Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  It is interesting to speculate what difference it would have made to our subsequent careers if we had gone to Oxbridge. I suspect Malcolm would have adapted to it better than I, and he might have stayed on to become a don. In later life he enjoyed being a visiting Fellow at Oxford, and for many summers chaired an annual seminar for foreign academics and writers run by the British Council in a Cambridge college. He always seemed very happy and at home in these settings – the smooth lawns, gravelled paths and ancient buildings soothed his spirit, and the ritual of hall and high table appealed to him – but the redbrick University College Leicester, housed in a converted lunatic asylum, a brief glimpse of which inspired Kingsley Amis to write Lucky Jim, provided more useful material for a first novel in the 1950s.

  Although we had much in common, there were also important differences between us, more obvious in some of our books than others. I was a Londoner by birth and upbringing; Malcolm’s roots, in spite of some early years in Metroland, were essentially provincial. He was born in Sheffield, grew up in Nottingham, and never felt at ease in the capital. In time he developed a liking for country life. When we met I was a practising and fairly orthodox Catholic, and several of my novels are concerned with Catholic hang-ups about sex and the loss of traditional faith. Malcolm enjoyed visiting empty village churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’, but had no religious belief. He cherished the values of secular liberal humanism, and his novels are often about liberal humanists who lack the strength to resist forces in society that are inimical to those values. If our ‘campus novels’ were sometimes confused in the memories of readers, and we were occasionally congratulated on writing each other’s books (a mistake difficult to correct graciously), that was partly because we drew on the same kind of experience, and found that we perceived the academic world with a similar sense of humour. Edith Wharton, writing in her memoirs about her friendship with Henry James, says, ‘The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights.’ I often had that experience with Malcolm, long after he left Birmingham, when we heard in some senior common room or conference bar a remark or anecdote ripe with fictional possibilities, and our eyes would meet as if silently to say, ‘Toss you for it?’ But it was his influence and example that first encouraged me to develop an element of comedy which was present but subdued in my first two novels. I remember that in our very first conversation, he commented favourably on a parody in The Picturegoers of the bizarre names often listed in Hollywood film credits – a passage which I had regarded as an insignificant detail. Sometimes a remark like that from a source you respect can make you see your own work in an entirely new light.

  Malcolm was already firmly established in the literary world when he arrived in Birmingham. Eating People Is Wrong had caused more of a stir than The Picturegoers, and he was a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on a cultural spectrum that ran from Punch to the Critical Quarterly. His confident professionalism and readiness to turn his hand to any literary task, moving effortlessly from one stylistic register to another, impressed me and inspired emulation. I placed a few sketches in Punch myself, and in 1963 collaborated with Malcolm and a talented undergraduate in the Birmingham English Department, Jim Duckett, to write a satirical revue which would never have come into existence without Malcolm’s initiative. Jim Duckett, whom I had tutored in his first year, wrote, produced and performed in a student revue in his second year which impressed Malcolm and me. Malcolm invited John Harrison, the Artistic Director of the Birmingham Rep, whom he had known in Nottingham, to see it, and persuaded him to commission a revue from the three of us for the Rep’s autumn season. I have happy memories of hilarious script-writing sessions, Jim and I improvising as we paced up and down in Malcolm’s office while he pounded out our lines on an upright typewriter, improving them in the process. We finished off the script in the summer vacation at the rented cottage near Beverley in East Yorkshire which Malcolm and Elizabeth had retained after he left his job at Hull. The show, entitled Between These Four Walls, was a mixture of sketches and songs, inspired by Beyond the Fringe and the BBC’s TV programme That Was The Week That Was. It was generally well received, though box office takings never recovered from the assassination of President Kennedy halfway through its four-week run. We writers each received £40 for our contributions. It was not a negligible sum at that date, but the fascinating and instructive experience of sitting in a theatre and registering every nuance of an audience’s reaction to one’s words was far more valuable. I discovered in myself a zest for satirical, parodic and farcical writing which found its expression in my next novel, The British Museum is Falling Down, dedicated ‘To Malcolm Bradbury, whose fault it mostly is that I have tried to write a comic novel’. It was his favourite among my books.

  Malcolm was always a great collaborator, and wrote an amusing account of his early enthusiasm for that form of literary composition, which was included in Liar’s Landscape. I do not know whether it was literally true that he and his friend Barry Spacks, whom he met at the University of Indiana on his first visit to America in 1955–6, would bash away simultaneously at their typewriters until one called out ‘Blocked!’ and then change places and continue each other’s stories, but it is a wonderful image, both sublime and ridiculous, of collaboration overcoming the frustrations and anxieties of the creative process.

