Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  A little later the crew filmed the arrival of Philip Swallow, to be challenged by the pickets guarding the entrance. This character was played brilliantly by Christopher Godwin, one of several excellent supporting performances in the series. I was surprised to see him approaching at the wheel of a swish new car, immaculately polished by the rental company from which it had obviously just been obtained, which seemed to me inappropriate to Philip Swallow’s character and lifestyle. I mentioned this to Chris Menaul and he immediately called for a replacement vehicle, a compact saloon some years old which, to save time, was borrowed from its owner, one of the technicians. Because Nice Work was being made on my doorstep, so to speak, I observed far more of the process than most screenplay writers get to see, both in studios and on location. I developed a very good working relationship with Chris Menaul, often sitting beside him as he watched the action on a monitor, and occasionally making a comment which he sometimes acted on. He often had new ideas of his own to improve the script and would ask me to write a few new lines at short notice, which I took some professional pride in supplying to his satisfaction. He also executed some of his ideas without telling me and I didn’t discover them until I saw the first, roughly edited tapes – usually with approval.

  Two major crises arose in the course of filming. There is an episode in the novel in which Robyn shadows Vic on a visit to a trade fair in Germany, where he plans to order a new core-blower to improve the output of his foundry. Chris Parr had discovered very early in the development of the project that the biggest foundry trade show in Europe, which only takes place every four years, would open in Düsseldorf in May 1989, just when we would want to film this episode. The organising body, GIFA, readily agreed to let us film inside the exhibition hall and a participating company were willing to let us use their stand for a few hours. I accordingly wrote a scene showing Vic and Robyn making their way through a crowded hall between massive machines in simulated operation. It promised to be a stunning spectacle. But soon after filming in Birmingham began, GIFA abruptly withdrew their permission for us to film in or anywhere near the Düsseldorf show. Apparently someone had sent them not only the script of the scene at the trade fair, but the following scene in a restaurant, in which two German businessmen, unaware that Robyn understands German, try to deceive Vic about the specification of the machine he wants to buy. Alerted to this by Robyn, Vic is able to turn the tables on them. It is this collaboration in an unfamiliar setting far from home, and their celebration of it later in a luxury hotel, which make it plausible that Robyn should indulge Vic, and perhaps herself (for she is disaffected with her boyfriend Charles at this point) with a one-night stand. But to GIFA this twist in the plot was an unacceptable slur on the honour of German businessmen which called for our banishment from the trade show.

  We pleaded that our story also showed British businessmen indulging in deception – but to no avail. We appealed to GIFA’s sense of humour – but it evidently didn’t exist. Desperately we offered to make the offending characters Swiss-German. No dice. In the end I had to rewrite the sequence so that Vic visits a German factory to buy his core-moulder. It was filmed in a factory in the Black Country town of Stourbridge which made machinery of this type, with German actors and appropriate signs on the walls. It was much less visually interesting than the original setting, but it stimulated me to improve the script. With Andy’s help the technical discussions were made more convincing, and the comedy of Robyn pretending to be Vic’s bimbo girlfriend, with a Rummidge accent that could shatter glass, so that she couldn’t possibly be suspected of understanding German, and the unprepared Vic’s astonishment at this transformation, was hilarious. It helped me to write this scene that by now I had a good idea of the way the two lead actors could play off each other. It was such discoveries of new possibilities of comedy and drama in my own story, arising out of the collaborative process of adaptation, that made the whole experience so interesting for me.

  The second crisis also had a connection with the German episode in the story. At this stage of my life I still took an interest in popular music, listened to it on my car radio or Top of the Pops, and occasionally bought albums or tapes of this kind. When writing Nice Work it occurred to me that if I gave Vic a similar taste, which he indulges only in the privacy of his Jaguar, it would indicate a sentimental vulnerability not apparent from his outward persona, and prepare for his infatuation with Robyn. I wrote:

  He favours female vocalists, slow tempos, lush arrangements of tuneful melodies in the jazz-soul idiom. Carly Simon, Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Randy Crawford and, more recently, Sade and Jennifer Rush.

  A song called ‘The Power of Love’, sung and co-written by Jennifer Rush, was a worldwide number one single in 1985 and remained popular for some time afterwards. The words express a woman’s passionate commitment to a vaguely defined affair, and urge the man to surrender to the power of love. When Vic begins to feel an amorous attraction to Robyn,

  he played Jennifer Rush a lot on the car stereo … her voice – deep, vibrant, stern, backed by a throbbing, insistent rhythm accompaniment – moved him strangely, enclosing his daydreaming in a protective wall of sound.

  It is by dancing with Robyn to this record in the German hotel’s discotheque that Vic finally gets to hold her in his arms, sheds his inhibitions, and is willingly led upstairs to her bed.

