Trevor Smith

David Lodge

Biography

Born in South London on 28 January 1935, Professor David Lodge is a graduate and Honorary Fellow of University College London. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to write full-time. He was Harkness Fellow in the United States (1964-5), Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1969) and Henfield Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia (1977). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Chairman of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989. He is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, mainly about the English and American novel, and literary theory. He is the author of The Art of Fiction (1992), a collection of short articles first published in the Independent on Sunday.

Lodge's suburban upbringing in a traditional Catholic family in the austere conditions of postwar England is reflected in his early fiction. His first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), is a portrait of a Catholic family living in South London, and their daughter who has attracted the attentions of their undergraduate lodger. Ginger, You're Barmy (1962), his second novel, drew on his own experience of national service, while The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), a comic novel, is the story of a poor Catholic graduate working on his thesis in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Worried that his wife may be pregnant, he becomes involved in a series of adventures and meetings that parallel or parody episodes in the modern novels he is studying. Out of the Shelter (1970) begins with a child's experience of the Blitz and his rescue from an air-raid shelter, a formative experience which is developed as a metaphor throughout the book as the young boy matures into an adult.

Changing Places (1975), was Lodge's first book in a trilogy of campus novels. Inspired by his experience teaching in California, the novel centres on two academics: Englishman Phillip Swallow from the University of Rummidge in the West Midlands, and Morris Zapp, an American from the State University of Euphoria (California), and their participation in an exchange programme that sees them swap politics, lifestyles and wives. Small World (1984), the second book in the trilogy, develops Zapp and Swallow's story, while Nice Work (1988) completes the trilogy with the story of industrialist Vic Wilcox and his unlikely relationship with marxist, feminist and post-structuralist academic Dr Robyn Penrose. Small World and Nice Work were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

How Far Can You Go? (1980) and Paradise News (1991) both deal with the doctrinal changes and moral uncertainty which beset members of the Catholic church in the post-war period generally and the 1960s in particular. Therapy (1995) continues similar themes through the story of a successful sitcom writer plagued by middle-age neuroses and a failed marriage.

Ralph Messenger, the central character of Lodge's most recent novel, Thinks ... (2001), is Director of the prestigious Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science at the fictional University of Gloucester. A notorious womaniser, he is forced to reappraise his lifestyle when he becomes involved with Helen Reed, a novelist who has come to work at the university.

David Lodge is a successful playwright and screenwriter, and has adapted both his own work and other writers' novels for television. Small World was adapted as a television serial, produced by Granada TV in 1988, and Lodge adapted Nice Work as a four-part TV serial for the BBC, broadcast in 1989. It won the Royal Television Society Award (Best Drama Serial) and the author was awarded a Silver Nymph for his screenplay at the International Television Festival in Monte Carlo in 1990. He wrote and presented a documentary about the academic conference circuit, Big Words - Small Worlds, which was broadcast on Channel 4 in November 1987, and a film about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, broadcast by the BBC in 1993. He also adapted Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit as a six-part television serial, first screened in 1994.

His first stage play, The Writing Game, was produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in May 1990, and subsequently in Manchester and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lodge adapted it for Channel 4 television in 1996. His most recent play, Home Truths, was performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1998. The author subsequently re-wrote the play as a novella, published in 1999. Consciousness and the Novel (2002), explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction, and includes essays on Charles Dickens, Henry James and John Updike. His new novel, Author, Author: A Novel (2004), opens in December 1915 with the dying Henry James, and journeys back to the 1880s to explore James's 'middle years'.

David Lodge lives in Birmingham.

Genres (in alphabetical order)

Criticism, Drama, Fiction, Literary criticism, Screenplay, Short stories

Bibliography

The Picturegoers MacGibbon & Kee, 1960

Ginger, You're Barmy MacGibbon & Kee, 1962

The British Museum is Falling Down MacGibbon & Kee, 1965

Graham Greene Columbia University Press, 1966

Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966

Out of the Shelter   (revised edition 1985)   Macmillan, 1970

Evelyn Waugh Columbia University Press, 1971

The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971

20th-Century Literary Criticism: A Reader   (editor)   Longman, 1972

Changing Places   Secker & Warburg, 1975

The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature   Edward Arnold, 1977

