Writer's Luck

by David Lodge

  I had lost a friend and brilliant editor before I got to know him well, and I was hugely indebted to him for introducing my work to France – much, much more than I realised at that time. Though I recovered from the critical battering Paradise News received, and subsequently maintained a respectable position in the notional league table of British novelists, my later novels never made quite the same impact as they had in the previous decade. In France however my reputation grew astonishingly in the 1990s, and as I cannot be sure that I will write a third memoir I will conclude this one with a brief summary of the phenomenon.

  English paperback editions of new novels are usually published within a year of first publication, but the French equivalent, livres de poche, are (or were in those days) not normally published until three years after the first publication. Therefore anyone eager to read your latest novel had to buy it when it first came out, and the French were increasingly eager to buy mine. The third translation to appear, Un tout petit monde, sold 58,000 copies within a few years, and as Rivages issued other titles from my backlist between the new ones there was a snowball effect of accumulating sales and fans. The books were reviewed widely and favourably, and for each new one I would spend a week in Paris, accompanied by Mary, doing an intensive programme of interviews for various media, photographic sessions, bookshop signings and occasional events with a mainly English-speaking audience. For TV and radio interviews I was dependent on simultaneous translation through an earpiece, which the French media are used to providing for foreign visitors. I managed pretty well in spite of my impaired hearing, though I was always anxious about live broadcasts, which could not be edited. At the signings I relied on Mary to chat with the punters in her fluent French when necessary, while I plied my pen. She told me after one such event that a young woman had said to her, ‘You are so lucky to be married to David Lodge!’ and she replied, ‘I think he is lucky to be married to me.’ Which is true.

  These visits to promote my latest book in France were exhausting, but worthwhile. By the turn of the century sales of the Rivages first editions of my novels were several times greater than those of their English equivalents. In 1998 my second play, Home Truths, was premiered at the Birmingham Rep. I sent a copy of the Secker edition of the playtext to my new editor at Rivages, Françoise Pasquier, as a gift, and I was pleasantly surprised when she proposed to publish it. I suggested that instead I should try turning it into a novella, and she jumped at the idea. Secker were also receptive, and so it went ahead. The Secker edition was published in 1999, received mixed reviews, some as dismissive as the early ones of Paradise News, and struggled for several years to reach sales of 9,000. The Rivages edition, entitled Les quatre vérités, published a year later, sold over 90,000. In 2002 Pensées secrètes, the French translation of Thinks …, was number one in the bestseller list of L’Express immediately after publication, a position no book of mine ever reached in Britian, and it stayed there for three weeks.

  In effect I enjoyed a second, accelerating career as a novelist in France while the first one in my own country began inevitably to slow down. Few writers can have had such luck. There are other British novelists, such as Julian Barnes, William Boyd and Jonathan Coe, who have large French readerships, but they belong to a younger generation and their success in France developed in parallel with their British careers. My late success in France was as surprising to me as it was gratifying, given the resistance of French publishers to my work before Gilles acquired Nice Work for Rivages. Why French readers responded so differently and in such numbers when the books were made available to them is an interesting question, which I often pondered myself, and sometimes put to French friends.

  One common view was that French literary fiction was going through a very flat period – that it was introverted, humourless and lacking in narrative energy. What the French liked about my novels, and fiction by other British and American writers, was the combination of comedy and humour with serious themes and engaging plots. In a sense this contrast has always existed between French and English fiction. The former tends to make a clear generic distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘comic’ fiction, whereas it is hard to think of the work of any classic English novelist (apart from Samuel Richardson, who was hugely influential on French writing) which does not contain an element of comedy. But it is also true that whereas French writers like Sartre, Camus and Françoise Sagan were widely read in Britain in the 1940s and ’50s, in the 1980s and ’90s French novels rarely made much impression in Britain until the advent of Michel Houellebecq.

  Another factor in the popularity of my novels in France is probably that two principal sources of their narrative and thematic material are academic life and Roman Catholicism. A large proportion of readers of literary fiction in any country are university graduates, and the Anglo-American campus novel, with its tendency to a comic-satirical treatment of this milieu, has a peculiar attraction for Continental European readers because there is no equivalent in their own cultures. To write a campus novel you need to have experience as a teacher and scholar to draw on, and the combination would be unacceptable in the ethos of most European universities where the dignity of the professoriate is sacrosanct. The genre therefore has a kind of transgressive fascination for their staff and students. Teachers of English literature in French universities who read my literary criticism also enjoyed my novels and would sometimes teach them in their courses, and graduate students would write theses about them. This probably helped to disseminate my work in society at large.

  As in other western European countries the number of practising Catholics in France has dropped steeply in recent decades, though estimates vary considerably. It seems that about half the population still identify themselves as Catholic in polls (down from 80 per cent in the early 1990s) but only about 5 per cent of them are pratiquant as measured by weekly mass attendance. Private education in France is however predominantly Catholic, and has left its mark on many who left the Church in adulthood. France today is culturally more of a Christian country than the UK, and its Christianity is Catholic. A very much larger proportion of my French readers than British ones would therefore have a Catholic background, and be interested in fiction which treated Catholic experience without any didactic or devotional agenda, and with humour. I receive letters from French Catholic readers which confirm this.

