Out of the Shelter

by David Lodge

  Out of the Shelter is probably the most autobiographical of my novels, inasmuch as Timothy Young’s early life, and the circumstances in which he comes to visit Heidelberg, correspond closely to my own. For Part I, I drew on my memories of the London Blitz of 1940: of being “evacuated” with my mother to the country for much of the war (though my father, unlike Timothy’s in this and many other respects, was not a London air-raid warden but a musician in the Air Force); of growing up in the post-war austerity years in the unlovely environment of South-East London, on the borders of New Cross and Brockley, going to a grant-aided Catholic grammar school, and slightly surprising myself by my own academic success, which would eventually propel me into the professional middle class. For my aunt, I substituted the character of Timothy’s sister Kate (I am an only child myself), physically and emotionally very different from Eileen. The adult relationships and intrigues in which Timothy becomes involved in Parts II and III are invented, but the context in which they unfold is based on personal experience and observation. I did, for instance, actually live clandestinely in a women’s hostel on my first visit to Heidelberg, though not with the interesting consequences this entails for Timothy. Gloria Rose, I am sorry to say, though I badly needed someone like her in 1951, is a figure of imagination, and the birthday party on the Neckar that proves so memorable for Timothy was suggested by a poster advertising a boat trip that I did not take.

  Out of the Shelter is, then, autobiographical in origins, but not confessional in intent. Generically, it is a combination of the Bildungsroman (the useful German term for a novel about the passage from childhood to maturity and the recognition of one’s vocation) and the Jamesian “international” novel of conflicting ethical and cultural codes. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Henry James’s The Ambassadors are its most obvious literary models. (Some of the stories of Joyce’s Dubliners, and James’s What Maisie Knew also influenced the handling of the naive central consciousness.) What encouraged me to base a novel on my first visit to Heidelberg, and the domestic milieu against which it was fore-grounded, was a feeling that my experience had a representative significance that transcended its importance for me personally. Perhaps I felt this all the more keenly because I was writing the novel in the late 1960s, when the generation gap between those who remembered World War II and those who did not was provocatively encapsulated in the slogan, Never trust anyone over thirty.

  The war and its aftermath shaped my generation in a number of ways. Its epic scale and scope, seen from a childish perspective, impressed on us a simple patriotic ethic and mythology that were not to be easily or lightly discarded. (How the old emotions welled up again in the Falklands War!) Its anxieties and privations made us temperamentally cautious, unassertive, grateful for small mercies and modest in our ambitions. We did not think that happiness, pleasure, abundance, constituted the natural order of things; they were to be earned by hard work (such as passing examinations) and even then it cost us some pains to enjoy them. It seemed to me that by virtue of my encounter with the American expatriate community in Germany in 1951 I had been granted a privileged foretaste of the hedonistic, materialistic good life that the British, and most of the other developed or developing nations of the world, would soon aspire to, and in some measure enjoy: a life of possessions, machines and diversions, of personal transportation, labour-saving devices, smart cheap clothing, mass tourism, technologically-based leisure and entertainment – making available to a large section of society pleasures formerly restricted to a tiny minority. Is this a new freedom for man, or a new enslavement? I do not presume to give an answer, but the question is raised obliquely in Timothy Young’s story.

  The question has special point in relation to Britain in 1951, a year that, with historical hindsight, appears as one of crucial transition, the hinge on which our society swung from “austerity” to “affluence”. When I made my journey to Heidelberg in the summer of 1951, the Labour Government, its landslide majority of 1945 reduced to six seats in the General Election of 1950, was on its last legs. The Party had been split by the resignation from the Cabinet of Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson over the introduction of charges under the National Health Service, and its leadership weakened by the illnesses of Cripps, Bevin and Attlee. Other difficulties and embarrassments included the domestic fuel shortages, the confiscation of the oil plant at Abadan by the Persian Government, and the disappearance of the diplomats Burgess and Maclean, soon to turn up in Moscow. But the root cause of most of the Government’s problems, as I discovered when I did a little background reading for my novel, was an economic crisis which it was unable to control, partly because of its political dependence on the United States.

