One of the most tantalising fragments of David Lodge’s autobiography is the description of the day in 1959 when its hero, then aged 24, marries his long-term sweetheart, Mary Jacob. Even by the standards of the 1950s it has been a protracted courtship – chaste, respectful, requiring frequent visits to the confession box and dating all the way back to the morning in 1952 when the two newly arrived undergraduates first set eyes on each other in an office at University College London. Triumphantly united with his bride, Burton suit encasing his quivering flanks, Lodge, according to one observer of the wedding photographs, “looked like the cat who had finally got the cream”.

And here the veteran Lodge-fancier will find memory tugging at his or her sleeve. Like Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder – a fictional exemplar several times invoked in the course of this life‑and-times – incredulously fetched up at a requisitioned, war-bound Brideshead, we have been here before. A glance at Lodge’s sixth novel, How Far Can You Go? (1980), confirms that more or less exactly the same description is applied to Dennis, the burly, acne-scarred, Anthony Eden-era chemistry graduate stalled at the altar with his altogether scrumptious but long-resisting fiancee, Angela. The latter, we are told, “looked beautiful”. Dennis resembled “the cat who was finally certain of getting the cream”.

Just to complete the equation, the subject matter of How Far Can You Go? is the progress, or otherwise, of a group of Catholic undergrads through the 1950s and on into the age of Aquarius. Angela, as well as being skilled in the arts of natural childbirth, is also (like Mrs Lodge) the mother of a baby with Down’s syndrome. Does this mean we can safely assume that Lodge is Dennis? In fact, this identification turns out to be a red herring. Lodge, we soon learn, can be far more plausibly connected with “Michael”, a sex-fixated English student in the novel, who writes a postgraduate thesis on Graham Greene and is described by his creator as “a troubled character” who feels “spiritually compromised by a habit of masturbation which he cannot kick and cannot bring himself to confess”.

Candour is always an attractive quality in an autobiographer, and if this portrait of a furtive onanist slinking around the “art magazine” shops of Charing Cross Road offers a new side to Lodge – novelist, screenwriter, proud author of The Modes of Modern Writing and much high-grade critical work besides – then there are also some illuminating sidelights on how the fledgling writer and his wife – The Picturegoers (1960) was in the press by this stage – having “got the hang of the basic act in the missionary position” by the time they returned from their honeymoon, gradually “became less inhibited and more versatile lovers”.

Seen in its context – the 1950s and, worse than that, the Catholic 1950s – this is not quite as funny, or as unintentionally funny, as it sounds. For one of Quite a Good Time to Be Born’s principal themes is inhibition, how you overcome it and the moral and practical consequences of that conquest – a sexual (and also a social and at times an intellectual) journey with, Lodge implies, many a consolation in store for the restricted once their shackles are hurled aside. There is, he reckons at the end of this affecting account of a 1950s courtship, much to be said for “an unhurried exploration of the possibilities of erotic love”. At the same time he could probably have done without Catholic teaching on birth control, to which the Lodges zealously adhered until the mid- 60s.

To go back to Dennis slavering at the altar, Lodge’s apologia pro vita sua is brimful of this kind of thing: authoritative little interventions in which he hastens to assure us that while an episode in one of his novels is taken entirely from the life, the reality drawn on in another is twisted irrevocably out of kilter. The ARP warden father in Out of the Shelter (1970), with its neatly evoked recollections of the blitz, is not, in case you were wondering, Lodge senior (then somewhere in Scotland with the RAF) but an older man, while the short story “When the Climate’s Sultry”, in which two holidaying 1950s couples stick to segregated rooms by night but pair off for afternoon siestas, “should not be taken as biographical”. Did Mrs Lodge insist on this clarification?

