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.  

ALL YOU NEED KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS OF DAVID LODGE – PART ONE

Dear Reader, I’m sorry, but I did warn you that this was coming when, in my last posting, I reviewed David Lodge’s autobiographies Quite a Good Time To Be Born and Writer’s Luck. I noted that, having consumed his autobiographies, over the summer season I read my way methodically through all fifteen of Lodge’s novels, only a few of which I had read before. I also said that I would present a three-part series commenting on them all. And here for your edification the series begins.

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David Lodge’s first novel was The Picturegoers, published in 1960 when he was 25. But in a detailed introduction to a 1993 reprint of the novel, Lodge notes that he’d begun writing it when he was 21 and finished it long before a publisher picked it up. He also says it is very much a young man’s novel, rather too eager to explain things at length and get lost in side-issues. This is true, but even so, The Picturegoers is a very competent novel and nothing for the older novelist to be ashamed of. I also have to note that it is a novel more seriously immersed in Catholicism than his later, and often more satirical, views of religion are.

It is structured as a series of vignettes of various people who go regularly to the cinema. The seedy old picture palace, the Palladium, is depicted vividly in all its tattiness and the novel makes it clear that even in 1960, picture-going was declining under the impact of television. Even so, Lodge implicitly equates the picture-going habit with religion and church-going – another form of escaping from everyday reality, perhaps.

The first half of the novel has people reacting to the screening of a Hollywood sex-farce (though given a different name, it sounds like the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Seven Year Itch). This evokes different reactions from different members of the audience. It stirs up the thuggish teddy-boy Harry to violent sex fantasies, which he later tries to act out. It makes the older married man nostalgic for the livelier sex he had with his wife when they were younger. And the local Catholic priest Father Kipling – who sees the lascivious film by accident – is so outraged that he tries to set up a “crusade” to stop people going to the movies. (The “crusade” is a flop and even Father Kipling’s bishop advises him to give it up.)

In the second half, the desperate theatre manager tries to woo back his diminishing audience by screening something different – the classic neo-realist Italian film Bicycle Thieves. But this is too much like reality, and the audiences aren’t impressed. Unwillingly, he ends up attracting a teenage audience by screening Rock Around the Clock, which has the kids jiving in the aisles, much to his disgust. Movie-going is still declining, just like church-going.

Inasmuch as it has a main character, it is the young intellectual Mark Underwood who, as Lodge’s introduction suggests, draws very much on aspects of Lodge’s own life. He’s a Catholic who has lapsed a bit, but who is bucked up by lodging with a lively and welcoming lower-middle-class Irish Catholic family, the Mallory family, and he falls in love with the eldest Mallory girl, Clare. She clearly expects this to lead to marriage. She had tried a vocation as a nun, but had given it up and left the convent before she took her final vows. Why did she leave? This dangles as a question until late in the novel when she explains to Mark that another postulant, Hilda, had what amounted to a lesbian crush on Clare, which might have caused a scandal. (Given that the novel was published 60-plus years ago, this is explained very discreetly.) Later, to extend the movies-religion equation, Lodge had poor neurotic Hilda having transferred her adoration from religion to the cult of James Dean.

As always, Lodge presents very accurately the customs and observances of pre-Vatican II Catholics. But (and here I am giving a big spoiler, as I am allowed to do what dealing with older novels) I find very implausible the eventual “conversion” of Mark Underwood, which has him leaving Clare and going off to try a vocation as a priest. This simply does not square with the character who is presented to us for most of the novel. Again in his 1993 Introduction, Lodge says he now thinks this was an artificial conclusion, too influenced by all the Catholic novelists he’d been reading (Bernanos, Mauriac, Greene etc.). And yes, Mark does spend many pages solilioquising and agonising over the bleeding obvious.

