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 TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS OF DAVID LODGE – PART THREE

 

This is the third and final in a three-part series covering all the novels of David Lodge, following on from All You Need to Know About the Novels of David Lodge – Part One and All You Need to Know About the Novels of David Lodge – Part Two which appeared in the last two postings.

 

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Home Truths (first published in 1999) is the shortest book David Lodge ever produced – not a novel but a novella, 134 pages of wide-spaced print in the Penguin paperback I read. It is a kind of satire on celebrity culture and glib profiles written in glossy Sunday supplements.

A well-paid, wealthy TV-and-film scriptwriter is fuming because a vindictive woman journalist has written a snide and nasty profile about him. Scriptwriter calls on an old friend of his, a once-esteemed, but now written-out, novelist who is trying to live quietly in the country. Scriptwriter persuades novelist to get revenge by arranging to be interviewed by woman journo, but in the process collecting enough dirt on her to write his own nasty profile on her… except, of course, that it all backfires in a farcical way, with dodgy things being revealed about scriptwriter, novelist and novelist’s wife. There is a total of five characters in this novella – scriptwriter, novelist, novelist’s wife, journo, and journo’s boyfriend. It all takes place in the novelist’s living room, except for some of the last pages, where journo and boyfriend are talking in a car. The denouement involves a piece of shocking news that was topical when Home Truths was written, but that now seems to belong to a different time.

Home Truths neither feels nor sounds like a novel (or novella), and there’s a good reason for this. It is in fact David Lodge’s own adaptation and modification of a play he had written, which apparently went down well (according to Lodge’s own pompous “Afterword”) with Birmingham audiences, but which was not picked up by London theatres. Hence it did not reach the wider public that Lodge hoped to attract. So he decided to cut his losses by presenting it in the prose form with which his readership was more acquainted.

Note the cast of just five characters. Note the one setting (the event in the car was added for the novella version). Note the four-act structure in its four chapters. Note the frequency of dialogue linked by “he said” and “she said”, in effect giving us the playscript. Note the careful descriptions of the setting, presumably giving hints to the set-designer. Note lines designed to get characters off stage such as “Christ, I must get going.” Note what seem to be modified stage directions to actors such as “She sat down on a chair at the dining table, and stared into space… Her anger had evaporated. Her countenance now expressed only remorse and apprehension.”

The only other playscript I have read which was adapted clumsily into a “novel” is Henry James’s woeful The Outcry (reviewed on this blog), and I will give Lodge points for producing something more readable and funny than that. Even so, this is one of Lodge’s slightest productions.

Maybe I have the soul of a snide writer of celebrity profiles, because I can’t resist quoing from Home Truths one line which might very well apply to Lodge himself: “There are far too many writers around who have nothing more to say, but insist on saying it again and again, in book after book, year after year.”

 

Thinks… (first published in 2001) is in some sense yet another of David Lodge’s “campus novels”, but the focus is shifted from academic rivalries, conferences and jockeying for power to the problems of what consciousness is, and a kind of exploration of the abyss that lies between the humanities and the sciences.

At the (fictitious) Gloucester University, Ralph Messenger is a cognitive neuro-scientist working on the construction of Artificial Intelligence. He believes that the concept of “mind” is a fiction. Human brains are machines driven by impulses over which we have no control and there is no such thing as free will. Love, grief and other such emotions are merely the machine recalibrating itself.

Helen Reed is a novelist, who teaches a creative writing course in the humanities wing of the university. Newly widowed, she is emotionally vulnerable and misses her husband. She too explores consciousness, but in a very different way from Messenger. She reads the analytical passages of (the later) Henry James; and in the characters she creates in her own novels, she produces versions of particular states of mind.

With the tacit permission of his wealthy American wife, Ralph Messenger is a lecher, one in a long (and by this stage predictable) line of lecherous academics found in David Lodge’s novels. After all, if free will doesn’t exist, then Messenger need feel no pangs of conscience about his infidelities. He sets out to seduce Helen Reed. But loyalty to her late husband, and such residual Catholic qualms as she still has from her childhood (yep, trust Lodge to bring in his ex-Catholic schtick), Helen resists Messenger’s advances… for a while.

This is the framework of the novel, which runs very much on the concept that it is never really possible to tell what exactly another person is thinking. Just as Ralph Messenger and Helen Reed have different ideas of what consciousness is (he more clinical; she more intuitive) so do they interpret each other in radically different ways.

