by David Lodge
The American edition of Author, Author was published by Viking in October. My previous three novels had received a more consistently favourable reception in the American press than in England, but the US reviews for Author, Author were deeply disappointing. Curiously, given the subject, the downmarket papers New York Newsday and People Magazine were among the few that were enthusiastic, but they don’t carry much literary weight. The Boston Globe was gratifying, and the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books were friendly, but the rest of the reviews in important publications were negative. Invariably they mentioned that the novel went over much of the same ground as The Master, published in the USA in June, and invariably they compared it unfavourably to Tóibín’s book. There was in many of these reviews an implication that my novel was bound to be a loser simply by trailing after Tóibín’s. Sophie Harrison struck this note at the outset of her piece in the New York Times Book Review (generally considered the most influential book pages in the USA): ‘The Master casts a terrible shadow over this book’, and conjured up with relish the moment when I first heard about Tóibín’s novel. ‘It is hard not to imagine the awful emotions in the Lodge household at this point, the anguished telephone call: He’s written a what? About who?’ (Actually the imaginary dialogue is not very good – why would I say, ‘He’s written a what?’?) Entertainment Weekly made the same point more sympathetically: ‘Meet the year’s unluckiest good novelist. Lodge . . . had the bright idea to fictionalise the life of Henry James . . . Then Colm Tóibín beat him to the finish line.’
Needless to say, these reviews did nothing to raise my spirits as I prepared for a brief US ‘book tour’ that had been arranged long ago. I had an invitation to speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival on the weekend of 6 November and Paul Slovak had suggested I should do readings in New York, Boston and Washington in the week following. The New York venue was the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street YMCA, the most prestigious place for such events in the city. In March he emailed me to say the Y had asked ‘whether it might be possible to move your reading from Monday November 8 to Monday November 1’. This would mean ending instead of beginning my tour at Chicago. It had the advantage of bringing the events closer to the publication date of the novel, but he pointed out that Monday 1 November was the eve of the presidential election. It seemed to me that this was not a very auspicious time to be promoting a novel about Henry James (no doubt some other author slated for the 1st had come to the same conclusion about his book and asked for a different date). On the other hand the opportunity to observe the keenly contested and enormously important election at first hand was irresistible, so I went along with it. This decision, good audiences, and the fact that I had arranged to meet friends all along the line, made what might have been a gloomy trip actually very satisfying.
Alison Lurie had kindly agreed to introduce me at the Y, and she came down from Ithaca, where she teaches in the autumn semester at Cornell, to spend the weekend in New York. We spent an agreeable Sunday morning at the Metropolitan Museum, and strolled afterwards in the park, in unusually warm weather for the time of year, and sat on a bench in the sunshine while she counselled me wisely about managing my disappointment over the reception of Author, Author. The next day we went to the Neue Gallery of German and Austrian art, and ran into Joyce Carol Oates, who has had more than her fair share of rough treatment by the press. When I told her that Entertainment Weekly had called me the unluckiest good novelist of the year, she said dryly, ‘Don’t go around boasting about it. All the other writers will be jealous and say, “No, no, I’m the unluckiest good novelist of the year.”’
The Y likes to have two authors for each event, and I was paired with Louis Auchinloss, a venerable figure well into his eighties but still writing indefatigably, author of more than forty novels and collections of short stories which in many ways continue the Jamesian tradition in American fiction. I had been reading one of them, The Rector of Justin (1964) on my journey, and told him sincerely that I was greatly enjoying it when he joined me in the green room, tall, patrician, and immaculately suited, like one of his own characters. The Y readings are austerely theatrical: you walk out from the wings to the front of a large bare stage under bright lights, stand at a lectern, and address a darkened auditorium. There is no Q & A sequel – just a signing in the lobby afterwards. I read an extract from the chapter about the first night of Guy Domville – more or less the same as at Rye. After various experiments I had found that this reading worked best with audiences even if I had to impersonate all the characters myself, like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend (‘He do the police in different voices’). I always ended the reading at the moment when Henry James was booed and fled from the stage of the St James’s, but at my next reading, in Cambridge Mass., I made an adjustment.
At every social gathering and encounter in New York that weekend, much of the talk was inevitably about the coming election. Most of the people I met were Democrats, passionately opposed to Bush, and immensely excited by signs of a last-minute surge by Kerry in the opinion polls. On election day I travelled by train to Boston, Kerry’s home turf, and in the evening watched the early results on television with a friend who is a professor at Harvard and a number of her friends and colleagues. The party split up at about midnight when it was clear that the result would depend on the vote in Ohio, and the next morning it was evident that Bush had narrowly but decisively won. My ‘escort’, Sally, who came to my hotel to take me to a radio station to record an interview for a book programme, was devastated by the result, and said she and her husband were seriously thinking of emigrating. She told me her best friend was at home, unable to get out of bed, weeping uncontrollably. When she picked me up later to take me to the Harvard Bookstore for my reading she warned me that there might not be anybody there. Happily the rows of chairs were fully occupied when I walked in, but I had never seen so many glum, unsmiling faces at such an event. In the course of the day I had decided to modify my reading so that it ended at the very end of the chapter, a passage about Henry James walking home alone from the theatre after the debacle of the first night, a passage that begins: ‘So it was over. He had come to the dead end of the road, the dry bottom of the well, the rock wall at the end of the tunnel. Failure.’ It seemed to strike a chord.
Was Author, Author a failure? Well, no, not a world-class, total turkey, Guy Domville-type failure. But it was not the success I, or my publishers, had hoped for. The British reviews were about three to one in favour, and the good ones were very good indeed. Author, Author also did very well in those round-ups of people’s ‘Books of the Year’ just before Christmas. But the number of hostile or unenthusiastic reviews was significant, and there were proportionally more of them in America. A novel about Henry James was bound to be controversial, and the existence of a competing novel gave opportunities for prejudicial comparisons which don’t normally present themselves in reviewing fiction. The question of James’s sexuality, for instance, was particularly sensitive, and those reviewers who objected to my presentation of James as a celibate bachelor by choice and inclination in middle life were able to invoke in contrast Tóibín’s sympathetic rendering of James’s homosexual yearnings. Commercially it is too soon to do a reliable audit, but at this time of writing sales of both the Secker and Penguin editions are substantially less than the sales of Thinks . . . at the same point after publication. This disappointing performance can be partly attributed to the resistance of readers to the subject of the book and its genre, both very different from anything my usual audience expects from me. But the publication of a highly praised novel on the same subject six months earlier must also have had some effect. It is perhaps relevant to record that when L’Auteur! L’Auteur! was published in France in January 2005, nine months before the French edition of The Master, it received almost unanimously favourable reviews, was on the bestseller list of L’Express for nine weeks, and sold (in the French equivalent of hardback) twice as many copies as Secker sold in the same period
after publication. My novels are, however, surprisingly and gratifyingly popular in France, and the sales of this one were well below those of its predecessor, Pensées Sécrètes (Thinks . . . ), so no firm conclusions can be drawn.
‘It’s not a race, nor a contest. David Lodge’s pitch-perfect bio-novel about Henry James and his crisis of the mid 1890s neatly complements Colm Tóibín’s The Master and merits equal applause’, Boyd Tonkin observed kindly in The Independent, when the paperback edition of my novel was published in the summer of 2005.14 Well, it wasn’t a race, but it was a contest, for reasons I have explained, though neither Colm Tóibín nor I had sought one; and it is pretty obvious that, in the Year of Henry James anyway, he won it. Exactly how critical was the order of publication of the two books, and what might have happened if it had been reversed, must remain matters of speculation.
Timing is not all, however, in the evaluation of literature. Time is all. Only time will tell whether The Master is a better book than Author, Author, or vice versa, or whether they are equally admirable in different ways, or equally negligible. Time will also tell when I have finally got over this episode in my professional life and feel able to put it behind me. It will be the moment when I decide I would really like to read The Master. grew longer, but we have kept – but not just yet.
Birmingham, November 2005
Notes
1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), pp. 35–65.
2 Novick’s main evidence is a passage in Henry James’s notebooks, written in California in March 1905, when he was gathering material for The American Scene (1907) recalling his experiences in the spring and summer of 1865 in Cambridge, Mass.: ‘How can I speak of Cambridge at all . . . The point for me (for fatal, for impossible, expansion) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C. that I sit and write of here by the strange Pacific on the other side of the continent, l’initiation première (the divine, the unique), there and in Ashburton Place . . . Ah, the “epoch-making” weeks of the spring of 1865!’ [Novick’s ellipses]. This certainly sounds as if it might refer to a sexual experience, but in context James’s heightened language could equally well refer to his discovery of his literary vocation. No convincing evidence is offered that Oliver Wendell Holmes was James’s lover.
3 Guardian Review, 2 April 2005, p. 30. Reviewing Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb, in the same journal, 22 November 2003, Alan Hollinghurst observed: ‘as gay studies started to take on the heft of a discipline, there were even bolder attempts to catch bigger writers (Henry James being an eminently recalcitrant example) in what Robb calls “the elastic web of gay revisionism”.’
4 ‘The Curse of Henry James’, Prospect, September 2004, p. 66.
5 ‘The Haunting’, Daily Telegraph (Books section), 13 March 2004.
6 There was a BBC adaptation as a single TV drama broadcast in 1975 which I did not see and about which I have no other information.
