“I drew my first breath on the 28th January, 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England.” The “quite” in the opening line of this memoir is characteristic – David Lodge has never been one to overstate his case. The memoir, published to coincide with his 80th birthday, is a portrait of the novelist as a young man, and James Joyce – along with Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis – turns out to be one of the writers who made him want to write. Lodge has a rare comic gift, at its best in his celebrated campus novel Changing Places (1975), in which two academics – Morris Zapp from the US and Philip Swallow from the UK – swap universities with fast, loose and hilarious consequences. He has also had a distinguished career as an English professor at Birmingham University (his critical work The Art of Fiction, seen by some as a riposte to FR Leavis, has never been out of print).
He grew up in Brockley, a south-east London suburb, in a lower-middle class, Catholic family. His father is sympathetically described: a self-taught dance musician, playing fiddle, sax and clarinet (“I owe most of my creative genes to him”). His mother does not come into complete focus, although he is belatedly rueful about her labours as a housewife: “She was marginalised and became a kind of servant to both of us.” He shows, without labouring the point, that fiction – reading it and, later, writing it – helped liberate him from himself, was his way of going off-duty.
As a memoirist, he remains duty-doing, his prose the equivalent of someone wearing a tie knotted so tightly at the neck it threatens to throttle the wearer. He writes about himself as if about someone else: Lodge the literary critic writes about Lodge the novelist as if the two were not the same man. Commentaries on his own work are excruciatingly self-conscious.
It comes as no surprise when he admits he has always been a worrier. At times, he affects the language of psychoanalysis but very much at arm’s length, like someone picking up a sugar lump with tongs, as if he does not quite know whether to trust the vocabulary he is borrowing. Chapter Four begins: “I was now halfway into what Freudian psychoanalysis designates the latency phase of personal development, ‘a period of emotional quiescence between the dramas and turmoils of childhood and adolescence’.” He blames the convent boarding school to which he was sent for his “anxiety to a neurotic degree”.
There is so much good behaviour recorded, it is almost comic. Lodge once threw a stick at a motorist in Cornwall as a small boy, showing off to friends. But that is as bad as it gets and he is still sorry. Later, he emerges as someone with a gift for making firm friendships (with no call for stick-throwing). Falling in love with blond, Catholic Mary, his wife-to-be, who studied English with him at UCL (“the godless university”), progresses smoothly, although his account of it is foot-shufflingly formal: “Mary was happy to accept me as her first boyfriend.” He also writes with affection about the late Malcolm Bradbury, former colleague and literary rival.
Unlike Bradbury, he stays put at Birmingham, although not without huge misgivings – in particular a wobble about whether or not to apply for a lectureship at Cambridge. This is a baggy book with a second volume envisioned. It includes chapter and verse on why he gave up French at school, how he secured his first at university and he bangs on (if this is a permissible verb in the context) about Catholic attitudes to contraception.
Towards the end of the book, the content becomes more interesting as he honestly describes the shock of having a Down’s syndrome baby, his third child (who would settle the contraception question): “For me it was a profound shock. I had supposed I was on an escalator bearing me and my family to higher and higher levels of fulfilment, pleasure and happiness, and suddenly it had stopped, irreparably. The vague visions I had entertained of the future did not include looking after a mentally handicapped child.” The honesty is impressive but that image of the escalator is a bit of a downer – naive somehow and limited as an image for life.
He goes on to describe the fortune of meeting enlightened Down’s syndrome specialist and psychologist Rex Brinkworth, and of being able to give Christopher a good education. By far the happiest stretches in the book describe the family’s trips to America. America seems to have been Lodge’s great escape in life, the 20th-century equivalent, he suggests, of the grand tour of Europe, a welcome changing of places.
Quite a Good Time to Be Born is published by Harvill Secker (£25). Click here to buy it for £20