How Far Can You Go?   (published in the US as 'Souls and Bodies')   Secker & Warburg, 1980

Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews in 19th and 20th Century Literature Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981

Small World   Secker & Warburg, 1984

Write On: Occasional Essays 1965-1985   Secker & Warburg, 1986

Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader   (editor - 2nd edition 1999)   Longman, 1988

Nice Work   Secker & Warburg, 1988

After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism Routledge, 1990

Paradise News   Secker & Warburg, 1991

The Writing Game   Secker & Warburg, 1991

The Art of Fiction   Secker & Warburg, 1992

Therapy   Secker & Warburg, 1995

The Practice of Writing   Secker & Warburg, 1996

Home Truths   Secker & Warburg, 1999

Home Truths: A Novella   Secker & Warburg, 1999

Thinks ...   Secker & Warburg, 2001

Consciousness and the Novel   Secker & Warburg, 2002

Author, Author: A Novel   Secker & Warburg, 2004

Prizes and awards

1975   Hawthornden Prize Changing Places

1975   Yorkshire Post Book Award (Finest Fiction) Changing Places

1980   Whitbread Book of the Year How Far Can You Go?

1984   Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   Small World

1989   Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   Nice Work

1989   Royal Television Society Award   (Best Drama Serial)   Nice Work

1989   Sunday Express Book of the Year Nice Work

1990   Silver Nymph   (International Television Festival (Monte Carlo))   Nice Work (screenplay)

1995   Writers' Guild Award (Best Adapted Screenplay) Martin Chuzzlewit

1996   Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) Therapy

1997   Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)

1998   CBE

Critical Perspective

David Lodge has enjoyed an unusual dual status in English literary life over the past four decades, a leading comic novelist who is also one of the foremost literary critics of his generation, to date producing twelve novels and nine volumes of critical analysis, reviews and essays. Since retiring from teaching at Birmingham University in 1987, Lodge has sought popular outlets, regularly writing in newspapers, and for television (he adapted Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit as well as his own Nice Work (1988) as serials). His involvement with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre goes back to satirical revues in the early 1960s, and more recent plays The Writing Game (1991) and Home Truths (1999) - the latter dealing with a novelist beset by the demands of the mass media - have been performed there.

As a critic, Lodge was formed by the 'New Criticism' prevailing in his youth but rapidly evolved into a clear-sighted explainer both of Modernist authors and postmodernist critical movements from semiotics and structuralism onwards. As a novelist, his early influences were 'English Catholic' novels (subject of his postgraduate thesis: he later wrote books on Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh); and the 1950s 'campus novel'. Important examples for him have been Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, but also Eating People is Wrong by his friend Malcolm Bradbury - with whom Lodge has sometimes been ruefully confused. In both roles, Lodge is interested in the Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (1966) (his first critical book) as well as The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (1977) (title of his probably most influential criticism). Indeed, his academic's interest in the structure of fiction tends to dictate his practices as a novelist. As Lodge himself has pointed out, he needs to discover the idea that will generate the story; and he habitually uses what are known to narrative theorists as 'binary structures'. These are analysed in his critical works, prevalent throughout his novels, and easily spotted: in Changing Places (1975), two English Professors, one British and the other American, swap jobs and cultures. Nice Work puts the seemingly antithetical worlds of academia and heavy industry together, as feminist academic Robyn Penrose becomes involved with Vic Wilcox, the blunt-talking manager of a local engineering factory. Most of Lodge's books are the product of diligent research and are set up in a highly deliberated, at times slightly predictable way; their characters can become simply mouthpieces for Lodge's own discussions of issues and ideas. But in these two novels especially, the ironic interplay of subject and setting is masterly, and they are highly amusing to read.

