Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Lodge

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Foreword

  The Late Graham Greene

  The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis

  A Tricky Undertaking: The Biography of Muriel Spark

  John Boorman’s Quest

  Alan Bennett’s Serial Autobiography

  The Greene Man Within

  Simon Gray’s Diaries

  Terry Eagleton’s Goodbye to All That

  Frank Remembered – by a Kermodian

  Malcolm Bradbury: Writer and Friend

  The Death of Diana

  Trollope’s Fixed Period

  Writing H.G. Wells

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  This thoughtful and enlightening collection by one of our best-loved and most highly respected novelists and critics includes essays on Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Terry Eagleton, Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett, as well as pieces on John Boorman and the death of Princess Diana. It also gives insight into Lodge’s own writing processes and novels. Full of anecdotes and wonderful observations, Lives in Writing is the perfect literary companion.

  Drawing on David Lodge’s long experience as novelist and critic, Lives in Writing is a fascinating study of the interface between life and literature.

  About the Author

  David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks..., Author, Author and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

  ALSO BY DAVID LODGE

  FICTION

  The Picturegoers

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  The British Museum is Falling Down

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  How Far Can You Go?

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Therapy

  Home Truths

  Thinks . . .

  Author, Author

  Deaf Sentence

  A Man of Parts

  CRITICISM

  Language of Fiction

  The Novelist at the Crossroads

  The Modes of Modern Writing

  Working with Structuralism

  After Bakhtin

  ESSAYS

  Write On

  The Art of Fiction

  The Practice of Writing

  Consciousness and the Novel

  The Year of Henry James

  DRAMA

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  Secret Thoughts

  To Angela, and in memory of Tom

  Lives in Writing

  David Lodge

  Essays

  FOREWORD

  I have combined creative writing with the practice of literary criticism for more than fifty years, and I think of myself as primarily a novelist in the former capacity, and a critic and theorist of the novel in the latter. But as I get older I find myself becoming more and more interested in, and attracted to, fact-based writing. This is I believe a common tendency in readers as they age, but it also seems to be a trend in contemporary literary culture generally. These essays variously describe, evaluate and exemplify different ways in which the lives of real people are represented in the written word: biography, the biographical novel, biographical criticism, autobiography, diary, memoir, confession, and various combinations of these modes. The book’s title has another meaning: with a single exception, all the subjects are or were by profession ‘in writing’ of various kinds (though one of them is primarily a film-maker). The connections between their personal lives and the work they produced make a thread that runs through all these essays. Nearly all contain autobiographical passages of my own, and some in the latter part of the book are framed as memoirs. The last essay belongs to a sub-species of autobiography, of which Henry James was the supreme exponent, in which a writer tells the story behind the story of one of his books: the history of its genesis and composition, and sometimes its reception. In the title essay of an earlier book, The Year of Henry James, I treated my novel Author, Author in this way. ‘Writing H.G. Wells’ is more polemical. Given the controversial status of the biographical novel at the time A Man of Parts was published, an account of how it was written inevitably became a kind of defence of this hybrid genre.

  Although I hope scholars may find things of interest in this book, it is designed primarily for the ‘general reader’. In the interest of readability I have kept footnotes and bibliographical information to a minimum. Books discussed or quoted are identified simply by author, title and date of first publication.

  D.L., February 2013

  THE LATE GRAHAM GREENE

  NORMAN SHERRY’S THREE-VOLUME biography of Graham Greene1 occupied him continuously and exclusively for twenty-eight years, which may be a record of some kind. Greene died in 1991, having correctly predicted that he would not live to read the second volume, which was published in 1994. He also prophesied that Sherry would not survive to read the third and last volume, eventually published in 2004, a remark in which one might detect some resentment at the ever-increasing scale and scope of the biography, and regret for having authorised its often embarrassing revelations. That prophecy was happily unfulfilled, but at times it was a close-run thing. Sherry promised Greene that he would visit every country that the novelist had used as a setting for a novel, a vow that took him to some twenty countries, entailing danger, hardship, and at least one life-threatening illness. He admits on the penultimate page of the biography that ‘reaching the end had often seemed beyond my strength and spirit’, and superstitiously left the very last sentence of his narrative unfinished.

  It is impossible not to see in the progress of this enormous work a cautionary tale about the perils of literary biography when it becomes an obsessive and all-consuming project, a doomed attempt to re-live the subject’s life vicariously and somehow achieve a perfect ‘fit’ between it and his artistic output. ‘No novel can be believable if the novelist does not acknowledge the truth of his own experiences, even when these are disturbing,’ Sherry asserts in the course of this final instalment. ‘Greene needed to deal with his past: and we, in turn, need to excavate his private history.’ There are several debatable assertions here. What does ‘truth’ mean in this context? If we grant that writers often deal with painful and disturbing personal experience in their fictions (and Greene himself wrote that ‘writing is a form of therapy’) does this not usually involve departing from the empirical facts of such experience – altering them, even inverting them, reinterpreting them, and combining them with purely fictional material? If so, is there not a danger in trying to pin down the sources of characters and events of novels too literally in the writer’s own life? Does a novel become more ‘believable’ when we succeed in doing this? Or less?

