Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  The reason I had not approached the Rep before was that it didn’t really have a suitable space for my play. The shabby but intimate and acoustically perfect theatre in Station Street where Between These Four Walls, the revue I co-authored with Malcolm Bradbury and Jim Duckett, was produced in 1962 had been supplanted in 1971 by a new one, a striking modernist structure more than twice its size at the end of Broad Street. It was largely financed by Birmingham City Council, and its scale was a typical case of civic ambition overriding theatrical common sense. The architect’s brief was to design a theatre with nine hundred seats in the main auditorium, and his response, approved by the Rep’s Board and several qualified advisers, was a steeply raked fan-shaped auditorium facing an enormous stage – bigger than Covent Garden’s at that time. It is a spectacular space, and fine for epic plays and pantomimes, but much too big for most modern drama with small casts and realistic dialogue. If the actors project to reach the back rows their lines lose subtlety and nuance for the auditors in the front rows; if they play appropriately to the front rows the people in the back rows can’t hear them well. It is a space in which it is very difficult to create a bond between audience and players, and it has broken several directors’ hearts. It was also far too big for the potential audience in Birmingham for serious theatre, and often half empty for performances. It reached its nadir when a matinee of Shaw’s St Joan had to be cancelled because only a dozen people had booked for it. (In recent years it has much improved in this respect by commercially astute programming, co-productions with other reps, and hosting touring productions, and it now has the use of a new 300-seat theatre embedded in the new Library to which it is joined.)

  Having sat in this theatre many times I was sure it was unsuitable for my play, but the only alternative was a Studio theatre which was originally designed as a rehearsal room, and had been converted to make a space with flexible seating for about 125 people. Some outstanding productions were mounted there, but on very limited budgets, and they seldom attracted ‘name’ actors. Nevertheless I was willing to see my play premiered there and hoped that a more ambitious production might develop from it. The moment seemed propitious because a new Artistic Director had recently been appointed to the Rep: John Adams, who had come from the Octagon in Bolton where he had made a reputation for lively and innovative productions. Leah sent him ‘The Pressure Cooker’ and we heard that he was definitely interested and would like to meet me to discuss it. But when I went to have lunch with him at the Rep’s restaurant his interest had cooled. Evidently he had been upset by hearing that the Leicester Haymarket was considering the play when he had supposed it was being exclusively offered to him – an unfortunate crossing of wires traceable to Leon Rubin. John told me that the Rep’s budget allowed them to put on only one play a year in the Studio, and he planned to fill the rest of the programme with shows by touring companies appealing to a youthful audience. He doubted whether ‘The Pressure Cooker’ was suitable for the Rep’s solitary production, and his last word on that occasion was not promising: ‘Is it perhaps really a good radio play?’

  I had in fact had a letter from a BBC Radio 3 producer who had been at the Cottesloe reading, offering to produce the play with some pruning of the language likely to give offence. But after talking it over with Leah I decided that there was no advantage in doing it first on radio. I had conceived it from the beginning as a stage play. It seemed to me that the force of the three readings was essentially theatrical, that they would gain much from the presence of a live audience; and that the tensions between the three main characters, compelled to be in each other’s company by the circumstances of the course, would also gain from being acted on a single set. I recognised in retrospect the influence on me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (No Exit), about the special hell of three mutually incompatible people who are trapped for ever in a French Empire drawing room. It had made a considerable impact on me in my youth, and I had seen it again on television not long before writing the first draft of ‘The Pressure Cooker’.

  The National Theatre’s option ran out in July. David Aukin was willing to renew it, but I sensed that he was discouraged by our bad luck with the provincial reps. Leah and I decided to take the rights back and try to find a producer ourselves. She suggested the Royal Shakespeare Company and I thought it was worth my writing to its Artistic Director, Terry Hands, whom I had tutored in my first year as an assistant lecturer at Birmingham. Terry replied encouragingly: ‘I am delighted you’ve written a play – though I must warn you that, unlike novels, you will have less control over the physical aspects of each scene. Could you send it in to us and we will take it from there.’ The phrasing of this message might have implied acceptance sight unseen if I had not already become inured to disappointment in my first theatrical venture. Leah sent off the playscript, but neither she nor I ever heard another word about it from Terry or anybody else at the RSC.

