by David Lodge
In August that year Mary and I had a touring holiday in Brittany with Malcolm and Elizabeth Bradbury. We took two cars to give each couple freedom to roam separately and avoid friction over issues like smoking, to which Malcom was addicted. It was an enjoyable trip which concluded with a reunion with the Honans, who were spending the summer as usual at St Brévin and crossed the Loire estuary to meet us for dinner at our hotel. We also made a new friend, Maurice Couturier, who would later play an important part in my authorial life. Professor of English and American Literature at Nice University, and the leading French specialist in the work of Vladimir Nabokov, he had spent a term as a visiting Fellow at East Anglia where he got to know Malcolm. He and his wife Yvonne usually spent August in Brittany to get away from the heat and crowds on the Côte d’Azur, and he had arranged to meet us at a hotel in the country, where we stayed for a couple of nights. We immediately felt at ease with him and Yvonne and passed a pleasant few hours in their company. He had some experience of translating and told us that he had made several efforts to persuade French publishers to commission a translation of The History Man, but without success. He had enjoyed some of my novels and asked me if any French publishers had expressed interest in them and I said that some had been approached, but I had received no offers. There seemed to be something about the kind of novel that Malcolm and I wrote which didn’t suit French publishers’ taste.
By the autumn of 1986 the cuts in university funding initiated by Mrs Thatcher’s government began to really hurt. Student numbers had grown without a corresponding increase in staff. The size of tutorials and seminars was increasing and it was getting difficult to remember the names of all the students one taught. It was inevitable that soon all courses in the English Department would be taught in seminar-sized groups and lectures. I was not looking forward to my next teaching term in the spring. Birmingham happened to be without a Vice Chancellor at this time. One had recently retired, and his replacement, Professor Michael Thompson, was serving his last term as VC of the University of East Anglia and would not be arriving until January. In the meantime, the Vice Principal, Professor Mike Hamlin, was Acting Vice Chancellor. He circulated a warning to staff in September that ‘unless action is taken during this current financial year to reduce expenditure … by the end of the year the University’s current reserves will be totally exhausted’. It was estimated that the University would have to shed 140 academic and 100 technical and secretarial posts and would therefore be offering early retirement schemes to encourage staff to leave service earlier than they had intended. (This had to be voluntary because at the time most academic staff in British universities had tenure and could not be made redundant.) Retiring under such a scheme meant that you immediately began to draw the pension you would have received if you had continued working until the age of sixty. This was exactly the kind of financial life jacket that I needed to take the plunge into being a full-time writer, so I applied for it. Christopher was due to begin his residence at the CARE village in Ironbridge in the autumn of 1987, and I anticipated that I would have to ‘top up’ the cost of his fees there, which were in excess of the sum paid by central government through Birmingham Social Services under the system then in place. Early retirement would ease anxiety about keeping up such payments while pursuing the uncertain career of a freelance writer.
My application was rejected at first, but I accepted an invitation from the Acting VC to discuss the matter further, after which it was approved. The basis of the agreement was that I would have a continuing membership of the University as an Honorary Professor, making occasional contributions to its educational and cultural life, and my appropriate publications would continue to be listed in the University’s annual Research Report – a document that had acquired new importance in the competition for funds in higher education. I made clear that it was my intention to continue living in Birmingham in close proximity to the campus. I was lucky that Mike Hamlin, who knew my writing and appreciated it, was Acting VC at this time. The previous VC would not have been so sympathetic, and Michael Thompson was coming from UEA where the MA in Creative Writing directed by Malcolm was a huge success. I had met Thompson socially at Norwich through that connection, and it was likely that when he arrived at Birmingham he would have asked me to head a similar programme, extinguishing any prospect of early retirement.
I felt some qualms of guilt at deserting the ship in which I had sailed for half my adult life at such a critical moment, and I admitted as much in the speech I gave at the customary farewell drinks party in the summer, which I shared with my colleague Joan Rees, a veteran of the Department who was retiring at the usual age. But as well as wanting more time to develop my various creative interests, and as well as finding teaching more and more difficult due to increasing hearing loss, I was becoming more conscious of difficulties in reconciling my persona as a senior professor with my identity as a writer. I had managed to separate these two roles by not performing as a writer on campus, but there had been something artificial about the pretence. The writer inevitably drew on his experience of the milieu he worked in, and I had managed to get away with that in Changing Places and Small World by using the licence of comedy. ‘Rummidge’ in those novels was a kind of caricature of Birmingham, a city that was used to being the butt of jokes, and could laugh at itself. Most of my colleagues had reacted to the novels in that spirit, well aware that the real University was a much more impressive institution than its fictional equivalent. But I was conscious that the novel I had nearly finished, though it contained comedy and humour, was a much more realistic and recognisable picture of both the city and its university than its predecessors, which would only make it more difficult to continue pretending that my lives as a novelist and as a professor were quite distinct. In retrospect I think that must have been one reason why I had applied for the Oxford chair; but now I was more grateful than ever that I had not been offered it.
