Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  I had declined similar invitations from more prestigious institutions in America than Riverside, but I had a particular reason, apart from Ruth’s involvement, for accepting theirs. With Nice Work published, and the TV adaptation finished and accepted, my thoughts were turning towards my next novel, which was to draw on the experience of going to Hawaii in 1983 to help Eileen when she was terminally ill. I had only a vague idea of the characters and plot of the book at this point, but I knew that thematically it would juxtapose the commodified version of paradise disseminated by the tourist industry with the promise of a transcendent paradise after death which gives comfort to religious believers but is losing credibility for many in our sceptical age. In the preceding November I had attended a seminar on ‘The Anthropology of Tourism’ at the ICA in London which gave me a number of useful ideas, and I was doing a lot of reading in liberal theology, but I felt a need to refresh and increase my knowledge of Hawaii before I started writing. The visiting appointment at Riverside was an ideal opportunity to return there, paying travel expenses which would cover two thirds of the cost of flying from London to Honolulu and back, with an honorarium that would more than cover the cost of an extra week in Hawaii.

  My duties at Riverside were fairly light: to give three lectures (which I had already prepared for other occasions and had not published), to be available in an office at certain hours for anyone interested in talking to me, and to make other incidental contributions to the cultural life of the campus. I had suggested to Ruth in advance that I might direct a rehearsed reading of ‘The Pressure Cooker’, if actors could be recruited. I sent her the play, and she embraced the idea enthusiastically. When I arrived she already had a cast in place, mostly staff and graduate students from the English Department. One was a British expat who had once been a professional actress, and made an excellent Maude. For Leo, Ruth had enlisted a seventeenth-century specialist because he was Jewish and from Chicago, like the character, but unfortunately he had no natural talent for acting. However, the ex-actress gave me a very good tip which served me well with all the cast: telling them to breathe in just before their cue lines are delivered – it helps to eliminate the heavy, monotonous pauses between lines that are typical of amateur theatricals. I found directing an interesting experience. My priority immediately became not doing justice to the subtleties and integrity of the text but ensuring that the audience didn’t get bored and switch off. I cut many lines and left out whole scenes, summarising their content myself, so that the reading didn’t take more than 90 minutes. The audience seemed to enjoy it.

  The apRobertses were very helpful and hospitable during my stay, taking me for a long drive in the desert as far as Palm Springs, and giving a party in my honour in their home, but I didn’t want to impose on them for company. Fortunately there were a number of friends living in the LA area who had cars to pick me up, otherwise I might have felt rather lonely. I was boarding in a bed & breakfast, with a spacious room that had huge windows, giving a splendid view of the Pacific Ocean but with no curtains, only flimsy paper blinds, which I found vaguely discomfiting, imagining I must be silhouetted against them at night. One evening I received a telephone call in this room from Martyn Goff, chief administrator of the Booker Prize, asking if I would be chairman of the judges in the current year. It was not entirely a surprise, as Malcolm had told me he was going to recommend to the Committee of Management that I should be invited to act in this capacity. Nowadays the chairman is always appointed first, but Goff had already conscripted three other judges: Maggie Gee, Edmund White and David Profumo. Of these Maggie Gee was the only one I knew personally, though I hadn’t been in touch with her for several years. Goff told me that he wanted to find a woman for the fifth judge, and was hopeful of getting Doris Lessing to act, which I thought would be interesting. I asked him to give me time to reflect, and then call me back. I didn’t hesitate for long. I knew it would mean reading over a hundred novels, or enough of some of them to be confident of eliminating them, and re-reading the best ones. But I thought it would be an interesting experience which I would want to have at some time, and it might as well be this year. By the time the Booker was done and dusted I would be ready to begin writing my new novel. I seldom phoned Mary while I was away on long trips, because she found it rather upsetting; but I made an exception in this case, and told her about the invitation and that I was going to accept. She told me I would regret it. She was right.

