by David Lodge
In June 1988 I was invited to take part in a big International Literary Conference in Dublin, one of several events celebrating the city’s Millennium which the Irish Tourist Board had decided, on debatable historical evidence, was founded in AD 988. It was a distinguished gathering of writers from all over the world, including Derek Walcott, Susan Sontag, Chinua Achebe, Joseph Brodsky, Liz Lochhead, Les Murray and Craig Raine, as well as an impressive home team including Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Aidan Higgins, Thomas Kilroy and John Banville. There were three days of short papers by individuals on the theme (very loosely interpreted) of ‘Literature as Celebration’, with responses from the floor. The most contentious session was Chinua Achebe’s denunciation of Conrad’s classic tale Heart of Darkness as racist, which was robustly challenged by Craig Raine, stirring up a debate which rumbled on throughout the conference. I agreed with Craig that it is a mistake to read texts from an earlier era through the ideological spectacles of the present, and that by the standards of his own age Conrad was enlightened in his treatment of European colonialism, but this is a kind of argument which will never be settled. In my own slot I spoke about the difficulty of applying the word ‘celebration’ to literature in the modern period, when most great writers (including Conrad) were deeply pessimistic; but Joyce’s idea of ‘epiphany’ and Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘carnivalesque’, which applies perfectly to Finnegans Wake, helped me to reach a more positive conclusion and end with homage to the greatest of Dublin writers. The conference had been timed to coincide with Bloomsday, and I joined with several other Joyceans in the early morning of 16th June on the roof of the Martello Tower in Blackrock where the first episode of Ulysses is set. Standing in a circle we read passages from it aloud like a prayer group, before dispersing to find some breakfast.
The climax of the conference, on its last evening, was a collective reading by the visiting writers, chaired by Seamus Heaney, in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a magnificent seventeenth-century neoclassical building on the outskirts of Dublin modelled on Les Invalides in Paris, which had been beautifully restored and renovated very recently. The event was open to the public, and the great hall was packed. All the writers at the conference had been invited to read from their work, and were allowed a maximum of seven minutes each, with stern instructions to strictly observe this limit. Cynics among us argued about who would overrun by the greatest margin, and some made bets on the outcome. Susan Sontag turned out to be the biggest offender, going on for twenty minutes. I chose a passage from Nice Work which I thought would work well as a reading and with some judicious cuts would not overrun by more than a minute or two. It was from the chapter in which Robyn Penrose, accompanying Vic Wilcox in his Jaguar on a business mission, analyses a roadside advertisement for Silk Cut cigarettes which they occasionally pass (it was ubiquitous at that time) consisting of a flowing expanse of purple silk with a long slit in it. She uses all the most sophisticated methods of literary criticism, including the metaphor/metonymy distinction, to demonstrate the levels of subliminal persuasion, including sexual symbolism, encoded in the advertisement, to his outraged bafflement. It was the first time I had exposed this novel to a public reading, and I was elated by the laughter it drew from the audience. Craig Raine congratulated me afterwards and said he was going to put a pound on the novel for the Booker Prize as soon as possible.
I could not suppress private hopes of some luck with the Booker this year, but I kept them to myself and got on with the task of adapting Nice Work for television. Nearly all novels contain more narrative information than can be dramatised in a few hours on a screen; and although a serial adaptation, running to several hours, can do more justice to the original novel than a single film, the main task of an adaptor is always to decide what to leave out. The first things to go are passages describing the consciousness of the main characters – their private thoughts and emotions. Although these can be suggested in film by body language, facial expressions and music, or by interior monologue spoken in voice-over, the densely detailed rendering of consciousness we take for granted in the novel is not possible in the film medium. Nice Work contains many passages of that kind, but essentially it is about a relationship between two people who are continually interacting with each other, in dialogue scenes which express the differences of character and values between them, and it was therefore well suited to adaptation.