  The dance was therefore a crucial scene, and we were all delighted by how well it worked when we saw it on video. But it was necessary to apply for permission to use the music, and this had been left rather late. Imagine our dismay when a letter from Jennifer Rush’s agents was received, saying that Miss Rush understood that her song was used in the story as ‘an aural aphrodisiac’, and permission was refused. If the scene had to be shot again, we would never be able to find an alternative song with appropriate lyrics whose rhythm would match the movement of the dancers’ limbs; and if we had to commission the composition of a new one, it would have nothing like the same effect on the audience as the well-known original. Summoning all my rhetorical skills, I composed a letter to the agents assuring them that in my screenplay the song served to express a sincere, romantic and chivalrous attraction between the man and the woman. After a suspenseful interval, to our immense relief permission to use it was granted.

  As spring turned into summer, my time was more and more occupied by reading the submissions for the Booker Prize, which were arriving in the house in Jiffy bags almost daily. In April Martyn Goff had entertained us five judges to lunch at the Athenaeum and explained the procedure. Employed at times in the rare book trade, currently Head of Book Trust, a charity dedicated to the promotion of reading and writing, and himself the author of several novels, he was admirably qualified to administer the Booker Prize. Part of his job was to sit in on all our discussions to ensure that they were properly conducted, without himself contributing except to answer questions about the rules. One of these was not to talk about our proceedings to others, either publicly or privately. In spite of that prohibition, ever since the prize became newsworthy juicy morsels of information invariably appeared in the press in the run-up to the announcement of the winner, and it was only after Martyn Goff’s death that it became clear he was the source of most of these leaks. I was mildly shocked by this revelation, which was perhaps naïve of me. His instinct for publicity was one of his qualifications for the job.

  Part of the purpose of the lunch was for the judges to get to know each other. Maggie Gee I had met before on several occasions, but some time ago. She had a BA and B.Litt. in English from Oxford and in the late 1970s she obtained a research fellowship at Wolverhampton Polytechnic to write a PhD thesis on ‘Portraits of the Artist in Contemporary Fiction: critical selfconsciousness as a characteristic feature of 20th century writing’. Wolverhampton Poly was hopeful of attaining University status and had established a number of such fellowships to support its case, but it lacked a qualified member of staff to supervise Maggie Gee’s thesi
s. John Fuller, who had supervised Maggie at Oxford and thought highly of her, wrote to me on her behalf asking if I would be her ‘external supervisor’, and I agreed to see her. She was obviously very bright, so I took on the assignment, for which I was paid, seeing her at longish intervals, reading and commenting on her thesis, and acting in due course as one of the examiners who approved it for the doctorate. In 1981 she sent me a copy of a novel she was about to publish called Dying, in Other Words, a quirky metafictional tale centred on the mysterious death of a young woman whose naked corpse is found on the pavement beneath her fourth floor bedroom in an Oxford lodging house. I was impressed by its energy and originality, and provided a few lines of commendation which were printed on the back of the jacket in due course. Two years later I received a proof copy of The Burning Book, which combined similar postmodernist tricks with an earnest polemic against nuclear weapons. On the strength of these books Maggie Gee was included in the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ showcased in the magazine Granta in 1983, but my memory of them was dim when we met at the Athenaeum, and I hadn’t read her latest, Light Years (1985).

  Two of the other judges I had never met before: the American writer Edmund White, then based in Paris, whose semi-autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) is a classic of gay writing; and David Profumo, son of the former Cabinet Minister, a novelist and regular book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph. The fifth judge was Helen McNeil, who taught American Literature at the University of East Anglia, where I had met her previously. Martyn Goff had been turned down by Doris Lessing when he approached her to be a judge, and he appointed Helen in her place when I was in Hawaii, without consulting me, which I regretted and resented. She was a second American on the panel, which seemed one too many for a prize restricted to novels by British, Irish and Commonwealth writers. My misgivings deepened when I discovered that Maggie Gee had held a Creative Writing Fellowship at UEA and formed a friendship with Helen McNeil, and that David Profumo was also a good friend of Maggie’s. Such personal friendships between members of a committee can affect independent thinking and inhibit debate, and I thought it might seem to outside observers who discovered these facts that the judges, myself included, had too many associations with each other and the University of East Anglia for comfort.2

  We dispersed after the Athenaeum lunch to resume the task of reading. I enjoyed it on the whole, especially when the hay fever season was over and I could read in the garden, for the summer of 1989 was a good one. It was fascinating to sample such a huge number of literary novels published in the same year instead of cherry-picking as usual, and to see what trends in form and content could be discerned. I say ‘sampled’ because it would have been impossible to read from cover to cover every one of the 120-odd novels that had been submitted by their publishers, who were allowed two titles each. I found that after fifty or sixty pages it was pretty obvious whether a novel was a contender, and if you discovered that other judges greatly admired one of your rejects you could go back and give it further consideration. A meeting was scheduled in June for us to draw up a provisional list of ‘possibles’, and another early in September to agree on a more stringent list of eligible candidates (later known as the longlist, and published). The meeting to select a shortlist of six would be held on 21st September, and we would decide on the winner in the afternoon before the banquet on 26th October.

