Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  The sales of my books at home and abroad had by this time given me a healthy bank balance, and it occurred to me that I could afford to buy a small flat as a pied-à-terre in London, which would be a good investment as well as a great convenience, and a place to meet Dad in comfort. I began checking the Sunday Times property pages, and looked at a couple of flats in Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia without being impressed by what I could get for my money. Then one Sunday I saw a small advertisement in the paper for a new block of eight flats in WC2 which seemed promising, and I arranged to view a one-bedroom flat on my way home from a conference in Exeter later that week. The address was almost miraculously ideal, very near Leicester Square Tube station, a few minutes from Euston on the Northern line, and within easy walking distance of almost everywhere I would want to get to: theatres, cinemas, bookshops, libraries, galleries, my literary agency and the Groucho. The price for a 120-year lease was more than I had intended to pay, but as soon as I got inside the flat on the second floor where the estate agent was receiving potential buyers, I knew it was exactly what I wanted.

  It was very small, but the space had been cleverly used, a galley kitchen open to the living room creating an illusion, enhanced by high ceilings, of greater space than the actual dimensions. Double-glazed windows subdued the noise of the traffic from the busy thoroughfare below, and the fixtures and appliances in bathroom and kitchen were of high quality. The agent was a pleasant lady who obviously regarded me as a desirable leaseholder and promised to reserve the flat for me for 24 hours. I phoned Mary, telling her to come up to London next day with Christopher to see it. She had been sceptical of my plan all along but she agreed immediately that the place was perfect for my purposes and had some attractions for herself. So I committed to buying it there and then and handed over a substantial cheque as a deposit. It was a quick, effortless decision about which, uncharacteristically, I never had second thoughts.

  I got the keys to the flat in mid-June, and began accepting furniture and utensils which I had ordered, mainly from Heal’s and John Lewis. I brought very few items from Birmingham, apart from pictures. There was a special pleasure to be derived from furnishing a completely new living-space, pristine and empty like a painter’s blank canvas before he makes his first marks, where one could express one’s taste undistracted by the traces of previous occupants. For the living room I bought a folding table of lacquered black ash that could serve as a desk or for dining, two tubular chrome upright chairs with black leather seats, a tan leather Italian sofa concealing a fold-out bed, a matching armchair, a matt black ash coffee table and a low cabinet with drawers, bookshelves and in due course a slim Bang & Olufsen music centre on top. The floor was already fitted with a grey speckled carpet which I later replaced with strips of maple wood. A modification I made more quickly was to install air conditioning, since the windows could not be left open for long periods without letting in a great deal of dirt with the London air. The living room faced east and was flooded with sunlight in the morning, and I never passed into it from the tiny front hall without feeling blessed by my ownership. It was another kind of writer’s luck that had led me to that inconspicuous ad in the Sunday Times at a propitious moment. Although I rarely use the flat for sustained writing, for which I require all the resources of my study at home, I keep a laptop and printer there for email or when copy is needed at short notice, and use the space for uninterrupted thinking, reading and note-taking, and for professional business such as interviews with journalists, meetings with visiting foreign publishers, TV, radio and theatrical producers, and even on occasion auditions. It also gave a new source of pleasure and interest to Dad to come up by train from Brockley to Charing Cross and have lunch with me in comfort. He was amazed when he made his first visit. That I could afford to buy this light, airy and commodious flat in the heart of the West End, territory he knew so well from his days as a musician, finally convinced him that I was not only successful but well off, and made him feel a little more secure himself.

  19

  In the summer of 1991 I began work on a new project which had been proposed to me by Blake Morrison, at that time literary editor of the Independent on Sunday. Over the previous twelve months the poet James Fenton had contributed a weekly column to the paper called ‘Ars Poetica’, the title of a famous treatise by the Roman poet Horace. Each week he selected a short poem, or part of a longer poem, and wrote a few hundred words of commentary to bring out the meaning and felicity of the text and to throw light on some aspect of the art of poetry in general. Blake called me to say that Fenton was coming to the end of his stint, and to ask me if I would be interested in doing a similar column on the art of prose fiction. I said yes almost before he had finished his pitch, because I knew this was something I could do, and would enjoy doing, drawing on many years of teaching and writing about the techniques of the novel and the short story, as well as experience of writing prose fiction myself. I submitted a couple of trial contributions which Blake was happy with, and a contract was drawn up. ‘Ars Poetica’ had been tagged ‘James Fenton’s Masterclass’ in the newspaper and Blake wanted to apply the same description to my column, but I vetoed that, aware that it would be an inviting target for a hostile reviewer of my forthcoming novel.