If Quite a Good Time to Be Born is a rather straightforward, and at times downright pernickety, résumé of the way life transforms itself into art, then the life undergoing this transformation is a fairly unusual one that, if only for sociocultural reasons, deserves all the publicity it can get. After all, the 50s – when Lodge was in his late teens and early 20s – were the age of what was known as the “New Man”. And while the New Men came in varying shapes and sizes – from the nest-feathering technocrats of CP Snow and William Cooper’s novels to the irony-wielding poets of the Movement and the existentialist horde urged into being by Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956) – Lodge himself is a highly representative specimen from their central strand: the upwardly mobile grammar school boy from a lower-middle-class home, driven forward by educational opportunities that his parents could only dream of, and lured into academe by the prospect of a degree and a superior white-collar job.

A good adjective for the family background would be “Wellsian”, which is to say suburban, not too well-off, cluttered – although Lodge was an only child - and at times faintly mysterious. One grandfather was a Thameside publican. The other, “Pop”, had ne’er-do-well tendencies that left him faintly marginalised at clan gatherings. There was a buried artistic strain, which made its way to the surface in the person of Lodge’s father, William, a professional musician who at one point featured in the house band at Mrs Meyrick’s notorious 1920s speakeasy the 43 Club – in which Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte come to grief – and whose “sweet tenor-style” voice was only driven off the airwaves by the advent of American crooners.

Lodge is astute about his upbringing in Brockley, south-east London (“Brickley” in The Picturegoers), files a lengthy description of the cramped interior of 81 Millmark Grove, notes the peculiarity of a household routine geared to his father’s being out every night and requiring silence every morning, and the consequent neglect of a mother who, as he puts it, was “not sufficiently assertive to do anything about it”. A bright boy, whose life was not so much disrupted as stirred up by the displacements of war, he sailed through the entrance exam to the local Catholic grammar school, would have sat his O-levels at 15 had the authorities allowed it, and despite parental misgivings started at UCL shortly before his 18th birthday.

It is easy to take the rise of the New Man for granted. Down in the lower reaches of the provincial university English department, at a time when “English Studies” was only just being allowed a life of its own, the path to preferment could be torturous. Kingsley Amis passed his pre-Lucky Jim years as an assistant lecturer at Swansea in something near poverty. The prodigiously well-qualified DJ Enright, whose early criticism had appeared in Scrutiny when he was still an undergraduate, spent most of the era teaching abroad. Even Lodge, with his glowing first-class degree and well-notched academic bed-post, took the best part of a decade to establish himself: three years for a BA, two years’ national service, two more years for an MA and so on.

The army interludes, later worked up as Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), ram home Lodge’s New Man credentials by placing him sideways-on to “the establishment”, a phrase coined at almost exactly the time he set off for basic training at Bovington Camp in Dorset. As Jonathan Browne, his alter ego, puts it – although Lodge offers his usual punctilious gloss on what did and didn’t happen – “I dimly perceived that I had been wrenched out of a meritocracy, for success in which I was well qualified, and thrust into a small archaic world of privilege, for success in which I was singularly ill endowed.”

The academic world into which Lodge himself ultimately emerges turns out to be thoroughly up-to-date, or rather in the process of becoming so. The University of Birmingham, whose English department he adorned from 1961 onward, is clearly his park and his pleasaunce, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said of Oxford, with Malcolm Bradbury shortly to arrive as his colleague and Richard Hoggart masterminding the nearby Cultural Studies centre. And if Lodge, in the context of his social and professional stamping grounds, is a new kind of man then he and Bradbury are self-evidently a new kind of don: non-Oxbridge, keen on the latest evaluative trickery – Lodge’s first critical work was the formidably switched-on Language of Fiction (1966) – but fascinated by the world beyond the academic palisade. They were as likely to be found collaborating on revue sketches as conducting a graduate seminar, as happy to be occupied with a review for Punch or the Tablet – the old Catholic affiliations persisted – as a commission from Critical Quarterly.

The faint air of selfconsciousness that attends Lodge’s account of his early dealings with media-land is something of a false trail, for it encourages the reader to believe he intends to take a theoretical interest in the kind of book he has written and the tradition in which it lies. In the end, though, the genre to which Quite a Good Year to Be Born belongs – a fairly recent one, as it happens – doesn’t seem to bother him. This is a pity, as Lodge’s professional take on the subject of the middle-class literary memoir – as opposed to its distinguished forebear, the upper-class literary memoir – would be interesting to hear, for the differences that separate the two are as much a question of form as content.

