The British Museum is Falling Down

by David Lodge

  The ‘system’ depicted in The British Museum is Falling Down was specifically Catholic, but in writing the novel in the comic mode I was hoping to engage the interest and sympathy of non-Catholic and non-Christian readers as well, by presenting the ironies and absurdities of married life under the dispensation of the ‘Safe Method’ as one instance of the universal and perennial difficulty men and women experience in understanding, ordering and satisfying their sexuality. Barbara makes the point explicit in the course of her reverie in the last chapter:

  . . . there’s something about sex perhaps it’s original sin I don’t know but we’ll never get it neatly tied up you think you’ve got it under control in one place it pops up in another either it’s comic or tragic nobody’s immune you see some couple going off to the Continent in their new sports car and envy them like hell next thing you find out they’re dying to have a baby those who can’t have them want them those who have them don’t want them or not so many of them everyone has problems if you only knew . . .

  This example of interior monologue brings me to the second aspect of The British Museum is Falling Down on which it seems appropriate to comment in this introduction: the element of literary parody and pastiche. In looking for a character, or pair of characters, and a milieu, in which to explore the Catholic-sexual theme, I turned to an idea I had casually jotted down some time before, for a comic novel about a postgraduate student of English literature working in the British Museum Reading Room, whose life keeps taking on the stylistic and thematic colouring of the fictional texts he is studying. In this I was drawing not only on my own experience of writing a thesis (on the Catholic Novel from the Oxford Movement to the Present Day) in the British Museum, but also on more recent research into the way fictional worlds are constructed in language – work completed just before I left for the United States on the Harkness Fellowship, and published a few months after this novel as Language of Fiction (1966), my first book of academic criticism. That, then, was my basic concept of the novel: a young, married, impoverished Catholic research student, racked by anxiety about his wife’s putative fourth pregnancy, would be propelled through a series of picaresque adventures centering on the British Museum Reading Room, each episode echoing, through parody, pastiche and allusion, the work of an established modern novelist. The shifts of tone and narrative technique involved would be naturalised by making the hero prone to day-dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations, which would in turn be motivated by his chronic anxiety about his marital circumstances. The basic irony of Adam Appleby’s plight is that the only element in his life that seems authentically his, and not already ‘written’ by some novelist, is the very source of his anxiety. ‘It’s a special form of scholarly neurosis,’ says his friend Camel, as Adam recounts a Conradian experience in the Reading Room, ‘He’s no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.’ ‘Oh yes I am,’ Adam retorts. ‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.’

  No doubt the use of parody in this book was also, for me, a way of coping with what the American critic Harold Bloom has called ‘Anxiety of Influence’ – the sense every young writer must have of the daunting weight of the literary tradition he has inherited, the necessity and yet seeming impossibility of doing something in writing that has not been done before. There is a passage in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds that is à propos:

  The modern novel should be largely a work of reference: Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers, and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature. Conclusion of explanation.

  That is all my bum, said Brinsley.

  There are ten passages of parody or pastiche in the novel, mimicking (in alphabetical order, not the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo, author of Hadrian VII), C.P. Snow, and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and subgenres: the Chesterbelloc style of essay writing is caricatured in ‘Egbert Merrymarsh’, and there is a post-graduate sherry-party scene that was supposed to be a kind of distillation of the post-Amis campus novel (three aspirant novelists are present at the occasion, and taking notes on it) but which bears the impress especially of Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong (1959).

  Malcolm had come to the English Department at Birmingham in 1961, a year after me, and we quickly became friends and collaborators. In 1963 the two of us, and a talented Birmingham undergraduate called Jim Duckett (who, sadly, died in 1980) were, through Malcolm’s contact with the artistic director of the Birmingham Rep, commissioned to write a satirical review for that company. It was the era of Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was, and satire was in fashion. Our revue, entitled Between These Four Walls, ran for its scheduled month in the autumn of 1963, and enjoyed a modest success, though audiences were badly affected by the assassination of President Kennedy halfway through the run.1 Among the cast was a young actress called Julie Christie, who was working at the Rep for £15.00 per week to acquire theatrical experience, in spite of being a very bankable film star on the strength of her recent performance in Billy Liar. We writers made even less money out of the show than Julie Christie, but I did not begrudge the time and effort expended on it, for I found the experience of seeing one’s work performed, and of sitting in a theatre and observing every nuance of an audience’s reaction to one’s words, utterly fascinating. The work itself was comparatively trivial and ephemeral, but it was, necessarily, in the comic mode, and for me that, too, opened up new horizons.

