Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  We are having a delightful time with Matthew, and the summer in Lockington was particularly enjoyable. I am growing quite doting; but then he is not either rebellious or sinful. I keep telling him about decent living, the high moral life, and respecting his father, and am encouraging him to go in for the church. Piety, piety I cry. I hope it works.

  In February 1965 I received disturbing news from Malcolm. He was being headhunted by the new University of East Anglia at Norwich, who were luring him with the prospect of early promotion to Senior Lecturer and the chance to head and design an American Studies programme from scratch, and he was obviously tempted, though deeply divided, by the offer. He wrote: ‘I’m in a state of great indecision: one thing it makes me realise is how attached I am to Birmingham, and how if I went I’d miss you.’ I felt exactly the same, and wrote a letter setting out a number of reasons why he should stay in Birmingham, the final one being that he was a conservative as regards education and would be unhappy in an institution dedicated (as the ‘New Universities’ of that era were) to radical innovation in teaching the humanities. At the end of March, however, just as we were about to leave Providence, we heard that Malcolm had accepted UEA’s offer. He told me long afterwards that on the day when he had promised to respond to it he went out with two letters in his pockets, one saying yes and one saying no, and posted the latter; but the next day UEA rang him up and said, ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’ and he agreed that he didn’t. Malcolm hated to say no to anybody, as many people – literary editors, British Council officers, conference convenors, and secretaries of literary societies – discovered to their advantage.

  I wrote back, only slightly exaggerating the note of grief. ‘Oh Malcolm, how could you do it? How could you turn your back on Brum and us? We’re really very desolated that you won’t be there when we get back.’ Communication was interrupted during our long trek west, and it wasn’t until May that I received from Malcolm a fuller account of the matter and his fluctuating feelings about it. Apparently Richard Hoggart had suggested to Terence Spencer that he should see if Birmingham could match Norwich’s offer with something comparable, and Spencer, after seeming receptive to the idea, had finally failed to act on it. ‘This very complicated situation has involved us in all kinds of doubts, anguish and uncertainty, and is half a reason for our excessive silence, since in a way I was hoping that I’d still be in Birmingham after all. I shall feel particularly depressed about not having your day-to-day company. This won’t mean that we won’t see each other, obviously, but less often, and not teaching together, which will be a great loss.’

  And of course we did continue to see each other at regular intervals over the years that followed, sometimes on academic occasions, sometimes on visits with wives and children. We had a two-family holiday in Brittany together in 1967, and much later a touring holiday without children in the same part of France. When Malcolm and Angus Wilson (who had a part-time post at UEA) started the MA course in creative writing there, which under Malcolm’s direction would become the most successful of its kind in the country, I was its first external examiner. (There was only one student that year, Ian McEwan. I wish I could say I instantly recognised his genius, but I didn’t, though I did pass him, complaining of the scruffy state of his manuscripts.) In 1977 Malcolm encouraged me to apply for the Henfield Fellowship in creative writing at UEA which was associated with the MA course, and I spent a summer term there writing part of How Far Can You Go?, living in a little maisonette on campus and occupying Malcolm’s office, as he was on sabbatical leave. Since he was working at home I saw a good deal of him and spent every Sunday with the family. And for twenty years or more we would meet every July at the British Council Seminar in Cambridge, previously mentioned, at which I was a regular guest speaker, as was Malcolm himself after he handed over the chairmanship to his friend and colleague at UEA, Christopher Bigsby.