  Malcolm responded to the stimulus of other people’s ideas and could often see in them possibilities of which their originators were unaware, as I discovered shortly after he came to Birmingham. I had found in a local second-hand book shop a copy of a light romantic novel, by a completely forgotten novelist, published in 1915, called Nymphet. That is the familiar name given by the hero of the story to an eleven-year-old girl who facilitates his eventual union with his beloved. It is also of course the generic term applied by Humbert Humbert to the eponymous heroine of Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated novel, Lolita, published forty years later, generally assumed to be the first use of this archaic word in modern fiction. It was possible, by close reading and interpretative ingenuity, to see beneath the innocent sentimental surface of Nymphet the unconscious representation of an adult man’s erotic attraction to a pre-pubescent girl, and to regard it therefore as some kind of precursor of Nabokov’s masterpiece. It seemed to be an idea worth writing up, and I accordingly did so, and sent my essay to a few magazines – without success. I showed it to Malcolm and he offered to rewrite it and split the fee if he placed it. Being hard up at the time, I agreed. Malcolm transformed my straightforward essay into a personal anecdotal piece in a humorous self-mocking style which he had honed in many contributions to Punch, and sold it under the title of ‘Nympholepsy’ to the American magazine Mademoiselle, which paid a great deal more than Punch. Pocketing my share, I was impressed by this achievement – and perhaps a little piqued. It was then that I began to write humorous journalistic pieces of my own. Malcolm had a pragmatic, professional commitment to writing which was contagious. It was this basic, inexhaustible appetite for the craft and business of writing which, among other qualities, made him in due course such an inspiring teacher of younger writers. And he was always thrifty with ideas, aware that they do not grow on trees. In 1988 I encountered ‘Nympholepsy’ once again, much elaborated, revised and updated, in a chapter of his Unsent Letters (1988).

  Close friendships between writers have a special character, especially when they are formed fairly early in their careers, when both parties are developing their work, showing it to each other, discussing it, perhaps collaborating on it. The friendship of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin was a classic example. Inevitably there is an element of competitiveness in such a relationship, which can cause some tension later, but at this early stage it is a constructive rivalry, as between two athletes specialising in the same events who train together. For three academic years, 1961–4,
I enjoyed that kind of relationship with Malcolm continuously. We saw each other nearly every day at the university in term time, had offices on the same corridor, took coffee together in the senior common room and shared lunch in Staff House. There was always much to talk about: new books, new writing projects, departmental politics. It was a period of expansion and change in British universities, and the rather old-fashioned Birmingham syllabus was under revision, to make room, or more room, for areas of study in which Malcolm and I had an interest: modern English literature, American literature, literary theory. We started a seminar course for second- and third-year students called ‘Comparative Critical Approaches’ which we taught jointly. The name was coined by Richard Hoggart who was appointed as second Professor of English Literature the year after Malcolm arrived and founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, initially a postgraduate programme within the English Department, which would create a whole new subject in British higher education. Not all the more senior members of staff were enchanted with these developments and department meetings could be long and contentious.

  Our intimacy extended into social life, where Malcolm and Elizabeth soon became the principal friends and companions of Mary and myself, entertaining each other, going out to the cinema or the theatre and even, I recall, a black-tie staff dinner-dance, as one did in those days. They were better off than us – Malcolm, being older than me, was on a slightly higher salary, and was earning much more from his writing – and he owned a new VW Beetle, then a very trendy car, in which he drove us to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford and other venues. He was a good, safe driver, and I remember him saying that it gave him great satisfaction because he had always been helpless and hopeless with anything mechanical. I envied him the car, and also the brand-new, centrally heated house he and Elizabeth bought in Edgbaston which compared favourably with the jerry-built two-bedroom inter-war semi we occupied in Selly Oak. But Malcolm’s encouragement and example gave me hope that I could raise our standard of living with my pen in ways I had not considered before.

  Several post-war British novelists began their careers with a ‘day-job’ teaching in a university, but most of them gave it up as soon as they felt able to do so. Malcolm and I were unusual in being equally committed and ambitious in our academic and creative careers. This was partly because the life of a freelance writer simply seemed too risky, especially for a married man with a family (Mary and I had two children by 1962 and the Bradburys had their first the following year) but it was also because we were genuinely interested in the academic study of literature, and wanted to make our mark on it. So we set ourselves up for a very busy life, combining teaching, writing scholarly books and articles, with writing novels, short stories, and in due course scripts for stage, radio and TV, as well as doing a good deal of journalism, including regular reviewing of new fiction, which in the 1960s was usually done in batches of half a dozen books at a time. We would not have been able to maintain this tempo of work if we had not married on the pre-Women’s Lib assumption that the husband was the breadwinner whose work had priority and the woman the housewife and mother whose career was suspended during the early years of childbearing. It was symptomatic that I received the news that my second child, Stephen, had been born (four weeks earlier than expected) while attending a conference in London with Malcolm in the spring of 1962, and that when Elizabeth left the hospital with her first-born, Matthew, in the following year I drove her home in the clapped-out Ford Popular I had managed to acquire by then because Malcolm was away on some pre-arranged academic engagement.