  I flew to Honolulu on my fifty-fourth birthday, 28th January. My aim was to soak up as much detail as I could in one week about the location of the new novel, and in particular about the dominance of its social and economic life by tourism. I took with me a stoutly bound A4 notebook I had dedicated to the work in progress, and the first thing I wrote in it that day was the name of a free newspaper, Paradise News, which I plucked from a rack in the baggage hall of the airport, adding the comment: ‘Could this be the title for my novel?’ I did not find a better one, for it seemed to incorporate all the themes I had in mind: religion, death, the afterlife, tourism, and discovery of the unexpected.

  I had arranged to write an article about my trip for the Evening Standard’s travel pages, which gave me a pretext to contact in advance various people in the tourist industry in Hawaii, and brought me a complimentary upgrade of the room I had booked at the towering Hyatt Regency Beach hotel in Waikiki, with a splendid view of the beach and the ocean. I also had some very useful contacts at the University of Honolulu. One was Nell Altizer, a poet and teacher of American Literature who had done an exchange with UEA and was a friend of the Bradburys. Alerted by them to my visit, Nell had arranged for me to give a talk on campus, and there I met one of its most venerable figures, the seventy-six-year-old Ruel Denney, also a poet but perhaps best known as one of the three authors of a classic work of sociology, The Lonely Crowd. He introduced me to the Dean of Travel Industry Management, who was slightly defensive about the academic status of his subject, but usefully informative. Ruel also gave me his own pragmatic take on the exploitation of Hawaii as a tourists’ paradise: that its commercialism was justified by the contribution it made to the local economy, and to funding education in particular. But he urged me to try and see more than Oahu, the most developed of the Hawaiian islands, where Honolulu and its beach resort Waikiki are situated. To that end he arranged for me to visit a friend of his, William Merwin, a very distinguished poet, twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and American Poet Laureate in 2010, who lived with his wife in an unspoiled part of the island of Maui. Before I made that trip, I hired a car and drove to Sunset Beach on the north side of Oahu, where the biggest waves pound the shore, to watch the surfers at their spectacular sport, and swam cautiously in the shallows myself. On another day I took a tour of Pearl Harbor which was extremely interesting, though not very relevant to my novel. I also wrote down all the names of all the businesses in the Honololu Yellow Pages that began with the word ‘Paradise’, from Paradise Antique Arts through Paradise Dental and Paradise Pizza to Paradise Yacht Sales. There were more than fifty of them.

  The head of PR for the Hyatt Regency, who was very helpful throughout my stay, booked me into the Hyatt hotel on Maui and drove me to the airport to take the short flight to the island. My first impressions were that it was at an early stage of the same kind of tourist development as Oahu had undergone, but still had much unspoiled natural beauty. The main problem in accessing the latter was the density of traffic on the two-lane highways. I hired a car for the day and, following the directions I had been given, drove along narrow twisty rural roads to the far side of the island where William Merwin and his wife Paula had their home. I eventually found it, hidden in a small plot carved out of dense vegetation on the side of a hill. Merwin and Paula, who had been an editor of children’s books, were very hospitable in a laid-back, low-key way. They gave me a welcome gin and tonic on arrival, a simple meal cooked by Paula, and afterwards we sat on their porch and talked.

  It turned out that Willi
am had worked for the BBC in London for a time in the late forties or early fifties, and knew Henry Reed and Reggie Smith, two men who figured in my TV documentary Birmingham Writers in the Thirties. That was about the only link between us. I hadn’t had time to read any of his poetry, and he didn’t know my novels. Though still writing, he had opted out of the professional literary life, while I was still making my way in it. As a couple they lived simply, were dedicated environmentalists, used solar power, and despised their neighbours for linking up with cabled electricity. Europe – even New York – seemed incredibly distant to them. In effect they had exiled themselves from modern America. When I raised the topic of the tourist industry’s appropriation of the Paradise myth, William said it was an invention of the hotel trade between the wars, and Paula said the word didn’t misrepresent Hawaii as it was then. She was probably right, but he was quite wrong. I later discovered The Hawaiian Guidebook, by Harry Whitney, published in 1875, which declared on its title page: ‘The earthly paradise! Don’t you want to go there? Why of course!’ I made this the epigraph to my novel.