The characters of Vic and Robyn are introduced separately in the novel, in the first and second chapters respectively, with a detailed rendering of their thoughts as they get up on a chilly winter morning and leave their homes to go to work. In the screenplay this action is covered more concisely by cutting back and forth between the two characters and their interaction with wife or partner. When a director, Christopher Menaul, was appointed and read the first draft of my script, he suggested a further acceleration of the narrative tempo, a near-encounter between the two main characters in the first ten minutes, when Vic is held up in a traffic jam close to the University caused by a one-day strike of academic staff in which Robyn is a leading participant. She approaches Vic, fuming in his car, with a sheaf of leaflets in her hand and a winning smile on her face, and is saved from an angry confrontation when a cheer from the strikers (because a lorry driver has agreed to respect the picketing) makes her turn back. It’s a nice moment, anticipating the combative relationship that will soon develop between them, and Chris Menaul added many other visually effective scenes to the script as it developed. I was lucky that he was chosen to direct the serial. He had been working in TV drama mainly on popular series like The Sweeney and Minder, for some ten years, and Nice Work was a new kind of opportunity to show what he was capable of.
Once the director is in place, the next stage in the process of producing a TV drama is casting. While I was writing the novel in 1987 Mary and I were watching, along with a sizeable proportion of the British population, a BBC serial called Fortunes of War, based on a sequence of six novels by Olivia Manning known as the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy, which portrayed the experiences of a young British married couple in Romania and Egypt just before and in the early years of the Second World War. Guy and Harriet Pringle and their adventures were known to be closely based on the lives of the author and her husband Reggie Smith. He was one of the people I interviewed for my TV documentary Birmingham Writers in the Thirties, and for me an additional source of interest in the novels and the excellent TV adaptation. Guy was played by Kenneth Branagh and Harriet by Emma Thompson, two rising stars who became attached while making the serial and would later marry. I was quickly hooked on Fortunes of War, and enraptured by Emma Thompson’s performance in particular. Her portrayal of Harriet as an intelligent, fearless, and attractive young woman in a strange and sometimes hostile environment made her seem perfect casting for Robyn Penrose, and I began to visualise my heroine as Emma Thompson as I wrote and brooded on the novel. When I made this suggestion to Chris Parr, he agreed and approached her agent. Emma expressed interest, and as it happened Ken Branagh had brought his Renaissance Theatre touring company to Birmingham at this time, the late summer of 1988, and she was there with him. I invited her to our house in Edgbaston for a chat and she came – not in a taxi, as I expected, but on foot, having walked from the nearest bus stop. It was a sunny afternoon, and we sat in the garden in deckchairs, discussing Nice Work over a cup of tea. She was calm, focused and candid. She admired the novel and was definitely interested in the role of Robyn, but said that if she were to play it she would have to find a way to make her sympathetic to the audience. ‘She seems such a cold character on the page,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she has ever had her heart broken.’ The comment surprised me, but I saw that she had a point, and stored up the remark for future use.2 Emma also told me that Channel 4 had proposed to produce a weekly TV show of her own, consisting of sketches and songs which she would write and perform with a few select partners. It was scheduled to be made in the same period of the coming year as Nice Work, so she wou
ld have to decide between them. I expressed a sincere hope that she would choose Nice Work, but I could understand the attraction for her of a show which she would write as well as perform in. I was not surprised when in due course that was the offer she accepted, though when the series, entitled Thompson, was broadcast the following spring it was generally found disappointing.
The first actor approached for the part of Vic was Bob Peck, who had established himself as a TV star in the BBC serial Edge of Darkness in 1985, and would soon play a leading role as the gamekeeper in the film Jurassic Park. Chris Parr and I visited him on the set of another TV drama and chatted to him about Nice Work. He was friendly but I sensed that he was not really drawn to the character of Vic – and I think he was right. Peck excelled at playing characters under extreme stress – on the edge of darkness, one might say – but I’m not sure that he had an equal gift for comedy, which was essential to the role of Vic. Casting the other parts was not a problem, and we ended up with a great team of actors, but it was a long time before Warren Clarke was cast as Vic and Haydn Gwynne as Robyn. I was disappointed when I heard this news, for although Warren Clarke was a versatile actor on stage, in films and on television, he was not an established lead actor, and Haydn Gwynne was almost completely unknown. In the event this turned out to be a great advantage, because they both gave superb performances, and the fact that they were not instantly recognisable to the audience enhanced the realism of the drama.
