by David Lodge
Anita Brookner’s review gave me particular pleasure, especially as it came out on the day of my launch party, where a kindly sales director from Random House slipped the folded cutting into my hand to read afterwards. Geoff and Tasja had early on had the happy idea of holding this event in the splendid library of the Reform Club, Henry James’s own club, and the setting of a scene in the novel. I had made a research visit there when doing my final revision of the text, to check some details concerning the lavatory, and obtained the secretary’s informal agreement to the party on that occasion, but when Tasja later enquired about available dates she was told by an assistant administrator that we could not use the club for our party because Henry James was no longer a member. This was undeniable; but when we pointed out that Henry James was actually dead, and found a living member who would act as nominal host, as the club rules required, all went smoothly, and the date was fixed for 9 September. The elegantly printed invitations bore as a motto some words from James’s letter to his father triumphantly announcing his election to the club in 1878, ‘J’y suis, j’y reste – forever and a day.’ The party was particularly enjoyable because the thick carpets, tiers of leather-bound books, and upholstered chairs muffled the usual din of such occasions and made it possible to have real conversations in comfort.
Among the guests was Danny Moynihan, to whom Author, Author is dedicated, and his wife, Julia. Dedications are an interesting feature of books, worth an essay in themselves. Originally addressed to patrons, in modern times they are private messages attached to public documents, though they may also send covert signals to readers and reviewers (I am a model spouse and parent, I have glamorous and powerful friends, I am a pussycat so please treat me gently) but my simple dedication ‘To Danny Moynihan’ was innocent of any such intention. Danny is the oldest friend with whom I am still in contact. His mother and mine had been schoolfriends, and his family lived near ours in south-east London in the 1940s until they moved to Hastings, where I used to visit him occasionally. He left school at sixteen and was apprenticed as a cabinet-maker, but round about 1950 he daringly chucked it in and came back to London to live with his grandmother, just up the road from our house, with the aim of becoming an actor. He took a clerical job in the City while attending classes in acting at Morley College, and won a scholarship to the Webber Douglas school of drama. I was then in the sixth form at school (Danny is a couple of years older) and used to attend the end-of-term presentations by the students at Webber Douglas, usually consisting of short extracts from classic plays, from which I got a valuable introduction to world drama. In due course he became an actor on stage and television (best known perhaps as the prosecuting counsel in the long-running series, Crime of Passion). We continued to see a good deal of each other in the ’50s, and only a professional engagement prevented him from being my best man in 1959. When I moved to Birmingham and he went back to live in Hastings, the intervals between our meetings inevitably grew longer, but we have kept in touch. St Leonards-on-Sea, where he and Julia now live, is not far from Rye, and we had a bar lunch at the Mermaid in the summer of 2003 when I was doing my research there. The formation of my own desire to write is closely entwined in memory with Danny’s youthful determination to become an actor, and it seemed to me that Author, Author, with its focus on the agonies and ecstasies of literary and theatrical life, might be appropriately dedicated to him. I also co-opted him for my next public presentation of the novel, on the Monday following the party, at the Rye Festival.
The Rye Festival is a fairly modest affair, and I did not expect a huge audience there, but this event mattered to me more than any other in my programme because of the intimate connections between the town and my novel. Hilary Brooke was still organising the literary side of the festival and had put me in the same ‘Henry James Lecture’ slot as before, though it was understood that I would be doing a reading, with an introductory talk. In mid-July, in the course of email correspondence about the arrangements, she wrote: ‘We could, if you would like, provide additional readers to share readings with you, particularly of dialogues. Rye has quite a lot of local talent, as you may imagine. Let me know what you think.’ I don’t know whether this suggestion was the result of unfortunate experiences with novelists reading from their work, but I was rather taken with it. It occurred to me that I could easily adapt part of the chapter about the first night of Guy Domville, with its multiple points of view, as a reading for several voices. I prepared a script and sent a copy to Danny, asking him if he would do the Henry James passages (he agreed readily) and another to Hilary asking if she could find two readers for the characters of Elizabeth Robins and Florence Alexander. I would read the linking narrative passages, and between the four of us we would do the fragments of dialogue from James’s play and An Ideal Husband. I wasn’t aiming at a full dramatisation of the text, but rather a vocalisation of its use of free indirect style in the shifts of point of view.