  Both Malcolm and I had grown up, like most of our generation, with a favourable image of America as our indispensable ally in the war, and as a land of greater affluence and opportunity than post-war Austerity Britain. In the 1960s its novelists seemed generally more innovative, and its academic critics more high-powered, than their British counterparts. Malcolm had spent two separate years in American universities before he came to Birmingham and he was planning to go back for another. What he said and wrote about America made me want to see it for myself. I applied for a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship, a munificent scheme that no longer exists in the same form, which funded one or two years of study and travel in the United States for eligible candidates, and was lucky enough to be selected. In the late summer of 1964 I took a year’s leave of absence from Birmingham and embarked on the Queen Mary with Mary and our children, aged four and two, for New York. I was attached to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island for a semester, and spent the summer in San Francisco; in between we drove slowly across the country from east to west, and more quickly back again afterwards. My project was to educate myself in American literature, which I had never formally studied, but I also managed to write most of The British Museum is Falling Down and a short monograph on Graham Greene while I was there. It was an amazingly liberating and fulfilling year for me, and also for Mary, though the kids, especially Stephen, were too young to get much out of it.

  In that age before email, fax machines and direct-dialling international telephone connections, Malcolm and I communicated by airmail letters or economical aerogrammes. I wrote more frequently, being free of mundane academic duties, he more copiously when he did find time to do so. I kept most of his letters and as I write this I have in front of me what was probably the first one he sent after our departure from Birmingham, headed simply ‘Sunday’ but evidently written in October 1964, which covers more than five sides of flimsy yellow quarto in single-spaced typescript. It begins with two pages of departmental news and gossip, then ‘on the literary front, plenty of news too’. He had delivered his new novel, Stepping Westward, to Secker & Warburg and ‘they were very pleased with it and . . . have offered what seems a much better advance – four hundred pounds . . .’ It was to be published in the spring. ‘They also want me to rewrite the Expatriates for them’ (this was his PhD thesis) and ‘Eating People is going into its third Penguin edition’. His short book on Evelyn Waugh was coming out from Oliver & Boyd and he would send me a copy. He was delighted by my news that Doubleday had taken my second novel Ginger, You’re Barmy for publication in America. He was planning another novel himself, and Bryan Wilson (a sociologist friend) had asked him to write a book for sixth-formers on the social background to literature (which he did in due course). Meanwhile ‘I’ve done three scripts for Swizzlewick – a very interesting experience.’ This was a twice-weekly BBC TV comedy drama series about the local council of a fictional Midlands town, created by the local playwright David Turner who had recently had a hit with a stage play called Semi-Detached. Turner wrote the first series, which had a mixed reception and aroused the ire of Mrs Whitehouse; some other writers including Malcolm were co-opted to contribute to a second series.

  The letter continued with proposals for my collaboration in new projects. The first was something called Uncle Harvey, of which I now retain no memory. It was evidently to be a kind of highbrow satirical radio revue for the Third Programme written by Malcolm, Jim Duckett (who had now graduated and was working as John Harrison’s assistant at the Rep) and me, drawing on other writers like David Turner occasionally. Each programme would have a different theme, and Uncle Harvey was to be a linking character and presenter. Discussions with the BBC had gone well but they wanted to make a trial programme before committing themselves. (This programme, on the subject of British politics, written without my participation, was recorded in Birmingham, but nothing came of the project.) Malcolm reported that the script of Between These Four Walls had been sent to Ned Sherrin, producer of That Was The Week That Was, without eliciting any response, but John Harrison wanted us to do another revue for the Rep in the spring of 1963 – ‘What do you think?’ I didn’t think I could collaborate at such a long distance, but the show, called Slap in the Middle, with additional input from David Turner, was postponed till the autumn of that year and I did contribute some material to it. I had been publishing some humorous pieces in American magazines and M
alcolm asked me to keep them in a file so he could read them in due course, and he added as an afterthought: ‘Oh, I have a piece coming up in Mademoiselle . . . You might see it!’

  This letter gives some idea of Malcolm’s extraordinary range of interests as a writer, his energy in pursuing them, and his infectious enthusiasm for collaboration, all qualities which made him such a stimulating friend to other writers. To my mind he often wasted his time on projects which had little hope of coming to fruition and some of which would bring him little money or prestige even if they did. But that was the way he worked: he liked to have lots of projects going at the same time and would drop them and pick them up again as circumstances dictated or allowed. More than thirty years passed before Secker finally published the book on American literary expatriates.

  The last two paragraphs of the letter throw light on other aspects of his character. In the penultimate one he comments pessimistically on the result of the recent general election in England, which was won by Labour under Harold Wilson’s leadership with a very narrow majority, after thirteen years of Tory government. I was surprised to be reminded of how right-wing Malcolm’s views were, especially on education. ‘I’m very miserable they got in,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve no doubt that if they stay in office long enough they’ll ruin English universities . . . I feel the educational system will come in for a hell of a beating. Already in Bristol they are doing a great levelling act, cutting out the Direct Grant Schools.’ Mary and I voted Labour and approved of comprehensive education, in which she had worked as a teacher, but this difference did not disturb our friendship with the Bradburys. I’m fairly sure he voted Liberal, not Conservative, in the ’64 election, and later he was a vocal supporter of the SDP during its brief political life – as I was, less publicly. Ideologically he was a lower-case conservative, cherishing tradition, hierarchy, and moral principle. In the final paragraph of this letter he charmingly caricatured himself in this respect: