Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

            “QUITE A GOOD TIME TO BE BORN: Becoming a Writer, 1935-1975” by David Lodge (first published 2015); “WRITER”S LUCK”|: A Memoir, 1976-1991” by David Lodge (first published 2018)

 

 

            Often it is sheer serendipity that sets you reading the works of a particular author.

Some months ago, my wife and I were going to the wedding of a nephew, to be celebrated just outside Featherston. For us, this meant a drive from Auckland to the Wairarapa. Quite a long haul at the best of times, but lengthened by the fact that, when we were south of Taupo, we found that the Desert Road was closed because of an accident – so we had to drive around the western side of the mountains in the central plateau, adding a couple of hours to our journey. Fortunately, we were entertained the whole way. We’d borrowed from the local library a 13-CD set of the actor David Timson reading the first volume of the autobiography of English novelist David Lodge (born 1935). It’s called  Quite a Good Time to Be Born, subtitled “Becoming a Writer, 1935-1975” (first published in 2015). This kept us listening from Auckland to Wairarapa and most of the way back from Wairarapa to Auckland.

Perhaps you share my view of autobiographies. Nine times out of ten, the most interesting, revealing and intriguing parts of an autobiography concern the childhood, youth and young adulthood of the author – that is, the years of formation before a public persona is established. Thus it was with Quite a Good Time to Be Born.

David Lodge gives a vivid account of being the son of a musician, brought up in a lower-middle-class household in Brockley on the fringes of London. He remembers precisely the type of schools he went to, and the time, during the Second World War, when it was all air-raids and bomb-shelters and evacuation. Of course throughout his autobiography, he tells us what experiences fed into the novels that he later wrote. So these childhood experiences of wartime became the basis of part of his novel Out of the Shelter. After both his schooldays and his first university degrees were over, it being the period of the Cold War when all Western countries wanted to ensure their Youth was Fit to Fight, Lodge had to do two years of compulsory national (military) service. This meant two dull and soul-destroying years in a tank regiment… out of which he later produced the novel Ginger, You’re Barmy.

The most formative thing in his earlier years, however, was that he was raised a Catholic. His parents he presents as tolerant and broad-minded people, but still committed to their religion, and of course young David’s schooldays were spent in Catholic schools. He gives a bad report to only one school – a primary school which he briefly attended as a tot, run by rather severely disciplinarian nuns. For the rest of his schools, they were run on strict lines as all grammar schools then were, but he recalls with affection most of the priests and religious brothers who taught him, and remembers one Irish lay teacher who really set him on the path of loving literature and writing. He is very precise and detailed about how Catholic life was in the pre-Vatican II period, with long fasts undertaken, confession regularly attended, pilgrimages taken by groups of Catholic university students, consciousness of sin and a firm sense of Heaven and Hell.

Again, most of this he relates in a good-natured way, and tells how he became a critic by writing a thesis on British Catholic novelists. But his attitudes (if not the church’s) gradually changed once he was married and had to deal with the church’s ban on artificial contraception. His wife Mary was also a practising Catholic and the couple struggled with the church’s ruling. This tension fed into his novels The British Museum is Falling Down and especially How Far Can You Go?, both of which dealt with this part of Catholic life in terms of comedy. David and Mary were to have three children, the youngest of whom had Down’s Syndrome. Lodge apologises for using the outmoded and offensive term “Mongolism”, but that was the term that was still routinely used in the 1960s. Against the advice of people who suggested their Down’s Syndrome son should be put into a special hospital, the Lodges embraced him as one of the family and were glad they did.

Lodge in recent years has said that he has basically withdrawn from the church – but despite satirising the severe strictures surrounding sexual activity that were the norm in his youth, he also says that the old rules of courtship and sexual activity being confined to marriage were, in the long run, saner than much that has followed the “sexual revolution”.

These earlier sections of Quite a Good Time to Be Born are the most relatable. Once Lodge gets into his first years as a lecturer and then a professor of English Literature, the narrative becomes a little less engaging. Lodge spent the whole of his professorial career at the University of Birmingham, juggling his teaching activities with being both a prolific novelist and a prolific critic. He also paid a number of long visits to the USA as a visiting professor at Berkeley in California. Inevitably there are anecdotes of the colleagues he worked with, friendships, departmental clashes over courses and the type of things one expects in an account of a campus. Many names of academics – some of them well-known as critics – are mentioned. Lodge eventually wrote three campus novels  and was often mistaken for his contemporary and friend Malcolm Bradbury, who also wrote campus novels. Lodge’s first campus novel Changing Places was published the same year (1975) as Malcolm Bradbury’s more  bitter campus novel The History Man and critics praised both novels in the same terms.

Even when he is dealing with his academic contemporaries, however, Lodge is usually good-humoured. There are, at most, one or two people of whom he writes negative things. At least in this first volume of his autobiography, Lodge seems to be somebody who actively likes human beings, rejoices in other people’s achievements, and regards his own successes as a piece of luck for which he himself is not necessarily responsible. And yet, as Quite a Good Time to Be Born reaches its later chapters, we feel more and more heavily the effect of a mere chronicle, as if Lodge is dutifully ticking off events in his life rather than saying anything illuminating about them. The vivid nature of the childhood and early-manhood chapters has evaporated.