  My first two books, The Picturegoers and Ginger, You’re Barmy, had had their moments of humour, but both were essentially serious works of scrupulous realism. Through the experience of working on Between These Four Walls, I discovered in myself a zest for satirical, farcical and parodic writing that I had not known I possessed; and this liberated me, I found, from the restrictive decorums of the well-made, realistic novel. The British Museum is Falling Down was the first of my novels that could be described as in any way experimental. Comedy, it seemed, offered a way of reconciling a contradiction, of which I had long been aware, between my critical admiration for the great modernist writers, and my creative practice, formed by the neorealist, antimodernist writing of the 1950s. My association with Malcolm Bradbury, and the example of his own work in comedy, was therefore a crucial factor in this development in my writing, and the dedication to The British Museum, as well as the sherry-party scene, acknowledges that debt. A few years later, Malcolm left Birmingham for the University of East Anglia, where he is now Professor of American Studies. We both regretted the separation, but it was probably a necessary one for the healthy development of our respective literary careers. We are often enough linked, not to say confused, in the public mind, as it is. (I was once rung up by a man who asked me to settle a bet by declaring whether I was the same person as Malcolm Bradbury.)

  To return to The British Museum is Falling Down: I was well aware that the extensive use of parody and pastiche was a risky device. There was, in particular, the danger of puzzling and alienating the reader who wouldn’t recognise the allusions. My aim was to make the narrative and its frequent shifts of style fully intelligible and satisfying to such a reader, while offering the more literary reader the extra entertainment of spotting the parodies. This in turn meant that the parodies had to be comparatively discreet, especially in the early part of the book. In the later chapters they become longer, more elaborate and more overt. For aesthetic reasons I wanted the last of these passages to be the most obvious, most appropriate and most ambitious parody of all. At the same time,
I was aware, as the book approached its conclusion, that Adam Appleby’s marital problems needed to be seen, however briefly, from another perspective, that of his wife, Barbara. But could such an abrupt and belated shift in ‘point of view’ be contrived without an effect of clumsy improvisation? To solve this problem, and the problem of finding a climactic parody, in a single stroke, was one of those moments of happy inspiration that make the labour of composing literary fictions worthwhile. In what famous modern novel did the character of a wife, up to the penultimate chapter an object in her husband’s thoughts and perceptions, become in the last chapter the subjective consciousness of the narrative, and give her own wry, down-to-earth, feminine perspective on him and their relationship? Where but in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel which (I belatedly realised) had, in limiting the duration of its action to a single day, and in varying the style of the narrative from episode to episode, provided me with the basic model for The British Museum is Falling Down. Molly Bloom’s famous, unpunctuated interior monologue lent itself to my purposes with uncanny appropriateness: my novel could end, like Joyce’s, with the hero returned to his home, reunited with his spouse, asleep in the marital bed, while the more wakeful wife drowsily pondered the foibles of men, the paradoxes of sexuality, and the history of their courtship and marriage. For Molly’s keyword, ‘yes’, I would substitute a more tentative word, as more appropriate to Barbara’s character and the mingled notes of optimism and resignation on which I wanted to end the novel. I had always intended that Barbara’s immediate anxiety should be relieved in the last chapter. When I recalled that Molly’s period also started in the last episode of Ulysses I knew, if I had not known it before, that there is such a thing as writer’s luck.

  When the novel was in production with MacGibbon & Kee (the publishers of my two previous novels, later to be swallowed up by Granada) I discussed with my editor, Timothy O’Keeffe, the advisability of drawing attention to the parodies in the blurb on the dust jacket. He was against doing so, and I accepted his advice. I later came to think that the reader is entitled to a hint about what to look for in the book. Very few reviewers recognised the full extent of the parodies, and a surprising number made no reference to them at all. Some complained that it was a somewhat derivative novel without perceiving that this effect might be deliberate and systematic. When an American edition was published later, the blurb carefully drew attention to the parodies, and they were duly noticed and generally approved.

  My working title for the novel from an early stage of composition had been The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm, a line from a song by George and Ira Gershwin that I particularly liked in Ella Fitzgerald’s lilting rendition, and often intoned to myself during my two years’ stint in Bloomsbury:

  A foggy day in London Town,

  Had me low, had me down,

  I viewed the morning with alarm,

  The British Museum had lost its charm.

  The proofs of the novel had been sent to me in San Francisco, corrected and returned to London, and the book was about to go into the final stages of production, when it occurred to Tim O’Keeffe to ask me if I had obtained permission to use the words of the Gershwin song in my title. I had not.

