Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  I felt I had lost control of the meeting as the discussion swung this way and that, with a number of new candidates being proposed and opposed for the three remaining places. John Banville’s stylish and noirish novel The Book of Evidence, which had been on my own first-round list, was added to the shortlist. Michael Frayn’s witty epistolary novel The Trick of It had also been one of my original six, and had been enjoyed by most of the others, but was deemed too slight. Then we seriously considered a book we had ‘called in’3 – James Hamilton-Paterson’s Gerontius, a biographical novel about the composer Elgar and the voyage he took to Brazil in old age, which we had all read recently and been charmed by. I was tempted by it, but I was concerned that so far we had no novel on the list which reflected contemporary life in Britain, as London Fields did. I had been very impressed with A Disaffection, by the Scottish writer James Kelman, a novel about a few days in the life of a disillusioned young schoolteacher in Glasgow, written in a stream-of-consciousness style which managed to be different from Joyce or Woolf, and gave a vivid if depressing picture of Glaswegian working-class life. I had described it in my notes as ‘very impressive – a serious contender’. Apart from me, only Ed had named it as one of his six titles in the first round, and the others were not enthusiastic when I brought it forward at this late stage. And now Ed proposed Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford, a venerable literary figure born in 1911, who had not published a novel since 1968. Jigsaw was in fact a memoir of the author’s early years in France and Italy, with names and minor details fictionalised. It was gracefully written, but not in my opinion a novel. Ed spoke eloquently of the pleasure it had given him, and which its lesbian theme was sure to give to many gay readers, subtly drawing our attention to the heterosexual orientation of the other contenders, and he won the support of Maggie and Helen. It looked as though Jigsaw and Gerontius were going to fill the last two places on the shortlist, which to me would have been a dismayingly bland outcome. Martyn Goff was getting restive because we were approaching the deadline for relaying the result in time for the next day’s newspapers. (It was in fact the longest shortlist meeting in the history of the prize to date.) There was no time for further discussion, only for a deal. I said: ‘If we can have Kelman on the list instead of Hamilton-Paterson, I’ll accept Jigsaw.’ The others agreed. Martyn hurried off to phone the media, and we slumped in our seats, drained of energy, and silent for quite a long time, as we wondered how the result of our deliberations would be received. When Martyn returned Maggie put that question to him. He said we would be blamed for the books we had left out, but not for those we had chosen. I suspected he said that to every panel of judges.

  In fact we were blamed on both counts by the press. Admirers of Martin Amis deplored the omission of London Fields, but A Disaffection was generally perceived as a large indigestible lump of Scottish miserabilism. Ishiguro’s nomination was expected, and John Banville’s was approved by those who had read his novel, but Sybille Bedford’s name meant little to all but some elderly literati and Rose Tremain’s novel had not yet been published so elicited little comment. The passage of time justified our choice of authors: Atwood, Banville and Kelman all won the Booker Prize later, and Rose Tremain won that year’s Sunday Express Prize for Restoration. At the time, though, our shortlist was generally described in the press as very disappointing, and I felt I had mismanaged the judging, especially in failing to get London Fields included. In fact I succumbed to a period of deep depression and longed for the whole charade to be over. But there were several weeks before the prize was awarded and no respite from obsessional brooding about it. We judges had to re-read the contenders in preparation for our final meeting, and I had to prepare two speeches for the final ceremony in the Guildhall. One was the ritual complimentary description of the shortlisted books before I announced the winner, and the other was a speech to the assembled guests after a comfort break, in which the chairman of the judges was asked to address a topic of his choice related to the prize (a custom which I think has since been discontinued). Furthermore I was committed to attending a weekend conference at the University of East Anglia totally dedicated to the Booker Prize in this year of its twentieth anniversary. One of the participants was Antonia Byatt, who had been a judge in the past and was to win the prize herself in the following year with Possession. In a panel discussion about the judging process she said, ‘One judge cannot ensure that a particular novelist wins, but they can stop someone from winning.’ True – and two judges are probably irresistible.

  Our final meeting on the 26th of October to decide the winner of the 1989 prize was something of an anticlimax after the passion and dissension of the shortlist meeting. We met in a hotel in the afternoon before the banquet, and the proceedings took little more than an hour. All of us chose The Remains of the Day as the winner except for one person who argued for Restoration but gracefully accepted the majority verdict. So in the end we had the consensus I had aimed at, for a book that I had always regarded as the likely winner and described in my notes as ‘a near perfect execution of an original and intriguing concept’. We then had tea and retired to change into our evening clothes before being driven to the Guildhall, where I met up with Mary. Because it was the twentieth anniversary of the Booker several previous winners had been invited, but not Salman Rushdie, who was still in hiding under police protection. Kazuo Ishiguro was a popular winner, and got a long round of applause when at the end of his acceptance speech he referred sympathetically to Rushdie’s ‘alarming plight’.