14
I was to retire officially at the end of the academic year in September 1987, but as I was on leave in the summer term under my part-time contract, and that was followed by the long vacation, I was in effect a full-time writer by the end of March, free to devote myself to several projects I had in development. The most important was the novel, ‘Shadow Work’, but since I had not signed a contract for it or committed myself to a delivery date I put it aside when other projects demanded my attention. Chief among these were my play, ‘The Pressure Cooker’, and a script for a TV adaptation of How Far Can You Go? which London Weekend Television had optioned. But the first thing I did at the end of March was to head down to the Oval Rehearsal Rooms in London to observe the read-through and first rehearsals of Granada’s production of Small World, clutching the thick typescript of Episode One which had been sent to me.
I had had very little contact with Granada since I was shown Howard Schuman’s first draft a year earlier. It had probably taken him many months of writing and rewriting further episodes before the serial was green-lighted for production, and then he had been involved in auditioning actors with the Director, Robert Chetwyn, while the production team worked on a schedule for filming. This latter task was more than usually complicated because of the many foreign locations in the story, very few of which were faked in the TV serial. Persse’s encounter with Miss Maiden in Hawaii, for instance, was filmed at the swimming pool bar of a luxury hotel at Heathrow with Polynesian décor; but more extended episodes of this kind were filmed on location, in Amsterdam, Lausanne, Istanbul and other exotic settings. The kind of expenditure this entails is more usually associated with major feature films than television drama. The serial also had an enormously long cast list, of some seventy actors with speaking parts, major and minor. Granada really splashed out on this project, and I felt that I had made the right choice between them and the BBC. Furthermore, they agreed at some point to increase the number of episodes from four to six to accommodate Howard’s faithful adaptation. Everybody involved in the production was very exc
ited and expectant as this show got on the road.
All drama, whether acted on stage or filmed or televised or broadcast on radio, is a collaborative activity, but the person with most responsibility for the character and quality of the finished product is the director. Bob Chetwyn, five years older than me, had started out as an actor but established himself as one of the most successful theatrical directors in London during the sixties and seventies, particularly in the field of comedy, working with a number of distinguished playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, Peter Nichols and Joe Orton, and actors such as Ian McKellen, Ralph Richardson and Flora Robson. More recently, like many theatre directors, he had moved into the medium of television, and had directed two very popular comedy drama series, Private Shultz and An Irish RM; but Small World was a more challenging project than either of those. Bob and Howard were both gay. They had shared a flat together in Eccleston Square, Belgravia, since the 1960s, and entered into a civil partnership in 2006, but temperamentally they were very different. I quickly established a warm relationship with Howard, who was cheerful, amusing, and obviously enjoyed his continuing involvement in the production. Bob was more reticent and saturnine, and sometimes I felt he was weighed down by the responsibility of his position.
As a complete novice in this milieu, I did not have such a thought during the few days I spent at the Oval rehearsal room, a large space like a school hall, with miscellaneous items of furniture lined up against the walls for use when needed, and white lines marked out on the floor. I was too excited by simply being there, meeting and chatting to actors, watching them at work, seeing scenes from my novel performed, and helping myself from the table in one corner laid with snacks, coffee, tea and soft drinks. Television rehearsals are less intensive than the theatrical equivalent, because there isn’t time to do every scene. Their main purpose is to familiarise actors with their parts and get them used to working with the director and each other, by acting out a number of selected scenes. Inevitably some lines are queried by the actors and may be changed on the spot. I ventured to make a couple of suggestions, and felt disproportionately pleased with myself when they were adopted.
Because of his theatrical contacts Bob had been able to recruit a number of excellent actors willing to play supporting roles, for example Sarah Badel, who played Philip Swallow’s wife Hilary and doubled as his mistress Joy, Sheila Gish, who played Fulvia Morgana and Désirée Zapp, and Rachel Kempson, matriarch of the famous Redgrave theatrical dynasty, who was a superb Sibyl Maiden, the retired Girton scholar. The actors in leading roles were in fact less well known, and the one who played the young hero, Persse McGarrigle, was not known at all in Britain. Finbar (‘Barry’) Lynch was an Irish stage actor whom Bob and Howard discovered in Dublin after a long search. He was perfect for the role: a newcomer to British television drama as Persse is to international academia. Morris Zapp was played by John Ratzenberger, an American actor who was known in the UK mainly for his role as the Postman in the enormously popular sitcom Cheers.