  There were fewer reasons to tempt Malcolm to revisit Birmingham, but among them was television. He was one of the first English literary novelists to embrace the medium enthusiastically, and he kept faith with it throughout his career, in spite of many frustrations and disappointments. The BBC’s Drama Department at Pebble Mill in Birmingham was a centre of innovative production until it was phased out at the turn of the century; Malcolm had made contacts with the people who worked there when he lived in the city and maintained them after he left. The first fruit of this association was a ‘Play for Today’ broadcast in January 1975 called The After Dinner Game which he wrote (characteristically) in collaboration with Chris Bigsby. It was a studio play, as most TV drama was in those days, rehearsed like a stage play and then recorded on video by a multi-camera method in twenty-minute ‘takes’, which had to be aborted and done again from the beginning if anyone fluffed their lines. I went along to Pebble Mill at Malcolm’s invitation to watch this tense, complicated, collaborative operation, impressed by, and a little envious of, his involvement in it. The experience kindled in me a desire to get involved myself one day, though it was many years before that came to pass, by which time TV drama had become less theatrical and more filmic, and Malcolm had demonstrated his professional mastery of the medium in numerous original plays, mini-series, and adaptations. Like every writer who works in television and film, he wrote many scripts that were never produced, but he was exceptionally unlucky with the adaptation of his own novel, Rates of Exchange, which the BBC commissioned him to write as a six-part serial. Two weeks before principal photography was due to begin (on location in Hungary) when it was, of course, fully cast, and several hundreds of thousands of pounds had already been spent on it, the project was cancelled because of a dispute, or crisis, over budgeting in the BBC’s Drama Department. Only someone who has been professionally involved in television drama, and knows how difficult it is to get a major serial ‘green-lighted’ for production, and has some idea of how much rewriting of the screenplay is demanded even after that point has been reached, can begin to imagine the depth of Malcolm’s disappointment. Many writers would have given up the medium in disgust, but he persevered with it, pausing only to relieve his feelings in a satirical novella, Cuts (1987).

  It is clear from our correspondence in 1965 that we both genuinely mourned our separation, and if I had been in Birmingham at the time I would undoubtedly have done more to persuade Malcolm to stay there. But in retrospect it was obviously essential for our individual development as writers that we should separate. One department could hardly contain two novelists writing satirical academic novels, and it was necessary that we should have different experiences to draw on for them. Changing Places and The History Man both appeared in the same year, 1975, and both were about the same basic phenomenon – the global radicalisation of universities in the late 1960s/early 1970s – but observed in very different places and fictionalised in quite different ways. I was right in predicting that Malcolm would find aspects of the radical ethos of UEA uncongenial, but that was precisely what provoked his masterpiece, The History Man. Like Evelyn Waugh, whose work he admired enormously, Malcolm’s imagination responded with gleeful relish to the things in contemporary society he found most alien, extreme and absurd.

  Changing Places was inspired by an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California in Berkeley in the first half of 1969, a time when it was a key site of the student revolution and 1960s’ counter-culture. I was determined to make use of this material in a novel, but conscious that several novels had already been published about visiting Englishmen having transforming experiences in American universities, not least Malcolm’s Stepping Westward (1965), in which a provincial British novelist called James Walker is writer-in-residence at a campus in the middle of America and proves ill-equipped to read the political plot in which he becomes involved. Pondering how to find some new angle on this transatlantic rite of passage, it occurred to me that there had been no novels about American academics visiting British universities, though this was not uncommon in those days, u
sually through an exchange scheme. That was how the binary structure of Changing Places – two professors, one English and one American, having parallel adventures in each other’s habitats – evolved, partly out of the need to differentiate my work from Malcolm’s.

  To my surprise and disappointment the novel was turned down by three publishers before Malcolm, who had read it with appreciation, recommended that I send it to his own publisher, Tom Rosenthal at Secker & Warburg. We already had the same literary agent, Graham Watson of Curtis Brown, to whom Malcolm had introduced me soon after we first met, and he acted on Malcolm’s suggestion. Tom Rosenthal accepted the novel, subject to some reduction in length. When it was published it received a royal flush of good reviews and my fortunes as a novelist improved dramatically. I have published my novels with Secker (now Harvill Secker) ever since. Many authors would have hesitated to encourage a writer-friend whose work in various ways inevitably competed with theirs to join their own publisher’s list, but Malcolm’s helpful gesture was typically generous and unselfish. In the late autumn of 1975 Tom Rosenthal told us he had been informed by the Yorkshire Post that they had narrowed the choice for their annual Fiction Prize to Changing Places and The History Man. When my novel won Malcolm’s disappointment must have been sharpened by the irony that he had been instrumental in getting it published, but he never exhibited any hard feelings. It was a minor prize, only £150 in value, but it was a first for me and would have been for him. Happily a few months later he received the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award for The History Man. Neither novel, incidentally, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, when the judges decided that only two novels instead of the usual six were worthy of the honour. One of the judges was Angus Wilson, who told Malcolm privately that he had felt unable to argue for The History Man because they were colleagues at UEA, but it is more probable that he disliked the book’s take on contemporary culture.