  Then my faithful friend Donald Fanger, Professor of Russian Literature at Harvard, hearing that I had written a play, offered to pass it to his friend Robert Brustein, a famously versatile man of the theatre – playwright, critic, producer, teacher and currently Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., which is part of Harvard University but also a professional public theatre. I accepted the suggestion gratefully; Leah and I had talked about the possibility of launching the play in America, and she had already elicited strong interest from the Long Wharf Theatre which stood to Yale much as the ART did to Harvard. We sent the script to Bob Brustein, who replied, ‘It’s a funny, intelligent look at the whole notion of writing colonies, and I think it would do very well in Cambridge.’ But he wanted to try it out with a rehearsed reading before committing himself. I was happy to agree to that and planned to attend it if possible. Meanwhile Leah had shown the play to a young London producer, André Ptaszynski, who had been very successful in managing tours by the new generation of British comic actors and actresses like Rowan Atkinson, Victoria Wood, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, and was now looking to get involved in straight drama. He liked ‘The Pressure Cooker’ and optioned it for a year. The agreement included American rights, but Bob Brustein wasn’t bothered by that. He proposed to stage the reading early in the New Year, and as André was going to be in New York at the same time, it was agreed that he would join me at it.

  I was glad to put this play aside for a few months and to stop thinking and negotiating about it. I was now determined to finish ‘Shadow Work’ by the end of the year so that it could be submitted to Secker and included in their autumn catalogue for 1988, which would go to press some time in February. The spring and autumn catalogues are the essential means by which booksellers, literary festivals, literary editors of newspapers and magazines, and interested personnel in other media inform themselves about forthcoming books and plan their responses accordingly. If it missed the autumn catalogue, the novel would not be published until the spring of the following year, and I did not want to wait that long. I had been writing it, on and off, for nearly two years and like many authors I secreted an underlying anxiety that some other writer might have the same or a similar idea for a novel and publish it first. Also I felt that it was a timely book which might seem less pertinent if its publication were delayed too long. It treated not only the impact of monetarism on industry and universities in the 1980s, but also the deregulation of financial markets which was another of Mrs Thatcher’s initiatives, colloquially known as the Big Bang. I gave my heroine a brother who was a product of the new aggressive financial culture, with a cockney currency-dealer girlfriend who handled sums equivalent to a small university’s annual budget every week, and to give some credibility to these characters I managed, with the help of my accountant, to be a fly on the wall of a dealing room for a day in a London investment bank.

  ‘Shadow Work’ was a book that presented new challenges for me because the two main characters, or ‘centres of consciousness’, to use Henry James’s term, through whom the sto
ry is filtered, were more different from me than characters of equivalent importance in my previous novels. One was a woman, and the other was the managing director of an engineering firm. Of course I was very familiar with Robyn Penrose’s professional life and could easily represent it, and satirise it to some extent, but like any male writer I was dependent on intuition and imagination to represent her consciousness. For Vic’s family life I was able to draw on my own relationship with my father, and to a lesser extent with my son Stephen in adolescence, but Vic’s marriage is entirely different from mine. His professional life was wholly strange to me, and could only be portrayed by research, observation and the help of Maurice Andrews, without which I could never have written the book. The basic structure of the narrative – a man and a woman meet and are mutually antagonistic at first but gradually develop a respect for each other and for the work each does – has something in common with the classic heroine-centred love story, for example Pride and Prejudice. Clearly it could not end in the same way, for Robyn would never fall in love with Vic. But Vic could conceivably become infatuated with Robyn, a development replete with interesting and amusing possibilities. This led me to conceive a reversal of the plot towards the end of the novel whereby Vic arranges to ‘shadow’ Robyn at the University, pretending it is all in the spirit of Industry Year. The scene where he sits in on a tutorial discussion of Tennyson’s Maud is one I particularly enjoyed writing.

