeting of the local Writers’ Group scheduled for that evening. Dr S himself belonged to this group and introducing me to its members had been his main motive for proposing my visit to Fiji, so I was annoyed that he had absented himself for unexplained reasons. I could have done with some help in addressing a group who turned out to have very varied interests, abilities and ethnic identities. The first to arrive was a gigantic Tongan with a beard and a mop of woolly hair, wearing a long skirt and a T-shirt stretched over his beer belly, who said that he was writing a comic novel about a man who has a pain in the arse and tries various remedies without success. ‘It is autobiographical,’ he told me. The next was an Indian who said, ‘I come early because I am interested in words, and in the beginning was the word.’ Disconcertingly he picked up one of my own books without my permission, sat down and began reading it. I can’t remember what I said when they were all assembled, but they seemed to enjoy the occasion and some stayed talking and drinking until well after midnight. Andrew Hook’s wife Caroline came and did not stay late, but I had an interesting conversation with her before she left. She had given up a career in nursing to do a degree in English and Politics, taught at the University and was a fan of Terry Eagleton. She said Fiji was full of racism of a genteel, unacknowledged kind, based on shades of skin colour.

  Next day, a Sunday, she and Andrew took me with their two delightful young children to Pacific Harbour, a famous resort near Suva, choosing a beach that epitomised the archetypal tropical paradise: a long, palm-fringed crescent of pristine, platinum-coloured sand, lapped by a turquoise sea. I was eager to swim, but soon after I entered the water I felt a tingling sensation like pins and needles all over my body. It was not painful, but rather unpleasant, and soon drove us all out of the water. There was no visible source, and we suffered no after-effects, but I thought it must have been caused by something – perhaps minuscule creatures that were biting us or discharging some kind of electricity. A friend who had the same experience in tropical waters has recently told me I was being stung by tiny jellyfish. It was very frustrating, but we retired to a nearby hotel behind the beach which had a fine pool in which we enjoyed a swim, and afterwards I treated the Hooks to a barbecue lunch.

  No arrangements had been made for me to visit the University the following day or to do anything else, which I attributed to Dr S’s incompetence. References to him by the Hooks and others were guarded and ambiguous, and I inferred that he was embroiled in some kind of marital crisis and his whereabouts were unknown. With nothing to detain me in Suva I decided to fly back to the international airport at Nadi that afternoon and stay at a hotel there for a night instead of getting up very early the next day to catch my connecting flight to Auckland. I had flown to Suva in a Boeing 737, but the return flight to Nadi was in a small and fragile-looking propeller plane which was ‘Delayed’. Out on the tarmac a couple of engineers were tinkering with its undercarriage, calling occasionally for new tools to be brought out. Time passed. Eventually the plane was cleared for take-off, and we passengers, a dozen or so in number, carried our bags out to be weighed on scales beside the plane. Then they weighed the passengers. I had never experienced this before, and it did not inspire confidence. By the time we took off it was evening, and very soon, in the way of the tropics, it was night. We were flying through clouds which entered the cabin through the ventilators in the form of vapour, and the little plane pitched and yawed in the turbulence. One could see nothing through the windows, but I knew what was underneath us: nothing but jungle-covered hills, with no place for an emergency landing. Fortunately none was required.

  A representative of my publishers in New Zealand, a very nice man called David, met me at Auckland and gave me a lightning tour of the handsome city in his car and an excellent lunch at Sails restaurant, overlooking the marina, before taking me back to the airport to catch my plane to Wellington. David told me he had tried to read Keri Hulme’s The Bone People three times without being able to finish it. This first novel by a writer of part-Maori descent, published by an obscure New Zealand press in a first edition of 800 copies, was the surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, and a highly controversial choice by the judges. Although I managed to read it to the end I shared David’s opinion of its literary merit. Its success had however given an enormous boost to New Zealand’s cultural prestige, and David warned me to be tactful in discussing it while I was in the country. New Zealand writers are polarised between those who see themselves as belonging to an essentially English and European literary tradition and those who, motivated either by loyalty to their native roots or by post-colonial guilt, believe they have a duty to recognise, recuperate and integrate the aboriginal cultural tradition in their work. In a country with a relatively small population, where literary writing is heavily dependent on state subsidy in various forms, this is a contentious issue.