  The big swing against Labour in the General Election of 1950 was a clear sign that the electorate was fed up with self-denial and impatient for some of the cake they had been promised for so long. And at last the Government was in a position to hand out a little cake. Cripps’ budget of April 1950 was based on a cautious economic forecast of a three per cent rise in industrial production, and estimated that an extra £200 million would be available for private spending. Three months later, this painfully earned bonus was dashed from his hands by the outbreak of the Korean War. Though the immediate conflict was in Asia, there was widespread fear that the Russians would escalate the Cold War in Europe into a hot one. The United States promised strengthened defences, but only on condition that European allies matched American aid with self-help. Thus, at the very moment when Britain was at last beginning to get its peacetime economy working smoothly, and easing the brakes on private consumption, it was forced by political circumstances to undertake a crippling burden of rearmament. On 4 August, 1950, the British Government undertook to increase its defence expenditure by £1000 million over the next three years. Since many other nations, including the United States, were doing the same thing, the result was a world-wide shortage of raw materials, which slowed Britain’s industrial recovery, and caused balance-of-payments difficulties, falling dollar and gold reserves, and inflation. Gaitskell confronted these problems in his 1951 Budget by raising taxation, curbing private spending, and holding back expenditure on State welfare. It was probably the only realistic policy – the majority of voters were no more willing than they are now to embrace the unilateralist alternative – but it split the Party, and associated Labour more firmly than ever with “austerity”.

  It was no surprise when the Tories won the election of October 1951, though for their first two years of office they were no more successful than Labour in managing the economy. Then the crisis disappeared, as suddenly as it had arisen, with the ending of the Korean War and the swing of world markets against the producers of raw materials and in favour of industrialized countries like Britain. The Conservatives reaped the political harvest, epitomized in Harold Macmillan’s 1959 campaign slogan, “You’ve Never Had It So Good” (a significantly American locution, which fell oddly from the lips of that quintessentially British politician) and the Labour Party languished in opposition for the next thirteen years. In this perspective, the qualified success of the Festival of Britain in 1951, which the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison (who had lent his name to the famous indoor shelter) described as “the people giving themselves a pat on the back”, seems more like the people giving a final push, friendly yet firm, to the departing Government.

  In 1951 most of these political and economic events were, of course, either hidden in the future, or simply not apprehended by a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, but they form part of the subtext of Out of the Shelter.

  Out of the Shelter (1970) was the fourth of my novels to be published, coming between The British Museum is Falling Down and Changing Places, but it was conceived before the earlier of those books, and in tone and technique has much more in common with my first two works of fiction, The Picturegoers and Ginger, You’re Barmy. That is to say, it is a “serious” realistic novel in which comedy is an incidental rather than a structural element,
and metafictional games and stylistic experiment are not allowed to disturb the illusion of life. The production and publication of this book had, however, their moments of black comedy, though I did not see them as funny at the time. The story may be of interest to those who are interested in such things, and will allow me to explain why and in what respects I have revised the text for this new edition.

  I wrote most of the novel in 1967–8, and delivered the typescript to my agent in December 1968, just before leaving Britain for a six-month stint as visiting associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It was under option to MacGibbon & Kee, who had published my first three novels with modest success. After a longish interval I heard that they had rejected Out of the Shelter, for reasons that were never spelled out, but had something to do, I believe, with the imminent departure from the firm of my editor, Timothy O’Keeffe, and the disappearance, not very long afterwards, of MacGibbon & Kee as a separate imprint, absorbed into the Granada empire. The novel was then submitted to Macmillan, who after another long delay offered to publish it on condition that I cut it by a third. I accepted that the novel was too long, but this seemed excessively drastic surgery, even to a demoralized novelist anxious to find a publisher. We agreed on a twenty-five per cent reduction. The publishers suggested that it should be made at the expense of local colour, historical contextualization and the discussion of ideas, throwing more attention on to the character and fortunes of the young hero, though they did not make any specific recommendations. In the event, I followed their advice, cutting a good deal from the first section about Timothy’s childhood, and several scenes in Parts II and III which were more discursive or descriptive than dramatic in content. Also excised was a longish appendix in the form of an essay, purportedly written by the character Don Kowalski some thirteen years after the main action, about the social, political and economic life of Britain in 1951.

  I completed this work in August 1969, after my return to England. The man at Macmillan chiefly responsible for accepting the novel had now left the firm, and my new editor had not read the original MS. He pronounced himself pleased with the cut version, but thought it could still be improved by some fine combing-out of redundant lines and phrases. When this was done, it was still a longish novel, and presented costing problems to the publishers. My editor wrote to suggest that it should be set by computer, “a new method which we have begun to use for several of our novels with considerable success”. He assured me that it would be significantly quicker and cheaper than conventional printing. The drawback was that I would not be able to see proofs because, allegedly, they would be unintelligible to anyone who was not a computer expert. Such an expert would check the computer-coded tape on to which the text had been typed against my copy-edited MS. “He will, of course, take the utmost care: his reputation depends upon it.” Eager to please, and to co-operate, I suppressed my misgivings and agreed.