  The success of my writings in France owes much to the skill and dedication of my translators, especially Maurice and Yvonne Couturier, Suzanne Mayoux and Martine Aubert in fiction, Marc Amfreville in criticism, and Armand Eloi in drama. I am profoundly grateful to all of them. The experience has given me great pleasure and satisfaction, marred only by regret that I am unable to converse with my readers and interviewers, when I meet them, in their own language; and that Gilles Barbedette, who started the whole phenomenon, did not live to fully enjoy the vindication of his professional judgement.

  Reviewing the balance of good luck and bad luck recorded in this memoir I have no doubt that the former outweighed the latter. This was largely a matter of fortuitous timing. I happened to hit my stride as a novelist when the going was good for literary fiction in Britain, energised by a new generation of novelists younger than me, and by an entrepreneurial spirit in publishing and the book trade which extended the audience for new writing and made freelance authorship a viable profession. This eventually overreached itself in the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1997, which most people in the literary world now regard as a grave mistake. It allowed books to be sold as cheaply as the seller wished, putting power into the hands of chain stores and supermarkets, who pressured publishers for discounts, diminishing the yield for writers, and devaluing the book as a cherishable artefact by offering two or three for the price of one, like punnets of strawberries when there is a glut. Within a short time the digital revolution in communications, and in particular the rise of Amazon, first as a distributor of discounted books and ebooks, and then as an instrument of self-publishing, further increase
d the cheap availability of new writing but reduced the profit derived from it by publishers and their authors. It is significant that France, having abolished retail price maintenance for books shortly after Britain, quickly restored it when the disastrous effect of abolition on traditional bookselling was perceived. This was to my advantage as my French readership grew.

  It was never easy to make a living as a full-time writer, but it is now extremely difficult in the UK, and even well-established authors have had to accept greatly reduced advances for their work. In consequence many British writers who began successful independent careers soon after graduating from university in the 1970s and ’80s have returned to academia to supplement their declining incomes by teaching Creative Writing in the many universities and colleges which now offer this popular subject, thus encouraging new aspirants to a more and more crowded profession. This is almost exactly the opposite career path of myself and other writers of my generation and the previous one (Kingsley Amis and John Wain, for example) who adopted university teaching as their primary source of income until they felt confident enough to go freelance. This reversal was the result of changing social and economic conditions over time. Looking back I feel no regrets about the pattern of my own career, and no doubt that for me 1935 was quite a good time to be born.

  In 1978 I interviewed Malcolm Bradbury about his novel The History Man in front of an audience of postgraduates and staff at Birmingham University, followed by their questions and comments. This is a still from a video recording of the event produced by the University’s TV and Film Unit, directed by Paul Morby, whose idea it was.

  Tom Rosenthal at the launch of a compendium of novels by George Orwell published jointly by Secker & Warburg and Octopus in 1976.

  Paul Morby, a good friend for many years, also took this photo of me with a display of the first Penguin edition of Changing Places in Hudson’s Bookshop, New St, Birmingham in 1978.

  Young relatives visiting our home amuse themselves with polystyrene cut-outs of Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, as caricatured on the cover of the Penguin Changing Places.

  In Connemara, in the summer of 1979, with the Mirror-Class dinghy on the roof of our Cortina Estate.

  Mum, sadly afflicted by Parkinson’s in the late 1970s, at the front door of 81 Millmark Grove with Dad, Mary and Christopher.

  When I visited the city of Lodz, Poland, in November 1981, as part of a British Council tour, temperatures were well below zero, and some kind person lent me this luxurious fur coat.

  Mary and I enjoyed a memorable holiday in the Peloponnese in the spring of 1982, added on to another British Council-sponsored excursion to Athens and Thessaloniki.

  My faithful Japanese translator and friend Susumu Takagi took me to the ancient city of Kamakura, near Tokyo, where I broke my journey round the world in 1982.

  I took this photo of Eileen in Waikiki, on the same journey in 1982.

  David and Goliath: I receive my consolation prize as a shortlisted candidate for the Booker Prize in 1984 from the towering figure of Sir Michael Caine.

  Mary in the grounds of the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, April 1984.

  We leave the Villa, happy after a very enjoyable stay, and relieved that I had not been identified as the author of Small World.

  From left to right, Robert Stone, me and Craig Raine, taking a break from the Wellington, New Zealand literary festival in 1986.

  The rear garden of our house in Edgbaston, with the new study extension visible to the left. Late 1980s.

  Malcolm and me in the garden of Frank Kermode’s house in Cambridge, probably early 1980s.

  Colin Maccabe, who tells me ‘I bought the jacket in Shanghai in May 1984 and wore it constantly in the eighties. It was my perk from the People’s Republic of China.’

  A lone reader of Dostoevsky on the Caribbean cruise, summer 1988.