  These questions belong to a larger debate which has exercised literary critics and scholars since T.S. Eliot declared in 1919 that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material’. Eliot challenged the Romantic view that the creative process is essentially expressive of the writer’s self, and by implication the legitimacy of biographical interpretation, contributing crucially to the emergence of a new movement in academic literary criticism which regarded the text as an autonomous verbal object, and by the end of the twentieth century had triump
hantly affirmed the ‘death of the author’. Meanwhile non-academic readers showed an increasing interest in biographies of authors, which were often written by academics of an empirical and historical bent. The fact is that the appeal of literary biography is undeniable and irresistible but cognitively impure. We are fascinated by the mystery of literary creation, and therefore eager to discover the sources of a writer’s inspiration; but we also take a simply inquisitive human interest in the private lives of important writers, especially if they involve behaviour that is in any way unusual. Graham Greene was a man whose life offered ample opportunity to satisfy both kinds of curiosity – perhaps so much opportunity that Norman Sherry allowed himself to be overwhelmed and in the end exhausted by it.

  His first volume, covering the years 1904–39, was by far the best, convincingly locating the source of Greene’s obsession with the theme of treachery in his unhappy childhood, and telling vividly and lucidly the absorbing story of his up-and-down early career as a writer, and his remarkable courtship, marriage and extra-marital sexual life. It thoroughly deserved the praise it attracted. The second volume was less satisfying, because its thematic organisation obscured the narrative line of Greene’s life in the period 1939–55, but it did memorably contain the stranger-than-fiction story of Greene’s love affair with Catherine Walston, wife of the British Labour politician Harry Walston, which inspired The End of the Affair (dedicated ‘To C.’). The third volume, at 900 pages, is the longest and also the weakest. Sherry’s determination to find a real-life model for every important character in Greene’s novels, unweaving their artful blend of observed fact and imaginative invention, becomes increasingly obtrusive, and in spite of the book’s enormous length and plethora of facts, there are puzzling gaps. If there was a reference to Dr Fischer of Geneva (1980), for instance, I missed it, and there is none in the index. This enigmatic fable was a minor work, but one would like to know something about the background to its composition and its reception. Was it passed over because it had no obvious source in Greene’s life?

  Apart from what we learn from Greene’s letters, which are quoted at length, we get from this book a less vivid sense of what Greene was actually like as a person in later life than from the much shorter and more selective memoirs of the companion of his later years, Yvonne Cloetta, and his friend Shirley Hazzard.2 Sherry has no anecdote as revealing as, for instance, Yvonne Cloetta’s first intimation of The Honorary Consul:

  One morning, he appeared in the doorway, looking extremely worried, and announced quite abruptly, ‘It’s terrible to think that from now on I’m going to have to live for three years with a certain Charlie Fortnum.’ And he went back to whatever he was doing, without saying another word.

  Greene knew from experience how long a full-length novel would take to complete at this stage of his life, and how much it would cost him. ‘Retirement is always a distressing time for a man. But for a writer it is death,’ he remarked to Yvonne Cloetta on another occasion. So he went on writing although he found it harder and harder, and was seldom satisfied with what he produced, even when his readers were. He was his own harshest critic. ‘I think it stinks,’ he said, sending the manuscript of Our Man in Havana to Catherine; and of A Burnt-Out Case, again to Catherine: ‘I hate the book. There are bits I like, but I’ve hardly had a moment of pleasure working this time and the result is muddled and shapeless.’ His well-known practice of writing a certain number of words a day (500, later reduced to 300) was a ritual that enabled him to carry on a task that he often found agonisingly difficult. The gradual accumulation of words was reassuring and he attributed to the figures an almost magical significance, cabling Catherine on the completion of A Burnt-Out Case: ‘FINISHED THANK GOD 325 WORDS SHORT ORIGINAL ESTIMATE.’ The novelist Shirley Hazzard was friendly with Greene from the late 1960s onwards, when she and her husband lived on Capri where Greene had a villa. ‘When from time to time Graham told us, “I have a book coming out,” he would occasionally add, “Not a specially good one.”’ Hazzard’s own summary judgement of the later work cannot be bettered:

  The inspired pain of the earlier fiction would not recur; or even the intensity of those lighter and livelier works that Graham had once differentiated as ‘entertainments.’ What remained was professionalism: a unique view and tone, a practised, topical narrative that held the interest and forced the pace of the reader. Poignancy was largely subsumed into world-weariness, resurfacing in spasms of authenticity.

