Henry James famously contrasted life as “being all inclusion and confusion”, with art “being all discrimination and selection”. I wish that David Lodge, a James aficionado, had heeded the latter part of that dictum when he was planning Writer’s Luck, the second volume of a memoir that began with Quite a Good Time to Be Born (2015). This book presents a writer who simply has no clue as to what he should leave out, or how to compress a narrative for the sake of pace. In his acknowledgements he thanks his agent, editor and others for their help, though evidently none of them troubled to tell him his book needed serious pruning.
The wonder of it is that Lodge, an award-winning novelist, literary critic and professor, has such an eye for the untelling anecdote, the irrelevant detail. The warning signs are there early on when he methodically records his children’s O and A-level results, class of degree and subsequent career, as if he’s writing a round-robin Christmas card to some distant acquaintance. Family is important to him, and elsewhere he writes movingly about his third child, Christopher, born with Down’s syndrome, and about tending an ailing aunt who lived in Honolulu – he suffered bad sunburn while out there, “especially on the back of my legs”. He keeps losing the reader’s goodwill by the pointless indulgence of his accounts.
From his mother he appears to have inherited an anxious and despondent nature. A good deal of the book is coloured by a mood of prickly, thin-skinned self-justification, not unusual in a writer but pretty lowering at close quarters. When Paul Theroux writes a disobliging review of How Far Can You Go? Lodge does what he often seems to do – fires off a furious letter to the offending paper (here, the New York Times). When he receives great reviews in the US for his next novel Small World he quotes them triumphantly – needily.
His approach to the craft of fiction is, like everything else, meticulous, and he marks up very precisely the links between his academic itineraries and what ended up in the books, or didn’t. On a trip to Korea “there was nothing I observed that rang any bells with the themes and motifs of my novel”, though he admits the country was “not uninteresting”. Likewise, Pearl Harbor was “extremely interesting”, but “not relevant to my novel”. At a university conference in Victoria, Canada, he is disappointed by the breakfast arrangements (“no bread, only muffins”), while in Wellington, New Zealand, his hotel room was so “poorly designed and furnished” that he found his depression returning. And so, ploddingly, on.
Truthfully – vulgarly – my hopes for this book rather focused on the tittle-tattle its author had accumulated in 60-odd years of the literary life. And to an extent he delivers, even if the gossip is hedged about with his personal grievances and remembered slights. His experience as chairman of the judging panel for the 1989 Booker prize is revealing: he was unhappy with the choice of judges, and felt he “mismanaged” the whole thing by not getting Martin Amis’s London Fields on the shortlist, blocked by two female judges (Helen McNeil and Maggie Gee) who deplored its “sexism”. Indeed, the chairing of the prize so dispirited him that he sought help from a counsellor specialising in stress. He is decent enough to admit that his wife Mary – a sane but shadowy figure in this narrative – advised him against it from the start.
As the titles of both memoirs indicate, Lodge knows he has been blessed (“Few writers can have had such luck”) by opportunities and remuneration that are vanishingly unlikely in today’s world. And yet so much of his reminiscing is clouded with woe. After his own Booker-shortlisted disappointments in 1984 and 1988 he did win a Sunday Express prize for Nice Work – a 20 grand purse, no less – but this delight too is crimped when he is told at the award ceremony not to make a speech. While his flashes of vulnerability may soften the reader’s heart towards him, they are scant illumination amid the pedantry, the prolixity and the general moaning. Bizarrely, he attributes the failure of the TV adaptation of Small World partly to the fact that none of the cast had been to university – which is like saying that Dunkirk is a failure because none of the cast has been to war.
At times I wondered whether the author had adopted an alter ego. Is he trying to hide his real self? He has certainly succeeded in hiding the nimble, accomplished comic novelist whose books I thrilled to in my younger years – The British Museum Is Falling Down, Changing Places, How Far Can You Go?, Nice Work, and even later ones such as Therapy and Thinks …
But this idea of self-concealment in the end fails to persuade, for no one would choose to write something as grindingly Pooterish as this, even for fun. Somerset Maugham once advised: “A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.” And give the reader some room to think. Writer’s Luck is not the most insufferable memoir I’ve read from this literary generation – that would have to be Frederic Raphael’s Going Up. But it is insufferable.
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