  The nuclear family in 1989: Stephen, Chris, Julia, Mary and me.

  Dad on the patio of our Edgbaston house. He could use a sewing machine and sewed breast pockets on shirts that did not have them, to keep his glasses in.

  I make a suggestion to John Adams, director, during rehearsals for The Writing Game at the Birmingham Rep, spring 1990.

  Recording a conversation with Melvyn Bragg at home in Edgbaston for ‘The South Bank Show’, in 1991.

  On an unidentified beach, probably in summer 1991, wearing a T-shirt I bought from a store in Harvard Square earlier that year.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to the following persons and institutions for permission to quote from unpublished letters: Ben Bergonzi, extract from letter by Barbara Wall; Curtis Brown on behalf of the Estate of Malcolm Bradbury, extract from one letter; Catherine Michaels, extracts from letters by Leonard Michaels; The Random House Group Archive and The Random House Group Ltd., extracts from letters by Tom Rosenthal and John Blackwell. For information received on request I am indebted to Maurice Andrews, John Archer, Paul Slovak and Anthony Thwaite.

  The dedication to this book expresses deep gratitude to my literary agent, Jonny Geller, who has supported and encouraged me throughout the writing of this memoir and its predecessor, expressing his enjoyment as a reader while giving the occasional subtle hint of what parts might be usefully reconsidered. My editor Geoff Mulligan made many helpful suggestions for improving the text I finally delivered. An anonymous copyeditor, and a proof-reader, Alison Rae, contributed further refinements and saved me from making some embarrassing errors of fact. Liz Foley, Publishing Director of Harvill Secker, and her assistant Mikaela Pedlow worked hard to satisfy my somewhat pernickety concerns about the production of the book and to incorporate my numerous late inserts and deletions. My wife Mary was an invaluable source of facts and memories for this book, its first reader when it was completed, and frequently called upon to give her opinion of various passages about which I was uncertain. Usually I decided she was right.

  D. L., October 2017

  INDEX

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Achebe, Chinua, 295

  Adams, John, 266, 340–1, 345–9, 361–2

  Adcock, Fleur, 240

  Alison, Barley, 169

  Allen, Walter, 158, 159, 160

  Altizer, Nell, 317, 354

  Amfreville, Marc, 377

  Amis, Kingsley, 51, 192, 312–13, 378

  Amis, Martin, 57, 127, 174, 187, 192, 234, 283, 293, 331, 333, 335

  Andrews, Marie, 227

  Andrews, Maurice (‘Andy’), 227–30, 269, 270, 323, 326

  apRoberts, Bob, 314–15

  apRoberts, Ruth, 149, 313–15

  Archer, John, 100–1, 117

  Ariosto, 140

  Arnold, Edward, 18

  Arnold, Matthew, 9, 10

  Atwood, Margaret, 333, 336

  Aubert, Martine, 376

  Auden, W. H., 158, 160

  Aukin, David, 246, 264, 267

  Austen, Jane, 54, 367

  Badel, Sarah, 261

  Bagnall, Nicholas, 107

  Bainbridge, Beryl, 177, 200

  Bakhtin, Mikhail, 204, 251, 271, 295

  Bal, Mieke, 80, 81

  Ballard, J. G., 187–8, 190, 192–3

  Banfield, Anne, 82

  Banville, John, 295, 334, 335–6

  Barbedette, Gilles, 302–3, 342–3, 373, 377

  Barnes, Julian, 187–8, 293, 337, 375

  Barthes, Roland, 12, 13, 14, 20, 122, 178, 319

  Bartlett, John, 32

  Batchelor, John, 169

  Bates, Alan, 244

  Beardsley, Monroe, 319

  Bedford, Sybille, 335

  Bennett, Alan, 118

  Bennett, Arnold, 17

  Berger, John, 106

  Bergonzi, Bernard, 111

  Bergonzi, Bernardine, 111, 151

  Bergonzi, Gabriel, 111

  Ber
row, Jim, 157, 159, 160

  Best, Andrew, 17

  Bigsby, Chris, 25

  Bigsby, Pam, 25

  Bill, Stephen, 294

  Birt, John, 263

  Black, Hillel, 185

  Blackwell, John, 98, 107, 161, 168, 176, 177, 188, 282, 290, 301

  Blair, Isla, 118

  Blakemore, Colin, 254

  Blakemore, Michael, 201

  Bliss, Caroline, 244

  Bloom, Harold, 127–8

  Bloom, Michael, 356, 357, 358

  Boulton, Jim, 18

  Bourjac, Isabelle, 57

  Boyd, William, 375

  Bradbury, Elizabeth, 25, 255, 350

  Bradbury, Malcolm, 13, 20, 22, 24–5, 47, 58–62, 66–7, 101, 102, 103–5, 117–19, 161, 172, 173–6, 190, 194–5, 255, 257, 265, 288, 294, 301–2, 315, 350, 363

  Bragg, Melvyn, 362

  Branagh, Kenneth, 298

  Brewer, Derek, 33

  Brittain, Vera, 159