After the rehearsals in London the production team moved back to Manchester, where Granada’s headquarters are situated, for filming in studios and on nearby locations, and I went up there for a few days to observe and eavesdrop. This is in fact a less interesting experience than watching rehearsals, since there is a lot of boring repetition of short takes with long pauses between them while technicians make adjustments to cameras and lighting. In the evenings I watched the ‘rushes’ – roughly edited sequences only a few minutes long filmed that day – and they too were slightly disappointing, but I was assured by the professionals that properly edited and with a good soundtrack they would come alive. I was however awed by the scale of the operation my novel had set in motion: the number of people besides the actors and director and writer who were involved, and the many different operations from casting to catering that had to be arranged and co-ordinated to move the film forward. Soon the production team and principal actors would set off again, like some great caravan of old, with the lighting cameraman and sound recordist, gaffer and clapper boy, make-up artists and wardrobe mistresses, set dressers and gofers, on a journey of several months’ duration to new locations, acquiring and shedding members on the way. Before I returned home I left my own mark on the final product when Bob allowed me to make a brief appearance in one of the scenes, as a member of the conference at Rummidge University pausing in a corridor to examine a noticeboard.
Of the parallel projects I mentioned earlier the one that can be most briefly dealt with was the proposed adaptation of How Far Can You Go? as a four-part serial for London Weekend Television. I was originally encouraged to attempt this by Patrick Garland, who liked the novel, and he interested Nick Elliott, the Controller of Drama and Arts at LWT, in the idea. John Birt, who later became Director General of the BBC, was then head of LWT. He was a fan of my book, having had a Catholic upbringing in Liverpool similar to that of some of my characters, and he gave strong support to the project. Patrick had been scathing about my first attempt at a draft script of Episode One, but I improved on it and submitted it to Nick Elliott, who responded in July. His letter began promisingly, ‘I really do like the script. I think you’ve done it very well. It moves along and delivers the book well.’ But he continued: ‘The trouble is that things have changed completely here at LWT. John Birt has gone to the BBC to be Deputy D.G. His replacement is a man called Greg Dyke who I don’t think would want HFCYG for his schedule … He’s very keen on ratings … best known for the invention of Roland Rat on Breakfast TV.’ Nick Elliott didn’t in fact dare even to mention my draft script to Greg Dyke. Instead he passed it to his equivalent at Channel 4, but that didn’t come to anything either. I had never quite believed that a dramatisation of a novel all about Catholics would appeal to the largely secular TV audience, so I decided not to waste any more time on it. Greg Dyke became Director General of the BBC thirteen years later, after John Birt.
The history of ‘The Pressure Cooker’, later called The Writing Game, is more complicated, and a full account would fill a book as long as this one. It was a fascinating though often frustrating odyssey, which initiated me into a way of working entirely different from writing prose fiction. Composing a novel is an essentially solitary, silent process, over which the writer has more or less complete control up to the point of finishing it and submitting it for publication. Before and/or after acceptance there may be some feedback from editors, friends, and people with relevant special knowledge, which the writer is free to accept, emending the text accordingly, or reject (though that may have consequences). With a play this intervention of other minds in the creative process never ceases, because it does not consist entirely of words on a page. Every production of a play is different from every other because different artists are involved. It evolves through rehearsals which throw up new problems and new solutions, often until its first public performance and sometimes afterwards; and every performance of the same production is subtly different from every other one, as is the audience’s reaction to each. (It is also true of course that every reading and re-reading of a novel is unique, produced in the silent theatre of the individual reader’s mind.)
For a playwright even getting to the start of this collaborative process – i.e. having the play performed for the first time – can be a long and frustrating experience. I had a lucky start with the rehearsed reading of ‘The Pressure Cooker’ at the National Theatre, but their option on the play led only to a long period of inactivity. In the late spring of 1987 I made an appointment to see David Aukin about the stalemate, and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. He had given up hope of persuading any of the NT’s resident directors to take on the play. Instead he wanted to use it to test a new initiative of his own: getting provincial repertory theatres to produce new plays which if suitable and successful could transfer to the National. He had the Bristol Old Vic in mind, since he knew the Artistic Director there, Leon Rubin, and I agreed readily to sending him the script. Rubin responded ent
husiastically, said it was the best-written play he had read in a long time, and that he wanted to direct it himself in the Bristol Studio. I was thrilled. But on 15th June I had a letter from David: ‘Catastrophe! Leon Rubin has parted from Bristol, he had a bust-up with his Board, he tells me one of the issues was our co-production. He does, however, still want to direct your play and suggested that it now be mounted with Leicester, my old haunt.’ David had been Artistic Director at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre before coming to the National, but he did not seem to think this would necessarily ensure a warm reception from the new management; and my own feeling was that if the play was going to be premiered at a theatre in the Midlands, it ought to be the Birmingham Rep.