I had assumed that Hilary was offering me the assistance of some talented amateur actors, and was surprised and delighted when two highly qualified professionals who live near Rye offered their services: Elizabeth Seal, the star of Irma La Douce and many other shows, and Sue Schlesinger, semi-retired from a stage career under the name of Sue Robinson, and married to Roger Schlesinger, brother of the late John Schlesinger, the film director. The reading was scheduled at the Methodist church in the evening of Monday 13 September, and it was agreed that we would all meet there for a rehearsal in the afternoon, and adjourn to Lamb House for tea or drinks. I looked forward to the occasion immensely. It was, however, sandwiched between two other engagements, both involving Colm Tóibín, about which I had misgivings.
Hilary had told me months before that Colm and his publishers were keen that he should talk about The Master at the Rye Festival, and he was slated to do so in the afternoon of the day following my event. Hilary asked me if I would like to stay on and attend his session. I said it was the last thing in the world I would want to do, and guessed that he would feel similarly about attending mine, but I suggested that we might have lunch together on the Tuesday before I departed. I asked her to convey this to Colm, and to book a quiet restaurant for us if he were agreeable – as, in due course, he was. When I made the proposal it seemed like a good opportunity to meet again, to talk, and perhaps laugh, over the strange circumstances that had brought us into unforeseen rivalry. But timing is all. Our contrasting fortunes in the Booker competition, and the comparisons between our novels being made in the reviews of Author, Author, were bound to place a constraint on the meeting, certainly as far as I was concerned, and I did not look forward to it with any eagerness – or to a conversation with Colm on Radio Four’s Today programme about the current vogue for Henry James, linked to our joint appearance at the festival. Hilary had been approached about this by the BBC, and after some hesitation I agreed for the sake of the publicity that would accrue, not only to Author, Author, but to the festival.
Mary accompanied me to Rye. It’s a long drive from Birmingham, so we had decided to leave a day early, and break our journey at Tunbridge Wells, partly because we had never visited this legendary spa town before, and partly because a hotel there was recommended in the Good Hotel Guide. Our room was indeed spacious and comfortably furnished, but it had an unusual open-plan design which incorporated the bathroom. Only the toilet made a concession to modesty with a frosted glass door. The shower was open-sided and the big bathtub was mounted on a kind of plinth in full view of the double bed. It looked like the stage set for a play called Sexual Perversity in Tunbridge Wells, or perhaps an art installation entitled The Death of Privacy in the Age of Publicity.
I was booked to pay my own dues to the Age of Publicity the next morning on the Today programme, ‘down the line’ from the studio of the BBC’s local station, Radio Kent, situated quite near the hotel, and I had been asked to present myself there at just before eight. It was pouring with rain when I went out at about seven thirty, but having ascertained tha
t Radio Kent was accommodated in a small shopping mall on a main road with no parking, I decided to walk. When I got to the mall I found entrance barred by a kind of portcullis, and there was no sign of life in the Radio Kent reception office. I discovered a side door on the street which seemed to be for the use of the studio’s employees, but there was no bell or entryphone. I banged repeatedly on the steel door, to no effect. I did not have a mobile phone with me, or a relevant number to dial from a call box. The rain dripped from my umbrella. The minutes were ticking away. Surely the BBC in London would have made contact with Radio Kent by now and be urgently concerned about my non-appearance? Surely somebody would think of coming out into the street to look for me? But there was no sign of life in the building. I banged on the door again, and shouted, to no avail. I could think of nothing else to do but return to the hotel and try to contact somebody from there. I had moved some distance in this direction when I saw a hunched figure slanting across the road through the rain, clutching a beaker of takeaway coffee, and making for the steel door. I ran back and managed to get inside just before he slammed it shut again. He seemed mildly surprised at my appearance but escorted me upstairs and into the studio where his colleagues nodded genially and directed me to a microphone. I had about a minute to spare before John Humphrys’s jaunty voice came down the line, followed shortly by Colm’s mellifluous brogue. I had prepared a joke to deal with the inevitable opening question (‘It’s like London buses, you wait years for a novel about Henry James and then three come along at the same time’) but after that Colm sounded, not surprisingly, the more fluent and composed speaker. I never did discover how I was supposed to have gained admission to the studio.