The novel was published on 19th September, and received excellent reviews. The only notable exception was one in the Sunday Times by Craig Brown. The literary editor who had replaced Claire Tomalin after she resigned from the paper in 1986 told me that Brown had ‘begged’ to review the book, but he did not care for its combination of realism and playful intertextuality. A little later the Booker shortlist was announced, and Nice Work was on it, to the jubilation of myself and everyone at Secker & Warburg, Penguin and Curtis Brown. The banquet at which the result would be announced was on 25th October, which meant that, preoccupied as I was with the screenplay of Nice Work, I had to scan the competition rather hastily. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was an ambitious and challenging fabulation, taking Rushdie’s brand of magic realism to a new extreme, but there was as yet no inkling of the global impact it would have. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda was inspired by Edmund Gosse’s autobiography Father and Son, but it too was a kind of fabulation, its climax the transportation and construction of a glass church in the Australian wilderness to settle a wager. The book that really gripped me was Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, a fascinating evocation of a British expat family’s life in Moscow in 1913, as the ice and snow of winter begin to thaw. The other novels were Utz by Bruce Chatwin, a very short book about a collector and dealer in fine porcelain living dangerously in Eastern Europe in the Cold War period, and Marina Warner’s The Lost Father, a complex family saga set mainly in Italy, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Nice Work was the only novel of the six which dealt realistically with contemporary British life, though that didn’t strike me at the time.
The chairman of the judges that year was the politician and author Michael Foot. I had spotted him one evening in the Tube on my way to a party in Hampstead, with a bulging book bag at his feet, reading what had to be one of the novels submitted for the Booker, but it did not look like mine. The other judges were the novelist Sebastian Faulks, the film critic Philip French, the poet and critic Blake Morrison, and the novelist Rose Tremain. They made a distinguished and well-qualified team. I had met Rose socially as a member of the Norwich literary community connected with UEA, but I didn’t presume that this would bias her in my favour. On the night of the banquet I chatted briefly with some of the other candidates as we gathered in the Guildhall for drinks, telling Penelope how much I had admired her book, and exchanging compliments with Salman on our respective novels. Marina looked tense and complained that the event was ‘so gladiatorial’, which of course it is by design. Peter Carey was the bookies’ favourite, and it was soon pretty obvious that he was the winner, because several reporters were clustered around him, indicating that the judges’ verdict that afternoon had leaked out.
I didn’t find my second Booker banquet as exciting as the first one. Apart from the absence of suspense about the result, there was a feeling of déjà vu in being a runner-up for the second time, sitting through Michael Foot’s dutiful praise of all the candidates, stepping up to receive the bound copy of one’s novel and a consolation cheque from Sir Michael Caine, accepting the condolences of friends among the guests, watching John Blackwell drink himself legless in disappointment again, and having to pour him into a cab to take him home to Clapham before returning to our hotel.
In a book called Lives in Writing published in 2014 I wrote an essay about my friendship with Malcolm Bradbury in which I described watching next day ‘in a hungover and somewhat despondent mood’ a videotape of the live television coverage of this Booker prize-giving at home, when he was one of the guests who ‘as they arrived … were quizzed about who should or would win … Tall and handsome in his dinner jacket, Malcolm said with a smile, “For love and friendship I hope it’s David Lodge”, for which I blessed him, knowing that such an outcome would have revived the hurt of his own disappointment five years earlier.’ But a reference I came across later in a letter suggests that it was at the 1984 Booker banquet, when Small World was shortlisted, that he said this. Not that it matters – his magnanimity would have been the same in either case – but my confusion shows how closely one Booker night resembles another. The only memory of the 1988 occasion I am quite sure about was a brief conversation with Michael Foot as the evening drew to a close, in which he told me that only three novels had been in contention at the judges’ meeting that day, and he had personally wished to give the prize to The Satanic Verses, but his second choice was Nice Work. That was pleasing to know.