Always one to make style itself part of his novels, Lodge uses three different modes of narration in Thinks… As an experiment, Ralph speaks all his thoughts spontaneously into a recording device, producing a sort of stream-of-consciousness; but we know it’s a bit of a fraud as he frequently edits and re-writes his ramblings. Helen puts her thoughts down in an orderly and well-composed diary. The irony is that he, the clinical scientist, produces a chaotic narrative while she, the imaginative and feeling novelist, produces a coherent and well-structured narrative. Lodge’s third mode of narration is conventional third-person-omniscient style, but there are also literary pastiches such as he produces in a number of his novels. Helen sets her creative-writing students the task of using a set topic to parody the style of various modern authors, and we get all the parodies. Thinks… is big on the idea of speech as potential deception, and in the course of the novel, three important characters prove to be deceiving people in a big way.

Judged as a “campus novel” I rate this Lodge’s second-best after Nice Work. Although campus poltics are not the centre of the Thinks…, there are some pungent comments (which I can only imagine are Lodge’s own heartfelt opinions) about the idiotic ways money-conscious universties attempt to draw in students by offering fashionable but pointless courses. The “Acknowledgements” show that Lodge, who has explored the nature of consciousness in some of his works of criticism, did some serious research among neuro-scientists to make Thinks… more plausible. I assume, too, that his reading of Henry James fed into the next novel he wrote.

 

Author, Author was published in 2004. Not only did I review it when it first came out, but I have already reproduced the review elsewhere on this blog. However, for your convenience, I again produce it here, once again unaltered from its appearance in the old Dominion-Post (17 October 2004):

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In Author, Author, David Lodge presents a proposition about sex that is so shocking, daring and contrary to current received morality that it is likely to outrage quite a few readers. Lodge suggests (and I did warn you this was pretty shocking) that some people can live productive, significant and worthwhile lives without engaging in sexual activity at all. Astounding as it may seem in this day and age, he implies that there may be something to be said for celibacy.

Author, Author is Lodge’s novel about Henry James. Thanks in large part to his authoritative biographer Leon Edel, James is now seen by many as the paradigm of repressed homosexuality. Clearly James lived and died a virgin, but that hasn’t stopped Queer Theorists from combing through his convoluted prose for signs of covert sexual activity. Lodge’s James is a different creature. The James of this novel does indeed admit to himself that he is probably a “Uranist” by inclination (the term “homosexual” was only just beginning to be used in his day). But the thought of actual sexual contact with anyone horrifies him. On the one occasion a man propositions him, he flees in terror. His one meeting with Oscar Wilde convinces him that Wilde is a flashy cad and bounder. In fact, Uranist or not, says this novel, James’ most significant emotional relationship was probably with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have committed suicide because James did not reciprocate her passion for him. Only later, implies Lodge, did James come to realise how much she meant to him, thus inspiring him to write his sad short story The Beast in the Jungle.

Actually James’ sexuality is not centre-stage for most of this novel, even if it is likely to cause much comment…. More central for Lodge is the tale of how James, the literary perfectionist and high-brow, tried and failed to turn himself into a bestseller. Framed by scenes at James’ deathbed in 1916, the novel focuses on James’ friendship with the vulgarian bestselling George Du Maurier (author of Trilby) and James’ disastrous attempts to write a popular West End play. The failure of his Guy Domville was a great humiliation.

Though thoroughly enjoying every page of Author, Author, I did find myself asking anxiously whether it is really a novel, or simply dramatized literary biography. In extensive author’s notes at the beginning and end of its leisurely 400 pages, Lodge assures us that all major characters are real, as are all quotations from letters, plays and so forth. Characters’ thoughts and much dialogue, however, are inevitably Lodge’s invention.

I approve of his admiring, affectionate portrait of the novelist plugging away despite adversity and depression. I enjoyed playing the game of recognising which of James’ novels and stories are being referred to, in embryonic form, in those scenes where James gets sudden inspiration.  But in some sense the game is up about six pages from the end when Lodge tells us, in his own voice, exactly what he thinks of James and his achievement.

I’m sure James would have loved the affirmation Author, Author gives him. But his fastidious soul might have been outraged by the literary form.