  I began with a piece called ‘Beginning’, juxtaposing two opening paragraphs, one from Jane Austen’s Emma (‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence …’) which is classically lucid, measured and objective, its ironic implications concealed beneath the elegant style; and the other from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard …’), an irresistible ploy to get the reader’s attention which is soon infected by a characteristically modernist obscurity and ambiguity, conveying the narrator’s despair of ever discovering the truth about other people’s inner lives. I continued with weekly instalments on the Intrusive Author, Suspense, Teenage Skaz, The Epistolary Novel, Point of View, etc., each beginning with one or two short extracts from classic and modern fiction. I planned to end the series, which was entitled ‘The Art of Fiction’, a year later with a piece on Ending. These little essays went down very well with readers of the Independent on Sunday, and soon the Washington Post, the Melbourne Sunday Age and Milan’s Corriere della Sera contracted to publish selections from the series. I realised that when it was finished I would be able to turn it into a book, extending the tight word-limit of the original commentaries.

  This weekly task (though I always wrote two or three instalments ahead of the publishing schedule) was a good way to occupy myself while waiting for the publication of a new novel. I felt reasonably confident about the reception of Paradise News, which was to be published on 30th September. Dan Franklin, who was now head of Secker, described it as ‘the work of a novelist at the top of his form’. Mike Shaw wrote to me: ‘It really has done the spirit so much good to have such a joyful book and one which is so readable, well-constructed and beautifully written.’ My publicist Serena Davies thanked me for making two hours trapped on a broken-down train pass in a pleasurable trance. These were all readers predisposed to like the book, but I felt they expressed genuine enthusiasm. It was also reassuring that Penguin had promptly bought the paperback rights, and the foreign rights had been acquired by Viking and several European publishers. But in September I observed some less encouraging portents. Critics and literary editors were speculating in the press about likely candidates for the Booker shortlist and I noticed only one reference to Paradise News. Then a few weeks before the novel’s publication date two magazines, the Literary Review and the London Review of Books, published reviews which were, in different degrees, negative. These two magazines were published monthly and fortnightly, respectively, and used this as an excuse to ignore the customary request of publishers when sending out advance copies to the press, that reviews should not be printed before the date of publication. Weekly and daily journals also frequently ignored it, eager to publish thei
r verdict on a new book of interest before it was swamped by a deluge of rival commentary. I (and probably most other writers) do not object strongly to papers jumping the gun if the review is on the whole favourable. But to publish a dismissive review of a book before potential readers can get their hands on it, or compare the review with others, may prejudice them against it and affect the tenor of reviews still in preparation. I always deplored this practice.

  Graham Coster’s review in the LRB was long, conscientiously detailed, and negative by default. That is, there wasn’t a single statement in it that could have been quoted by my publishers to recommend the book, and it referred frequently to my previous novels and other novelists to measure its disappointment. David Sexton’s piece in the Literary Review (then edited by Auberon Waugh) was openly hostile, attacking not only Paradise News but my work as a whole. He had evidently read the new novel in a proof copy with a cover designed for the book trade, which quoted the sales figures for my previous novel. He began: ‘Waste not, want not. David Lodge is a dab hand at make do and mend. His previous novels have done nicely for him – Nice Work sold over 300,000 copies in paperback – so why change a winning formula? They don’t do it in Hollywood, do they? … This year’s model has exactly the same plot as its predecessors – a weedy academic from “Rummidge” goes to the New World and has his eyes opened and his wick dipped.’ It ended: ‘Lodge is aiming at an audience more attuned to Hi-de-Hi than Henry James. He is good at what he does and doesn’t skimp his task. Paradise News will be a great success, the holiday paperback of 1992, the TV series of the year after that. The product he is flogging though is formulaic.’ There was also an aside about ‘his appalling little classes on “The Art of Fiction” in The Independent on Sunday’.1

  Every novelist’s work has its own DNA, a tendency to favour certain narrative structures and rhetorical devices which reappear in different contexts and to different effect in their work. I am, for instance, drawn to binary oppositions in my fictions between different cultures, professions and mind-sets, and had acknowledged that in print. Paradise News contained such contrasts, but to allege that its plot was ‘exactly the same’ as those of its predecessors, and that these replicated each other, was absurd. Paradise News was in fact the only one of my novels since Changing Places in which the central character goes from Rummidge to America, and its story was new fictional territory for me, having an ex-priest as the central character, dealing with dark family secrets and with death. This was subject matter that required considerable departures in form from my recent novels – for instance, a long autobiographical narrative by Bernard, a method which I had not used since Ginger, You’re Barmy thirty years earlier. But when Paradise News was published other reviewers seemed to take their cue from Sexton. Both Anthony Quinn in the New Statesman and Tom Shone in The Spectator accused me of recycling themes and narrative devices from previous novels with an eye to television serialisation. Zoë Heller (not yet a published novelist herself) trashed the novel comprehensively in the Independent, with occasional ejaculations like ‘Intimations of Mortality in Paradise! Freaky Deaky!’ She concluded, echoing Sexton: ‘As always, Lodge works hard to make everything fit together … his mistake is to assume a pitifully lazy reader.’