  At the June meeting we drew up a list of forty-seven novels which were deemed worthy of serious consideration, and at the first September meeting we whittled these down to seventeen to be considered for the shortlist. During that time I had phone conversations with both Maggie and Helen. Maggie wanted an assurance that the shortlist would not be decided by a numerical majority of only 3 to 2. I could not give it, but reiterated what I had said at the beginning of the process, that I hoped we could reach a consensus by discussion. In the course of my conversation with Helen she listed her criteria for a good novel, and the last of them was, ‘It must be ideologically correct.’ I was so startled by this declaration that I did not challenge it, as I should have done. At this time the phrase ‘politically correct’ had not yet reached Britain from America, and when it did so it carried the scare quotes which allowed it to be used ironically by sophisticated left-wingers as well as scornfully by outraged right-wingers. ‘Ideologically correct’ was a much more inflexible concept which one associated with Stalinist Russia or Mao’s China. In my view a responsible literary critic should always try to suspend his or her ideological principles and prejudices when reading a text to assess its literary merit.

  I prepared carefully for the shortlist meeting, and had a folder with my notes on all seventeen books, arranged alphabetically by author. The first of these was Amis, Martin. As mentioned earlier, I thought his novel Money had been unjustly excluded from the shortlist by the judges in 1984. I was pleased when I heard that he had a new novel out this year, called London Fields, and looked forward eagerly to reading it. Having done so I described it in my notes as:

  Notable for dense, imaginative and expressive use of language, summoning up a wasteland vision of urban and global entropy. Brilliant metaphors and similes. Often blackly funny. Cunning interweaving of motifs and symbolism. MA’s preoccupations with pornography & Swiftian relish of disgusting behaviour manifest in earlier work continue here, but much more under control. Keith is an extraordinary creation – totally loathsome, yet credible and weirdly vital … The flatness and unchangingness of the other main characters is the only arguable flaw in this generally brilliant achievement, and perhaps it is a little too long for its own good. But a frontrunner.

  The shortlist meeting took place in the utilitarian premises of Book Trust in south-west London. We sat at a rectangular Formica-topped table with myself at the head, Martyn to one side and slightly behind me, the two men to my left, and the two women on the right. I began by proposing that we should get an idea of our collective preferences by going through the seventeen novels one by one, each person classifying them as ‘shortlist’, ‘hold’ or ‘eliminate’, and I had prepared a chart to record these responses, but Ed suggested that instead we should each simply say what our current six choices for the shortlist were, and this won support from the others. At the end of the first round everyone had chosen Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Rose Tremain’s Restoration, and they were accordingly shortlisted. Both Ed White and David Profumo had nominated London Fields, though they were less enthusiastic than I in giving their reasons. I pointed out that no other novel in the remainder we were now considering had achieved three votes in the first round, and proposed that it should therefore be shortlisted.

  At this Maggie launched a fierce attack on the book as morally and formally flawed: seriously confused, banal, unconvincing on nuclear catastrophe and pollution, and irredeemably sexist. It sounded like a prepared speech, lasted for ten minutes or more, and was remembered later by Martyn Goff in an interview as ‘the time when Maggie Gee handbagged David Lodge’. She was supported unreservedly by Helen McNeil. The import of the telephone conversations I had had with each of them was now clear. I did my best to defend Amis’s novel, but Maggie and Helen were adamant. Ed said that as I was chairman they should accept my casting vote in Amis’s favour, at which Maggie looked distressed and said she would be very unhappy if London Fields went through. David Profumo said that he didn’t think we could shortlist a novel to which the two women judges were so strongly opposed. It was 12.30 and we still had only two books on the shortlist. I put London Fields on hold and suggested we considered Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, which had been commended with some qualifications in the first round, and it was agreed that it should be shortlisted. With that accomplished, we broke for lunch.

  At the heart of the ‘sexism’ accusation against London Fields was that the plot turned on the murder of the central female character, who is by implication complicit in the crime, and Amis underlined this theme by stating in a prefatory note to the novel that originally h
e had intended to call it The Murderee. Some days later, when I was still brooding on the meeting, I recalled that Maggie’s own first novel had been based on a similar idea, which I confirmed from the copy in my possession. At the end of the novel it is revealed that the dead woman left in the room from which she apparently threw herself, or was thrown, the complete text of the novel we have been reading. Had I remembered this fact at the time of the meeting I would have been tempted to use it against Maggie, but it was just as well I didn’t. During the lunch break David Profumo quietly informed the other judges that Maggie had recently had a very upsetting experience and was in a fragile psychological state, so should be treated sensitively. He was right to tell us, but it inhibited me from making any attempt to revive the case for London Fields in the afternoon session. Had I put it to a vote, David would certainly have voted against, or abstained and left us with a 2:2 deadlock.