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Thus my review from seventeen years ago, which I still endorse after looking at the novel again so many years later. You might note that I make exactly the same criticism of Lodge’s later novel A Man of Parts – is it a novel or dramatized biography?

 

I cannot claim to know what goes on in a writer’s mind when he’s writing something new, but I do wonder if David Lodge changed his mind about the sort of novel he was writing midway through Deaf Sentence (first published in 2008). It starts as one sort of novel and ends as a very different one.

In middle age, as he recounts in his autobioigraphies, David Lodge suffered loss of hearing, which eventually amounted to complete deafness. Deaf Sentence draws on this experience. Desmond Bates (apparently called Bates because there’s a deaf Mrs. Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma) is a retired professor of linguistics, suffering from severely impaired hearing. Always poking into the structure and formation of language he sometimes, in embarrassing situations, will launch into precise and pedantic monologues on these things. There is much detail – half-amusing, half-desperate – on hearing aids that do or do not work, attempts to learn lip-reading, and stratagems used by those going deaf to disguise their deafness.

Early in the novel, Professor Bates meets the perky, sexy young American postgraduate student Alex Loom. She begs his help in writing her doctoral thesis. Furtively, he makes a number of visits to her flat, without telling his commonsensical wife “Fred” (Winifred). If you’ve read enough David Lodge novels, you suspect you know where this is going – another of Lodge’s (tiresome and predictable) bonk-fests with lots of sex between libidinous older academic and younger woman. But the novel changes direction abruptly. Alex Loom, who proves to be dishonest, neurotic and opportunistic, is dumped from the story about midway through, with a hasty ten pages or so towards the end to account for what became of her.

Instead, Prof. Bates becomes concerned with the state of his aged, incontinent, increasingly senile widower father, living on his own in a decaying semi-detached down in London. There’s more autobiography here, as the old man was, like Lodge’s father, a band musician in the 1940s and 1950s, still pining for the old days. The latter half of Deaf Sentence focuses on Desmond Bates’s attempts to coax his father into a rest home. Much of this is semi-comic, with scenes of the old man behaving inappropriately when in the company of his son’s more tone-y and sophisticated friends and extended family. The plot leads eventually to the old man’s death.

I can see how Lodge intends to knit this novel together thematically. The punning title Deaf Sentence echoes the real “death sentence” that the old man has (there are many plays on the words “deaf” and “death” in the text). The unreliable Alex Loom was attempting to write a doctoral thesis on the linguistic nature of suicide notes – so more death references. Late in the novel there is an episode of euthanasia. And (placed rather awkwardly in the novel) there is a stand-alone chapter in which Prof. Bates, on a trip to Poland, visits Auschwitz and again ponders on death. Prof. Bates’s deafness is linked to his father’s infirmity and both indicate the inevitable decay that human beings go through as we age. Deaf Sentence becomes, in effect, a meditation on the brevity of life and how to use it. The unavoidable Lodgean references to Catholicism are here. Like Lodge, Prof. Bates is agnostic and eschews the idea of an afterlife, but sees some value in Christian funerals as opposed to secular ones and there’s the odd banter between Bates and his Catholic wife “Fred”.

In writing this novel, was Lodge deliberately saying farewell to his earlier and more comic style? There is some real comedy here and also Lodge’s habit of switching between modes of narration – most of Deaf Sentence is written as Desmond Bates’s diary entries, but there are outbreaks of the third-person omniscient voice. Nevertheless, it still reads as broken-backed. BTW, I think of this as Lodge’s last real novel, as the one that immediately precedes it (Author, Author) and the one that immediately follows it (A Man of Parts) are really dramatized biographies.

A Man of Parts (first published in 2011) appeared seven years after Author, Author, but the two books have to be paired. Author, Author is about an author, Henry James, who was probably homosexual by inclination but who lived and died a virgin. A Man of Parts is about an author, H.G.Wells, who was a very randy heterosexual and who probably seduced or had affairs with more women than England’s other serial philanderer of his era, Bertrand Russell. Wells almost equalled the scores achieved by France’s and Belgium’s legendary shaggers Guy de Maupassant and Georges Simenon.

Pardon me for beginning in this very vulgar and schoolboyish tone, but A Man of Parts invites it. The very opening page sports an epigraph telling us that “a man of parts” means a man with many talents and abilities, but that “parts” also means “private parts” – in other words, sexual organs.