  Wellington is very different from Auckland: smaller, quieter, perceptibly provincial. You could tell that the week-long Readers and Writers Festival was the first of its kind there, because the audiences filled most of the seats at every session and responded enthusiastically, but seemed rather shy of approaching the writers afterwards, preferring to smile from a distance. Most of us were accommodated in a hotel I came to hate. It was recently built and the lobby and public rooms were superficially chic, but the bedrooms were poorly designed and furnished. There were no drawers for clothes and no upright chair on which to sit and write at th
e desk, just a stool. The shower and toilet unit was open to the room, with a drain-hole in its tiled floor, but the floor sloped the wrong way so I had to paddle through half an inch of water to use the lavatory until the chambermaid mopped it up. The décor was beige wallpaper with a faint pattern that looked like patches of damp, and paintwork in a nauseous combination of lilac, pink and black. When I was alone in this room my depression returned so I spent as little time there as possible. I took part in various events, solo and with other writers, gave interviews to journalists, lectured at the University and went to receptions and parties. The local writers were very welcoming and hospitable, especially the poet Fleur Adcock and her sister who shared a house in Wellington. I shook hands with Keri Hulme at the Mayor’s reception, but had no conversation with her. In my solo event I read from a scene in ‘The Pressure Cooker’ where Penny mentions the title of her novel in progress, ‘Lights and Shadows’, which elicited a few isolated laughs from the audience that puzzled me. Somebody told me later that it was the original name of Keri Hulme’s first collection of stories, which was later republished with a Maori title. I went to a party for the doyen of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and his wife, who was rumoured to have written the notorious erotic novel The Story of O, published in 1954 under the pen-name of Pauline Réage. Emboldened by drink, I asked her if this was true. She gave a good-humoured ambiguous answer, and remarked that it was not a book for children. ‘Et pas pour tante Agatha,’ I said in my appalling French accent. She seemed amused by the phrase and repeated it with a smile. Much later it was revealed that ‘Pauline Réage’ was the pen-name of another writer, Anne Declos. Catherine Robbe-Grillet published a novel in the same genre at about the same time under the pseudonym Jean de Berg.

  A great enhancement of the week for me was the presence of the poet Craig Raine and the American novelist Robert Stone, who came straight from attending the Adelaide Literary Festival in Australia. They had had a good time there, but Craig was beginning to feel homesick – he carried a small tape recorder round with him everywhere to record his impressions and airmailed the cassettes back to his family – and Bob Stone had misgivings about a book tour of New Zealand he was committed to after the Festival, so I felt a kinship with them. I had known Craig only slightly before this time, but a proper friendship between us began then. Bob Stone I didn’t know at all, nor his novels, though I read a couple later with pleasure, but he was an amiable and amusing companion with a wit he kept flowing with alcohol and pills. One day a local man took the three of us on an excursion along the spectacular coast of the South Island. We swam in a fast-running stream and drank beer and ate a picnic, and mocked the people at the Festival who had most irritated us. It was a rare interval of carefree pleasure for me. Later our escort drove us to a magnificent beach where I watched two young women galloping their horses through the surf, a stirring sight. But when you looked beyond them you knew that you were standing on the edge of the habitable world, with nothing for thousands of miles but cold seawater and ice. I was as far from home as I could be.

  In spite of these diversions I would wake in the night in my horrible room and be unable to get to sleep again, oppressed by the knowledge that I was only halfway through my absurd itinerary, and wondering how much longer I could manage to give the impression of enjoying myself. I seriously considered cancelling the remaining stages of my tour, flying back direct to England, and even went so far as to enquire about flights. But I could not face the ignominy and shame of upsetting and inconveniencing the many people involved. Chief among these was Howard Felperin who had initiated the Australian part of my tour. I had only met him once, when he applied speculatively for the second Chair of English at Strathclyde University as he happened to be passing through the UK at the right time to be interviewed, and I was one of the external assessors recruited by the Head of Department, Colin MacCabe. We didn’t appoint Howard – he seemed too flamboyantly exotic for this academic setting, and there was another strong candidate – but we enjoyed talking to him both before and after the formal committee proceedings.