  For my own second speech of the evening I delivered some thoughts on the novel as both commodity and work of art, and the impact the prize had had on this duality:

  The Booker Prize is now situated on the dangerous, glamorous interface between the two sets of values. The judges do their best, debating the merits and comparing them according to the criteria of literary criticism. But media interest, and therefore public interest, is focused on its lottery-like nature, the known fact that the book which wins automatically becomes a bestseller. This has tended to generate a certain amount of hysteria around the event, and certainly produces considerable psychological strain for writers, publishers, agents and, not least, judges.

  Two years earlier Julian Barnes, who had been shortlisted for Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984, but would not be again until 1998, expressed the same sentiment more forcefully in the London Review of Books:

  The Booker, after 19 years, is beginning to drive people mad. It drives publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers (the unsuccessful shortlistees plus every other novelist in the country) mad with envy and disappointment.

  When I am asked what I think of the Booker Prize as an institution, I always reply that it has been good for the Novel, but bad on the whole for novelists. It has been good for the Novel because, together with other literary prizes that were later established on a similar model, it made literary fiction a subject of wider public interest than ever before, it got people buying and reading books they would probably not otherwise have heard of, and contributed to the proliferation of ‘Readers’ Groups’ which has been a generally benign social and cultural phenomenon. But there has been a downside to the Prize Culture which the Booker engendered. It has warped the evaluation of new fiction by measuring success as if it were a competitive sport. There is only one winner of the Booker Prize each year,4 and a few runners-up who derive some positive benefit from the outcome, but behind them a long tail of losers. Salman Rushdie told me that when one of his novels was not awarded the Whitbread Prize for that year’s best novel it was actually reported by the Guardian under the headline: ‘Rushdie Loses Whitbread’. Before the advent of Prize Culture the reputations of literary novelists were formed by a vague consensus among readers of such fiction, derived mainly from exchanging views within their peer group and reading and comparing reviews, whose writers were obliged to give specific reasons for their assessments. Now these reputations are made by s
mall committees who by convention express only the most general praise of the prize-winning books, and some committees include people who have no qualifications as literary critics whatsoever. Everything that gets into the public domain about the award of these prizes confirms that the results depend crucially on the personalities of the judges and the chemistry between them. Or, in other words, on luck. The majority of ordinary readers do not perceive the Booker and similar prizes in this way, and tend to attribute to their judgements a kind of authority which they do not and cannot possess.

  The competitive nature of Prize Culture has produced new kinds of stress for novelists by giving them an opportunity to fail which did not previously exist. Even novelists who have won the Booker Prize, or came near to doing so, may feel snubbed if their subsequent books are not shortlisted or longlisted. The publication of the longlist, which was adopted by the Booker in 2001, created a new kind of humiliation for such writers. For a book not to be chosen as one of the best six novels of a whole year’s crop is no disgrace, but not to make the cut of a dozen or more is less easy to shrug off. If you detect a personal note in that sentence you would not be mistaken: none of my novels was shortlisted or longlisted for the Booker after Small World and Nice Work. But I was very lucky to be shortlisted twice in this competition when its influence was at its peak.

  It was a pity that I allowed myself to become so obsessed with what I regarded as my failure as chairman of the Booker Prize committee because it prevented me from fully enjoying the success of the television serial of Nice Work, which began its weekly transmission two weeks before the banquet at the Guildhall. The reviews were excellent, and praised both the acting and the adaptation. Reviewers of TV drama, unlike film reviewers, rarely mention directors, and Chris Menaul was not given the credit he deserved, but his next commission was the first series of Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison, which raised the Police Procedural genre to a new level. Because Nice Work was shown on BBC2, and had no famous stars, it did not attract a huge audience, but it was greatly enjoyed by fans of the book who watched it, which is not always the case. It aroused some controversy on account of its sexual explicitness, which was as much verbal as visual. I received a call from somebody at the Daily Mail who had been shocked by this and said accusingly, ‘Do you realise this is the first time the word “clitoris” has been used on prime-time television?’ I didn’t know how he could be so sure, but if it was true I regarded it as a feather in my cap. One of the things in the TV adaptation that gave me particular satisfaction was the way it managed to capture the interplay in the novel between people belonging to two different social groups with distinctive vocabularies. Among the messages of congratulation I received, one I particularly valued was from Debbie Moggach, herself an experienced screenplay writer, saying, ‘The characters in it looked and sounded as if they actually did their jobs – rare on TV.’

  Another good thing that happened in this period, and did something to lift my spirits in the aftermath of the Booker, was finally getting an offer to produce my play – from the Birmingham Rep. Leah Schmidt had taken maternity leave to look after an adopted baby, and Charles Elton was handling the play in her absence. We had had a number of approaches during the summer from provincial and touring theatre companies, none of which came to anything for a variety of reasons, some of them bizarre. (One producer offered to do it if I would cut out all three readings, which are essential to the plot and arguably the play’s most original feature.) I decided to offer it to John Adams again because the script had been substantially revised, and I thought much improved, by the work I had done on it with Mike Ockrent. Early in September I rang John and briefly described the history of the play since he had read it, and he said he would like to see the latest script. After a few weeks’ delay, and one impatient enquiry from me, I received a call from John, who was in London. He had read the play on his way down, and loved it. He didn’t know what I had done to it, but it worked. The question was not whether the Rep would do it, but when; and he saw it as a main house play.