  Heller described Bernard’s father as ‘bog-Irish’, though the text states that he was brought up in a suburb of Cork and emigrated to England with his family as a teenager, and she confused the names of Bernard’s aunt Ursula and Yolande more than once, misattributing dialogue and garbling the story in the process. I listed these and other inaccuracies in a letter, not for publication, to the literary editor of the Independent, saying that I did not assume a pitifully lazy reader, and certainly didn’t expect to meet one in the review pages of the Independent. I also questioned the jeering tone of the review. The editor replied, apologising for the mistakes and saying that Zoë Heller was ‘devastated’ to discover that she had perpetrated them. As regards tone, he said that when an author had had a run of successful books there was a journalistic tendency to re-examine the reputation robustly.

  That is certainly a familiar phenomenon. Since 1975 I had published four novels in succession which were received with critical approbation and increasing sales figures. There comes a point when the media get tired of praising a successful writer and seize an opportunity to bring him or her down a peg or two – or three or four, and the culture of British literary journalism is probably more aggressive in this mode than that of any other country. Where else would there be a literary prize for ‘Hatchet Job of the Year’?2 It is often younger critics, like those cited above, who lead the attack since they have nothing to lose and something – i.e. attention – to gain by it. But the comment which most disturbed me was made by a seasoned reviewer, Max Davidson, in the Daily Telegraph. ‘Paradise News is more than disappointing, it is shoddy: a hotch-potch of different themes and different styles thrown together so carelessly that the kindest interpretation is that Lodge’s publishers and/or accountants are breathing six-foot flames down his neck.’ I had spent two years researching and writing this book. It was Max Davidson’s prerogative to express his low opinion of it, but if he couldn’t discern that it must have required considerable compositional effort, then clearly one of us was in the wrong profession; and for about ten minutes after reading his review, I thought it might be me.

  As more reviews appeared it became clear that they were not unanimously damning, but split about 50/50 pro and con. There were some very good ones, and sales seemed unaffected by the bad ones, for the book figured somewhere in the top 10 bestsellers until December. There were enough quotes from the favourable reviews to put on the cover of the Penguin edition, which did almost as well when it was issued next summer as Sexton had sarcastically predicted. Nevertheless I had to ask myself if there was any truth in the negative reviews, especially the repeated accusation that I had contrived an artificially happy resolution of all the issues which afflict or divide the characters in the course of the story. I had seen my novel as generically akin to Shakespeare’s late plays, sometimes called tragicomedies, which invite the audience to take pleasure in the unexpected twists of the plot that bring about reconciliation and reunion of the alienated and separated characters; and the tropical island setting of the story allowed me to weave allusions to The Tempest into the text, the significance of which was picked up by the more sympathetic reviewers. But in one respect I think the criticism of the authorial manipulation of the plot was justified. Bernard’s sudden discovery that Ursula is much wealthier than she was aware of is I think made plausible, but the amount of money involved is unnecessarily large and the diversion of some of it to Bernard in Ursula’s will, in spite of his insistence that it should all be left to his sister Tess who has a severely handicapped child, was a mistake. It diminishes the essential goodness of his character, and I regret it. It was a case of the author becoming too attached to and protective of the character he invented.

  While I was coming to terms with the very mixed reception of this novel I was also physically in pain. Mary and I played ‘social tennis’ regularly at the Edgbaston Priory Club on Saturday afternoons, when you just turned up and played doubles sets with whoever was available without the bother of arranging games and booking courts in advance. We played all through the year unless it was raining. The age range ran from teenagers to senior citizens, and ability varied similarly, but we usually managed to balance the pairs. Mary and I were not outstanding players, but we held our own and enjoyed the exercise. For my age I was agile and quick off the mark, and I compensated for my technical deficiencies by chasing apparently winning shots and returning them. It was probably some extreme effort of this kind that caused an acute intermittent pain in the right knee joint, unpredictable in occurrence and strong enough to make me cry out. It became most distressing at the very time when the worst reviews of Paradise News appeared. My excellent physiotherapist Barry Maddox, who is an expert on sporting injuries, was for once unable to diagnose e
xactly what the problem was, but after X-rays had been obtained a consultant orthopaedic surgeon determined that it was ‘plica’, a type of tissue around bones which can get torn due to wear and tear in the knee joint, and then gets pinched by movement. He proposed to perform an arthroscopy – keyhole surgery to clean up the knee joint – and an operation was scheduled for 2nd January in the New Year. With the aid of elastic bandages around the knee, and a growing awareness of what kind of movements to avoid, I managed to hobble though the remaining weeks of 1991.

  After the operation my right leg swelled up into the shape of a Zeppelin and recovery took much longer than I had been led to expect. In March, halfway through this tedious process, I was stunned by the news that Gilles Barbedette had died. I knew he had been unwell, but had no idea that it was so serious. He died of AIDS, though this was not public knowledge until some time afterwards because he had made his family and closest friends promise not to divulge his condition, as one of the friends explained to me later in a letter. I recalled his persistent dry cough and his habit of going out in winter with no topcoat and just a scarf round his throat, and wondered in retrospect whether this had been a kind of denial that he was sick.