Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  However, the dinner turned out to be a wholly convivial occasion. Ted Hughes was a good-humoured member of the party and displayed only mild interest when I told him the reason for my visit and something about the subject matter of my play. Seamus and Marie were charming and entertaining, and Donald as always a witty and attentive host. A grown-up daughter of the Fangers was also present. The food was excellent and a good deal of fine wine flowed. After the dessert, when there was a satisfied silence around the table for a moment, without preamble Margot began to sing a folk song in a strong melodious voice, and was warmly applauded by the rest of us. Then her daughter sang, followed in due course by Seamus and Marie and finally Ted Hughes. He sang the ‘Ballad of Finnegan’s Wake’, which partly inspired Joyce’s last great book. I was obliged to pass when it was my turn, mortified that I was unable to remember more than a few words of a single song, not even the riddle-song beginning, ‘I gave my love a cherry which has no stone’, which I used to sing to Julia and Stephen as a lullaby when they were infants. That Bob Brustein didn’t have a party piece to contribute either was some consolation. All the guests were amazed and delighted by the spontaneous sing-song. Whether it was a tradition in the Fanger family I did not discover.

  The next morning I went into the ART building for a rehearsal. The cast had already had a couple of read-throughs, and proposed some cuts to speed up the tempo of the play, and a certain amount of bowdlerisation. It seemed that American, or at any rate Bostonian audiences were more conservative than those in London, and the word ‘cunt’ just couldn’t be spoken from a stage in the ART. In the play the word is used referentially, not as an expletive which would have been easy to replace. The American writer Leo and the British novelist Maude are arguing about the different ways in which men and women write about sex, and Leo says: ‘Most women, in my experience, don’t believe their cunts are beautiful. That’s why they write about sex with their eyes shut.’ Bob suggested the archaic ‘quim’ as a substitute, which I accepted, along with the other small changes they had made. The part of Leo was read by Bob Brustein himself, which I took as a compliment, and the part of Maude by Sandra Shipley, a British actress who had been working in America for some time. The casting of Jeremy, the manager in charge of the converted farm where the action takes place, was interesting. I had described him as a young gay man, but Bob had cast a middle-aged actor who he thought could do the part effectively and would make more of a contrast with the character of Simon, the young British writer. This worked so well that I later changed the character-description of Jeremy, and his lines to some extent, making him more neuter than gay, the kind of man sometimes described as ‘a bit of an old woman’.

  The reading that evening was performed on a platform in the spacious foyer of the ART on Brattle Street, attended by about 150 people who almost filled the chairs available. André Ptaszynski, who had the British rights under option, came from New York to join me, and we sat in the middle of the audience. The reading went extremely well and got a lot of laughs. At the end of it I went on to the platform to take questions and comments from the audience and there was a lively discussion. Numerous people came up to me afterwards to say how much they had enjoyed the evening. Although it was evident to me that the scene leading up to the fight between Leo and Simon still didn’t work satisfactorily, there was no doubt that the evening had been a success. Bob Brustein said he would stage the play as soon as his commitments allowed and André’s belief in it had been reinforced. He and I went off to have a pizza, well pleased on the whole, and indulged in ‘dream casting’, the favourite game of people involved in the making of plays and films. For Leo, André suggested Dustin Hoffman, who was known to be looking for an opportunity to act on the London stage. If only …

  Before approaching actors, André had to secure a director, somebody with a track record of successfully directing comedies in the West End. Such people are as difficult to engage as star actors, and I was thrilled when Mike Ockrent responded positively after reading the play, for he had an impressive list of hits to his credit, including Educating Rita, Once a Catholic, and Peter Nichols’ Passion Play which I had particularly enjoyed. He also turned out to be a most engaging person, friendly, amusing and relaxed. The three of us had several meetings and in the late spring I started rewriting ‘The Pressure Cooker’ prompted by Mike’s comments, which were always suggestive, not prescriptive. He said he would like the characters to have more to do on stage while they were talking – for instance, perhaps Maude could be trying to telephone people during some of the scenes. That gave me the idea of introducing an answerphone into the writers’ living room. I had recently acquired one myself and was struck by the dramatic possibilities of this device, still something of a novelty at that time. I developed Maude’s Oxford don husband, who up to this point was just a name that occurred in conversation, into a bumbling character who keeps leaving messages for her about farcical domestic disasters at their home which are overheard by the others. As these lines would be recorded, I had added a sixth character to the play very cheaply.