That evening I climbed into the pulpit of the Methodist church, and the three actors stood in a row beneath me in front of the sanctuary (if that’s what Methodists call it) facing the audience in their pews. It occurred to me that the ecclesiastical setting might have been inhibiting if I had been presenting one of my raunchier comic novels, but it seemed quite appropriate to Author, Author. My collaborators did me proud and the audience responded warmly to their performance. Afterwards we adjourned to a nearby pub with them and some of Danny’s family, and then Sue and Roger Schlesinger took Mary and me back to their home in the country near Rye for supper and to stay the night. Tony and Sue Davis (recently married) were leaving for Germany early the next morning, and could not entertain us at Lamb House. The wind rose in the night, and was still blowing next morning, gusting to gale force. We had some hours to pass before lunch, so I took Mary on a tour of some of the Romney churches. We headed back to Rye along the coast road that runs below the sea wall at Camber Sands and noticed a crowd of people gathered on the beach above our heads, all gazing at something that was obviously of interest. When we stopped the car and joined them we saw an astonishing sight: a fair-sized cargo ship was stranded high and dry on the beach, listing at an angle of about thirty degrees but apparently undamaged, as if a giant hand had plucked it out of the sea and plonked it down like a child’s toy on the pebbles. Obviously it had been blown ashore by wind and tide during the night, and the waters had receded. It was on this very beach that George I had been shipwrecked in 1726, and from which he had been brought to Rye to shelter in Lamb House. The connectedness of things I encountered in the course of my Jamesian project was a constant source of wonder.
I was afraid this diversion would make us late for our rendezvous at the Mermaid with Colm Tóibín but he himself was delayed, having been a victim of one of the endemic cock-ups of the British railway system, and obliged to take a taxi from Hastings. He was dressed in the regulation loose black suit and black shirt of the contemporary writer and carried a soft leather overnight bag that looked as if it contained mostly books. When I referred to our encounter on the road to Santiago as our only meeting, he corrected me, to my considerable embarrassment, as I have already described; but he seemed not to mind that I had not recognised him or caught his name in the Harbourfront bar, and charitably recalled that I had complained of the noise on that occasion. He had come to Rye from the wedding of Zadie Smith and Nick Laird, the most coveted invitation of the year for the younger glitterati, and described himself as both exhausted and exhilarated by the experience.
Hilary had booked a table for us in the Mermaid’s restaurant. It was certainly quiet, as I had stipulated – we were the only diners – but the food was pretty dire. (I have always found the bar-food there very good, but the more pretentious restaurant menu should be avoided, unless we were exceptionally unlucky.) It wasn’t, however, the kitchen’s fault that our meal lacked authentic conviviality. We all performed creditably, but there was a slight sense of strain in the air. Needless to say, the Booker Prize was not mentioned between Colm and myself. We did touch lightly on some of the coincidences and ironies that linked our novels, including our visits to Lamb House. I had not yet read his account of meeting Michiel Heyns there in the Telegraph, but I had read the latter’s article in Prospect, which Colm had not seen. He was genuinely sorry to hear that Heyns had been unable to find a publisher for his book. I learned that Colm had started his novel in 2000, put it aside for a year or so, then resumed work on it and delivered it in March 2003. I had often wondered what his feelings were when he first heard about mine, presumably from Peter Straus, some five months later, but I was not ready for an exchange of confidences at that level. I was glad of Mary’s presence to keep the conversation going on other topics. She is of Irish parentage, and I am a quarter Irish, so discussion of recent changes in Irish culture and society occupied quite a lot of the time until Hilary turned up to take Colm off to his three o’clock talk. Before he left he took from his bulging bag a mint copy of Author, Author and asked me to sign it, which I found disconcerting. I muttered that I had bought a copy of The Master, but hadn’t read it yet, though (hypocrite lecteur!) I was looking forward to doing so. I picked up the bill, since I had initiated the lunch, and Colm accepted gracefully. We shook hands and parted.