The key feature of the old-style upper-class English literary autobiography of the Anthony Powell/Michael Holroyd/James Lees-Milne type was self-deprecation amounting, at times, to outright concealment. No personal trumpets were blown; if pain was felt then it tended to be disguised as something else; and even professional jealousies came wrapped up in a kind of resolutely encrypted obliquity. The anguish that attended certain parts of Holroyd’s Basil Street Blues (1999) is pretty much for the reader to guess at: Holroyd might sometimes drop a hint or two, but inference is all. The middle-class literary autobiography is much less discreet. If not exactly immodest, it is never shy of acknowledging its subject’s successes, particularly as there is a social battle going on that gives the presence of a Lodge and a Bradbury in Birmingham University’s senior common room quite as much solidarity as Powell’s understated accounts of the boys he messed with at Eton.

Even here in the stylised world of the middle-class literary memoir, though, there are distinctions to be drawn. The obvious parallel is with John Carey’s An Unexpected Professor (2014), and yet it turns out to be unexpectedly far-flung. They are within a year of each other in age. Each was a grammar-school boy from a London suburb. Each shares some of the experiences that middle-class men who got married in the 20 years after the war tend to have in common (both Lodge and Carey were rapt spectators at the birth of one of their children). But here the resemblances end, for Carey’s book is shot through with a personal myth-making – the dragons of the Oxford senior common rooms to be slain; the snubs from college grandees never forgotten; the vision of a university cleansed of its public-school taint and filled with embryo Careys – that Lodge’s mostly avoids.

Lodge isn’t much of a crusader, or a personal myth-maker, or even – in spite of the usual professional solidarity – an educationalist. Unlike Carey, who is a great proselytiser on behalf of grammar schools, Lodge believes the end of selective state education was probably a good thing. His distinguishing mark is simply his determination, a patient resolve to deal fairly with the world, look out for his own and his family’s interests, enjoy the perquisites that come his way – such as the mid-60s American tour offered by his Harkness fellowship – and ensure that his singular abilities aren’t ignored either inside academe or beyond it.

Come this memoir’s final lap, the question of Lodge’s extra-academic career, and in particular the kind of novelist he imagines himself to be, looms rather larger than before. As the middle sections of the book reveal in detail, it was not enough for a 1950s writer to have merit: he or she had to fit in with the critical strait-jacketings of the day. The Pan paperback of The Picturegoers, issued in 1962, bears a horribly close relationship to Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959), not least in the grimy realism of its frontispiece and the character CVs on the back (“MARK – who mapped out a girl’s body and knew just how far she would let him go” etc). But The Picturegoers is far too wry, far too spiritually absorbed, far too fond of pastiche-playfulness – a key Lodge attribute from the early days – to have its author marked down as an angry young man.

So what kind of writer is he, as the 1960s give way to the 70s, as the Catholic church starts tentatively to accommodate itself to the modern world and as the Lodges – the family number now set at five – proceed on their meritocratic way? By this time informed observers are maintaining that the comedy of his third novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), in which a Catholic postgrad and his wife try very hard not to have another baby, is preferable to the more realistic shadings of Out of the Shelter; critical reaction to the jet-setting academics of Changing Places (1975) bears them out (Bradbury’s The History Man, another archetypal campus novel, is published in the same year). We leave Lodge marching on towards the sunlit uplands of professorships, bestsellers and TV work, and a literary world full of comfort and security for the people able to crack its code, which, as he acknowledges in the preface, is now a historical artefact. New Men, of course, become old men, and as a piece of reportage from the third quarter of the English 20th century this is a sociologist’s paradise.

• A collection of DJ Taylor’s short stories, Wrote for Luck, is out from Galley Beggar Press.

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