  At this stage I was grappling with the problem of how to tie up the various other strands in the narrative into a satisfactory ending. I decided to exploit the novel’s subtext of allusions to the Victorian industrial novels on which Robyn lectures early in the book. She comments sardonically on their endings, which evade the political issues raised in the stories by the way the fortunes of the main characters are settled. ‘All the Victorian novelist could offer as a solution to the problems of industrial capitalism were a legacy, a marriage, emigration or death,’ she says. Death did not belong in this essentially comic novel, but when Robyn faces the imminent termination of her temporary lectureship, chance offers her in succession the other three solutions: emigration (to a job in America offered by Morris Zapp), marriage (to her boyfriend Charles) and a legacy (from a long-forgotten Australian uncle) which makes her financially independent. In the end she passes on all of them. She gets an unexpected last-minute renewal of her appointment at Rummidge and invests her legacy in a business venture that Vic, who has suddenly lost his own job, has long dreamed hopelessly of starting. I remember getting this idea and driving over to Maurice Andrews’s house that evening to ask him to invent for me a plausible product for this enterprise. He came up very quickly with a spectrometer that could give an instant readout of the composition of molten metal in foundry operations, instead of having to send it to labs for analysis, and I inserted this idea into a conversation between Vic and Robyn earlier in the novel.

  I did a final read-through and polish of the typescript in December and sent it off to Mike Shaw at Curtis Brown. It was now the season of office parties and Christmas lunch menus, and he was caught up in the obligatory socialising, so did not write to me until the 22nd to congratulate me on the book, which he had forwarded confidently to Secker. I was able to relax and enjoy our own family Christmas, but I had to wait till the New Year to discover what David Godwin, who had recently moved from Heinemann to replace Peter Gross as head of Secker, and whom I had not yet met, thought of ‘Shadow Work’.

  Although 1987 was a year in which I concentrated mainly on creative projects, I did not disengage entirely from the world of academic literary criticism and theory. Towards the end of April I went back to Providence, Rhode Island, having been invited by Mark Spilka to give the keynote lecture at a conference he had organised to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of NOVEL, the journal that he and Park Honan had started at Brown University, where I had spent a semester as a Harkness Fellow in 1964–65. The lovely campus had not changed much in the meantime, and the tree-lined streets of frame houses around it had largely preserved their character, though the house in which we occupied a flat next to the Armenian shoe-mender’s shop had gone. But I had little time to indulge in nostalgic musings because the conference had a crowded programme. Mark had suggested I might speak on ‘Why the Novel Matters’, the title of a well-known essay by D.H. Lawrence, but that was not my style. I offered a more neutral title: ‘The Novel Now: Theories and Practices’, which Mark resignedly accepted. I spoke in my dual role as novelist and critic and considered the widening gap between the two professions as a result of the saturation of academic criticism with theoretical discourse that was alien to most writers and readers of contemporary fiction, and ended by proposing Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as something both sides could identify with and learn from.

  The conference had attracted a large and interesting crowd and I met several friends and acquaintances from previous conferences, including Susan Suleiman and Robert Scholes – it was on this occasion that Bob revealed to me the subtext of the late-night conversation in Marilyn French’s hotel room in Zurich in 1979. I was not the only novelist participating. Nadine Gordimer was the star of the occasion, though she had not yet won the Nobel Prize. I went to the ‘Reading and Commentary’ she gave one evening in a packed Baptist church, a tiny, elfin, almost girlish-looking woman in spite of her grey hair. We sat in pews, which seemed appropriate to the quasi-religious fervour with which she anticipated a coming ‘revolution’ in South Africa. I had read very little of her fiction – in fact, only a magazine extract from The Conservationist, in which a man of distinguished reputation on an intercontinental night flight, when the cabin lights are dimmed and blankets distributed, insanely risks disgrace by masturbating a silently acquiescent teenage girl in the seat beside him for hours on end. I thought it was one of the most brilliant feats of prose writing I had ever encountered: tense, precise, sensual but not pornographic, and totally convincing. Nadine Gordimer had the reputation of being a rather prickly person, and with only this specific tribute to her work to offer, I did not seek a conversation with her.