Lodge's special creation is Rummidge; as the author's note to Nice Work explains, it is 'an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories...which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps'. Whether set in Rummidge or elsewhere, his novels have three consistent elements, appearing in differing guises and proportions from book to book. Firstly, there is 'a subject of considerable topical interest and concern'. During the 1980s he seized upon the decline of British manufacturing industry, and the rise of Women's Studies, while 'the current scientific and philosophical debate about consciousness' is elaborated in his latest novel, Thinks... (2001) Secondly, Lodge has fun with literary parody and pastiche: students in a Creative Writing class in the latter novel have to write assignments in the styles of Rushdie, Beckett and Martin Amis. Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, Lodge is a novelist of Catholic themes, reflecting upon the current state of play for English Catholics such as himself. There is often a character specifically deployed to offer Catholic perspectives on ethical dilemmas and offer counterweights to secular values. In Therapy (1995) this function is performed by Maureen, sitcom writer Tubby's first love; and in Thinks... it is bereaved novelist Helen Reed, whose Catholic upbringing impedes the progress of her affair with a randy academic. Lodge's most detailed discussion of Catholicism took place in How Far Can You Go? (1980), really a fictionalised essay rather than a fully-imagined novel. A group of friends from student days in the early 1950s are brought together again to re-examine their marriages and changes within the Church itself. Alongside the debates are Lodge's usual quota of topical references and comic set pieces (here the temptations offered by a Swedish sauna and its aftermath, rolling naked in the snow).

Catholics' dilemma over the use of contraception was the issue in The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), still a very funny if inevitably dated book now. It describes a day in the life of postgraduate student Adam Appleby and his wife, frustrated by the Rhythm Method and beset by anxiety over possible further pregnancies. There are some hilarious scenes, notably Father Finbar's explication of the Vatican's position while riding on a motorcycle through London traffic, and Adam's attempted seduction by a would-be femme fatale. These farcical episodes are all rendered in parodies of the novelists that Adam is supposed to be studying: Conrad, Greene, Henry James, Woolf, Hemingway and others, concluding with his wife's Molly Bloom-like interior monologue while her exhausted husband sleeps.

A much later but equally successful comic novel, Therapy, probably owes its origins to Lodge's 1993 television documentary about the popular pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The protagonist 'Tubby' Passmore is a television sitcom writer whose body, career and marriage start to fail during a sudden mid-life crisis. He seeks stress relief - from acupuncture, aromatherapy, and affairs - becoming fixated with researching the philosopher Kierkegaard's troubled love life. There is a good deal of typical Lodge by-play about the meanings of words, and the moral dilemmas of the comfortably-off. It is only when Tubby eventually searches out the spiritual dimension in the ageing shape of his first love Maureen, now a grandmother dealing with her own emotional problems by walking the pilgrimage in Spain, that he is enabled to sort out his life.

Thinks... is a good if familiar return to form, a lightly satirical treatment of a current 'hot topic' within a university setting. The plot structure is driven by the opposition-and-attraction felt between cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger and writer in residence Helen Reed. The novel switches between them, using stream-of-consciousness, third person narration as well as e-mails, bringing out their contrasting attitudes to sexual morality, mortality, and human consciousness itself (subject of the academic conference that concludes the book). The book functions in effect as a very amusing seminar, both on the current state of consciousness studies and the processes of writing. As ever, Lodge manipulates his cast of staff, students and ideas in good-humoured and highly informed ways.


© Dr Jules Smith

For an in-depth critical review see David Lodge by Bernard Bergonzi (Northcote House, 1995: Writers and their Work Series).

Author statement

'A novel is a long answer to the question "What is it about?" I think it should be possible to give a short answer - in other words, I believe a novel should have a thematic and narrative unity that can be described. Each of my novels corresponds to a particular phase or aspect of my own life: for example, going to the University of California at the height of the Student Revolution, being an English Catholic at a period of great change in the Church, getting on to the international academic conference circuit; but this does not mean they are autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense. I begin with a hunch that what I have experienced or observed has some representative (i.e., more than merely private) significance that could be brought out by means of a fictional story. To begin the novel I need to discover the structural idea that will generate the story: two professors passing each other over the North Pole on their way to exchange jobs, for example, or a parallel between the antics of globetrotting academics and the adventures of the knights of chivalric romance. I seem to have a fondness for binary structures, which predates my interest, as a literary critic, in structuralism. I use comedy to explore serious subjects, and find Mikhail Bakhtin's idea that the novel is an inherently carnivalesque form, subverting monologic ideologies by laughter and a polyphony of discourses, immensely appealing. I am fascinated by the power of narrative, when skilfully managed, to keep the reader turning the pages, but I also aim to write novels that will stand up to being read more than once.'

Opening Page