  I returned from the sunshine and balmy trade winds of Hawaii to chilly and overcast England on Monday 6th February, and had barely recovered from jet lag before I was on my way to Cambridge on the following Friday to deliver a lecture I had tried out at Riverside, ‘The Novel as Communication’. It was in a series sponsored by Darwin College, published the following year as Ways of Communicating, with Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Miller among the contributors. It seems common sense that novelists communicate something to their readers, but this assumption has been questioned by various modern theorists: Wimsatt and Beardsley for instance, with their ‘intentional fallacy’;1 Roland Barthes’ announcement of the ‘Death of the Author’, which follows from recognising that the meaning of a text is produced by its reader; and Derrida’s argument that the nature of language itself makes it impossible to fix the meaning of an utterance. As a critic I recognised that these ideas had some force, but as an author I was not willing to give up the idea that I was involved in a communicative activity. In my lecture I said:

  To write a novel is to conduct imaginary personages through imaginary space and time in a way that will be simultaneously interesting, perhaps amusing, surprising yet convincing, representative or significant in a more than merely personal, private sense. You cannot do this without projecting the effect of what you write upon an imagined reader. In other words, although you cannot absolutely know or control the meanings that your novel communicates to its readers, you cannot not know that you are involved in an activity of communication.

  The complexities of this process, and the unpredictability of the interpretation of texts, were very soon demonstrated in a dramatic and alarming way, when the Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa on the 14th of February calling for the killing of Salman Rushdie for blasphemy against the Islamic faith and the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses, and for the same punishment to be meted out to those who assisted in its publication. There had been a number of protests against the book by Muslim individuals and communities in Britain and other countries towards the end of 1988, and in January 1989 there were significant demonstrations in Bolton and in Bradford where the book was publicly burned. But the fatwa was a wholly new phenomenon, and very shocking to all writers and readers of literary fiction in Britain and other secular democratic states. In retrospect it heralded a new age of anxiety for the whole world, which was ramped up to a new level of terror by the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on the 11th of September 2001.

  With a few exceptions most writers were shocked by Rushdie’s plight in 1989, and protested against the fatwa in the media. Several of his friends generously offered him refuge from pursuit by the press and intimidation by outraged Muslims. Fay Weldon declared that she was prepared to die for Salman Rushdie. I can’t say I was, but I signed a declaration by an impressive list of writers deploring the fatwa and its consequences. On the day of its publication I was asked by the BBC if I would be interviewed about it on Newsnight that evening, by a link with a studio at Pebble Mill, and I agreed. The interviewer indicated the kind of questions I would be asked: for instance, did I think the declaration would change the minds of the protestors? I would regretfully answer ‘No’, but affirm that if you were offended by a book, you shouldn’t kill the author, but instead write another book, or article, opposing it. When Mary came in from work at Handsworth College of Further Education and I told her about the interview, she was not pleased. There was a large Muslim element in the student body at the college, and she was aware of the feelings the Rushdie controversy had stirred up. She was afraid some students would know that she was married to me, watch or hear about the programme, and that this would affect her relations with them and possibly lead to some unpleasant incidents. I didn’t feel I could put her in what she regarded as jeopardy without her agreement, so I phoned the BBC to explain the circumstances and pulled out, though with deep regret.

  Salman Rushdie has written his own detailed memoir of the history of The Satanic Verses, entitled Joseph Anton, one of the pseudonyms he used while he was in hiding. That he has not only survived his extraordinary ordeal, but managed to go on writing and publishing until the fatwa was withdrawn, is testimony to his courage and resilience. Several people connected with the publication of the novel in other countries were not so fortunate, and events like the massacre of the staff of the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 have shown that the threat to the principle of free speech remains. What the Satanic Verses affair demonstrated unignorably was that the increasing permissiveness of Western culture and society from the 1960s onwards, in which virtually nothing is forbidden which does not harm people and nothing is sacred in the realm of discourse, is alien and offensive to a large section of the human race. Very few of the Muslims who demonstrated against The Satanic Verses from Bradford to Bangladesh had read it, or would have understood it if they had tried to do so. It was enough to be told by an ayatollah that it was blasphemous. The speed and reach of modern communications contributed to this phenomenon. Salman Rushdie, who in an earlier era would have been an avant-garde author with a fairly small, highbrow audience, was propelled to global fame by winning the Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children, which became an international bestseller. Its successor Shame attacked political figures on the Indian subcontinent under a thin cover of magic realism, and they reacted angrily, but he survived unscathed. In The Satanic Verses, however, he took liberties with the religion of Islam, which brought down on him a kind of condemnation not heard of in the West since the seventeenth century. The global village has been a more dangerous place for writers and artists ever since. Which is not to say that he is to blame for it.