7 Philip Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), p. 34.
8 Alfred Sutro, Celebrities and Simple Souls (1933), quoted in Simon Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master (1947), p. 135.
9 ‘Henry James and the Movies’, in Consciousness and the Novel (2002), pp. 200–33.
10 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), Vol. IV, chap. xiii.
11 Colm Tóibín, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994), pp. 149–50.
12 Henry James described Flaubert passing his life ‘in reconstructing sentences, exterminating repetitions, calculating and comparing cadences, harmonious chutes de phrases, and beating about the bush to deal death to the abominable assonance’. Peter Kemp, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (1999), p. 42.
13 ‘The Publishing Industry’, Guardian, G2, 10 October 2005, p. 4.
14 Independent, 22 July 2005.
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fn1There might have been a fourth. I was reliably informed in the spring of 2004 that the publishers of the American novelist David Leavitt were expecting his new novel to be about Henry James, but when it was delivered it turned out not to be. Perhaps he discovered that Colm Tóibín was working on the same subject and dropped it. I presume Leavitt’s novel was The Body of Jonah Boyd, published in the USA in May 2004.
fn2I might have realised this earlier, in January 2003, when I was deep into my own novel, and my friend, fellow novelist and Birmingham resident, Jim Crace, guessed its subject with astonishing ease and the minimum of clues (‘Historical? Late 19th century, early 20th? A writer? Henry James.’). But I did not.
fn3For further discussion of this topic see ‘Graham Greene and the Anxiety of Influence’, below, pp. 202–23.
fn4This had an amusing and ironic consequence. Long before I started writing Author, AuthorI took part in a so-called ‘Immortality Auction’, organised by the charity Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, at which people bid to have their name used for a character in the next novel by a participating writer of their choice. Dr John Plater bid successfully for that privilege in my next novel, and later generously doubled his donation to the charity. As I got deeper and deeper into writing Author, Author, and became more and more committed to using only historical personages in the story, I was increasingly concerned about honouring my contract. For a while I thought of calling George Alexander’s business manager at the St James’s Theatre, John Plater, but then discovered that this person’s real name, Robert Shone, appeared on the theatre’s playbills, and I must therefore use it. I seriously contemplated repaying Dr Plater his donation, but a friend who had read the MS pointed out that the man who taught Henry James how to ride a bicycle in Torquay had no name, nor was it likely that his real name could ever be discovered. So I gave the name of my patron to a character so minor that he never actually appears, but is only quoted. I wrote to John Plater explaining all this, and expressing the hope that the unique status of this character in the book would compensate for his obscurity, and he accepted the solution good-humouredly.
fn5Jim Crace, who had already guessed the subject of my novel early in 2003, astonished me even more by writing in an email in August, ‘I’m really looking forward to your Henry James novel (Title? “The Rest is Madness”?)’. I had told nobody about my working title. He said it was just a lucky guess.
fn6Exclamation marks were, however, used for the French edition of the novel, L’Auteur! L’Auteur!, because there is no tradition of calling for the playwright to take a bow in the French theatre, and this level of meaning in the title could not therefore be merely allusive.
fn7This was Amazing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall. The other shortlisted authors were Monica Ali, Damon Galgut, Zoë Heller and D. B. C. Pierre, who eventually won the prize with his first novel Vernon God Little.
fn8Published in 2006 as Liar’s Landscape, edited by Dominic Bradbury, with an Afterword (not an introduction) by D. L.
fn9Donald’s A Rope of Sand describes the romantic intrigues and entanglements of some American college girls in Europe and Egypt in the 1950s, which the first-person narrator self-consciously compares, from time to time, to situations in Henry James’s novels and stories. Also published in 2004 was Toby Litt’s Ghost Story, which one reviewer, Joanna Briscoe, described as ‘fiction by another Henry James enthusiast to add to all those suddenly and mysteriously gracing publishing schedules and the Booker shortlist’ (Guardian Review, 2 October 2004). ‘Ghost Story seemingly pays homage to The Turn of the Screw,’ said Ms Briscoe. I couldn’t see the resemblance myself, though Litt is certainly a declared admirer of Henry James and has written about him. In May 2005 A. N. Wilson published A Jealous Ghost, an explicit retelling of the story of The Turn of the Screw in a modern setting, presumably written the previous year, when all the other James-inspired books were appearing.
fn10I have described in the intro
duction or afterword to reissued editions of The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) how the entire first batch of review copies was mysteriously lost and never reached a single newspaper or magazine, and how, demoralised by the total absence of reviews, I was the first to discover this fact.
fn11In the previous interview – I can’t remember where or when – I had recalled a remark of Kingsley Amis’s, that ‘a bad review spoiled your breakfast, but it shouldn’t spoil lunch’, and commented that I thought one such review could spoil quite a few lunches.
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PART TWO
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