 

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Well, that was my response to hearing David Timson read Quite a Good Time to Be Born. Despite my misgivings about the later parts of the memoir, I was impressed enough, when I got back to Auckland, to whistle up from the national library service a copy of David Lodge’s second tome of autobiography, Writer’s Luck, mainly covering the years when, after after 27 years teaching in the University of Birmingham’s English Department, and after having established himself as a novelist with many publications, he decided to become a full-time writer.

Alas, this second volume is a very dull tome indeed. In his opening chapter, Lodge informs us laboriously of his further drawing away from Catholicism and the brief period when he sank into the nebulous “Sea of Faith” movement. Much later (p.234) he has a kind of epiphany and decides that he does believe in God but is an agnostic in that he embraces no particular religion. He compares notes with (Catholic convert) novelist Muriel Spark and (lapsed Catholic) novelist Anthony Burgess. Even more laboriously, he lectures us on structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstructionism, subjects of his academic books. He says that in 1976, when he produced Modes of Modern Writing, he came to the conclusion that the jargon of post-modernism was becoming impenetrable and tended to “mystify rather than enlighten” (To which, with the utmost crudity, I can only say “No shit, Sherlock”.) He chronicles how all his children did at school, what holidays they spent together (often in Ireland), and how his Down’s Syndrome son was accommodated. He tells us about visits to his ailing aunt in Hawaii. He also tells us how, out of pure curiosity, he saw a porn film while in France, and he touches gingerly on the fact that, while he himself is monogamous and no philanderer, he has nevertheless put sexually-explicit episodes into some of his novels, to the bemusement of some critics.

Very rapidly, though, Writer’s Luck lapses into accounts of more academic conferences attended (both before and after Lodge ceased to be an active academic) and the worthies who were there, with many familiar names being dropped. This always leads Lodge into telling us how everything fed into his series of “campus novels”. One gets the distinct impressions (a.) that most conferences he attended were more often socialising than serious academic discourse, being subsidised beanfeasts for the participants; and (b.) that whatever he has to say in his autobiographies about such conferences, he says much better in his novels. The lists of names, venues, dates and schedules are simply boring.

Once he is a full-time writer, we are inundated with the minute details of his dealings with publishers, what sort of dust-jackets his novels had, what sort of typography they had (no kidding), how his books were received and reviewed and how he fared with the Booker Prize (he was twice short-listed but never won). Obviously some of these details are necessary in the autobiography of a writer, but Lodge is very sensitive about the negative reviews he sometimes got, and often consoles himself by telling us of positive reviews that balanced them. (Okay, he never won the Booker, but Penelope Mortimer loved How Far Can You Go? and it won the Whitbread Prize, so there!). Then, once some of his novels are adapted for television, we get minute details of how he influenced or responded to each adaptation.

There are some amusing admissions. After telling us how he and other eminent academics supported a young theorist who wanted to push a “poststructuralist” view of literature, he later admits (p.124) that such an approach “became a kind of orthodoxy which ambitious young scholars felt obliged to embrace and apply to literature in a jargon-heavy discourse of tortuous obscurity.” Probably to the outrage of some New Zealand readers (but to my own covert snickers) he notes that he did read Keri Hulme’s Booker-Prize-winning The Bone People to the end, but when a friend told him that he had tried to read it three times and never finished it, Lodge “shared his opinion of its literary merit.” (p.239) He gives an amusing account of a disastrous conference on literary theory that was held in Glasgow, which had the audience turning rebellious at its patent elitism and obscurantism. Literary theory does tend to wilful mystification, after all.

The most painful episode came when he chaired and was a member of the panel judging the Booker Prize (in 1982). He favoured Martin Amis’s London Fields to get the gong, but was outmanouevred by two woman on the panel who insisted that only “ideologically correct” books should win prizes, and Amis’ novel was about an amoral, misogynistic, opportunist. I think few members of panels judging literary work ever break silence about how awards are given, and I applaud Lodge’s openness on this matter. More honest reports (on the questionable reasons some books win awards and others don’t) would help to break down the notion that book awards are always given on merit. I should add that (p.373) Lodge admits in the later part of his novel-writing career that his work lost favour, gained fewer positive reviews, and attracted a smaller readership than his earlier novels had. But he consoles himself with the fact that recently his novels, in French translation, have won great favour in France. Currently, novels by David Lodge are read by a much larger audience in France than in England.

My chief impression of Writer’s Luck was of an account being rendered – probably worked up conscientiously from diaries – by an author who is now in his eighties. Stealing somebody else’s words, allow me to quote, with approval, from Anthony Quinn’s review of Writer’s Luck in the Guardian in January 2018 (you may find it easily on line):

“This book presents a writer who simply has no clue as to what he should leave out, or how to compress a narrative for the sake of pace…. The wonder is that Lodge, an award-winning novelist, literary critic and professor, has such an eye for the untelling anecdote, the irrelevant detail. The warning signs are there early on when he methodically records his children’s O and A-level results, class of degree, as if he is writing a round-robin Christmas card to some distant acquaintance.”

Quite so. Lodge is now in his mid-80s and Writer’s Luck reads like an attempt to say the last word on everything he had done.

Dull. Dull. Dull.

 

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And yet, having read some of Lodge’s novels in the past, reading this two-volume autobiography did pique my interest in Lodge’s work. So over the summer season I decided to read all his novels. I will torture you with my findings on them over the next three “Something Old” postings.