  The most controversial speaker at the conference was Joseph Gold, who had written a book called Read for Your Life, and asserted that the function of the novel is to ‘increase human self-awareness and cultural awareness … and to increase our chances of survival’, which another delegate denounced as ‘an arrogant and pompous usurping of a moral standard’. I discovered that Gold had been born and educated in England and studied at Birmingham University before moving to the USA and more recently to Canada. He told me he was a therapist as well as a professor and offered counselling in which he prescribed to his clients the reading of novels carefully selected to help them come to terms with their particular problems. It sounded unorthodox to me then, but I believe it is an approved item in the therapeutic toolbag these days. The conferee I was most pleased to meet was a young woman from the University of California who, improbably, had attended the reading of ‘The Pressure Cooker’ at the National Theatre and claimed it was the best thing she had seen in London during her visit, which was even more improbable, but I chose to believe her. I was also pleased to be seated at dinner on the last evening next to Marianna Torgovnick, a very smart lady who was in the English Department at Duke University, and described Stanley Fish’s arrival in that institution as ‘like a dream come true’.

  I looked forward to relaying this compliment to Stanley himself, as I had arranged to spend the coming weekend with him and Jane in North Carolina before returning home. I found them occupying a luxurious house surrounded by flowering shrubs and trees, with four cars in the drive, one of them Jane’s, the other three to provide Stanley with automotive variety. They gave a party for me to meet people from Duke, and the Southern spring evening was warm enough for drinks on the lawn. It seemed an idyllic way of life they were leading in the most salubrious part of the so-called ‘Research Triangle’, an area of North Carolina containing several universities, research institutes and hi-tech
companies. Climate, environment, standard of living were all of the highest quality; it was just a little tame, I thought, compared to the Bay Area, and I wondered how long Stanley would stay there.

  In June I attended another conference, though this time as a creative writer rather than a critic. It is an annual event known as the International Writers Reunion, at Lahti, in Finland. Every year, at the summer solstice in June, about fifty writers from all over the world are invited, with their travel expenses paid, to join a somewhat larger number of Finnish writers at a lakeside site in the middle of the country to discuss, over three days and numerous beers, an appropriate theme, which in 1987 was ‘Literature and Exhibitionism’. Conscious of their marginal geographical position and a language which resembles only Hungarian and Estonian, educated Finns, and writers in particular, are fluent in English and other languages and crave contact with their counterparts in other countries. The Reunion is a way of facilitating this and they make the most of it. The event gets front-page coverage in the Finnish newspapers, and its proceedings are extensively reported on radio and TV. A regular feature in those days, and perhaps still, was a friendly football match between Finland and the Rest of the World, played by the light of the midnight sun and described live on radio by one of the country’s top commentators.

  The format of the Lahti discussions is simple: a panel of four or five writers speak on some aspect of the conference theme and then other participants take the roving microphone to comment. All speeches are simultaneously translated into five languages by a team of expert interpreters who compete eagerly for the work because it is much more interesting than the political and economic forums which are their usual assignments. The responses to the theme of Exhibitionism were predictably varied, but many focused on the confessional, autobiographical element in writing. J.M. Coetzee thoughtfully fingered the paradox that self-revelation is ultimately impossible because behind the self which is revealed there is always a hidden self that is doing the revealing. My compatriot Graham Swift claimed that the English writer was temperamentally afraid of doing anything that looked like ‘showing off’ and that it was only by reading literary exhibitionists like Borges, Beckett and Márquez that he had liberated himself from dull autobiographically based realism. As part of my own presentation I read an extract from Morris Zapp’s lecture, ‘Textuality as Striptease’, in Small World. It provoked much laughter but often, it seemed to me, in the wrong places. It was only when I reflected on this on the flight home that I realised that the simultaneous translations would have been lagging a sentence or two behind my reading.