  Howard is American, and as he freely admits, his career was crucially shaped by his failure to get tenure after several years of teaching in the prestigious Yale English Department. He regarded the decision as unjust and set out to prove it by obtaining full professorships in Australia and publishing respected books on Shakespeare and literary theory. He was a great fan of Small World, and hearing that I was going to New Zealand persuaded me to go on to Australia, fixing up lectures at Melbourne where he taught for some years, and McQuarrie University near Sydney where he now lived. He was very hospitable, put me up in his house high up above the harbour, escorted me to my lectures, introduced me to many interesting people and even mended the handle of my suitcase. But all the time I had a dull ache in the core of my being, of longing to get home. I regretted having arranged to break my journey in Hong Kong, and fretted impatiently there for two days, having meals with expatriate academic friends, buying a silk dress as a present for Mary, and not doing much else. Almost the last passage in my diary, written in my hotel, is this:

  So the last hours of this trip drag to their conclusion. I have never found myself wondering so often, ‘What am I doing here?’ However, there has been a certain deepening of knowledge I hope, of myself and of the world. What an extraordinarily small place it is. And how easy it is to detach yourself from a rooted position and become simply a floating body, not belonging anywhere, borne along on the tide like flotsam.

  When I got home and embraced Mary and told her how miserable I had been, she said, ‘Don’t do it again.’ I made many more long-haul journeys later, but never again went round the world in a single trip.

  13

  When I left England to orbit the globe at the beginning of March I had barely begun to write the novel that I called provisionally ‘Shadow Work’, and throughout that trip I looked forward to taking it up again when I was back home and recovered from jet lag. But I soon found that I had other pressing literary business to deal with. It is a common temptation for novelists, I suspect, especially in the early stages of composing a novel, when everything seems so difficult because of the number of decisions that have to be made, to put it aside and accept an invitation to do something else which seems interesting, rewarding – and easier. ‘Displacement activity’ is the psychologist’s term for this phenomenon. I think I have been fairly disciplined in this respect in the course of my career, but at this time I had so many commitments of various kinds that had to be honoured, long-standing projects that unexpectedly matured, and new opportunities which couldn’t be resisted, that it was well into autumn 1986 when I resumed serious work on the novel.

  The first of these distractions was Howard Schuman’s draft screenplay of Episode One of Small World, which I was invited to comment on. It began in the Chapel of St George at Heathrow, for Howard’s plan was to frame the whole story as Persse’s private confession to God in that location. I suspended judgement on this concept, but otherwise the script was a more faithful rendering of the first part of the novel than I had dared to hope for, and I offered only a few notes on it. That didn’t take up much time, but very soon afterwards there was an exciting new development in the prospects of my play, ‘The Pressure Cooker’. Charles Elton had sent the script to Patrick Garland, a well-known director of work on stage and screen with a special interest in theatrical adaptations of literary texts, and he had been favourably impressed by it. At this time he was directing and performing in his own Conversation Piece, a montage of poems, extracts from essays and recorded conversation by Philip Larkin, performed by the actor Alan Bates responding to prompts and questions from an anonymous interlocutor played by Patrick. It was on at the National Theatre in the Cottesloe, the smallest of its three spaces. I saw the show there at a matinee, enjoyed it enormously, and met Patrick afterwards, a friendly, intelligent and modest man whom I took to immediately. He told me that he had shown my play to a senior administrator
at the NT, John Faulkner, who had read it at a sitting – ‘always a good sign’ – and proposed that it should be given a rehearsed reading at the Cottesloe with Patrick as director. This was the NT’s way of trying out new plays in front of an audience of in-house personnel and invited guests, using available actors from the current repertory of plays in performance. I was lucky to have a quality cast for my piece: Jack Shepherd as Leo, Eleanor Bron as Maude, Greg Hicks as Simon, and Roger Lloyd Pack as Jeremy. Caroline Bliss who played Penny was then little known, but would soon become Miss Moneypenny in the latest James Bond movie.

  A performance was scheduled for 16th June, Bloomsday, which as a devoted Joycean I took as a good omen. I had agreed to examine a PhD at Kent University that day, an appointment which couldn’t be changed because the candidate was flying from China especially for the purpose and returning immediately. I despatched the business in her favour in the morning and drove quickly to London to attend the two o’clock dress rehearsal – so called, although there were no special costumes and only a minimal amount of movement by the actors, who had to read from the scripts in their hands. The Cottesloe was more than half full for the performance to an invited audience at seven in the evening. Mary was there, and my son Stephen and his girlfriend; also a few friends including Richard and Mary Hoggart, Tom Rosenthal and my former colleague John Russell Brown who had been a dramaturge at the National for a time after leaving Birmingham University. Charles Elton had brought along a new agent at Curtis Brown, Leah Schmidt, an American who had moved to the UK when she married an Englishman. She was to take over the handling of the play and all my future writing for theatre, television and film – another lucky break for me because she became one of the most respected agents in this field in London.