Lives in Writing

Reviewed by Martin Stannard
HARVILL SECKER, 272pp, £18.99
Tablet bookshop price £17.10 
Tel 01420 592974

Amusing, thoughtful and exquisitely engineered, this book is a delight. Yet its tone is modest: “unassertive and ironically self-deprecating”, as David Lodge describes Frank Kermode’s “social manner”. Kermode is rightly seen as “a master of the review-essay”, and Lodge might lay equal claim to that title. The long notices here of biography and autobiography (including a review of my own recent biography of Muriel Spark), revised and updated for the general reader, are spliced with intriguing experiments in memoir. As he grows older, Lodge explains, he finds himself increasingly “attracted to fact-based writing”. Lives in Writing is both about life writing, its art and craftiness, and one about a life in writing, an experimental autobiography.

Images of two dead and knighted friends, Kermode and Malcolm Bradbury, haunt the text. Throughout, Kermode hovers as a ghost of unattainable critical excellence: the founder of a famous UCL seminar introducing the stolid British to European structuralism and “non-aesthetic” cultural analysis; the focus of the infamous “McCabe Affair” which split the Cambridge faculty of English, resulting in Kermode’s principled retirement; finally as someone brave enough to regret the damage “theory” generally had inflicted on the skills of close reading. Bradbury emerges as delightfully bullish, avid for publication, and as the man who put creative writing on the British academic map at the University of East Anglia. (Lodge was his first external examiner when there was just one student: Ian McEwan.) Little is said of it here but Lodge was himself a commanding presence in those heated theory debates and, along with Terry Eagleton, helped to make the arguments of Saussure, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault intelligible to lesser mortals. There could be no better Baedeker to this ideological battleground than his piece on Eagleton’s After Theory (2003).

Since 1960, Lodge has pursued two careers: as academic and critic, and as novelist/playwright, spending 27 years at Birmingham University until he retired to go freelance. Bradbury, appointed by Birmingham shortly after Lodge, became a close friend and competitive stimulus. Their first novels, Lodge’s The Picturegoers (1960) and Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong (1959) had already appeared to good reviews when they met. “We were both children of the war and of the Blitz,” Lodge notes, “traumatically separated for a time from home and parents … It made both of us … temperamentally cautious and prone to anxiety in later life, but ready to seize the opportunities which opened up in peacetime for the beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act.” Both were, like many of Lodge’s subjects here – Kermode, Richard Hoggart (soon to join them at Birmingham), Muriel Spark, Alan Bennett, Eagleton, John Boorman, Kingsley Amis – lower-middle- or working-class grammar-school pupils, the unkillable children of the very-nearly-poor condemned by T.S. Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Unsurprisingly, these two stars of the comic campus novel turned rather to Kingsley Amis’ Jim Dixon and to Philip Larkin’s melancholy personae, as refreshing new voices articulating the lives of “ordinary blokes ... having ordinary experiences in ordinary places”.

But that is only part of Lodge’s intellectual history. He and Bradbury also admired and wrote about Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Lodge’s early work, like Greene’s, turned on the problems of sex, faith and doubt. Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize, are ingenious self-referential dramatisations of theoretical paradoxes: postmodern rather than anti-modernist like the work of Amis and Larkin. Lodge has not imitated their lurch to the right. Spark’s Robbe-Grillet-ish middle-period fiction, her reconfiguring of narrative time in a theological context, was influential, and Lodge’s fascination with life writing has not been a return to comfortable realism and a knowable world but the reverse. In Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011), which fictionalise the lives of Henry James and H.G. Wells respectively, the old division between fact and fiction collapses, and a distinction between the “fictional” and “biographical” novel is created.

The final essay discusses Lodge’s research for the Wells book. There are, he accepts, incontrovertible facts. But there are also gaps between those facts which only the imagination can, and must, fill to make any sense of them. Analysing these lives, he lingers over their subjects’ deaths, their confrontation with the unknowable, and (implicitly) wonders about his own religious faith in old age. A moving analysis of Trollope’s final, much-panned novel, The Fixed Period (1882), a parable about compulsory state euthanasia, focuses on the “struggle to reconcile the imperatives of sanctity of life and quality of life”. Anthony Trollope’s greatest fear was death-in-life, dementia or a stroke. It is one “to which writers are perhaps particularly sensitive”, partly because of their heightened imaginations, partly because “they may become addicted to the exercise of their craft and dread its withdrawal”. Ultimately Lodge (just about) hangs on to his faith while confessing to “a yearning for, rather than a belief in, transcendence” and abstractly contemplating the sense of his own ending.

This is a Book of the Dead: about those resurrected through others’ writing; about a kind of life after death for writers through their readership; about the death of the author. There is no mention in the index of “David Lodge” or of any of his works. The fixed period is life itself, however it ends. “Immortality seems impossible”, he remarks in an extraordinary piece on the public outpouring of grief for Diana, Princess of Wales, “but extinction seems unbearable. That is the existential double-bind in which we find ourselves.”