Remembering David Lodge: Author, Agnostic, and Consummate Chameleon
By the time the novelist David Lodge died on January 1 at the age of 89, the obituaries had long been written, gathering dust and occasional updates in the as-needed folder on the desktops of magazine and newspaper editors. And when they were published in the days after New Year’s, they struck an amazingly similar tone.
"British author David Lodge, known for novels satirizing academic life, dies at 89," the Los Angeles Times headline read. "David Lodge, British novelist who satirized campus life, dies at 89," read the Washington Post. "David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89," added the New York Times. The Times of London ran "David Lodge obituary: academic and author of acclaimed campus novels," while across the channel, Le Monde went with "David Lodge, British writer and master of the sarcastic academic novel, has died."
A few outliers, to their credit or discredit, strove for something different. The Jesuit magazine America looked back to Lodge’s early novels about the life of Catholics in Britain, with "Remembering David Lodge, the ‘agnostic Catholic’ who captured the post-Vatican II zeitgeist," and the Guardian opted for a curious column suggesting that Mary, his wife of over 60 years, was the unacknowledged author of his comedy: "In life, David Lodge was surprisingly mirthless. Luckily, his wife was a hoot."
And so was lost—or, at best, gestured at in a perfunctory way—the bulk of his writing. There were, for example, the autobiographical (and, if not spiritually, then at least sociologically Catholic) novels with which he began his career: The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger You’re Barmy (1962), The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), and Out of the Shelter (1970), culminating in the Catholics-and-sex story of How Far Can You Go? (1980).
And then there were the novels of the final part of his career. Some of them took up the internal consciousness of authors: Author, Author (2004), for example, about Henry James, and A Man of Parts (2011), about H.G. Wells. Others—Therapy (1995), Paradise News (1991), Thinks… (2001), and Deaf Sentence (2008)—aimed at characters’ gradual personifications of philosophical propositions.
Between those groups of novels came, of course, the academic trilogy that all the obituaries featured: Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988). These were Lodge’s bestsellers, two of them nominated for Booker Prizes as the U.K. book of the year.
Changing Places told the story of the culture shock as an American academic named Morris Zapp (based on Stanley Fish, an actual academic star of that era) flies to England to exchange places with a British professor named Philip Swallow, who in turn jets off to America for his own culture shock at Euphoria State University (based on Berkeley).
Small World follows these and other characters—especially Persse McGarrigle, a young Irish instructor of literature—around the globe on the international circuit of academic literary conferences. Nice Work returns some of these characters, notably Zapp and Swallow. It focuses, however, on Robyn Penrose, a feminist literary instructor tenuously clinging to her job, and Vic Wilcox, manager of a general-engineering firm—and what each has to learn when they are assigned to shadow each other in an ill-conceived government program to make the universities more responsive to the job market, and industry more sympathetic to university education.
In part, Lodge’s trilogy won acceptance because it fit nicely in the genre of the academic novel that, in Great Britain, ran from Kingsley Amis’s 1954 Lucky Jim through to David Lodge’s contemporaries, with his friend Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man in 1975 and Howard Jacobson’s Coming From Behind in 1983. Lodge was aiming at deeper things, however. In 1997, when I wrote on the failing of the academic novel as a genre, I described the decline as simple exhaustion, the seam of comedy in those campus settings mined out. But Lodge saw something more practical, I have come to believe—ascribing the changes in academics essentially to money, the high-flying funding of the 1950s and 1960s still somewhat available in the 1975 world of Changing Places and gone by the time of Nice Work in 1988.
The key to David Lodge, however, may be that he was always a chameleon, writing what were, at their heart, attempts to understand his predecessors in the art of novel writing. His endless work of literary criticism—15 volumes, from Language of Fiction (1966) to Lives in Writing (2014)—ought to have been the clue, and his later novels about Henry James and H.G. Wells ought to have been no surprise. Even among his early works we got such hints as his play with James Joyce’s Ulysses in The British Museum Is Falling Down. His campus novels featured a quest story modeled on Edmund Spenser’s 1590s The Faerie Queene in Small World, and deliberate references to such Victorian industrial novels as Mrs. Gaskell’s 1855 North and South in Nice Work. Lodge was always dwelling within the mind of the authors he had spent a lifetime reading, even as the plot and the diction were updated.
He was also a man of sorrows. His son, Christopher, was born in 1966 with Down syndrome, and in later life his deafness greatly increased, leaving him feeling isolated and separated from the world. The problem with deafness, he quipped, is that it’s "a comic infirmity," and thus less likely to engender sympathy than blindness, "which is a tragic infirmity."
He once modestly ascribed his turn to comedy to his friendship as a young academic with Malcolm Bradbury, "a crucial factor" in the development of his writing. But Lodge also described himself as an "agnostic Catholic," fallen from the faith but still somehow formed by it. And that may be the best description of his work, as he recast the tragedies of the human condition in the particularities of his time as comedies in a world that stubbornly refuses to remain unredeemed.
Joseph Bottum is a writer in the Black Hills. His most recent book is the new collection of fiction and essays, Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy, and he is a founder of the daily poetry Substack newsletter, Poems Ancient and Modern.
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