In many respects, it is hard to classify A Man of Parts as a novel. It might more truthfully be described as a dramatised biography, but with the emphasis on Wells’ sex life. Certainly there are long passages about Wells’ falling out with the Fabian Society. Certainly there is a tracking of Wells’ Utopian ideas, which were so often thwarted by the march of history that, when he died in 1946, he was despairing of humanity and its future. Certainly David Lodge traces the genesis of many of the books Wells wrote (not all of course – Wells wrote too much too hastily, and his later output isn’t worth recalling). Lodge can’t resist giving simplistic synopses of many of them.

But the focus is on Wells’ priapic adventures. He divorced his first wife Isabel because he found her too “frigid” (to relieve himself, he seduced skivvies and chambermaids). His second wife, Amy Catherine, he re-named Jane. She bore him two sons, and stayed with him as faithful housekeeper until she died in the late 1920s. Jane was complaisant and allowed H.G. the freedom to swyve where he would. They were such a liberal couple. Often this meant what Wells euphemistically called “passades” – casual affairs or one-night-stands with compliant women or sometimes prostitutes, as in his first visit to the United States. More important to him, though, were the “serious” affairs, where he told himself that he was a pioneer of a new sort of relationship, unhindered by convention, and did much theorising on Free Love. There was Hedwig Gatternigg, who threatened suicide when he’d had enough of her; the neurotic and vulnerable Violet Hunt; prim Elizabeth von Arnim; hysterical Odette Kuen; Dorothy Richardson, who feared she might be lesbian (she was) and basically slept with Wells in the hope of “curing” herself; and later in his life the Russian Moura Budberg, who may or may not have been a Soviet spy. (Lodge skirts around this is, but in his book Double Lives, reviewed on this blog, Stephen Koch asserts that Budberg was unquestionably a spy.)

More significant than all these, however, and given more space in this “novel”, are three younger women, either in their late teens or early twenties at the time when H.G.Wells, in early middle age, took to them.  Ah! That grand old cliché – older man finds muse in younger chick. In fairness to Wells, be it noted that (to the horror of their respective families) all three of these young women were willingly seduced and saw themselves as truly, madly, deeply in love with Wells. First the teenager Rosamund Bland, daughter of the children’s author Edith Nesbit, who, perhaps accustomed to her father’s own philandering ways, took reckless love for granted. It ended in tears and recriminations from the Blands. Then Amber Reeves, daughter of the Fabians, Maud and William Pember Reeves (High Commissioner for New Zealand). Amber was idealised in Wells’ novel Ann Veronica. Amber bore a child to Wells. Wells arranged to marry her off to a respectable chap. There were tears and more recriminations. Probably the most turbulent of Wells’ affairs was with Rebecca West (pseudonym of Cicely Fairfield), who practised with him the wildest of erotic games and who bore him a son. This affair was on-again, off-again over many years until a final rupture. It had a very negative effect in one way – Rebecca West’s son Anthony West grew up to like his father but loathe his mother and, as an author in his own right, in middle age he wrote memoirs condemning Rebecca.

But what is one to make of this book as a novel? A Man of Parts has a very long bibliography of all the sources and archives Lodge consulted. Allowing for the conversations and attributed thoughts that Lodge has made up, A Man of Parts reads like a chronicle, and one that goes on for far too long (I think it is Lodge’s longest novel – it runs to 560 pages in the paperback edition I have). It is as if Lodge didn’t want to sacrifice any of the reasearch he had done. As an assemblage of facts, it is very interesting and indeed encouraged me to look again at some of Wells’ work. But (like real life, and unlike good fiction) is has no focus. It rambles on and it is never clear if Lodge is presenting Wells’ sexual adventures ironically or seeing them as heartfelt explorations in sexuality.

Dare I say that, in the end, a sex addict is as boring as a drug addict? I’d rather remember H.G.Wells for his better novels than for his shagging.

 

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Now, dear reader, I’m not going to leave you dangling over a precipice. Here I have, over three separate postings, run methodically through all fifteen of David Lodge’s novels, for your edification. But I have not given you what you are longing for – an overview of the worth of David Lodge’s novels. I will therefore, next posting, conclude this series by giving you the definitive, authoritative and indisputable judgment on the works of David Lodge. No correspondance will be entered into.