So that was that. I felt a great sense of relief as we drove away from Rye and back to Birmingham. I had met Colm again and shared an amicable if unappetising meal with him: now perhaps I could free myself from unprofitable brooding on the possible damage the prior publication of The Master had inflicted on Author, Author. But a week later the Booker shortlist was announced, and The Master was on it. This was not unexpected, but it revived all my dark, obsessive thoughts. Once again in this narrative, timing was all: the shortlist was in the newspapers on the day I departed for the book fair in Gothenburg. This is the biggest event of its kind in Sweden and is designed for readers and book buyers rather than the trade. Thousands of people make an annual pilgrimage to it from all over Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, to browse the bookstalls and attend a non-stop programme of readings, panel discussions and lectures. Every year the fair focuses on the literature of a single country and 2004 was the year of British writing. The British Council had assembled the largest contingent of writers from these isles ever to attend such an event. As at Edinburgh, I found myself thrust into a scene of public exposure, non-stop socialising and literary shop-talk when I least felt any appetite for it.
I had been aware for some time (and you, gentle reader, have no doubt made the same observation) that I had not only strayed into a zone of Jamesian ironies as a result of writing Author, Author, but I was in some measure re-enacting the story of my own novel. That was indeed the supreme irony, for me, of the Year of Henry James. Colm Tóibín was my Du Maurier, The Master his Trilby, and Author, Author was my Guy Domville. Like James I must suffer the pangs of professional envy and jealousy while struggling to conceal them. The correspondences were not, of course, exact – Colm was not a close friend of mine, his novel was in a different class from Du Maurier’s and not a bestseller (yet, but if it won the Booker, it would bury mine under an avalanche of publicity and sales), and Author, Author was not a flop – but they were close enough to cause me some discomfort and dismay.
Four weeks later I sat in front of the TV at home and watched the Man Booker Prize programme, live coverage of the black-tie banquet at which the winning novel is announced and the cheque presented to its author. The BBC, which has been responsible for this programme for most of the last twenty-five years, has experimented with various formats without ever quite finding a satisfactory solution. Usually it is a combination of shots of the guests eating their dinners and quaffing their wine, recorded interviews with the shortlisted authors and/or readings from their books, and comments and predictions from a panel of critics. This year they tried a new formula which I thought was disastrous. Kirsty Wark, one of the star presenters of Newsnight on BBC2, introduced the programme in a shimmering evening gown, standing on a dais high above the guests, looking like the goddess Athene, or that iconic female figure who is the trademark of Columbia movies, wielding her handmike as if it were the torch of learning. In her opening address, briefly surveying the year’s crop of notable literary fiction, she mentioned ‘a strange fascination with Henry James’. Later in the programme she descended to the floor and moved among the tables where the shortlisted writers were seated with their publishers, agents and friends, and in each case asked either the publisher or the agent to tell the hushed hall, and the TV audience, why they thought ‘their’ author should win, with this person sitting silently beside them in shot. It is hard to think of anything more likely to cause a writer acute embarrassment, and it wasn’t an easy assignment for the publishers and agents either. Peter Straus had obviously prepared carefully for the occasion, and delivered a fluent panegyric on The Master without apparently drawing breath. If he had been pleading before the judges, he might have been successful. In the opinion of most pundits, and the bookmakers, the contest in the last lap was between Alan Hollinghurst and David Mitchell, but Colm Tóibín was thought to be a strong challenger in third place. The winner had of course already been decided that afternoon, and it was Alan Hollinghurst. It would be hypocritical to pretend that I was not relieved when the announcement came, but recalling my own experience of being a ‘losing’ shortlisted author in 1984 and 1988, I could imagine how Colm would be feeling. However cool and calm you try to be on the night, however pleased you are to be shortlisted, you have to imagine yourself winning in order to prepare the few words of thanks that will be called for when the judges’ decision is announced, so it is inevitably a let-down when the prize goes to somebody else.
