by David Lodge
Dear David,
Thank you for this. When will there be proofs of Author, Author, or is that a question which is far too early to answer?
Best, Peter
I replied:
Dear Peter,
Yep, too early. I delivered it only three or four weeks ago. Publication is scheduled for next September, so you can probably work it out . . .
Something about his insistent curiosity must have made me suspicious, because I added: ‘Any special reason for your eagerness to read it?’ before signing off. As soon as I clicked on the Send button, I knew the answer to my own question. I had been in an extremely agitated state over the past two days, and had failed to make some obvious connections, but now the penny dropped. The publisher of Tóibín’s forthcoming novel, and of most of his previous books, was Picador. Peter Straus must have been still in charge there when Tóibín was writing The Master, possibly under contract, and it was quite likely that he was now Tóibín’s agent. I quickly confirmed this last guess with an email to Geoff Mulligan. Soon afterwards Peter Straus answered my question:
Well I would love to read it and also I am enquiring on behalf of my friend, the collector of your work who is trying to get everything you wrote!
I didn’t reply, and he didn’t communicate with me again. He had got the information he wanted, though he didn’t know that I knew why he wanted it. (As I was saying, Henry James might have made all this up.) I was annoyed with myself for giving away the publication date of Author, Author so readily, but I didn’t really resent Peter Straus’s devious efforts to discover it. In fact – and this is the reason for telling the story in such detail – he had unknowingly done me a huge favour. If he had told me at the Martin Amis party about Colm Tóibín’s novel, I would have been morally bound to apprise Random House, Penguin and Viking USA of its existence while negotiations for my novel were still in progress, and it is unlikely that they would have reacted to my book with such unqualified enthusiasm or made such generous offers. Common business sense would have made them more cautious, and my disappointment and despondency would have been much more acute. Timing was all.
III
Usually the interval between the satisfactory completion of a book and the run-up to publication is one of the happiest and most serene times in a writer’s life – certainly in mine. One has a virtuous sense of having earned a spell of rest and recreation. There is time to catch up on all the reading you put aside so as not to be distracted from your own task. The anxieties of composition are over and anxieties about the book’s reception have not yet begun. One dreams of success, of course – all writers do; but it is precisely that, a free flow of agreeable anticipation unimpeded by the intervention of coarse fact. In the case of Author, Author, however, the shadow cast by Colm Tóibín’s novel robbed the interlude between completion and publication of all its usual pleasure – indeed made it into an ordeal, which stretched ahead of me for a whole year. It would be five or six months before I could discover how closely The Master resembled my novel, and another six before I could know how the reception of Author, Author would be affected by it.
I took full advantage of the leisurely production schedule to fine-tune my text. I solicited notes from my three editors, Geoff Mulligan, Tony Lacey and Paul Slovak, and revised the novel in the light of them. I read it aloud to myself to test the cadence of every sentence, seeking to eliminate inelegant repetitions of words and what Henry James called ‘abominable assonance’.12 I had detailed consultations with my publishers about the design of the book and its jacket. But there was a limit to how much tinkering and polishing one could usefully do. At the end of November I sent in my final version of the novel for copy-editing. There would be more queries to deal with after that, and proofs to be corrected in due course, but how would I fill up the rest of the time that yawned ahead? I wasn’t ready to start another novel. I had two vague ideas, but one was another historical subject which would require a lot of research merely to discover if it were viable – an effort which I did not feel like making in the circumstances – and the other needed some more ingredients which I would have to wait for inspiration to provide. So instead I worked on various non-fiction commissions – critical essays, introductions to classics, reviews – some of which are included in this book. I was happy enough when absorbed in these projects, but naturally they could not occupy all my waking hours, including some when I should have been asleep. I doubt if a day passed in that twelve-month period when I did not devote some time to cogitation and speculation about the fate of my novel.
When I confided my anxieties to friends I was struck by how clearly they fell into one of two categories: either they immediately grasped the reason for my concern, and empathised with it, or else they thought I was worrying unnecessarily (because Colm Tóibín and I were such different writers, and he was bound to have a quite different take on Henry James, because my readership was different from his, and so on). Ian McEwan, for instance, did his generous best, over a sandwich lunch and in a follow-up email, to persuade me that I had no reason to worry. I asked him if he would not have been worried if some reputable novelist had published a novel about the retreat to Dunkirk a few months before he was due to publish Atonement, and he said, ‘No.’ Well, perhaps if you are Ian McEwan you can shrug off any competition, but I didn’t feel such confidence. As a literary form, the novel is well named: it offers, or pretends, to tell a story the reader has not heard before. It seemed to me obvious that if two novels on substantially the same subject and of comparable intrinsic merit were published in the same year, the one that appeared first would cream off much of the interest, curiosity and surprise that such a book might excite in critics and ordinary readers.