Lodge’s second novel Ginger, You’re Barmy (first published in 1962) was his reaction to the two years of compulsory National Service he had to do in the army in the mid-1950s. Jonathan Browne and Mike Brady are fresh out of university. Middle-class and English, Jonathan has done well academically and is looking to get his national service over with, so that he can move into the world of academe. He plans to play along with the military system, much as he hates it. Mike Brady didn’t do well at university but also wants to get his national service over with. Irish and working-class, Mike has a rebellious streak and chooses to take the system on, rather than conforming to it. This leads to big trouble. Despite its jocular title, Ginger, You’re Barmy is not the sort of comic novel that Lodge later made his forte. Indeed much of it reads like dour documentary, doubtless worked up from notes Lodge made during his two years of military servitude. Those in authority – especially the corporals and other NCOs – are bullying to national service recruits. Squaddies are forced to do pointless duties. Parading and drill lead nowhere. There is a clear class structure, with the higher-ups and Regulars mainly coming from private schools or Oxbridge, and following a family military tradition. The food is generally disgusting. Punishments are severe. Most of the working-class recruits are spectacularly foul-mouthed. In his autobiography, Lodge notes that he euphemised most of the swearing in the first edition of this novel, using “fugg” instead of “fuck”. For a second edition years later, he reinstated “fuck” and “c—t” in all their glory – but then he had doubts about this and in the most recent edition he returned to the euphemised language, saying it was more appropriate to novels of the era when it was first published.

It is very easy to bracket Ginger, You’re Barmy with the “angry young men” British novels of the 1950s and early 1960s, written by Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, John Wain and their ilk. Like the “angries”, it is written in the style of realistic reportage and it attacks social castes and their elaborate rituals. It is a protest against young men having to give up two years of their life at a time when they should be getting on with their careers.  But the whole system of compulsory National Service was about to disappear even as Lodge was writing, which inevitably leaves Ginger, You’re Barmy as a period piece protesting against something that is now mainly of historical interest.

However, the “angry young man” aspect of this novel is only part of the story. Ginger, You’re Barmy is written in the first-person with Jonathan Browne as narrator, and we are soon aware that he is a rather devious and unlikeable character, finding excuses for his own behaviour while castigating others. Morally flawed, he may be reporting barrack-room conditions accurately, but he is clearly an opportunist. One strand of the plot (signalled to us at the novel’s very opening) is that he has moved in on his pal Mike’s girlfriend and supplanted him. Lodge also has to create a plot to keep the documentary readable. An NCO bullies and abuses an inept recruit to the point of causing his death (whether by accident or suicide is a matter for debate). The impulsive Mike takes an elaborate revenge. How plausible this part of the novel is will be something readers have to decide. For this reader, after all the documentary, it seemed a leap into the implausible.

 

The British Museum is Falling Down (first published in 1965) is witty and relatively short – though, alas, much of its humour now seems dated and laboured. Adam Appleby, in his mid-twenties, has very little income and is researching his doctoral thesis on a linguistic-literary topic, “Long Sentences in Modern Fiction”. This requires him to visit the British Museum Reading Room every day. But on the one day when the novel’s action takes place, Adam is preoccupied with something else. He and his wife Barbara are practising Catholics and the church opposes artificial birth control. Adam and Barbara, housed in cheap and uncomfortable lodgings, already have three young children and, given that the “rhythm” method of birth control is so unreliable (“Vatican roulette” according to its critics), Adam lives in mortal fear of Barbara being pregnant again. This is what distracts him throughout a totally unproductive day in the Reading Room. Adam daydreams. For a number of pages, he imagines himself as the pope, repealing the church’s ban on contraception.

Much of the novel’s comedy depends on broad slapstick. Adam inadvertently sets off a fire alarm in the Reading Room. Adam has to fend off a sex-hungry teenage girl when he’s trying to get hold of what he thinks is a valuable manuscript. His unreliable motor-scooter explodes. There’s also the comedy of awkwardness and social discomfort. Adam just happens to bump into his parish priest when he’s about to buy some contraceptives. In a gathering of literary academics, one character talks about “Kingsley Anus”, “C.P.Slow” and “Mormon Nailer”.