  In the next decade the Booker Prize became much more important in determining rewards and reputations – some would say excessively so. From 1980 onwards the choice of the winner was postponed until the day of the banquet at which it was announced, an event covered live on television. These developments allowed bookmakers to accept bets on the result and converted the event into a kind of literary Oscar night, steeply raising its public profile. In 1981 Malcolm was chairman of the panel that awarded the prize to Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children (though he told me his own preference was for D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel). The following year he was shortlisted for his own novel, Rates of Exchange, about an English academic’s adventures on a British Council lecture tour in an imaginary East European country under communist rule called Slaka. A few days before the banquet I sent him a postcard wishing him good luck, a picture of James Joyce as a young man looking quizzically into the lens of the camera. (When asked what he was thinking at that moment Joyce said he was wondering if the photographer would lend him five shillings.) The prize, however, went to J.M. Coetzee for Life & Times of Michael K. I phoned Malcolm next day to commiserate, and he said to me at the end of the conversation, in a tone at once encouraging and wistful, ‘Now it’s your turn’, knowing that I would have a new novel out next year. Small World, a carnivalesque romance about the international conference scene, was indeed shortlisted in 1984, when the surprise winner was Anita Brookner, for Hotel du Lac. At the end of my story, which was set in 1979, most of the characters are brought together at the huge annual convention of the American Modern Language Association in New York, and I contrived a brief Hitchcockian appearance in these pages for Malcolm and myself at a VIP cocktail party. The young hero of the tale overhears in the throng ‘a shortish, dark-haired man . . . talking to a tallish dark-haired man smoking a pipe. “If I can have Eastern Europe,” the tallish man was saying in an English accent, “you can have the rest of the world.” “All right,” said the shortish man, “but I daresay people will still get us mixed up.”’

  And of course they did. I was once telephoned in my Birmingham office by a man who asked me to settle a bet that I was the same person as Malcolm Bradbury. Letters were often addressed to me at the University of East Anglia, including one from the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Communications at Oxford. We were interviewed together by a German radio journalist at some British Council event in Hamburg and I vividly remember the panic on her face as she realised halfway through that she had mixed up our identities. Writing about this incident in a newspaper column I said we were in danger of becoming the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of contemporary English letters. The continual confusion was amusing but also exasperating. In spite of generic resemblances between some of our novels, it seemed to us that most of them were quite distinct in technique and thematic preoccupations.

  When Nice Work was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1988, Malcolm was among the distinguished guests at the final banquet who, as they arrived at the Mansion House, were quizzed on live television about who should or would win, and I watched a video-recording of the event next day, in a hungover and somewhat despondent mood induced by having been a runner-up once again. Tall and handsome in his dinner jacket, Malcolm said with a smile, ‘For love and friendship, I hope it’s David Lodge’, for which I blessed him, knowing that such an outcome would have revived the hurt of his own disappointment five years earlier. The element of rivalry which was always inevitably present in our relationship had by now become a potential threat to its stability, and we preserved our friendship by surrendering some of the intimacy of the early years. We no longer discussed our writing plans in detail or showed each other work in progress or gave detailed critiques of the novels when they were published, limiting ourselves to supportive expressions of general approval. I think we both wished to avoid getting too close to each other’s work, perhaps being influenced by it through knowing too much about it, and thus encouraging the people who insisted on pairing us together or confusing us with each other. But this is not to say that influence ceased. As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, all writers glance sideways at their peers as they write, and it was Malcolm whom I most often invoked as imagined reader and critic, to test the quality of the work.