I wondered whether reading The Master would settle my mind, and resolved to do so as soon as it became available. But after that happened (proof copies began to circulate early in 2004, and it was published in mid-March, a month earlier than previously announced) I found reasons more than once to postpone reading it. First I decided that I would not read it until I had done all the pre-publication media interviews for Author, Author; then not until my programme of readings and signings after publication was completed. I did not want to get drawn into making comparisons between the two novels. On the contrary, I wanted to distance my book from Tóibín’s as far as possible, and nothing I might say about the latter could appear unbiased. By not reading The Master I could avoid all questions about it with a simple and irrefutable excuse.
There was a deeper reason for this decision. Although I averted my eyes from reviews of The Master when it was published (all the more scrupulously because I received the proofs of Author, Author at exactly the same time) I gathered indirectly that it was being very well received, and I discovered that it was not after all a short novel, but a very substantial one. Reading it in this context could not be anything but a painful experience, and utterly unlike what reading a novel should be – a willing suspension of one’s own concerns in order to attend to the product of another’s imagination for the sake of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure. I would read The Master resisting pleasure and resenting, with a jealous proprietary interest, every overlap with my own book. So I decided I would not read it until the publication of Author, Author was well and truly over. But that turned out to be a moveable feast. British publication in September 2004 was followed by the American in October; the American by the French in January 2005, each entailing another round of public interrogation. The ideal conditions for reading The Master seemed to recede indefinitely. But I anticipate.
The first mention in the media of the coincidential similarity between these two novels (the first one I saw, anyway) was a paragraph in John Dugdale’s ‘Diary’ column in the book pages of the Sunday Times, for 28 March:
At some point in recent weeks, it’s fair to surmise, David Lodge read an email, profile or review containing the words ‘Colm Tóibín’ and spluttered. For Lodge’s just-announced autumn offering from Secker cen
tres on Henry James, and specifically in the 1890s ‘anxiously awaiting the first night of his make-or-break play Guy Domville’; and that’s precisely the subject of Tóibín’s The Master. With novels by Elsie Burch Donald (recent) and Alan Hollinghurst (imminent) also featuring James, it’s all getting rather spooky, possums.
Apart from the allusion to Dame Edna Everage, this was the kind of comment, tinged with Schadenfreude, that I had steeled myself to expect, and would encounter again in the coming months. The existence of Elsie Burch Donald’s novel was news to me, and I never saw it referred to again in this connectionfn9 But I had known for some weeks that Alan Hollinghurst’s forthcoming novel contained a Jamesian element. My first reaction to that information had been incredulous hilarity. I even took some transient comfort from the thought that the more such coincidences there were, the merrier, and the less the clash between my novel and Tóibín’s would signify; but I soon changed my mind. When I bumped into Dan Franklin and heard that he had recently been sent the MS of yet another novel about Henry James, told from the point of view of his typist, incredulity seemed a barely adequate response and hilarity a quite inappropriate one. The situation was spookier than John Dugdale knew.
One of the most obvious changes over the last few decades in the way literary fiction is marketed and publicised is that writers themselves are now expected to take a leading part in the process, a consequence of increased financial investment in the publishing of literary fiction and increased financial rewards for those who write it. When MacGibbon & Kee published my first novel The Picturegoers in 1960 I doubt if they did more by way of publicity than send out the review copies (and they weren’t very good at that).fn10 Once I had delivered the revised text of my novel, and corrected and returned the proofs, I was not troubled further by my publishers. But I received an advance of only £75, in three instalments, on signature, delivery and publication, which, even allowing for inflation, was a fairly small risk for the publisher. The average advance for a first novel in 2005 was £5,000.13 Publishing now operates in a completely different business environment, and success depends crucially on publicity. Although such ideas as the ‘impersonality’ of art, ‘the intentional fallacy’ and ‘the Death of the Author’ have dominated academic theorising about literature since the 1920s, the general reading public remains inveterately curious about the human beings who create the books they read, and publishers have found that interviews with writers in the press, and on TV and radio, or as a component of readings, signings and similar meet-the-author events in bookshops and at literary festivals, can boost a writer’s sales more than reviews. If you have accepted a substantial advance for a book, both self-interest and a sense of obligation make it hard to refuse to participate in such activities, and some writers positively enjoy the opportunity to explain their work, the personal contact with their readers, and the element of performance involved. I quite enjoy these activities myself, in moderation (though not so much since hearing loss set in).
I collaborated very willingly with Tasja Dorkofikis, my experienced and efficient publicist at Random House, in planning a publicity schedule for Author, Author because I felt this novel would need all the help I could give it. It probably received more media attention in the run-up to publication than any previous book of mine – not, however, without occasional snags and unwelcome surprises. The main featured interview was to have appeared in the Daily Telegraph, which, as is customary, required ‘exclusive’ rights (i.e. a guarantee that no interview would appear elsewhere beforehand). I independently offered the Guardian Review, which had published several pieces of mine in the recent past, an edited extract from the novel, naively supposing that this would not compete with an interview in another newspaper, but when the Guardian accepted it, and I informed Tasja, I discovered I was wrong. Each paper wanted to be first, and neither paper would budge (in spite of the fact that almost nobody except journalists reads both). So we passed on the Telegraph, and looked for another place for the first press interview. The Sunday Telegraph eventually did it in a great rush. The unfortunate journalist assigned this task had insufficient time to prepare for the interview, which when it appeared was composed partly of information and quotations from other, quite old interviews, including the headline, ‘A Bad Review Spoils My Lunch’, which was not the note I wished to strike just before publication.fn11 It was illustrated by a large photo of a rather grim and dishevelled-looking author, evidence that the stress of imminent publication was already beginning to tell. It is only fair to add that several friends said they enjoyed the article and my elder son said he learned more about me from it than anything else of the same kind he had read.