But most of the comedy relies on pastiches of canonical writers and extended literary jokes, befitting a student of literature. A novel confined to a single day consciously echoes the structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. There’s a descriptive passage mimicking the sex-obsessed D.H. Lawrence (“He passed through the narrow vaginal passage, and entered the huge womb of the Reading Room” etc.). When Adam attempts to renew his reader’s card, he faces a meaningless bureaucracy out of Kafka. A group of Asians in the Reading Room brings forth what sounds like an overwrought description by Conrad. Adam’s meeting with supervisors of his thesis is recorded in a plodding, cloth-eared style that can only be a parody of C.P.Snow’s dull prose. The terse dialogue with a group of “butchers” is Hemingwayesque. All this is fun up to a point, but also arch. We know that some jokes will be laboured as soon as we hear the protagonist’s name – Adam – for Adam was the father of mankind, which is exactly what Adam Appleby doesn’t want to be. As for Adam’s study of “Long Sentences in Modern Fiction”, probably the longest such sentence is Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, so inevitably The British Museum is Falling Down ends with Barbara voicing her fears of pregnancy and child-raising in a pastiche of Molly Bloom. And having noted all this, I’m sure there are some literary jokes that passed me by.

While laughing often enough at this novel, I found much of its self-conscious style overwhelmed, and finally smothered, what I think must have been intended as a satire on official Catholic teaching and consequent hardships for young parents.

Two matters of interest. At some points in the story, Adam Appleby suffers from an inexplicable pain in his knee. David Lodge made this same affliction a major plot-point in his later novel Therapy. In his autobiography, Lodge explains that The British Museum is Falling Down was originally going to be called The British Museum Has Lost Its Charm, a line from the Gershwin song “A Foggy Day in London Town” – but his publisher couldn’t clear the copyrighted line with the Gershwin estate.

 

Out of the Shelter (first published 1970 – slightly revised for 1985 reprint) was Lodge’s fourth novel. As he says in the Afterword to the revised edition, and as he explains in detail in the first volume of his autobiography  Quite a Good Time to Be Born, it is the most autobiographical of all this novels. Timothy Young grows up in a modest lower-middle-class Catholic household in London, during the war years and their immediate aftermath. He has vivid memories of the Blitz and of the family crammed in the backyard shelter during air-raids. There is tragedy when a neighbour’s house suffers a direct hit, killing a little girl with whom the boy used to play. Then come the drab years of rationing and austerity. But there is an unexpected lifeline from this. Timothy’s elder sister Kath – quite a few years older than he – has found work as a secretary with the American army. In 1951, when Timothy is 16, she invites him to holiday where she is stationed in Heidelberg, one of the few German cities untouched by wartime bombing. So Timothy leaves behind grey depressing post-war England and finds himself in a foreign town where occupying Americans are in charge. Instead of modest rationed meals he dines on thick juicy steak and Baked Alaska  and finds himself in the company of precocious American boys of his own age, who drink milkshake after milkshake until they make themselves sick. Americans dominate the roads of Heidelberg in their latest-model Fords and Buicks. They have requisitioned all the best hotels and swimming pools. In full swing is a consumerism unknown to the English boy – Coca Cola apparently on tap all day long; large and fully-stocked refrigerators; long-playing records spinning in stacked order at parties; elaborate birthday parties thrown by wealthy American parents, including a party held on a riverboat cruising the Neckar, where the American teenagers indulge in the alien American custom of “necking”; gambling and – cautiously explored by Timothy – sex.

            The protagonist’s name is has obvious significance – “Young” – as this is a young man’s coming-of-age novel. In the opening chapter, Lodge writes his third-person narrative in a simple and naïve style, indicating the naivete of the little boy. The boy’s perception develops in adolescence, but not too much. Indeed, a little clumsily, Lodge has to add a postscript clarifying relationships between adult characters which the adolescent boy didn’t understand. The title Out of the Shelter also has obvious significance. Timothy has come literallly out of the bomb-shelter that protected him as a child, but also out of the shelter of English insularity, for the first time confronting another culture and American consumerism. One minor German character, Rudolf, makes it clear to Timothy that Germans suffered in the war, too, modifying his hitherto simplistic, boyish view of what the war entailed. Separated from his Catholic family, and with his hedonistic big sister Kath having lost her faith, Timothy also begins to think about religion differently. And then there is the matter of sex.