  But the most important revision I made was in the ‘fight scene’. Mike’s vital suggestion was that the quarrel which leads to Leo punching Simon on the nose should arise out of their professional as well as their sexual rivalry – that Simon should provoke Leo by probing his most sensitive spot, his self-esteem as a writer, uncovering the fact that he is blocked on his big novel-in-progress about the Second World War, and mocking his allegiance to an old-fashioned kind of realism. I also used the answerphone to introduce some music and a little dancing to increase the sexual tension in the build-up to the fight. Another fairly new electronic device which figured in the play to heighten the contrast between the American and the British writers was the portable computer which Leo brings with him to the writing course (nothing like a modern laptop, but resembling an old-fashioned portable typewriter in a case, with a heavy monitor carried separately). It occurred to me that towards the end of the last act Leo might hoax Maude, who knows nothing about computers, by pretending that he is permanently deleting the text of his novel in despair, in spite of her earnest efforts to dissuade him, before revealing that it is all safely backed up on a floppy disk, thus preparing for a kind of reconciliation between them at the end. It seemed to me that the play had been immeasurably improved by these rewrites, and I was eager to hear it read by professional actors. This was arranged in a room off Shaftesbury Avenue with a group of actors mainly from the cast of the Sondheim musical Follies, which was having a successful run at the Shaftesbury Theatre, directed by Mike. The reading went extremely well, and clinched his commitment to the play. He and André agreed to aim for a production opening in the autumn.

  The next step was casting. Mike was insistent that Leo should be played by an American, not an Englishman putting on an American accent, and André was equally firm in stipulating that it had to be someone with a recognised name in Britain. They knew that it would not be easy to attract such an actor, but at first it seemed as if we might be incredibly lucky. André had started at the very top of his list with Dustin Hoffman, and astonishingly the actor was seriously considering the offer. We were told that he had two close advisers, one of whom had told him he should do it and the other one that he shouldn’t. Some tense weeks followed while he made up his mind. Nice Work was published at this time and Mike Ockrent came to the launch party, warning me that if Hoffman really did say yes he would make my life hell by his demands for rewrites, because he was that kind of star actor. In fact I had the impression that Mike himself rather dreaded the prospect of working with him. But neither of us had to worry about this for long because Dustin Hoffman decided to do Shylock in The Merchant of Venice instead, produced in London by Peter Hall for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The search for an American Leo resumed with the help of a New York casting agency, but proved incredibly frustrating. It was difficult to get actors to even read the script. Real stars were understandably reluctant t
o risk their reputations in a new play by a writer with no track record as a playwright, and all suggestions of good but less well known actors failed to satisfy André. We were running out of time, because his option would expire at the end of the year, and although he was willing to renew it there was no reason to think he would have any more success in casting Leo, and Mike’s availability to direct was shrinking. Leah’s advice to me was that we should take the rights back and think about launching the play from a provincial theatre. This was a deeply disappointing conclusion to what had been a very exciting and creative collaboration with André and Mike, but I accepted Leah’s realistic assessment of the situation. Not for the first time I was grateful that I was primarily a novelist, rather than a playwright totally dependent on the co-operation of other people to see his work into fruition. And I certainly couldn’t complain about my fortunes in the former capacity. At about this time I at last acquired a publisher in America and had reason to hope that the partnership would last for more than one book. Viking-Penguin enthusiastically accepted Nice Work for publication in the summer of 1989, and soon afterwards obtained the US paperback rights to several novels in my backlist to add to the Penguin edition of Changing Places they had issued in 1978. From then onwards they published all my fiction, and some non-fiction, in America.

  16

  Early in December 1988 Nice Work was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year, sometimes confusingly referred to as the Sunday Express Fiction Award. This was a new prize, founded the previous year, when it was won by the Irish novelist Brian Moore for The Colour of Blood. It was the first of several new literary prizes which were set up on the model of the Booker in the eighties and nineties, in the hope of bringing equivalent publicity and cachet to their sponsors, though none succeeded in that aim. The Sunday Express was a surprising sponsor, being a popular middlebrow paper, but its energetic Books Editor, Graham Lord, who had published several novels himself, was a vociferous critic of many of those that had won the Booker Prize, and he founded the Sunday Express one to challenge its primacy, rewarding novels which combined good writing with strong narrative content and subjects of general interest. To compete with the Booker for public recognition, he persuaded the paper to set the value of its award at £20,000, compared to the Booker’s £15,000, and for some time it was in cash terms the biggest literary prize in the UK.

  I wrote to Anthony Burgess in December, thanking him for nominating Nice Work as one of his ‘Books of the Year’ in the Observer, and mentioning that it had been shortlisted for the Sunday Express Prize, ‘though it is inauspicious that one of the judges, Auberon Waugh, publicly announced in September that he hoped I wouldn’t be shortlisted for the Booker and, when I was, that Nice Work wouldn’t win it’. I have no memory of where Auberon Waugh made these statements, or what reasons he gave; but I had had a touchy relationship with him for some time past, conducted mainly by letter or in print. In 1971 I published a pamphlet on Evelyn Waugh in the Columbia Essays on Modern Writers series and sent him a copy. He wrote to me commending my critical appreciation of his father’s work, but objected violently to a sentence on the very last page: ‘Measured against the very great novelists, whether of the nineteenth century or the twentieth, Waugh falls a little short of the first rank’, and he was not placated by the next sentence: ‘But almost everything he wrote displayed the integrity of a master craftsman and much of it was touched with comic genius.’ It still seems to me a reasonable assessment, which Evelyn Waugh himself would have agreed with. In his fictional self-portrait The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) he wrote that ‘the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. The originators, the exuberant men, are extinct and in their place subsists and modestly flourishes a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance … among these novelists Mr Gilbert Pinfold stood quite high.’ What Auberon objected to in my words was the implied elevation of writers like James, Conrad, Lawrence and Joyce above his father, for he shared Evelyn’s distaste for modernism. He was very much his father’s son in literary and other matters. A few years later he gave Changing Places, probably the most Waugh-like of my novels, a favourable review, but was scathingly dismissive of How Far Can You Go? because of its sympathetic treatment of the post-Vatican II renewal of the Catholic Church, which Evelyn deplored in the few years he lived to observe it.

  The Sunday Express Prize was announced and awarded early in January 1989 at a lunch in the Café de Paris in Regent Street. I must have put all the documents relating to this event in a folder which I have mislaid, and my efforts to glean information about it from other sources, including Express Newspapers, have failed. Graham Lord died in 2015, and it would seem that all data about the prize were lost with him. At this distance in time I can recall few details of the prize-giving lunch. Of the other shortlisted writers who were there, I can name only two. One was Justin Cartwright, who was sitting next to me and told me how much difference it would make to his career to win the prize, though he thought I would win it. I hoped he was right because I didn’t relish being a runner-up yet again. Mike Shaw sat next to me on the other side, sharing the same thought. Another shortlisted author was Graham Greene, nominated for his last novel, The Captain and the Enemy. Though it is the best of his late fiction, it is a short and slight novel and was probably chosen by the judges partly in recognition of a lifetime’s achievement, and accepted as such. His publisher Max Reinhardt was present at the lunch and passed me a very kind message from Graham saying that he thought I deserved the prize and hoped I would win it.

  Among the judges present were Kingsley Amis and, I think, Ruth Rendell, but I can’t recall any others. If Auberon Waugh had been there I would have recognised and remembered him, so perhaps he had dropped out of the judging panel. At the end of the meal someone, probably the editor of the Sunday Express, made a short speech and announced that I had won the prize, and I went to the head of the long table where photographers were grouped to record the handing over of the cheque. I asked the man who seemed to be master of ceremonies if I should say a few words afterwards and to my surprise he said ‘No’, and was quite emphatic when I queried this answer. So after receiving the cheque, with a brief thank-you to the presenter, I returned to my seat. It made a very anticlimactic conclusion to the event, and I felt it must have seemed ungracious to the assembled company. The party broke up fairly soon afterwards, and I was able to thank Kingsley Amis as he was leaving for his share in the verdict. It meant a lot to me because his novels had been an important influence on my own, and the subject of a good deal of my literary criticism. But I felt none of the elation that should have accompanied winning this substantial prize, only relief at not losing, and regret that I had not ignored the officious man who told me not to make a speech. This was prolonged by a report in one of the next day’s papers that ‘David Lodge collected his cheque and scuttled back to his seat without a word of thanks.’

  I did however write to thank Graham Greene, with whom I had corresponded over the years and met on a few occasions, for his message and a similar statement he had made to the Sunday Express. I wrote: ‘These remarks have done something to relieve me of a certain embarrassment at being pushed involuntarily into competition with you, whom I revere above all other living writers. I feel there is only one prize worthy of your achievement, and I hope that the award will not be frustrated by one silly man in Stockholm any longer.’ It was well known that a member of the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature had persistently vetoed Graham Greene as a recipient.

  Soon afterwards I flew to Los Angeles to be Regents’ Professor at the Riverside campus of the University of California. This was a two-week engagement, funded by the governing body of the University to bring distinguished academics to its several campuses for short visits. Riverside was the poor relation in this family of institutions, situated in an unfashionable suburban area on the southern outskirts of the v
ast sprawling conurbation, but it was keen to raise its profile. The invitation was instigated by Ruth apRoberts, the senior professor of English there, who had met me at Los Angeles airport and driven me to the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1982. She was a big lady in every sense – in stature, in enthusiasm, in generosity – who had published scholarly books on Trollope, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and literary criticism of the Bible, but was also well read in other periods, and a fan of my novels. Ruth was Jewish but, as her surname declared, married to a man of Welsh extraction, Bob apRoberts, who was Professor of Medieval Literature at one of the campuses of California State University.