  By the end of December I had given the copy-edited MS. a final check and returned it to the publishers. At the beginning of January 1970 I had the first intimation of trouble to come. It seemed that the computer could cope with only a small amount of italic, and that titles of books, etc., would therefore have to be printed in roman inside quotation marks. This rather shook one’s faith in the new post-Gutenberg technology.

  Publication was scheduled for early June. In April the date was postponed till August; in May it was postponed again till 10 September; in August it was postponed again till 24 September. By this time, I had seen an advance copy of the book, and was appalled. The text was riddled with misprints, nearly all introduced by the printer, and many of them grotesquely obvious (like u for you). A pun had been removed, and a joke thus transformed into a meaningless banality, by the correction of a deliberate misspelling, in spite of the fact that I had written in the margin of my MS: Joke! Do not correct spelling. The lines of type were bumpy, the spaces between the words grossly uneven, and there were strange gaps within words, notably between the o and th of my central character’s name, Timothy, which appeared two or three hundred times. Those lonely words at the beginnings of lines that printers call widows abounded, as did awkward word-breaks at line endings. In short, it was the most hideous piece of printing that I had ever set eyes on, and there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it.

  My editor was suitably apologetic and sympathetic, but the sheets of the first printing were already being bound. I discovered many years later, through a chance meeting at a dinner party with someone who worked for Macmillan at the time, that this monstrosity was actually a second attempt: the first printout of my novel was so garbled that they had to discard the tape and start all over again. My editor concealed from me this fact (which explains the repeated postponement of publication), no doubt in fear of authorial rage. He need not have worried. Reviewing the correspondence in which this sorry story is recorded, I am dismayed by my own pusillanimity, the mildness of my complaints, my servile eagerness to please, the readiness with which I waived the right to see proofs. Nowadays I take nothing on trust, involve myself in every stage of a book’s production, and insist on seeing, not only proofs, but the corrected proofs as well. (I am fortunate in having co-operative publishers and an editor as obsessively perfectionist as myself.)

  Out of the Shelter was finally published on 1 October 1970, at the height of the season, in a week when, it seemed, every important English novelist had a new book out. It received relatively few reviews – fewer by far than my previous novels – and those that appeared, though generally favourable, were shortish and restrained in their praise. There was a long and appreciative notice in the T.L.S., whose contributors were then still anonymous, which I later discovered was writtten by Bernard Bergonzi. He was well qualified to review the novel, having come from a Catholic lower-middle-class London background very similar to my own (in fact we grew up within a couple of miles of each other, though we did not meet until we were both university teachers). His review gave me great pleasure, as did one by James Davie in the Glasgow Herald, but they made little difference to sales of the novel, which were disappointing. Macmillan sold a little over two thousand copies and, a year or so after publication, pulped the remaining unbound sheets. The novel was never paperbacked, or published in America, or translated into another language. It was the least successful of my novels, and is certainly the least well known, though a few of my friends like it more than any of the others.

  How far, and in what proportions, this relative neglect of Out of the Shelter was due to bad timing, poor production, or the literary quality of the text itself, would be hard to gauge and is, in any case, probably not for me to say. But I have always felt that this novel might appeal to a bigger audience than it managed to find on its first publication, and it therefore gives me particular pleasure to see it in print again. Since, for reasons already given, the text had to be re-set (rather than photographically reproduced from the first edition) I have taken the opportunity to revise it. I should not have taken advantage of the same opportunity had it arisen (it did not) in other reissues of my novels. As a general rule I would say that the point of reissues is to make available to interested readers the full range of a writer’s work in its historical continuity, the imperfections and immaturities of early works being part of their identity and often of their charm. But I make an exception of Out of the Shelter. Of all my other novels I think I can honestly say that they were as good as I could make them at the time of their publication: but this one was written, and then drastically cut, at a time of considerable personal stress, when my critical judgment was not, I believe, altogether reliable. The original text was certainly far too long, but it now seems to me that the cuts I made were not invariably well-advised, and that some opportunities for further cuts and adjustments were missed.

  Accordingly, in revising Out of the Shelter for this new edition, I have restored a small proportion of the deleted passages, made a number of new cuts, and, in the process of retyping the entire text, m
ade many small stylistic alterations. I have, however, resisted temptations to change the story, and the narrative method remains as it was: everything is presented from Timothy’s point of view, but narrated by a “covert” authorial voice that articulates his adolescent sensibility with a slightly more eloquent and mature style than Timothy himself would have commanded.

  In short, I have not attempted to rewrite the novel, as if I were tackling its subject for the first time in 1984, but have endeavoured to discover the most effective version of the novel I wrote in 1967–8.

  DAVID LODGE

  August 1984

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  Copyright © David Lodge, 1970, 1985

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