            Nearly all the details given so far in this notice are pure autobiography. 16-year-old Lodge did take a long holiday in American-occupied Heidelberg in 1951. Also, though it seems improbable, like Timothy he really did live there in a hostel for young women, having to remain hidden in his room when the other tenants were around. But two things are pure fiction. It was his mature aunt Eileen who invited him to Heidelberg, not an older sister. (Lodge was an only child and has no siblings.) This does affect the novel as Kath comes across more like a solicitous aunt than a sister to the teenager. Then there is the matter of sex. I’m sure 16-year-old David Lodge’s mind and body boiled and bubbled with erotic imagery as any teenage boy’s mind and body do. But at least some of the (relatively mild) sexual experiences Timothy has play more like erotic wish-fulfilment fantasies than lived experience.

 

            Changing Places (published 1975) was the first of Lodge’s “campus novels”. It is built on a  comic conceit as old as the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse. Two academics swap places and each not only discovers how the other lives, but each actually comes to embrace the other’s way of life. Specifically American academic Morris Zapp, specialising in Eng. Lit., takes up a visiting professorship at Rummidge University (in other words, David Lodge’s University of Birmingham). Meanwhile Philip Swallow, lecturer at Rummidge University also in Eng. Lit., takes up a visiting professorship at  Zapp’s Euphoria College in the state of Euphoria near the city of Esseph with its Silver Span bridge (i.e. in California near San Francisco with its Golden Gate bridge). To state the bleeding obvious, Changing Places is in part David Lodge’s response to his own time as a visiting professor at Berkeley, California.

Neatly for Lodge’s plot, Philip Swallow, after some other sexual adventures, moves in with, and partners, Zapp’s wife Desiree who was in the process of divorcing Zapp. And Morris Zapp eventually moves in with Swallow’s wife, and mother of their three children, Hilary. This is the stuff of standard bedroom farce and the tale involves such obvious japes as a cupboard full of empty tobacco tins falling on Zapp’s head when he explores Swallow’s study, and Swallow’s private conversation with his faraway wife being accidentally broadcast on a talkback show. In its resolution, Morris and Desiree and Philip and Hilary seem to be settling on a menage-a-quatre. Had Lodge been watching Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice?

As is so often the case, Lodge can’t resist showing off his savvy about literary genres – a trait that, frankly, becomes more than a little tiresome if you read all his novels. A section of the novel is written in the form of letters between the four main protagonists, but then Lodge spoils the joke by explaining it when he has one correspondent write, of a book she is sending, “There’s a whole chapter on how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody’s done that since the eighteenth century?” Ho, ho, ho and how self-referential. Following this there’s a section in the form of newspaper clippings (John Dos Passos, anyone?). The finale is the four-way conversation of Morris and Desiree and Philip and Hilary, presented as a screenplay. Such fun.

What is the comparison Lodge makes between an American campus and an English one? Dare I say it’s rather predictable. Students in England tend to be more conformist and are only beginning to become rebellious under American influence. English professors are more stuffy and authoritarian. Students in the USA are openly rebellious all the time, go in for noisy demos at the drop of a hat, rumble with the police and loudly insist that they have a part in running the college. Their professors court students’ favour by acting like their peers and pals. In England, it is really the American Zapp who shakes up the University of Rummige’s administration and in effect stages a coup in the Eng.Lit. department. Poor Philip Swallow makes little impact on the University of Euphoria, but does adopt its ways. There’s a lot more open, unbuttoned and promiscuous sex in the USA than there is in England and Swallow goes happily down that rabbit-hole.

Given that the novel is now nearly half-a-century old, and seems set even a little earlier than that (1968 maybe?), much of it is very dated with its anti-Vietnam War protests, jokes about state governor Ronald Duck (obviously Ronald Reagan) etc. There is an odd, and I suspect unintentional undertone to it. Lodge wallows so much in the luxurious meals, available sex, mod cons and easy-going teaching style that Swallow finds in Euphoria, that is comes across as real yearning for these things. Lodge doesn’t satirise so much as he envies. Its very much like teenager Tim Young in Out of the Shelter being bedazzled by the American Way of Life.