by David Lodge
These sessions normally take place in the open air, but the weather was unseasonably cool and wet, and we spent a good deal of time in marquees. However, the rain held off to allow the football match to be played under a cloud-veiled midnight sun. I was enlisted as a substitute for the Rest of the World, and spent the game on the sidelines praying that I would not be called upon. Fortunately our side won the game 4–3 without my assistance, due mainly to the efforts of a Hungarian writer who I do not remember making any contribution to our discussions but was a brilliant dribbler of the ball in the style of Puskás. Graham Swift, a younger and fitter novelist than me, also played a useful midfield role in this victory. I took home with me a red shirt imprinted with the insignia of the Rest of the World team as a souvenir to impress the family.
The highlight of this conference for me was sampling a traditional Finnish smoke sauna, offered as a diversion one afternoon as an alternative to a tour of the town of Lahti, a kind of small-scale Milton Keynes. The only kind of sauna I knew at that time was a cramped wooden cubicle in Birmingham University’s Sports Centre which I had tried once in preparation to write a scene in How Far Can You Go? The Finnish smoke sauna was a very different experience. It was like a large timber oven with bench seats, heated in advance by an open wood fire, until the required high temperature was reached, which imparted its smoky aroma and sooty deposits to the interior and thus on to the perspiring naked bodies of the writers (all male; the ladies had a separate facility elsewhere) who crowded into it. One emerged into the open air feeling mildly barbecued and plunged, with a shock of brief duration, into the nearby lake. After three such treatments I felt beatifically warm and relaxed. Later we lolled on the veranda, drank beer and ate sausages as swallows swooped through the pearly permanent dusk of the summer night. In the years that followed saunas of various kinds would figure frequently in my recreational life and occasionally in my fiction and drama.
My next experience of one came quite soon, as a result of looking for a suitable place to give our Down’s son Christopher a summer holiday. He was now nearly twenty-two and had been at the CARE community in Ironbridge for two years. He had settled in happily there, and was doing well in the carpentry workshop, turning out elegant wooden bowls on a lathe. He came home to Edgbaston every fourth weekend. As he was well trained in using public transport he was able to take a bus on a Friday afternoon from near the CARE community to the Birmingham bus station where I met him, and to which I returned him early on Monday morning for the return journey. He also had seasonal holidays at home, including two weeks in the summer. As we no longer had annual family holidays with Julia and Stephen, it was difficult to think of one that would suit him and be tolerable for us. I had read in the newspapers about Center Parcs, a new type of upmarket holiday village originating in Holland, which had recently opened in Sherwood Forest and seemed promising for our purpose. The concept was a large secure area in the country with one-storey ‘villas’ built in the woods so as to be screened from each other, and a vast indoor swimming pool complex called a Tropical Paradise, plus other sporting facilities both indoor and outdoor, shops and restaurants, and an artificial lake for water sports. You parked your car on arrival, and after that moved around on bicycles or on foot.
It seemed ideal for our purpose so I booked a villa for a week in August for Mary, myself and Chris, and Julia decided to join us. The experiment was successful – so much so that since then we have spent either a week or a few days nearly every summer at Sherwood Forest or one of the other Center Parcs that have been created in England. It became a family tradition, supplementing the more exotic or luxurious holidays we severally arranged for ourselves. It was the perfect holiday resort for Chris, safe, friendly and predictable. He has always looked forward eagerly to the annual visit to Center Parcs, and in due course so did our three grandchildren from infancy right through their teenage years. Their parents came with them, and Mary’s mother and other members of her family joined us on several occasions. We got into the habit of booking two villas next to each other for large family parties, and shared evening meals together, al fresco in warm weather. After trying the other sites, we have in recent years remained faithful to the greatly improved Sherwood Forest one.
In a late novel called Deaf Sentence (2007) I wrote a somewhat prejudicial account of a fictional holiday village inspired by Center Parcs, called ‘Gladeworld’.
Gladeworld. What a strange phenomenon. Like a negative image of a place with properties, such as confinement and induced pain, that you would normally regard as being themselves negative, which has the curious effect of turning them into positives, or so it seems from the contented looks of the inhabitants. A benevolent concentration camp. A benign prison. A happy hell.
The narrator is Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics, whose temperament has not been made sunnier by hearing loss, and who has been reluctantly persuaded by his wife to take a weekend break with two friends in Gladeworld. The barbed-wire chain link fence around the place reminds him of prisons and concentration camps; the crowds of bathers in the Tropical Paradise screaming as they launch themselves into the moulded fibreglass White Water Rapids, or down the twisting transparent tube which coils its way from the top of the geodesic dome to spit them out into a deep pool at the bottom, remind him of medieval paintings of Hell. I enjoyed writing this chapter and relieving myself of some of the negative feelings I developed from being condemned to repeat the same experience year after year. But there was one feature of Center Parcs that I genuinely looked forward to, which Desmond also admits to enjoying, and that was the sauna.
I observed on our very first visit to Sherwood Forest that there was a sauna for which one paid an entrance fee and to which children were not admitted, and it seemed an attractive alternative to the crowded and noisy Tropical Paradise to which it was attached. One afternoon, with memories of the Finnish smoke sauna still fresh in my mind, I went on my own to see what it was like. Pictures of the facility in brochures and posters at Sherwood Forest showed smiling men and women together, draped in towels, so naturally I put on swimming trunks in the men’s changing room. But when I passed into the sauna proper I noticed a large sign, ‘Swimming Costumes Optional’, and to my astonishment I saw that about half the people in the pool and under the open showers that ran along one wall were naked. I made a quick decision to dodge back into the changing room, where I took off my trunks, put them in the locker with my clothes, and went back into the sauna with a towel wrapped round my waist. As I was taking a shower two beautiful young girls aged about seventeen, naked and wet from the swimming pool, came to the shower heads next to me and proceeded to wash off the chlorinated water of the pool, laughing and chattering in a foreign tongue, without giving me a glance.
Their unselfconscious nudity enchanted me, but how could such things happen in England? The foreign tongue was a clue. The founder of Center Parcs was a Dutchman, a Catholic who had conceived these holiday villages as places in which families could enjoy active holidays in the north of Europe, where the weather can never be relied on in summer and is freezing cold in winter. The sauna was historically a response to the same climatic challenge, and it is a standard feature of life in Holland, Germany and other countries in north-eastern Europe. No one there would dream of wearing a swimming costume in a sauna, for it cancels out much of the physical pleasure and health benefit of the experience, and mixed public saunas where everyone is naked are accepted. The first Center Parc in England was evidently being managed by people who had brought with them the sauna culture of Continental Europe, and it had probably attracted a good many visitors from there. When I offered to introduce Mary to the sauna at Center Parc, she hesitated, but having taken the plunge, metaphorically and literally, she enjoyed it and became like me a devotee of the baking heat of the wooden cabin, the icy shock of the cold douche and plunge pool, the luxurious sensation of swimming naked in a warm swimming pool, and the deep relaxation afterwards.
T
his carefree acceptance of ‘optional’ nudity in mixed saunas at Sherwood Forest Center Parcs didn’t last long, and in fact it is hard to believe that it happened at all, for it constituted a charter for voyeurs and exhibitionists. After a couple of years the management, perhaps responding to complaints, catered for customers who preferred to be naked in the sauna by offering mixed ‘Continental’ sessions, and sessions for men or women only where costumes were optional. We took advantage of these while they were available. When the company opened new villages in Longleat and Suffolk, and redeveloped the Sherwood Forest one, they had large luxurious spas offering massage and beauty treatments, with a warm swimming pool open to the sky, surrounded on two levels by saunas and steam rooms of various exotic and specialised kinds, and areas for relaxation equipped with waterbeds, loungers and divans covered with blankets and artificial furs. Continental sessions in the evenings were particularly pleasant, lolling in the warm pool and gazing up at the sunset-tinted sky. Unfortunately neither these nor the single-sex option proved popular with Center Parcs’ clientele, and they were gradually phased out. All now have the same dress code: swimming costumes must be worn.
As the years passed and I became more affluent we booked more expensive ‘executive’ villas at Sherwood Forest which had superior amenities, including a private sauna beside the patio at the back – a very small basic one, just big enough for two or three people, with a cold shower outside, or in some cases a tub of cold water suspended from a bracket with a dangling rope attached which you pulled to drench your heated body with icy water. Mary and I, and Julia and her husband Phil, with whom we usually shared a villa, would often use this facility in turns when it got dark enough in the evening to have a sauna and cool off outside without attracting peeping Toms. It was a sovereign way to ensure a deep sleep afterwards, though it inspired a comic set-piece in Deaf Sentence with alarming consequences for the central character.
The sauna became a habit for Mary and me, sometimes indulged in hotels, and more frequently at our local tennis club which has a small sauna and steam room next to its indoor and outdoor pools, but always clad in a swimming costume. For me there are two distinct kinds of euphoria produced by the full sauna experience. One is the relaxation and sense of physical well-being generated by the transition from hot to cold to warm, and the other is the sensation of swimming naked afterwards. The difference in pleasure between swimming wearing a costume of any kind and the sensation of swimming without one, the water coursing unimpeded round your loins as you move through it, cannot be exaggerated, and I first discovered it in Center Parcs.
We swam naked in the sea during a heatwave in Majorca one summer. The hotel we were staying at would drive us to an unfrequented rocky shore in the evenings where we bathed in caressingly warm water. But such opportunities were rare. Much later Mary and I several times rented an old Provençal house in the hills above the Côte d’Azur near Grasse belonging to a friend of my French translator, Maurice Couturier. It was much too big for just the two of us, inside and out, but we enjoyed its extravagant spaciousness and the privacy it afforded. The back of the house faced south and from the terrace where we breakfasted you looked down over the steep garden and the rolling hills beyond, towards the profile of Antibes and the Mediterranean horizon. On the lower level of the garden there was a large rectangular swimming pool warmed by the sun, and a lean-to with loungers, parasols and other equipment. A gardener and handyman came in at prescribed times to tend the plants and check the swimming pool’s water, but otherwise we were able to swim in the nude unobserved, drying off afterwards in the same state, and we usually did so twice a day. In my first memoir I described meeting Mary on what was for both of us our first day as students at University College London, initially attracted by her looks, and wrote that ‘I remember thinking, if not at that precise moment, then not long afterwards, that Mary had a kind of beauty that would last – a rather extraordinary reflection for a seventeen-year-old, as if I were already sizing her up as a possible wife.’ I was not wrong. In her seventies she still had a very fine body, and nothing pleased me more on those holidays, or did more for my libido, than to watch her from my deckchair sauntering round the margins of the pool, or removing insects from its surface with a long-handled net, wearing only a straw hat.