  The final instalment of Sherry’s biography is then – perhaps inevitably, given Greene’s long productive life – a story of gradual decline of creative power from a very high peak of achievement. The second volume ended with the composition of The Quiet American (1955), Greene’s last fully achieved masterpiece. It was also the first novel to hint at the waning of his belief in the Roman Catholic religious doctrine which had underpinned his most powerful and important previous novels, from Brighton Rock (1938) to The End of the Affair (1951). Politics, rather than religion, provides the ideological frame of reference which defines character and conflict in The Quiet American, and it has acquired a justified reputation as a novel prophetic not only of the folly of the American involvement in Vietnam but also of other ill-fated foreign adventures, including the war in Iraq. Greene’s play The Potting Shed, a hit in London in 1957, but a flop in New York, showed that his imagination was still kindled by the more extreme paradoxes of Catholic spirituality, but Our Man in Havana (1958) treated potentially dark and serious matter in a spirit of comedy.

  This was a time of great turmoil in Greene’s personal life. His grand passion for Catherine Walston was slowly and painfully burning itself out. Though they continued to meet occasionally, Catherine resisted Greene’s pleas to leave her husband and children to live with him – in exactly what terms, we don’t know, because he burned all her letters; but his letters to her have survived and Sherry quotes them extensively. Greene was now in love with another woman, the Swedish actress Anita Björk, whose husband had recently committed suicide. He visited her frequently in Stockholm, and there was evidently a strong sexual charge between them, but Anita, tied to her career and her children, was no more willing than Catherine to throw in her lot with him. Could this, one wonders, have been the secret attraction of both relationships for Greene, always shy of emotional ties and commitments, even as he agonised over them? (The Human Factor has an epigraph from Conrad: ‘I only know that he who forms a tie is lost.’) He refers openly to his assignations with Anita in his letters to Catherine, perhaps as a subtle form of punishment, but he never wants to break off either relationship. After parting from, and then returning to, Anita, he writes to Catherine: ‘I feel hopelessly muddled. I missed her more than I thought I would, but now that’s healed, it’s you I miss. Am I crazy or do I just happen to love two women as I never have before?’ Several people thought he was crazy, including his wife Vivien, who cited his compulsive travelling, never staying in one place for more than a few weeks. There is probably enough material for a book called Graham Greene, Frequent Flyer. At the end of one year he calculated that he had flown more than 40,000 miles, quite a lot for someone whose occupation is usually described as ‘sedentary’. His letters to Catherine constantly proposed meetings in various exotic locations all round the globe; and his friend Michael Meyer tells an amusing story of an exhausting trip to Fiji and Tahiti that Greene arranged simply to escape Christmas, a feast he did not enjoy. Because of problems with their flights and weather they crossed the international dateline three times and experienced three successive Christmas Eves.

  Greene was still married to Vivien, though living apart from her, and he never sought a divorce, annulment, or legal separation. In the eyes of the Church he was of course committing grave sin. He had his own way of reconciling his conduct with his conscience – or perhaps by the late 1950s he had privately ceased to believe in the validity of Catholic moral theology. To the world at large, though, he was still the great Catholic Novelist (however stre
nuously he insisted that he was a novelist who happened to be a Catholic) and the experience of being pestered and appealed to for spiritual guidance by various devout and often troubled co-religionists, including priests, was an irony that caused him much embarrassment. ‘I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion . . .’ he complained later. ‘I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague.’ When the affair with Anita finally came to an end in 1958, Greene’s appeals to Catherine became more fervent, and his frustration more acute. He was also oppressed by the fear that his creativity was drying up. According to Sherry he came near to suicide, not for the first time in his life. Instead he went to a leper colony in the Congo, seeking material for a new novel.

  A Burnt-Out Case (1961) is not a completely satisfactory novel, but it is a peculiarly fascinating one for anyone interested in Greene because of its confessional nature. In the character of Querry, the famous Catholic architect who is praised as much for his spirituality as his artistry, but who in fact reveals himself to be totally lacking in faith in either art or religion, and a cold-hearted failure in personal relationships, Greene deliberately invited a biographical reading of the novel that would be uncomfortable for his Catholic admirers. Sherry, needless to say, finds models for other characters, and without much difficulty, since Greene was more or less making up the story as he did his research, putting in characters and incidents that he observed, as one can see from his journal written at the time, later published in In Search of a Character: two African Journals (1961). But Sherry’s effort to connect the character of the obnoxious journalist Parkinson with a friend of Greene’s called Ronald Matthews seems to me forced and unconvincing. Matthews was a journalist who had written a memoir of Greene, published in French as Mon Ami Graham Greene, which Greene disliked enough to prevent its publication in English; but there is no significant resemblance between the two men. What makes Parkinson live as a character, as Sherry’s quotations from the novel remind us, is Greene’s creative use of language, first, in describing the journalist’s gross physical appearance (‘his neck as he lay on his bed was forced into three ridges like gutters, and the sweat filled them and drained round the curve of his head on to the pillow’), and secondly in the wonderfully cynical rhetoric with which Parkinson defends his sensationally fabricated journalism, e.g.: ‘Do you really believe Caesar said Et tu, Brute? It’s what he ought to have said and someone . . . spotted what was needed. The truth is always forgotten.’