Earlier that month I had received news from Curtis Brown’s Foreign Rights department which, in retrospect, was just as significant for my career as the success of Nice Work in Britain. A small but up-and-coming French publisher called Rivages had made a good offer for the rights in that novel, and an option on all my previous titles. For years Curtis Brown and their French sub-agent Boris Hoffman had tried to interest the leading Parisian publishers of literary fiction like Gallimard in my novels without success, but now at last they had a home there. I soon received a charming letter from Gilles Barbedette, the editor in charge of foreign fiction at Rivages who was responsible. ‘I couldn’t resist the charm, wit, intelligence and irony of Nice Work. You definitely could sit on the same bench as Alison Lurie, for instance, an author whom we publish very successfully here, and I have a fantastically funny conversation with her. I actually just sent a copy of Nice Work to her for fun.’ He added that Maurice Couturier had agreed to translate the novel. Maurice, whom I had met during our tour of Brittany with the Bradburys, would have been my own first suggestion as translator if I had been asked, but I wasn’t: Gilles had chosen him through knowing his work on the Pléiade edition of Nabokov, in which both were involved. I had first met Alison Lurie when I interviewed her on stage at the ICA in London in 1985 to publicise her latest novel, Foreign Affairs, and began a friendship with her then which has been maintained ever since in correspondence, in her annual summer sojourns in London and occasional meetings in America. This web of personal associations which, unknown to Gilles, we had in common seemed a good omen for my relationship with him and Rivages, and so it proved in the years that followed.
My first novel to be translated into Italian also appeared in 1988, the fortuitous consequence of a personal friendship. Jeswyn Jones, wife of Martin, a couple who figured in QAGTTBB as friends of Mary and me at UCL and afterwards, had an Italian father who had immigrated to England, and an Italian cousin in Milan called Mariella Gislon, who translated English books in collaboration with a friend called Rosetta Palazzi. Early in 1987 Mariella wrote to Jeswyn
asking her to suggest some contemporary English novelists whom they might propose for translation to their publisher Bompiani, Umberto Eco’s publisher. Jeswyn suggested my name to Mariella, who wrote to me expressing interest, and I instructed my agents to send her copies of Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work. I recommended starting with the first one, since they formed a kind of sequence, though not by intention. The project prospered with what seemed to me unprecedented speed, and in little more than a year Mariella and Rosetta’s translation of the first novel, called Scambi, was published, and they had begun work on Il professore va al congresso, published in 1990. Most of my fiction, and some non-fiction books, have been published in Italy, where they have been well received and mostly kept in print. Who knows whether I would have had the same success there without that connection between Jeswyn Jones and Mariella Gislon? It was a matter of luck.
Throughout this eventful year the prospects of getting ‘The Pressure Cooker’ produced waxed and waned intermittently. Robert Brustein had optioned the play and arranged to try it out in a rehearsed reading at the ART on Monday 18th January. I flew to Boston a few days earlier because Donald Fanger and his wife Margot had kindly arranged a dinner party for Seamus Heaney and his wife Marie, Bob Brustein and myself on the Saturday. Seamus was teaching at Harvard at this time, and the hospitable Fangers had become friends of the Heaneys. I looked forward eagerly to this occasion, but I was disconcerted to discover soon after my arrival in Cambridge that Ted Hughes would also be a guest. He and Seamus were co-judges of the Observer Poetry Competition, and he had come over from England to spend a few days going through the entries to decide the winner and runners-up. The opportunity to dine in the company of these two famous poets would normally have seemed a rare privilege – but not at this time and place. My play was a somewhat satirical account of a residential creative writing course closely resembling the courses run by the Arvon Foundation, which Ted Hughes had actively and publicly supported from its inception. It was an extraordinary coincidence that I should meet him in Cambridge, Mass. at an intimate dinner party just before the play was given a rehearsed reading there. Fortunately there was no risk of his actually attending it, as he was returning to England before the event; but it seemed to me that I would hardly be able to avoid explaining the reason for my presence in Cambridge and arousing his interest in my play; and that the more I – or Bob and Donald – told him about it, the less he would like what he heard. I had never met Ted Hughes socially before, though I had heard him read at a Birmingham Literary Festival several years ago, and bought a book which he signed for me. On that occasion he had struck me as a wonderful reader of his own poetry but a rather grim and intimidating person whom one would not wish to cross in argument. I approached the evening with a certain trepidation.