  Our last collaboration, if it can be called that, was a Foreword/Afterword I wrote for a characteristic production of Malcolm’s, My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism’s Hidden Hero published by Secker in 1987. This started life as an article published in the Observer on 1 April 1984, which described a seminally important text called La Fornication comme acte culturel by an obscure French literary intellectual called Henri Mensonge, parodying and travestying the jargon of Continental literary theory in the process. It fooled a considerable number of readers, who failed to notice that the surname means ‘lie’ in French. Later Malcolm developed it into a short book and Tom Rosenthal asked if I would write an appropriate Foreword or Afterword. I wrote it in the persona of Michel Tardieu, the French Professor of Structuralist Narratology who was a character in Small World. He finds the identity of the nominal author of the book as suspiciously elusive as its subject:

  There is a suggestive consonance between the syllables ‘Bradbury’ and ‘Bunbury’, perhaps the most famous alias in the pages of English literature, which persuades me that the name is a floating signifier that has attached itself to many discrete signifieds: Bradbury the campus novelist, Bradbury the Professor of American Studies, Bradbury the Booker Prize judge, Bradbury the TV adapter of postmodernist novelists like John Fowles and Tom Sharpe, Bradbury the tireless international conference-goer and British Council Lecturer. Even within those disparate categories there is doubt and difficulty in establishing the facts – many British readers, for instance, being convinced that the novels of Malcolm Bradbury are written by David Lodge, and vice versa.

  I had been a half-time professor at Birmingham since 1984, and around the time that Mensonge was published I took early retirement from my post at Birmingham to become a full-time freelance writer. Malcolm carried on at UEA as Professor of America
n Studies till 1995, but with reduced duties, concentrating increasingly on the MA programme in creative writing, which by now commanded tremendous prestige, and continuing to appear in all the guises listed by Tardieu. Each of us decided at about the same time to steer our narrative writing in a new direction, and we took the same generic route: the biographical novel about a classic writer. My Author, Author was written after Malcolm’s death, but I first made a note about the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier as a possible subject for a novel in 1995, before I discovered that Malcolm was writing a novel about Denis Diderot, the French encyclopaedist, versatile man of letters and prominent figure of the Enlightenment, whose wide-ranging intellectual energy Malcolm admired, and whose disappointments stirred his sympathies. As soon as To the Hermitage was finished he began to plan a novel about Chateaubriand’s visit to America in 1791–2, a fragment of which gave Liar’s Landscape its title; and after writing Author, Author I decided to write a novel about H.G. Wells. Our earlier novels had all been set in our own lifetimes. We were, of course, part of a cultural trend: towards the end of the last century and in the first decade of the present one an increasing number of literary novelists published books which applied the techniques of fiction to the life stories of past writers. But it is interesting that we were both attracted quite independently to this kind of project at the same stage of our careers. And different as they are, To the Hermitage and Author, Author have some features in common: both end with the death of the main character, and both contain reflections on what Malcolm’s narrator calls ‘Postmortemism’ – whether, for instance, the life of books after their authors’ deaths compensates for the disappointments and frustrations of a literary vocation, or indeed for the irreducible fact of death itself. In To the Hermitage this theme is explored in a variety of ways, including a number of humorous anecdotes about the bizarre or mysterious fates of the actual corpses of writers such as Descartes, Voltaire and, most importantly, Lawrence Sterne. The author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey was as much a source of inspiration for Malcolm’s book as Diderot, for he spliced together a rambling, digressive, Shandean narrative of his own pilgrimage to St Petersburg in 1993, with an account of Diderot’s residence there as the guest of Catherine the Great in 1773–4.