  17

  Rehearsals for Nice Work began in mid-February 1989 at Pebble Mill, and I looked forward eagerly to being involved in them – too eagerly, as it turned out. The very first session I attended, sitting on a chair at the back of the room, began with a short scene in which Robyn’s yuppie brother Basil is speaking to her on the phone, expressing suspicion of the friendly relationship Robyn’s boyfriend Charles has formed in London with Basil’s girlfriend, Debbie. The part of Basil was played by a young actor called Patrick Pearson. It seemed to me that the way he delivered his lines betrayed much more emotion than was appropriate to the character, and when he paused at the end of a line I could not restrain myself from saying, ‘Oh, no, that’s not the way to do it!’ He turned round and looked at me with angry astonishment, and the others in the room also stared. I gave an embarrassed explanation of my comment, and the rehearsal continued. In a coffee break later the young production assistant came over to me and said, ‘Professor Lodge, you must never criticise an artist in rehearsal like that, you know.’ I apologised, and promised not to do it again, my mortification increased by the fact that he had been one of my brightest tutorial students a few years before. His name was Gareth Neame and he had a successful
career later as a producer in television and film.

  This was a bad start to my participation, but I managed to recover from it. Shortly afterwards Chris Menaul sent me a handwritten letter saying that the actors found my presence disturbing while they were working on scenes, so instead he would invite me in at the end of each week to see a run-through of what they had done. He would listen carefully to my comments afterwards, but I should try to find something encouraging to say to the actors, because ‘they’re all congenitally paranoid. Like directors. And writers?’ This system worked well, and I developed a good relationship with Chris and with the actors, including Patrick Pearson whose portrayal of Basil got better and better. It was immediately obvious to me that Haydn Gwynne was perfectly cast for Robyn. Tall and slim, with expressive eyes and long auburn hair that could be worn in a variety of ways, she looked like a more beautiful young Germaine Greer, and she had the advantage of knowing something about academic life, being a graduate of Nottingham University who had taught English Language at an Italian university. Warren Clarke was physically the antithesis of Vic Wilcox as described in the novel, for I had made him small in stature in order to prevent any identification of the character with my friend and guide to factory life, Maurice Andrews, who is tall and burly. But Warren Clarke was also tall and burly – a physique in fact more typical of industrial bosses in the West Midlands, and therefore excellent casting for Vic. Andy never made any secret of his input to my novel and was rather chuffed when he was enlisted as an adviser to the television production and given a credit for it. Before rehearsals started he had shown Warren the inside of a factory or two, while I gave Haydn a tour of Birmingham University.

  The BBC had obtained permission to film1 a lot of scenes on the campus in the four-week Easter Vacation. When this was announced it caused concern to some academic staff, and I heard there was a protest in Senate about the arrangement, on the grounds that the satirical elements in the story would reflect badly on the University. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this reaction, and it made me all the happier that I was no longer employed there. The Administration did not yield to these protests however, and were vindicated when they commissioned market research after the serial was transmitted which showed that 60 per cent of viewers thought it gave a very positive image of the University. But it was a strange experience for me to observe the recreation of my fiction in the place where I once worked. One morning I left my house and went to watch the filming of the scene mentioned earlier, when Robyn almost meets Vic, who is held up on his way to work by a demonstration of striking staff and student supporters at the entrance to the University. When I arrived, there before me was the scene I had imagined more than a year ago, brought to life with astonishing accuracy: a large delivery lorry surrounded by demonstrators blocking the entrance, wielding banners and chanting slogans. A young woman with a briefcase came up to stand beside me. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, gazing at the crowd. ‘Is the campus closed? I need to use the Library.’ ‘No, it’s just a television programme being made,’ I reassured her. She had not noticed the large signboard to one side of the entrance with the legend ‘University of Rummidge’.