The obituaries of the critic and author David Lodge, who died on 1 January aged 89, have been a long time writing and relate the facts scrupulously. He has earned the reporting of his passing as a fact of national importance. Nonetheless what I’ve read does not, I feel, entirely capture the essence of Lodgeism.
In my twenties (I’m three years his junior) I read Lodge’s first critical treatise, The Language of Fiction (1966) and his novel The British Museum is Falling Down (1965). Consider them together and it’s hard to avoid the j’accuse always latent in Lodge’s versatile genius – if you can’t write a novel what gives you the right to stand at a lectern and be all-knowing about fiction? I only taught a seminar with him once but that point was brought home to me more sharply than I liked.
I first heard Lodge speak at a conference in the mid-Sixties. The lecture went down badly. He was never a podium star. His delivery was flat and monotone. He was, like his jobbing saxophonist father, only fully expressive with his instrument in his hand – in David’s case, supremely, the novel.
I later learnt that he had just discovered his third child had Down’s syndrome. It would mean shaping his career and home round his son’s needs. Having joined Birmingham University in 1960, he only left when he retired from his position as professor of modern English literature in 1987.
David Lodge was never one for glittering prizes. He took a peculiar relish in tribulation. Of the numerous examples it pleased him to cite was that of The British Museum is Falling Down. Every single review copy was undelivered. The work was received with thundering silence.
We met over the years as academics do at conferences and talks. He came to UCL (his alma mater and my employer) in the late 1970s to address the English department staff. His talk was on the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, structuralism, and the acoustics of the written word. It was high-flown and politely received.
At supper later he asked me (wistfully I thought) what were the advantages of being based in London. I replied, flippantly, that it meant getting the New Statesman on Thursday. I should, of course, have said the British Museum. David Lodge did a wealth of research for his novels. He missed the great London collections.
Sometimes it was said of him, as it was said of Philip Larkin, that he didn’t sufficiently follow Joseph Conrad’s instruction to “in the destructive element immerse”. This line of criticism was given force by his late-life autobiographical trilogy where, the confessional door swinging wide, Lodge tells us he never as a boy masturbated. The word itself was strange to him until adulthood. There were wet dreams and pangs of lust hardly worth a couple of Hail Marys but he and his wife entered the marriage bed virginal. There was no dissipation in his teens. If he was ever drunk he does not record it. “I remained,” he says, “extraordinarily innocent by comparison with today’s teenagers”. There’s sex, licit and illicit, in the novels but, as Lodge asserts, he is a reporter not a combatant in the battle of the sexes. I suppose Jane Austen could have said the same, Kingsley Amis not.
What I think of David Lodge the author has been much quoted: “he is the best British novelist never to have won the Booker Prize”. What did he think of me? He kindly contributed to a Festschrift when my profession came to the collective verdict that my time was up.
He notes that I have “entertained” him over many decades. Notably my series of literary puzzle books. “Such research,” he says, “is a minor tributary to the mainstream of literary criticism” – but, nonetheless, “interesting”. Then comes a virtuoso piece from him in the puzzle genre on Graham Greene. It is corrective. And entirely in keeping with Lodge’s literary ethics.
One of his bequests to his profession in the novel Changing Places (1975) is the academics’ parlour game “Humiliation”. You get together and compete for who has not read some “greatest work”. The winner in the novel has not read Hamlet, and – when it gets out – is sacked.
Humiliation (in life not the novel) cuts you down to size. It inspires humility. We must, Lodge intimates, approach literature humbly. It is greater than us. That, I believe, is the main element in Lodgeism.
It raises the question: how great, as a writer, will posterity find him? I think his novel of Catholic faith and doubt, How Far Can You Go? (1980) will last. As will his novel debating what AI will do to literature Thinks… (2001). And I have personal reasons for hoping that Deaf Sentence (2008), about a retired linguistic professor losing his hearing, will still be read at the end of the century – barring miracle cures. Why did he never win the Booker? Comic novels (Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question is an exception) rarely do; serious novels about religion never do; and Lodge’s modest, ironic style does not grab judges who have to read 140 novels in five months. But he should have done.
Lodge had a superb ear for literature. He could hear the voice of the author. It is manifest in the pastiches of other writers which he inserts into his novels. Quite early in life his physical ears began to fail him. So, as my turn came round, did mine. I told him I believed it was National Service. The Lee Enfield nudged into my right ear and the two-inch mortar to my left had done long-term damage.
He had served in the Royal Armoured Corps which had lots of bangs. But he wouldn’t go along with me. He preferred to regard his deafness as a given affliction not an injury. I think, from conversations we had in open places, that he was late in getting state-of-the-art hearing aids. He lived with it.
Even with the best of aids, deafness cuts you away from social life. His move to biofiction (Henry James in Author, Author; H G Wells in A Man of Parts), autobiography and autofiction in his last writing years was, I believe, the result of isolation. He wasn’t a reporter on life any more. One thinks of Proust’s noiseless, cork-lined room.
The last time we met was at an LRB Bookshop talk to promote his autobiographical trilogy (Quite a Good Time to Be Born, Writer’s Luck and Varying Degrees of Success, published between 2015 and 2020). I was there to introduce him. We spoke downstairs before the event and he asked me frankly whether I thought, on the evidence of his recent writing, his mind was going. I said no but it was a fib. The reviews of his trilogy were polite to cruel (the Financial Times: “Lodge’s dullness is quite endearing”).
We went upstairs. Over his whole career Lodge had worked his readers, forming them into a congregation. Every seat was taken – everyone had read him and loved him. The event had the quality of a Deo Gratias: thank God for David Lodge.
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