Written by Although David Lodge, who died on 1 January aged 89, will forever be regarded as a ‘campus novelist’, he was much more than that
David Lodge rather admired Lionel Trilling’s notion of “pieties”, habits of mind and of behaviour that were retained even after the core or supporting belief was lost. “I suppose that in some ways I still think like a Catholic,” he told me, declining to be pressed on how exactly this worked, “but I would say that I am less and less Catholic all the time.” By this logic, there might be as much Catholic thinking in Lodge’s later novels – Thinks …, Author, Author and Deaf Sentence – as in early books like The British Museum is Falling Down, where the getting or non-getting of children, in accordance with Catholic teaching, is perhaps the major plot consideration; or his first novel The Picturegoers, which has something of the feel of an epistle to the spiritually starved and wayward. But mining Lodge’s novels for “Catholic content” or residual piety is something of a lost cause.
Trilling, of course, was speaking about the retention of Judaistic habits of mind in Marxism – Bertrand Russell found the same thing – and of a certain marxisant tendency even among those who had taken their copies of Capital and The 18th Brumaire to the second-hand shop. And Trilling’s argument was perhaps more germane to American liberal revisionism than to what was happening in Lodge’s England. David Lodge was far less entranced by America than was his lifelong friend and fellow campus novelist Malcolm Bradbury. So improbably joined-at-the-hip did they once seem that graduate students used to joke there was a writers’ retreat somewhere in Perthshire (or Iowa) called Bradbury Lodge. But where Bradbury was, by his own account, entranced by American consumerism and sexual energy, Lodge was much more sceptical about America, even though he, too, spent time there, and scored his greatest success with a novel of transatlantic (academic) exchange called Changing Places. However, he seemed in occasional political conversation more accepting than Bradbury of the country’s city-on-a-hill sense of mission, more of a believer in the “American dream”.
Bradbury was three years older, a significant head start in terms of adult experience, but he always remained an academic-who-wrote-fiction rather than a novelist who happened to have taken a university chair. Lodge gave up teaching for full-time writing in 1987, while Bradbury remains best-known now (The History Man apart) as midwife to fiction superstars Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro through the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme. Bradbury was a brilliant observational realist who thought himself a South American-style fabulist. Lodge, by contrast, was largely unaffected by literary schools, and suspicious of those who, having renounced all other faiths, accepted Jacques Derrida as their personal saviour; though he did structure The British Museum is Falling Down round a hilarious sequence of literary allusions, which might largely have appealed to the grad schools.
Lodge was born in Brockley, south-east London, in 1935. It would later become “Brickley”, in the same way that Birmingham became “Rummidge” in Changing Places. Such a birthdate put him in line for military service, which became the background to Ginger, You’re Barmy, his second novel, which was described very acutely by Christopher Derrick in The Tablet as “a story of conformity and dissent, but [it] rises far above the romantic fashion of discussing these things in strict isolation from the merits of what is conformed to or dissented from”; the review goes on to make a comparison with “Mr Waugh” and his wartime trilogy. This gets as close to the essence of David Lodge as a fiction writer and a thinker as anyone is likely to get, since it was precisely the dialectic of conformity and dissent, belief and unbelief, that energised his work, just as much as the comedy of contraception in The British Museum and the rather sourer comedy of abortion (and feminism) in Changing Places.
Though published in 1960, The Picturegoers arguably harks back to an earlier period, when “Hollywood” had only begun to seem not just an alternative to the drabness of post-Depression existence, but also a challenge to traditional values, including spiritual ones. In his brilliantly readable 1992 study The Art of Fiction – it indirectly gave rise to his 2004 novel about Henry James, Author, Author – Lodge explores many of the literary narrative techniques that have been lost to, or replaced by, cinema and television, the most obvious of which is, with some key exceptions in cinema, “point of view”. This Jamesian device was central to his own work, but when asked, in a 1998 interview we recorded – and BBC Scotland subsequently lost – if Catholicism remained his “point of view”, he was even at that point prepared to define himself as “a Catholic, but an agnostic one”.
He did, however, respond with enthusiasm to my suggestion that the culture of his young manhood was unconsciously shot through with Catholicism: the Beatles, pop art, the saturated swirl of the Disraeli Gears cover, the vogue for photographic hyper-realism all seemed in some way to be influenced by what was perceived as Catholic exoticism, even kitsch, though always in dynamic opposition to the “puritan” pragmatism and materialism of the established culture.
Where Bradbury saw the opposition, Lodge sensed the dynamic; while the older novelist continued to nurse the notion that he was among the South Americans, it was Lodge, as he showed in Small World, who was able to harness surrealism and romance within the confines of the realist novel. Though he will forever be associated with the form, he was never really a “campus novelist” in the manner of Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution or Bradbury’s Stepping Westward or Alison Lurie’s work; closer, perhaps, to the underrated brilliance of D.J. Enright’s 1955 Academic Year, which was set at the University of Alexandria, thus having its cake and eating it too. (David did have a very good record of inventing fictional universities, Gloucestershire, Limerick, before the real one was established, which is actually a rather good postmodern joke.)