Meanwhile, the Grauniad (as Private Eye immortally dubbed the chronically misprint-prone newspaper) had published the extract from Author, Author on 14 August. It was an impressive three-page spread and when I first opened my copy of the Review I was delighted. But when I began to read the extract I was dismayed to discover that my main character, referred to in the original text as ‘Henry’, was here called ‘James’ throughout. I fired off an email to the editor involved:
You have given me a magnificent spread in today’s Guardian, beautifully illustrated – but why oh why did you change ‘Henry’ to ‘James’ throughout, and without consulting me? It makes the discourse sound like biography, which was just the effect I was trying to avoid. The intimacy and familiarity of ‘Henry’ is appropriate to the fictional focusing of the narrative through HJ’s consciousness and point of view. That’s why it is used throughout the novel.
The editor apologised swiftly and abjectly. What had happened was that a junior sub-editor assigned the task of preparing the copy for printing had taken it into her head to apply a rule about proper names in the Guardian’s style book, designed primarily for factual reporting, to the extract from my novel, and the editor had failed to spot the changes. Needless to say, I had not been shown the proofs. (One rarely is shown proofs by newspapers in these days of emailed copy and just-in-time editing.) The editor had failed to spot the error, I’m sure, because ‘James’ is a given name as well as a surname. If my character had been called Henry Winter-bottom the surname would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
The Guardian took the matter very seriously. An apology was published at the first opportunity in the paper’s ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ column on the leader page (a daily feature so rich in interest and amusement that it has been anthologised), an emended text was posted on the Guardian website, and a week later the paper’s ombudsman or ‘Readers’ Editor’, Ian Mayes, devoted the whole of his Saturday column to a description of the affair and a denunciation of the over-literal application of the style book. If there is any truth in the adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity I should have been delighted at all this extra attention being focused on my novel – and in the most important pages of the newspaper. But, as Ian Mayes astutely observed, the mistake ‘intruded upon and distorted the relationship the author wanted to establish with his subject and with the reader’. It undid with a single unthinking stroke the delicate balance I had striven to attain between fidelity to fact and imaginative empathy in my portrayal of Henry James, and thus drained the prominent serialisation of most of its pleasure for me. As far as I was concerned, it was another episode in the history of Author, Author to be indexed under: ‘Irony, zone of’. Or did I perhaps after all need another entry: ‘James, Henry, curse of’?
On Thursday 26 August, a week before publication, the longlist for the Booker Prize was announced, and Author, Author was not on it. The shortlist is always something of a lottery, but omission from the longlist feels more like a snub. I would have minded less if The Master had not been one of the twenty-two novels selected. Timing again played its part: it was a downer to receive this news on the eve of my first public event to promote Author, Author, at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
Then the reviews began to appear. Different writers have different strategies for dealing with reviews. So
me read them avidly as they appear, others wait for their publishers to send them; some don’t read them at all, and others claim not to but covertly learn what they contain. My own practice is to skim the reviews as they come to me, to get a sense of how a book is being received, and then let them accumulate for a while, to be read later, with closer attention and in a calmer state of mind. When in due course I surveyed the British reviews of Author, Author it was clear that the favourable ones greatly outnumbered the unfavourable. But in the first week or two it didn’t seem like that: the needle of critical opinion swung abruptly between the admiring and the dismissive, and my spirits with it. The Sunday Times was gratifying but The Times was sniffy. The Telegraph was a rave, but the Guardian was lukewarm. The Scotsman commended me for following James’s injunction to himself to ‘dramatise, dramatise’, while the TLS declared that I ‘utterly neglected’ it. In the New Statesman George Walden concluded: ‘As a novel . . . it doesn’t work, and had it not been a novel at all it might have been a better biography’, while in the Spectator Anita Brookner declared: ‘This is a compelling book, which reads seamlessly, organically, as a novel.’ Most of the reviews made reference to Colm Tóibín, and several compared the two novels, sometimes in his favour, sometimes in mine. ‘It’s not that David Lodge has written a weak novel about Henry James. It’s just that it suffers in comparison to a brilliant one’, said Adam Mars-Jones in the Observer. ‘Lodge has settled James more comfortably into his own skin than any other biographer, or novelist, to date’, said Jonathan Heawood in the same day’s Independent on Sunday. My ego bounced like a ping-pong ball between these opposing bats.