15
Shortly after Christmas 1987 I had a phone call from the Marketing Director of Secker & Warburg, who had read the typescript of ‘Shadow Work’ over the holiday and was very excited by it. He assured me it would appeal to a much wider audience than any of my previous novels, and he was going to make sure that the trade knew about it. Early in the New Year I received a handwritten note from the new Publishing Director of Secker, David Godwin, which simply said, ‘I think the book is an absolute triumph.’ John Blackwell, who had been on a skiing holiday, took a little more time to send a long baroque epistle of praise. The only reservation anyone at Secker had about the novel was the title, ‘Shadow Work’, which was thought to have slightly sinister connotations more appropriate to a thriller. I had conceived it as a variation on the phrase ‘shadow play’, but I took the point and luckily I had another title in reserve, ‘Nice Work’, which everybody approved. Like the suppressed working title of an earlier book, ‘The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm’, it echoed a song by George and Ira Gershwin, ‘Nice work if you can get it’, and perhaps it was the fear of getting embroiled in another copyright dispute with the Gershwin Publishing Corporation that had deterred me from choosing it initially, though in fact no one could claim ownership of the two-word phrase ‘nice work’. It occurs with several different applications in the course of the novel, firstly here when Vic Wilcox remarks of the largely Asian workforce in his foundry, ‘They do nice work.’
Secker & Warburg had an option on the book of course, but there were several weeks of bargaining before a joint offer from Secker and Penguin was accepted and the contract signed. It included an advance on royalties for hardback and paperback rights in the British and Commonwealth market which was several times bigger than the advance I had received for Small World and would relieve me of any financial anxiety for some time to come. This reflected not only the sales of Small World and expectations for those of Nice Work, but also an increase in advances paid for literary fiction generally which had developed in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s, reaching its apogee perhaps when Martin Amis, or rather his agent Andrew Wylie, succeeded in getting an advance of half a million pounds for The Information in 1995. There were several factors involved in this phenomenon: the deregulation of financial markets in the eighties, the formation of new publishing conglomerates eager to get fashionable authors on their lists, the publicity-creating power of the Booker Prize and its imitators, and the insatiable need of the upmarket mass media for news and gossip with which to fill their columns and programmes.
All this had an impact on the profession of novelist, especially on authors of what the trade called ‘literary novels’, who earlier in the century were motivated primarily by a desire to add something of value to the body of English literature, rather than to attract a large audience and sell a large number of books (though of course such an outcome was always welcome). Now there wasn’t the same gulf between these two categories of fiction. The lists of top 10 bestsellers in the newspapers were still dominated by popular genre fiction, but occasionally a literary novel would get on to the ladder and even rise to the top. These lists became increasingly detailed as the computerised system Epos provided instantly available figures for bookshop sales of individual books down to the last digit. There were longer lists in the Bookseller and other trade magazines in which literary fiction made a better showing, and authors could see how they had fared in comparison with their peers. They could not be oblivious to the fact that they were operating in a market.
Success was rewarded with improved advances, but one was expected, and probably contractually obliged, to do one’s bit to earn them, giving up a good deal of time to publicity, being
interviewed by the press, on radio and TV, and doing events in bookshops and at literary festivals which usually took the form of a short reading, a conversation with a compère, and responding to questions from the audience, followed by a book-signing. Not all writers found this public exposure easy, and even those who enjoyed it, and the occasional breaks from the solitary life of authorship these events afforded, could weary of them. I was lucky that I never suffered from stage fright, but in later years increasing deafness made these occasions more challenging. In the late 1980s and ’90s however, when the publicity merry-go-round was still something of a novelty to me, I was very willing to climb aboard.
Soon after the contract for Nice Work was signed I was invited to a meeting in David Godwin’s office where people from all departments of the firm were arranged in a semicircle. David outlined to us an ambitious programme of publicity and promotion for Nice Work, and I kept my copy of the schedule he distributed:
May. Appearance at the Secker Breakfast at the Booksellers’ Conference in Bournemouth. 180 signed and numbered proof copies to be given to the booksellers. June. A special pre-publication champagne dinner at the Groucho Club for 30 booksellers and 10 others. Each bookseller will receive a personal, signed and numbered copy of the book, bound in four-colour jacket and gift wrapped. At least 70 of the numbered proofs will be mailed to booksellers, accompanied by a personal letter from David Godwin. July. Four-colour bound insert in the Bookseller. Four-colour poster on front cover of Publishing News. September. Publication Day. Dinner at Claridge’s for Literary Editors and writers.