Talking to David Lodge was always a pleasure, though very different to the brilliant Bradbury travelogues, which were show-stopping name-drops wreathed in pipe smoke rather than dry ice. Talking to Lodge got more difficult as his hearing began to fail, to the point where it let him down completely and, as he insisted, comically. Blindness, he would often say, had a certain tragic grandeur to it – Homer, Milton, Borges – but what great artist was mutt-and-jeff? It was pointless to murmur something about Beethoven, because Lodge couldn’t hear it, and besides, the Beethoven legend has come under question.
He wrote a series of memoirs, in which he discusses, with unaffected frankness, many aspects of his life and the challenges it threw up, as a teacher, a writer and a parent. But in a sense the novels, while in no familiar sense autobiographical, convey the cadences, the pitch and above all the pieties of his life.
Brian Morton is a Scottish writer, journalist, broadcaster and farmer.
David Lodge in The Tablet, by Brendan Walsh
David Lodge may have drifted away from churchgoing, but the temperament, the angle of vision, remained distinctly, persistently Catholic. Superficially, there’s the approach to sex, never insignificant or uncomplicated in his novels, and an abiding source of fascination and unease. But, more deeply, there always seems to be in Lodge’s narrative voice the Augustinian sense that life is both more gloomy and more hopeful than it looks from a flat, meritocratic, bourgeois perspective.
D.J. Taylor, a fellow critic and novelist, told me: “Lodge’s death represents the passing of just about our last link with the literary 1950s and that lower-middle-class world of social aspiration, National Service, growing up in the war’s shadow – the subjects of his early novels. Previous writers had explored this new demographic – e.g. Kingsley Amis and John Wain – but Lodge’s innovation was to examine it through a non-Oxbridge and Catholic lens. I think he varied between feeling he’d missed out on Oxbridge while welcoming the outsider status it gave him.” For Taylor, Lodge was “a deeply serious character, with a pronounced residual dourness which encouraged some of the tensions that give his best work its sheen”.
Some of Lodge’s earliest published work appeared in The Tablet. In May 1961, he submitted an exasperated review of a critical edition of Finnegans Wake. Later reviews led to snappy exchanges with L.P. Hartley (writing from the Athenaeum) and John Braine (writing from Woking) in the Letters pages. In a curmudgeonly piece in the Christmas double issue of 1967, he grumbled about “being cooped up at home, sluggish and dyspeptic from eating too much rich food … There’s nothing like Christmas for putting everyone in a vile mood.”
Reminded in an interview published in the issue of 4 September 2004 that he had begun to describe himself as “a provisional Catholic”, he told Mark Lawson: “Sometimes I now call myself ‘an agnostic Catholic’. I don’t want to cut myself off from the Church. I think it is quite useful and healthy to spend an hour a week in a liturgical situation. I find the waning of Catholic and Christian belief a very fascinating cultural phenomenon. I prefer to observe it from inside rather than outside. It is full of ideas for fiction.”
Nearly four years later, in “How far have we come?”, written for a special issue to mark the fortieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, he wrote: “The historical changes in Catholicism I was trying to depict in [How Far Can You Go?] reflected and were influenced by changes in secular society, for the 1960s and 1970s were decades of global revolution, rebellion and liberation – social, political and sexual. Catholics, however, had to cope with a special obstacle to sexual fulfilment. Having struggled with some difficulty to remain chaste before marriage, my characters find their enjoyment of conjugal love vitiated by the constraints of the only method of birth control approved by the Church – periodic abstinence – and by the consequences of its frequent failure. As secular society became increasingly permissive about sex, partly because of the invention of the contraceptive pill, the rules governing Catholic marital intercourse seemed, not only to that secular world but to many Catholics, more and more bizarre and the natural law arguments for them less and less convincing.” Lodge pointed out, “If you found you could conscientiously dissent from the Church’s teaching on birth control without ceasing to regard yourself as a Catholic, you could conscientiously reject a lot of other prescriptions and doctrines as well. But how far can you go in that direction without ending up in total relativism? Novels ask questions. They do not provide answers.”
In the 7 December 1985 issue, Lodge set out to explain “Why I write”: “Writing [is] such an exhausting and stressful process – and, when it comes out right, such an exhilarating one. Even writing the shortest book review entails the same process of risk, uncertainty, self-testing. And there, certainly, lies one reason why I write, though it is not peculiar to writing. The same motive has made other men soldiers, politicians, mountaineers and philanderers. Writing has the advantage over these other activities that its achievements are permanent. Texts are not merely remembered, they are recreated every time they are read. And there, I venture to say, at the risk of seeming pretentious, is the ultimate reason for writing: the chance to defy death, by leaving some trace of oneself, however slight, behind.”
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