  After so much frustration and so many rejections I was delighted by this enthusiastic acceptance, and pleased when I heard that John intended to direct the play himself. It demonstrated his commitment to the piece, and his production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing in the main house of the Rep had shown me that he could make a play of talk and ideas work in that challenging space. But when he said in another telephone conversation that he planned to put the play on perhaps in the autumn of 1990, but more likely in the spring of 1991, I was dismayed at the prospect of having to wait for at least a year to see it on the stage. I told him that my adaptation of Nice Work for the BBC was soon to be shown and was likely to generate interest especially in the Birmingham area, so it would make sense to exploit that by bringing the play forward, and he quickly came back with a proposal to mount the production in May of 1990. He was not happy with the title, saying that ‘The Pressure Cooker’ might suggest it was a ‘kitchen sink’ play, and I sent him a note suggesting as an alternative ‘The Writing Game’, a phrase that occurs in the dialogue. Without further discussion it turned up in the contract that was sent to me for signing, and I decided it was a better title, and let it stand. Henceforth it was The Writing Game. A Comedy.

  18

  Gilles Barbedette had invited me to come to Paris for a few days in January 1990 for the publication of the Rivages edition of Nice Work, and I was looking forward to meeting him for the first time. But the meeting was unexpectedly brought forward when he told me he was coming to Birmingham shortly before Christmas to stay with a friend. Naturally I invited him to call on us while he was there, which he did one morning, and we talked over coffee in my study. He was thirty-four, with the same birthday as me, and the same slight build as mine, though his dark hair was more abundant and curly. He spoke English as fluently as he wrote in it. We chatted about Jeu de société, as the French edition of Nice Work was called, which he explained meant a board game such as Monopoly. I didn’t love the title, but Gilles thought it was perfect so I concealed my doubts. He said how much he was looking forward to the book’s publication, but there were signs of tension in his body language and a hint of anxiety in his eyes which I didn’t understand until he spoke about the friend he was staying with in Birmingham. It was a young man who was a lecturer at Birmingham University whom he had met recently in Paris at a conference of some kind, and fallen in love with. He looked at me intently as he said this, obviously wondering how I would take the information that he was gay. It had not occurred to me that he might be, but I reacted calmly and he became more relaxed. I did not ask him about the young man, though when he mentioned his academic subject area I thought I knew who it was. Our conversation reverted to literature and I discovered that he was a writer himself and had published memoirs, novels and essays under the prestigious Gallimard imprint.

  In January I went to Paris as planned and Gilles seemed more at ease there, confident and debonair, though he had a persistent dry cough which made me wonder why he walked about the cold streets without a topcoat, just a long scarf around his neck. He introduced me to his colleagues at Rivages, and to Curtis Brown’s French sub-agent Boris Hoffman who had sent Nice Work to him: a gentle, rumpled man of about Gilles’s age, stroking a large white cat on his knee in a one-room office heaped with books and manuscripts. I now had a copy of the finished Jeu de société which had a stylish if enigmatic cover design, a detail taken from a painting of an unoccupied office interior. Like nearly all French books it had lightweight flexible covers, a format I greatly prefer to British hardbacks, which are heavy to hold if they are long books, and stiff to open. Established French publishers still favoured matt covers without illustrations at that time, but Rivages, a small independent firm that punched above its weight, shrewdly differentiated their books by giving them laminated covers with colourful illustrations. Rivages arranged some press interviews for me but I have no memory of them. I was not known at all in Franc
e outside the academic world, but Gilles was confident that Jeu de société would be well received. The reviews, when they appeared, were indeed excellent, and he planned to bring out Changement de décor later that year, translated by Maurice Couturier and his wife Yvonne. At about the same time Mariella Gislon wrote to say that she and Rosetta had delivered their translation of Small World to Bompiani, and that Umberto Eco had offered to write an introduction to it for the Italian edition, something he had apparently never done before.

  The success of the televised Nice Work gave a further boost to sales of the novel in Penguin’s ‘tie-in edition’ with a still of Haydn Gwynne and Warren Clarke in hard hats on the cover. In fact this title was almost continuously in the long bestseller lists from the autumn of 1988 well into 1990, thanks to a succession of helpful events: the Booker shortlisting, the Sunday Express prize, and the television serial, which itself received two further awards in 1990. The first of these was a ‘Silver Nymph’ (a small statuette) for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Monte Carlo International Television Festival in February 1990. The BBC flew me out to the south of France to receive it, with a couple of other Brits. We transferred from Nice airport to Monte Carlo by helicopter, skimming the waves in a rather thrilling way, and were accommodated in a luxurious hotel near the Casino. The whole episode was a brief immersion in the kind of glamorous showbiz event that I had previously only observed on television.