  I wrote immediately to the Gershwin Publishing Corporation in New York, requesting permission. It was refused. I pleaded with them to change their minds. They were adamant. I was deeply disappointed, because the title, and the song from which it came, had been so intimately connected with the genesis and composition of the novel. It was the Gershwins’ song, rather than Ulysses, which had consciously suggested to me the idea of limiting the action to a single day, and contributed the fog which is such an important part of the atmosphere of the story and the machinery of the plot. But time was short, and Tim O’Keeffe was pressing me for a new title. I suggested Wombsday, but MacGibbon & Kee were not happy with it. Tim wrote to say that if we could not agree on a new title immediately, publication would have to be postponed till the following year. Desperately I airmailed a list of about a dozen titles. Among them, I recall, were two quotations from Paradise Lost: So Spake Domestic Adam and Adam From the Cold Sudden Damp Recovering. Tim O’Keeffe cabled back his choice: The British Museum is Falling Down. Not a bad title, by any means, particularly when one recalls that the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ is supposed to have originated in a double entendre about male potency; but very much second best as far as I was (and am) concerned.

  This was not the only setback I experienced in connection with the publication of this novel. Indeed, The British Museum is Falling Down was very nearly consigned to oblivion as a result of an unexplained mishap that a more superstitious Catholic author might have attributed to divine displeasure.

  As the reader may know, new novels are normally reviewed in the national press in Britain immediately on publication, or not long after, and there are always more novels published than can be reviewed in any one journal. Hence something like a Darwinian struggle for recognition goes on between competing titles, especially at the peak publishing seasons. A novel which has not been reviewed within two or three weeks of publication has little prospect of getting much attention later, and is likely to sink without trace. The reader may readily guess, therefore, at my state of mind when, ten days after the publication of The British Museum is Falling Down in October 1965, I had not been able to find a single review of the book. Puzzled as well as despondent, I rang Tim O’Keeffe, who was himself at a loss to explain the absence of reviews except as the consequence of a great many important novels having been published at the same time. He spoke vaguely of reissuing review copies in a few months’ time if nothing had happened by then.

  Publishers are naturally hesitant to make direct representations to literary editors about the reviewing or non-reviewing of their books, since this would look like an attempt to manipulate the formation of literary opinion. Authors, for the same reason, are usually shy of seeming to interfere in the arrangements for reviewing their books, even if they have contacts with literary editors. But when another week passed with not a single mention of my novel in the book pages of the dailies and weeklies, my patience and sense of professional decorum snapped, and I decided to ring up the offices of a few literary editors whom I knew, to enquire about the fate of my book. I started with the local daily newspaper. The girl who answered said there was no record of their ever having received the book. I phoned a national newspaper and weekly review and got the same reply. Swelling with mingled emotions of hope and rage, I relayed this information to Tim O’Keeffe, who immediately made some enquiries of his own and phoned back to confirm that not a single review copy had reached its destination. For over two nail-biting weeks I had been waiting for reviews of a book that, as far as the press was concerned, had never been published.

  The mystery of the disappearing review copies was never solved. If the incident had occurred at a later stage of my literary career I think I should have made more fuss; but at the time my dominant emotion was one of relief that I had not, after all, been written off by the reviewing establishment. A fresh batch of review copies was sent out to the press with a covering letter of explanation, and in due course reviews appeared, only a little more scattered than would normally have been the case, and generally expressing qualified approval. The novel’s most devoted admirers have been, not surprisingly, Catholics, or academics, or both. I have noted in How Far Can You Go? that ‘most Catholic readers seemed to find it (The British Museum) funny, especially priests, who were perhaps pleased to learn that the sex life they had renounced for a higher good wasn’t so very marvellous after all . . . agnostics and atheists among my acquaintance, however, found the novel rather sad. All that self-denial and sacrifice of libido depressed them. I think it would depress me, too, now, if I didn’t know that my principal characters would have made a sensible decision long ago to avail themselves of contraceptives.’

  I will always have a special fondness for this novel, however, because of its affe
ctionately ironic evocation and celebration of that unique and wonderful place, the Reading Room of the British Museum. I am told, by those who have made the experiment, that if you apply to read The British Museum is Falling Down in the very building itself, you are required to do so in the North Library, that inner sanctum which (as a passage in the novel explains) is reserved for the perusal of books deemed to be either especially valuable or pornographic. I have not ventured to enquire which of these criteria has been applied to my novel.

  DAVID LODGE

  November 1980

  * * *

  1 Like many people, but with better reason than most, I can remember exactly what I was doing when the news broke. I was sitting in the stalls of the old Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Station Street, watching a performance of Between These Four Walls. In one of our sketches in the first half, a candidate for a job demonstrated his insouciance by turning up for an interview with a transistor radio playing pop music held up to his ear. The actor playing the role used to carry a real radio tuned to an actual broadcast. On the night in question it was suddenly interrupted by a newsflash: ‘President Kennedy has been assassinated.’ The actor quickly snapped the receiver off, but some members of the audience had caught the words and tittered uneasily, taking it as a joke in poor taste. In the interval everybody discovered the awful truth, and the second half of the show fell very flat.